David Caldwell MA PhD FSA FSAScot was brought up in Ardrossan in Ayrshire. He studied archaeology at Edinburgh University and gained a PhD there on the early use of guns in Scotland. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1971.

From 1973 to 2012 he was employed by the National Museums of Scotland in rolls including Keeper of History and Applied Art, Keeper of Scotland and Europe, and Keeper of Archaeology. He has also held other positions including as President of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland, President of the Society of Post-Medieval Archaeology, Chair of Fife Cultural Trust, board member of the National Trust for Scotland and patron of the Sydney Society for Scottish History.

His research interests have focussed on medieval and post-medieval Scotland, and he has published extensively in these fields. A theme in much of his work has been to combine or compare and contrast data derived from documentary sources with archaeological evidence. In the 1990s he directed a major archaeological project at Finlaggan in Islay on behalf of the National Museum, published in 2025 by this Society.