Janet Davidson

Janet Marjorie Davidson ONZM (born 1941) is a New Zealand archaeologist who has carried out extensive field work in the Pacific Islands throughout Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia.

Davidson was born in 1941.¹ Educated in Wellington, she was a teenager when she commenced work at the Dominion Museum as a vacation assistant.¹ She began studying for a Bachelor of Arts at the Victoria University of Wellington but subsequently switched to the University of Auckland, graduating in 1962.² Early archaeology work included excavations of middens at Porirua, the site of the Paremata barracks and at Sarah's Gully on the Coromandel.¹²

Davidson carried out field work in the Society Islands at Moorea (1961–1962), Samoa (1964, 1965–1966), Tonga (1964) and Nukuoro (1965) in the Federated States of Micronesia as well as Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

In 1964, Davidson graduated with a Master of Arts degree in anthropology from the University of Auckland with a thesis on the topic of shell middens.²³ She was the E. Earle Vaile archaeologist at the Auckland Institute and Museum (based in the Auckland War Memorial Museum) from 1966 to 1979.²⁴ From 1974 to 1976 she was a Rhodes Visiting Fellow in Oxford;² during this period her position at the museum was filled by the British archaeologist Aileen Fox.⁵ In 1980 she moved to Dunedin to join her husband, Foss Leach,⁶ continuing her association with the Museum as an honorary research associate in archaeology.⁷ She was an honorary lecturer at the University of Otago and later held the positions of ethnologist at the National Museum from 1991 to 1996 and senior curator, Pacific, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from 1996 to 2002.⁴

Davidson and Roger Green carried out archaeological field work in Samoa in the 1960s. They co-authored Archaeology in Western Samoa and laid the foundation for archaeology in Samoa. Part of Davidson's field work was studying settlement patterns in Samoa before 1840.⁸ In 1969 Davidson participated in the Cook Bicentenary Expedition undertaking archaeological research at the Vava'u Group, Tonga.⁹

Davidson has published widely on the prehistory of New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. She edited the New Zealand Journal of Archaeology from 1985 to 2008.¹⁰ She was also a major contributor to the Journal of the Polynesian Society.

Davidson received the Elsdon Best Memorial Medal from the Polynesian Society in 1986 for outstanding scholarship in the study of the Māori people.¹¹ In the 1996 Queen's Birthday Honours, Davidson was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to archaeology.¹²

The festschrift Vastly Ingenious: The Archaeology of Pacific Material Culture – in honour of Janet M. Davidson was published in 2007.² It presented essays of new research by leading international scholars with an introduction by Roger Green. Published by Otago University Press, the book was edited by three Pacific prehistorians: Atholl Anderson, Kaye C. Green, and Foss Leach.¹³

In 2014 Davidson received the Roger C. Green Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Zealand Archaeological Association.²¹⁴ She was selected as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's "150 women in 150 words" in 2017, celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand.¹

• The Prehistory of New Zealand. Longman Paul. 1984.