David Jeffrey Meltzer (born 1955) is an American archaeologist known for his influential studies of Paleo-Indians and Pleistocene mammalian extinction in the Americas.

[3] 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.

[4] 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.

[10] In his work, he has demonstrated the role of climactic and environmental changes in the disappearance of North American megafauna (against the "overkill" thesis),[11][12] challenged the controversial theory that the Clovis culture was destroyed by a comet,[13][14] and made the case that the domestication of dogs occurred in ancient Siberia.

[16] Meltzer and Willerslev would become close collaborators,[17] leading to a joint 2021 paper in Nature describing the peopling of the Americas based on the most up-to-date ancient genomic evidence.