Holding this position until 1966, he contributed to the uses of radiocarbon dating, to the geological history of changes in land and sea levels, and to the archaeological implications of this work. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1945, received the Prestwich Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1951, the gold medal of the Linnean Society in 1966, and was knighted in 1970.

Tim Murray

Golson, Jack

(1926–)

A native of Yorkshire, England, famed as a cricketer as well as an archaeologist of great skill and wisdom, Jack Golson studied archaeology at the University of Cambridge in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Originally intending to pursue research in medieval archaeology (he had embarked on graduate fieldwork at the abandoned English village of Wharram Percy in 1953), Golson soon emigrated to New Zealand to take up a position as the first prehistoric archaeologist appointed to the University of Auckland. His relocation to New Zealand lent great impetus to the development of prehistoric archaeology in that country and in the developing field of Pacific archaeology. Moving to the Australian National University (ANU) in 1961 to assume a founding position in prehistory, Golson set about conducting fieldwork in tropical northern Australia and encouraging the earliest of the thirty-nine graduate students who would earn Ph.D. degrees under his supervision.

Golson’s role at the ANU (which concluded with his retirement in 1991) has marked him as one of the most significant archaeologists in Australia. However, it was his excavations in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea, particularly at the site of Kuk, that brought him considerable international fame due to the site’s association with evidence of early agriculture in the region. A past president of the world archaeological congress, Golson is an inspiring educator and scientist whose strong political and ethical principles have done much to establish the special character of Australian and Oceanic archaeology.

Tim Murray

See also

Mulvaney, John; New Zealand: Prehistoric Archaeology; Papua New Guinea and Melanesia

Gorodcov, Vasiliy Alekeyevich

(1860–1945)

Vasiliy Alekeyevich Gorodcov was born in the Russian province of Riazan. The son of a village sexton, he initially studied to become an Orthodox priest but instead joined the army, serving as an officer from 1880 until 1906. Gorodcov’s interest in archaeology was inspired by his reading of Anuchin’s Russian translation of John Lubbock’s (lord avebury’s) Prehistoric Times, and he began to undertake field surveys in the areas where his military unit was stationed.

In 1887, Gorodcov attended the Seventh Archaeological Congress and reported on some Neolithic sites he had found, but it was not until the following congress in Moscow that prehistoric archaeology, with the support of the geographer and anthropologist Anuchin and the geologist Inostrantsev, became part of the congress agenda. In response to the interest in prehistoric sites and the need for archaeological mapping, Gorodcov mapped the Neolithic settlements of the Oka River and began to excavate the dunes. In 1901, when he was transferred to the southern part of the Russian Empire, he excavated burial mounds in the Donets River basin and organized excavations in the Izium district of Kharkov; in 1903, there were more excavations in the Bakhmut district of Yekaterinoslav Province. In 1905 and 1907, in the monumental transactions of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Archaeological Congresses, Gorodcov published the full reports of all of these excavations, including summary tables for the distribution of grave materials and photographs that were a model of archaeological reporting for their time.

The scope of Gorodcov’s fieldwork was extraordinarily wide, but he also became interested in the theoretical and methodological analysis of archaeological material. In a paper of 1902 entitled “Russian Prehistoric Ceramics,” he attempted to create a universal classification system for pottery that was even more rigorous