David J. Meltzer

Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory, and Affiliate Professor, Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen. Known for research on the earliest human populations in the Americas, which he approaches from evolutionary ecology, a thorough knowledge of archaeological and paleoenvironmental records, and the use of data from multiple disciplines, including genetics (ancient DNA) and climate studies, as in his First peoples in a New World (Second edition, 2021). He explores how initial colonizers met the challenges of adapting to the unfamiliar, diverse and changing climates and environments of late Ice Age North America. His documentation of their broad and geographically varied adaptive strategies has forced a revision of the received wisdom that Pleistocene people were exclusively big-game hunters or were responsible for Pleistocene mammalian extinction.

His fieldwork on the High Plains and Rocky Mountains is interdisciplinary and cutting-edge, as shown in his book, Folsom (2006), which combines the results of extensive new excavations and laboratory analyses, with the results of analysis of the original artifacts and bison remains recovered in the 1920s, to provide a comprehensive look at the adaptations of the late Ice Age Paleoindian hunters who killed a large herd of bison at this spot. Much of his work is informed by research into the history of American archaeology, and how its practitioners have over time sought to understand our species deep prehistory on this continent, and is the subject of his latest book, The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America’s Ice Age Past (2015).