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P. David Seaman was born in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, on January 31, 1932, the third of eleven children. His father Albert Leroy Seaman was a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service in Connellsville, and his grandfather Albert Redfield Seaman was a minister in the Pittsburgh Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church. At the age of five, David Seaman was placed in the first of a series of foster homes under the auspices of the Fayette county Child Welfare Program. While finishing high school, he worked for the local YMCA, and was a reporter for The Daily Courier in Connellsville.

Seaman served in the U.S. Army from February 1951 to February 1954, during the Korean War. In 1952 he participated in military maneuvers during a live atomic-bomb test at Yucca Flats, Nevada. In 1954 he was honored for efficient administration of a military hospital in Korea. Just before leaving for Korea, Seaman in January 1953 married Mary Miller Seaman of Louisville, Kentucky. They later had three children, Nancy, Mark, and Don, and presently have five grandchildren.

In February 1954, Seaman enrolled in Asbury College near Lexington, Kentucky, and received his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in May 1957. He completed a Master of Arts degree in Ancient Languages and Literatures at the University of Kentucky in August 1958. From 1957 to 1967 he served as instructor and later as divisional chair in foreign languages and literatures at Asbury College. In 1965 he completed his Ph.D. degree in Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. His dissertation Modern Greek and American English in Contact was a model for the study of immigrant bilingualism, and was later published by Mouton Publishers in the same series with Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures .

In June 1967, Seaman accepted a position with Northern Arizona University. His primary assignment was as professor of linguistics in the Anthropology department, but he also served as extension instructor in Phoenix, Cottonwood, and the Indian reservations of northern Arizona, and helped establish NAU linguistics courses in Education, English as a Second Language, Modern Languages, and Speech Pathology.

During the 1967-68 school year, Seaman created the nation's first NSF Summer Linguistics Institute for gifted high-school students. Each year, twenty-five top students were selected from around the country for an eight-week summer institute at NAU, in which they studied the basics of liguistic science and anthropology, and then performed two weeks of actual field work with native speakers of Hopi, Navajo, or Zuni. This program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was conducted in the summers of 1968 through 1973, when Seaman started his intensive Hopi research documented in this collection.

During the 1969-1970 school year, Seaman recieved a senior Fulbright fellowship to Greece. He was responsible for all U.S. English-language teaching efforts in Greece, including liason with the British Council and the Greek Ministry of Education, held a joint professorship at the University of Athens and the University of Thessaloniki, and was a chair of the 1000-major English Department of the University of Athens. In August 1970 he conducted a four-week national seminar in Athens for Greek teachers of English. Since then, he has made six research and consulting trips to Greece, most recently in June 1990 for a one-week national linguistics seminar for Greek teachers, sponsored by the Panhellenic Association of Language Schools.

Visiting Professorships have included for the National Council of Churches Summer Linguistics Institutes at Stony Point, Drew University, Meadville College, and the University of Toronto in Canada, and English-as-a-Second-Language Summer Insititutes at Marylhurst College in Oregon and the State University of New York at Oswego.

Seaman pursued a long-term interest in the languages and cultures of the Indians of the northern Arizona area, as well as a secondary interest in accounting. In 1970-1972 he consulted with the Zuni Tribal Council to help establish the first official Zuni alphabet. He did compliance and financial auditing on several Indian reservations, and from 1977-1980 worked on setting up the initial tribal-run accounting system for the Fort Mojave Tribe in the Needles, California area. In 1980 he received the prestigious Outstanding University Professor award at Northern Arizona University.

In addition to publication in newspapers and scholarly journals, Seaman's books include Modern Greek and American English in Contact (1972), Hopi Dictionary (1985), Havasupai Habitat (with graduate student Stephen Weber, 1985), A. F. Whiting Collection: User Guide and Index (1993), and Born a Chief (1993). All income from these books is assigned to a scholarship fund for Hopi students at Northern Arizona University, endowed by P. David and Mary M. Seaman in 1986.