David Vaughan, a British-born choreographer, critic and performer who was best known for preserving the history of dance through his definitive biographies and painstaking stewardship of the Merce Cunningham archive, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

The cause was complications of prostate cancer, his nephew Tim Vaughan said.

Mr. Vaughan served the Cunningham company and school in various capacities for a half-century. He enhanced the company’s reputation worldwide in 1964 when he coordinated a six-month tour to Europe and Asia, with John Cage as music director and Robert Rauschenberg as resident designer and stage manager.

He began collecting dance ephemera in the late 1950s and was considered the first in-house archivist of an American dance company, a post he held officially from 1976 until the Cunningham troupe disbanded in 2012 after Cunningham died, in 2009.

The archive was donated to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where Mr. Vaughan was the host of monthly film screenings.