David H. Kelley

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For the American television and film producer, see David E. Kelley.

David Humiston Kelley is a Canadian archaeologist and epigrapher, most noted for his work on the phonetic analysis and major contributions toward the decipherment of the writing system used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the Maya script.

From the late 1950s, he was one of the first Mayanist scholars to give credence to the theories of the Russian linguist and ethnographer Yuri Knorosov concerning the phonetic and syllabic nature of the Maya script, which would later lead to breakthroughs in the script's decipherment. 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.

Kelley is a professor emeritus in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Calgary.