Melinda A. Zeder

Melinda A. Zeder is an American archaeologist and Curator Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Her zooarchaeological research has revolutionized understandings of animal domestication.

Zeder received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1985 with a dissertation focused on faunal assemblages from the site of Tal-e Malyan in southeastern Iran. She later founded a zooarchaeological consulting firm, and secured a position at the Smithsonian Institution in 1992 as a research scientist in archaeobiology.

She has conducted extensive fieldwork throughout the Near East, including in Iran, Israel, Turkey, and Syria. Her research focuses on the origins of plant and animal domestication, and the impacts of agriculture on human prehistory. She has also pioneered approaches that combine archaeological and genetic analyses of plant and animal remains from archaeological sites.