David Humiston Kelley (April 1, 1924 in Albany, New York – May 19, 2011)[1] was an American archaeologist and epigrapher.
David Kelley was a descendant of Amos Humiston, a Union Army soldier who was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.
Kelley's landmark 1962 paper, Phoneticism in the Maya Script, would provide important corroborating data of the phonetic interpretation of Maya glyphs, which ran counter to the then-prevailing view that the script lacked phonetic elements.
[2][3] Kelley and Eugene Milone co-authored Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encyclopedic Survey of Archaeoastronomy (Springer, 2005).
Studying under Alfred M. Tozzer,[2] his doctoral dissertation (1957) at Harvard was entitled "Our Elder Brother Coyote".