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.