John D. Speth is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor (Emeritus) of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He completed his B.A. in Geology at the University of New Mexico (1965) and his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Michigan (1971). After teaching five years in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, he returned to the University of Michigan in 1976 where he remained until his retirement in 2012. He served as Chair of the Anthropology Department at Hunter in 1975–1976 and  Director of the Museum of Anthropology at Michigan from 1985 to 1989. He has also taught at the University of Arizona and at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Today, as Curator and Professor Emeritus, Speth continues to publish and give public talks on his archaeological research in both the New and Old World.

Speth studies prehistoric hunter–gatherer and small-scale farmer diet and foodways and the way these societies coped with food shortages. Largely, through the study of animal bones, he also explores the nutritional basis of Plains–Pueblo interaction in the Southwest and Neanderthal hunting strategies in the Near East. Speth’s North American work has focused on southeastern New Mexico, pursuing his theoretical interests in adaptation, technology, and subsistence, with bison hunting, the development of Plains–Pueblo interaction, and the pithouse-to-pueblo transition as three of his principal interests. Between 1977 and 2009, he directed University of Michigan excavations at three major sites: the Garnsey Bison Kill, Henderson Pueblo and Bloom Mound Pueblo. Over the years, he has published or co-authored ten books and monographs and dozens of articles on his Southwestern fieldwork, the latest one co-authored with Jamie L. Clark and titled Living and Dying on the Periphery: The Archaeology and Human Remains from Two 13th–15th Century AD Villages in Southeastern New Mexico (The University of Utah Press, 2022).  Additional books by Dr. Speth’s include: Zooarchaeology and Modern Human Origins: Human Hunting Behavior During the Later Pleistocene (co-edited with Jamie L. Clark, 2013, Springer); The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics? (2010, Springer); Human Paleoecology in the Levantine Corridor (co-edited with Naama Goren-Inbar, 2004, Oxbow); Bison Kills and Bone Counts: Decision Making by Ancient Hunters (1983, Chicago).