Kirch was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and was raised in Manoa valley from 1950s to 1960s. At the age of 13, he became an intern to Yoshio Kondo, a Bishop Museum malacologist. While there, he was studying Linnaean taxonomy and helped curate his mentor's collection of Polynesian snail shells. At the time, despite his strong interest in snails, he already had a passion for archaeology. Seeing it, Kondo suggested him to work with Kenneth Emory, a renowned Polynesian archaeologist. Unfortunately, Emory refused on working with Kirch, so Kondo took him under his wing so that Kirch could spend the whole summer conducting archaeological digs of his own. A year later, securing the permission of a landowner and some help from his father, Kirch had dug out a three-by-three-foot test pit at Hālawa on Molokai. In the midden of the pit, he found bone and shell fragments, which he carefully assembled, counted and write up results on. The results made Emory furious, but Kondo insisted that Kirch did everything right and therefore deserves to go with him to the South Point's excavation site.
Career
After graduating from the Punahou School, he attended University of Pennsylvania and Yale University from which he obtained Ph.D. in 1975. From 1975 to 1984 Kirch served on the staff of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Due to the research decline in mid-1980s, Kirch relocated to Seattle, Washington in 1984 where he was a director of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington and then became its Associate Professor. In 1989, he moved to California where he took a position at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Anthropology. He later took a joint appointment in the Department of Integrative Biology. His research focused on the archaeology, ethnography, and paleoecology of the Pacific Islands. He carried out original field research in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Loyalty Islands, Kingdom of Tonga, American Samoa, Yap, Belau, the Marshall Islands, the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, and Hawai'i. Kirch retired from the Berkeley faculty in July 2014, becoming Chancellor's Professor Emeritus and Class of 1954 Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Integrative Biology. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. He was one of the founders and the first President of the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology. In 2017 he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Bishop Museum. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust, advising on the preservation of cultural sites. His international collaborations include work with the Australian National University, the University of Auckland and University of Otago, and the University of French Polynesia. He is a member of the International Center for Archaeological Research on Polynesia, based at the University of French Polynesia. As a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, he served as a liaison to the Pacific Science Association. Through his work, he has come to the belief that practitioners of archaeology, historical linguistics, human genetic studies, ethnology, and archival historical research can work together to give a fuller picture of the past than any discipline alone could do.
