David Noel Keightley (October 25, 1932 – February 23, 2017) was an American sinologist, historian, and scholar, and was for many years a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Berkeley. Keightley is best known for his studies of Chinese oracle bones and oracle bone script.

David N. Keightley was born on October 25, 1932, in London, England, and lived there until his family moved to the United States in 1947. He attended Amherst College as an undergraduate student, graduating in 1953 with a B.A. in English with a minor in biochemistry. He then received a Fulbright Scholarship, which he used to study Medieval French at the University of Lille. He received an M.A. in modern European history from New York University in 1956. He then worked for several years at publishing companies in New York City and as a freelance writer before beginning his study of Chinese and Sinology.

Keightley began his graduate study in East Asian history at Columbia University in 1962. In 1965, Keightley moved to Taipei, Taiwan where he studied Chinese for two years at the Stanford Center (modern Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Study). He then returned to the United States to complete his doctoral studies at Columbia under the Swedish Sinologist Hans Bielenstein, and received a Ph.D. in 1969 with a dissertation entitled "Public Work in Ancient China: A Study of Forced Labor in the Shang and Early Chou".

...
Wikipedia