David J. Meltzer

Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory &
Director, QUEST Archaeological Research Program

With son Ethan atop Wheeler Peak, at 13,161 feet above sea level, the highest point in New Mexico. August 2007

Who I am ...

I began in archaeology as a 15 year old high school student excavating at the Thunderbird Paleoindian site near Front Royal (VA), and have been at it ever since. My undergraduate education was in Anthropology (with a minor in soils) at the University of Maryland (B.A. 1977). I then crossed the country for graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle, doing coursework in archaeology and Quaternary sciences (the latter through the Quaternary Research Center), ultimately earning degrees in Anthropology/Archaeology (M.A. 1979 and Ph.D. 1984). Newly-minted Ph.D. in hand, I came to SMU as Assistant Professor of Anthropology in 1984, and haven't left. I am now the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory.

My first day in the field, June 1971 (click to view a larger image & the story behind it)

... and what I do

My research interests center on the origins, antiquity, and adaptations of the first Americans (Paleoindians), who colonized the North American continent at the end of the Pleistocene (Ice Age). I seek to understand how these hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, initially unknown, ecologically diverse, landscape of Late Glacial North America, during a time of significant climate change. This has evolved in several directions, including an interest in understanding landscape learning, the demographics of colonization, and how such processes might play out over centuries and be visible archaeologically (here's a recent piece on the subject). In this regard, I was fortunate to participate in a series of very interesting NSF-sponsored conferences organized by John Moore and Bill Durham that brought together archaeologists, geneticists, linguists and social anthropologists, to explore issues related to the colonization of new lands.

That interest has also played out in investigations of the possible role of Clovis groups in Pleistocene faunal extinctions, the subject of several papers with Don Grayson (see Grayson and Meltzer 2002, 2003, and 2004, available as pdfs on my publications page). We don't think human hunters had much, if anything, to do with this extinctions process.  Mike Cannon and I followed up on that work with an analysis of what animals appear to have been part of the Clovis diet (in our paper, 'Early Paleoindian foraging'). We are now in the process of working up a paper on the evolutionary ecology of early Paleoindian foragers. Of late, this effort has expanded to include the Folsom period, to try and better understand the role of bison in the adaptive strategies of these nominally-specialized hunters.

My various research interests have been pursued through archaeological fieldwork in many areas of the United States, from arctic Alaska to west Texas. Since 1985, my field research has focused on Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene hunter-gatherer archaeology and paleoecology on the High Plains and Rocky Mountains of western North America. I have investigated and published on a number of sites, including Mustang Springs (TX), an important Middle Holocene (Altithermal-age) site, as well as the  Midland (TX) and Folsom (NM) Paleoindian type sites. 

A hefty volume on the three seasons of fieldwork conducted at the Folsom site, FOLSOM: new archaeological investigations of a classic Paleoindian bison kill, was published in the spring of 2006 by the University of California Press. The volume includes not just the results of our recent excavations at the site, but also a detailed analysis of the faunal and archaeological materials recovered at this historically-important locality in 1926-1928. Earlier reports on our work at the site appear in American Antiquity (2002) and Quaternary Research (2005), and a poster presentation (click here for pdf). More recently, Dan Mann and I have worked on the Quaternary depositional and erosional history of the drainages in the Folsom area (Upper Dry Cimarron River), and in a paper published in 2007 in the Geological Society of American Bulletin we attempt to link episodes of aggradation and incision to Late Glacial (especially Younger Dryas) and Holocene cycles of climate change.

Most of my recent fieldwork has been on other Folsom-age sites, such as Bonfire Rockshelter (a panorama of which is shown below) and Hot Tubb (both in Texas), and several in the high-elevation Gunnison Basin of western Colorado, including Mountaineer, Lanning, and Flat Top. The concentration of Folsom-age sites in that region during Younger Dryas times has prompted work with colleagues and collaborators in geology, paleoecology, and vertebrate paleontology, aimed at understanding the climate and environment in the Gunnison Basin at this time. Brief notes on the work at some of these sites, which has been done along with a great group of graduate students, are available here and on the QUEST web page.

My voice has also been part of the din over the origins and antiquity of the first Americans, which has involved visits to a number of the localities thought to be among the oldest in the hemisphere, such as Monte Verde (Chile) and Pedra Furada (Brazil), and joining - with colleagues Lawrence Strauss and Ted Goebel - in evaluating the fantastic claim that the Americas was colonized from Europe across the North Atlantic in Ice Age times by Solutrean boat people. Color us extremely skeptical, as attested in our paper, Ice Age Atlantis?

Controversy over the origins and antiquity of the first Americans is nothing new, and I also have a historical interest in the late 19th and early 20th century debate over human antiquity in the New World. This dispute cut to the conceptual core of American archaeology, and its study provides a venue for understanding the nature of scientific controversy and its resolution (as discussed in my recent "Seventy Year Itch" paper). Besides, it is easier to study the controversy over the first Americans from the comfort and perspective of a century away, than the recent one we've all been involved in, and for which the dust and the rhetoric hasn't yet settled. The effort to understand that controversy began in earnest in 1981 when I was a Predoctoral Research Fellow in the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Anthropology, and continues to the present. It has involved historical and archival research throughout the United States, produced a number of articles, and I continue to plug away at a very long and very dull book on the topic which might actually be completed by decade's end. Along the way, I took a brief detour further back in time to produce an introductory essay for the Smithsonian Institution's 150th anniversary re-issue of Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley by Ephraim Squier & Edwin Davis, the very first publication of that Institution in 1848.

My archaeological and historical research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, I received an extraordinarily generous research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program, which will support in perpetuity at SMU research on the earliest occupations of North America. 

I have published the results of my research in over 130 publications, mostly of the scholarly sort, but a number of them were written for general audiences and have appeared in popular science journals. I have also written or edited half a dozen books, including Folsom (2006), and Search for the First Americans (1993). The latter was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, which recently folded (alas) and the book is now out of print. However, a sabbatical in Spring 2007 enabled me to update and thoroughly revise it. Look for it early in '09 from the University of California Press.

At SMU, I teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including a couple of wide-ranging interdisciplinary courses, North American Great Plains and In Search of Ice Age Americans. I am teaching two graduate courses in Fall 2007: History of Anthropology and Research Strategies in Archaeology.

CONTACT INFORMATION: Department of Anthropology, SMU, Dallas, TX 75275-0336, or dmeltzer@smu.edu

A panorama of Mile Canyon and Bonfire Rockshelter (see Byerly, Cooper, Meltzer, LaBelle & Hill 2005)

(This page created and maintained by D. Meltzer; last modified, October 2007)