Kathleen O'Neal Gear received her B.A., cum laude, from California State University in Bakersfield, and her M.A., summa cum laude, from California State University in Chico. She conducted Ph.D. studies at the University of California in Los Angeles and did post-graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
In the 1980's, she worked for the United States Department of the Interior as the Wyoming State Historian, and later as the Archaeologist for Wyoming, Kansas and Nebraska. She has twice been the recipient of the federal government's "Special Achievement Award" for outstanding management of our nation's cultural heritage. She and her husband Michael Gear currently operate an anthropological research company called Wind River Archaeological Consultants.
She began writing full-time in 1986 and has over one hundred non-fiction publications in the fields of archaeology, history and writing, and has authored, or co-authored -- with Michael Gear -- twenty-three international bestsellers, which have been translated into seventeen languages.