Stuart D. Scott was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1932. He attended Bolles Military Academy in Jacksonville, Florida as a young man and joined a Submarine Naval Reserve Unit there. While attending the University of Florida, his Reserve Unit was activated during the Korean War. Upon completing his Navy duty, he obtained his B.A. degree in 1957, and then studied archaeology in the Anthropology Department at the University of Arizona where he received an M.A. degree in 1959. Scott spent nine months excavating with the Tikal Project in Guatemala before returning to the University of Arizona where he received a Ph.D. in 1963. He then spent a year in New Zealand as a Fulbright scholar, and took the opportunity to return home via Asia, the Mid-East, and Europe visiting famous archaeological sites and historical places such as Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, Egypt's pyramids, Pompeii, Stonehenge, etc.

In the fall of 1964, Dr. Scott started a long career in the Anthropology Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo where he taught graduate and undergraduate archaeology courses and the cultural history of Pacific Islands. For three summers he excavated in Samoa. In 1968 he instituted a multi-year field school on the west coast of Mexico that emphasized a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding Mexican prehistory. In 1979, closer to home, Scott established the Old Fort Niagara Archaeology in Progress Project at the historic fort in Youngstown, New York. It was during his work along the Niagara River that Scott became interested in the story of the 1837 Rebellion.

As he became intrigued with telling this story about the fate of 92 Canadians and U.S. citizens transported to Tasmania, he traveled throughout Ontario, England, and Tasmania in order to see firsthand where these men battled, were tried, incarcerated, and set to hard labor far from home. Writing To The Outskirts Of Habitable Creation tied together Scott's interest in history, his love of the South Pacific, his fascination with whaling and the sea, and his many years of work along the Canadian border at Fort Niagara — one of the many U.S. and Canadian sites that were refortified between 1839 and 1843 due to tensions caused by the 1837 Rebellion.

Scott retired in 1997 and lives in Tucson, Arizona with his wife, Patricia Kay Scott. Throughout his long career, he and his wife used school holidays and sabbatical years to travel. They spent a summer excavating with a colleague in Israel, returned to Mexico often, and were continuously lured back to New Zealand, Australia, and Micronesian and Polynesian Islands. Other than his many academic journal publications, he is best known from collaborating with his good friend, the late Dr. Charles Cazeau, in writing Exploring the Unknown, Great Mysteries Reexamined, published by Plenum Press in 1979, and later translated into Japanese and Bulgarian. The basis of that book became the subject of the syndicated newspaper column, Let's Explore that ran for many years in the Buffalo Evening News and Gannett newspapers.

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