David J. Meltzer

David Jeffrey Meltzer (born 1955) is an American archaeologist known for his influential studies of Paleo-Indians and Pleistocene mammalian extinction in the Americas. He is currently Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University and Affiliate Professor at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

Meltzer's scholarship on ancient human populations and fieldwork in the High Plains and Rocky Mountains have earned him widespread acclaim and "forced a revision of the received wisdom that Pleistocene people were exclusively big-game hunters or were responsible for Pleistocene mammalian extinction." He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas.

Early life and education

Meltzer first encountered archaeology at the age of 15, when he participated in the excavation of the Thunderbird Site, an important Paleo-Indian Clovis site near Front Royal, Virginia. Meltzer would later enroll at the University of Maryland, where he would graduate in 1977 with a BA in Anthropology. He then moved to University of Washington to complete an MA in Anthropology/Archaeology. Following a one-year stint as a Predoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, he returned to the University of Washington. Working under the supervision of archaeologist Robert Dunnell, Meltzer received his PhD in 1984.

Career

In 1984, Meltzer accepted a position in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. At SMU, he would come to work alongside leading archaeologists and cultural anthropologists, including Fred Wendorf, Lewis Binford, David Freidel, Caroline Brettell, and Carolyn Sargent.

A year after joining the faculty, Meltzer launched the Texas Clovis Fluted Point Survey. In 1996, he was made inaugural Executive Director of the Quest Archaeological Program at SMU, an initiative endowed by Joseph and Maude Cramer to advance research on the first peoples of the Americas. Under Meltzer's leadership, Quest would help fund studies across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

Revisiting Folsom

Between 1997 and 2000, Meltzer used new archaeological techniques to re-excavate and analyze the famous Paleo-Indian site at Folsom. He and his team studied excavated bison teeth from the site's bison-kill to determine that the hunt had happened in the fall. They further confirmed that Folsom witnessed at least 32 such kills.

One of the project's other objectives was to find the location of the hunt's associated campsite. In this, Meltzer and his team were unsuccessful. By sourcing the stone for "Folsom points" to Texas and Colorado, however, they were able to show that the Folsom site was part of a much larger area across which people of the Folsom tradition moved. Meltzer would document his findings in a 2006 book, ''Folsom''.

Peopling of the Americas

Meltzer's research has made him one of the world's leading experts on the colonization of the Americas and mammalian extinctions of the Late Pleistocene. In his work, he has demonstrated the role of climactic and environmental changes in the disappearance of North American megafauna (against the "overkill" thesis), challenged the controversial theory that the Clovis culture was destroyed by a comet, and made the case that the domestication of dogs occurred in ancient Siberia.

In recent decades, archaeology has been revolutionized by breakthroughs in DNA sequencing. In 2010, evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev became the first scientist to successfully reconstruct an entire ancient human genome. Meltzer and Willerslev would become close collaborators, leading to a joint 2021 paper in ''Nature'' describing the peopling of the Americas based on the most up-to-date ancient genomic evidence.

Works

* ''Folsom: New archaeological investigations of a classic Paleoindian bison kill'' (2006)
* ''The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America's Ice Age Past'' (2015)
* ''The Mountaineer site: a Folsom winter camp in the Rockies'' (2021, with B.N. Andrews and M. Stiger)
* ''First peoples in a new world: Populating Ice Age America'' (2021)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Meltzer, David J.
University System of Maryland alumni
University of Washington alumni
Southern Methodist University faculty
American archaeologists
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1955 births
Living people
Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge