Marley Brown is Director of Archaeological Research at Colonial Williamsburg and Research Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary.

Brown received his Bachelor's and Doctoral degrees in Anthropology from Brown University.

Brown uses archaeological research to understand the development of inequality and cultural pluralism within early English colonial societies of the New World. He has been studying African-American archaeology since the mid-1970s when he worked on the late eighteenth-century free Black site of Parting Ways in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Since 1982 Brown has been examining the rural and urban landscapes of slavery within Tidewater Virginia with emphasis on the problem of slave-master relations and the material lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants. In addition to research at the Atkinson site, Brown has directed fieldwork at four slave quarters in Virginia and in Bermuda and on two ante-bellum era slave houses in Williamsburg.