Alfred Marston Tozzer was born in Lynn, Massachusetts on July 4, 1877. He received degrees in anthropology from Harvard College: an A.B. in 1900, an A.M. in 1901 and a Ph.D. in 1904.

Tozzer traveled to Arizona, California, and New Mexico to conduct his initial anthropological field work during his undergraduate summer in 1900 and 1901 studying linguistics among the Wintun and Navajo nations. Between 1902 and 1905, Tozzer held the American Fellowship of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). As Traveling Fellow for the AIA and under the sponsorship of Charles P. Bowditch through Harvard's Peabody Museum, Tozzer spent three winters living with and studying the Lacandones of Mexico and Central America. This material was used for his Ph.D. Dissertation and in the publication A Comparative Study of the Mayas and Lacandones (1907).

In the fall of 1909, Tozzer led a Peabody Museum expedition to Guatemala. The expedition went to map the ruins of Tikal in order to complete the report started by Teobert Maker. Raymond Merwin was his assistant on this expedition which also studied Nakum. Tozzer's publications for the Peabody Museum on these sites in 1911 and 1913 are noted for their comparative methods and depictions of hieroglyphic inscriptions and architecture. Tozzer served as the Director of the International School of Archeology in Mexico City in 1914, and as a result, was in Vera Cruz during the U.S. naval bombardment and its six-month occupation by the United States Marine Corps. Tozzer then returned to Harvard where, other than during the time he served with the U.S. Military in both World War I and World War II, he spent the rest of his professional life.

More than fifty years after his first expedition, Alfred Marston Tozzer passed away on October 5, 1954.

In 1974, the Peabody Museum library moved to a new building and was renamed the Tozzer Library as a tribute to the collections Alfred Marston Tozzer established (Mesoamerican), and his enormous contribution to both Harvard and the field of anthropology.