Michael A. Hoffman was born in Washington, D.C., on October 14, 1944, and was raised in Virginia although he spent a lot of vacation time in Ohio.
from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and in 1971, he received his Ph.D. Hoffman went to Egypt for the first time in 1969, where he joined the American Museum of Natural History's Hierakonpolis Expedition.
On an excavation in 1984, he used sludge pumps to keep the site dry which paid off because he found a stratigraphic link from Dynasty 1 to Naqada 1.
He became a research professor in the Earth Sciences and Resources Institute at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
[2] His life's work led to a fresh appreciation of Egypt's predynastic past and how it culminated into statehood.