Association and played an important role in the early effort to establish protection for archaeological sites. He produced a major synthesis of the prehistory of the Auckland province and a revision of the Fijian sequence. Green also taught at the University of Hawaii.

Despite his activity in New Zealand, Green’s major interest lay in tropical polynesia, and with support of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and other institutions in New Zealand and Fiji, he returned to Western Samoa between 1963 and 1967 as part of the Polynesian Prehistory Program. From 1968 until 1970 Green undertook the Makaha Valley Historical Project in Hawaii, a major contract investigation funded entirely by private sources, which also made major contributions to the professional literature. Green also began his long collaboration with New Zealand ethnobotanist Douglas Yen at this time.

Green returned to New Zealand as the first Captain James Cook Fellow at the Auckland Institute and Museum and began a major fieldwork project in the southeast Solomons, co-directed by Yen and involving participants from New Zealand, Hawaii, and Australia. The major outcome of the project was the discovery of a number of sites containing Lapita pottery on the Santa Cruz and Reef Islands. This became the focus of his subsequent work. Green had been an important contributor to the definition of Lapita and other pottery in the central Pacific; now he was to become influential in defining the Lapita cultural complex in the western Pacific as well. The second phase of the southeast Solomons project during the late 1970s, again directed by Green and Yen, was concerned with Lapita sites on the Santa Cruz group.

During the 1970s Green wrote influential papers on the chronology of Oceanic languages, reviewed what was known about the Lapita cultural complex, and developed his ideas about Near and Remote Oceania. In the 1980s Green, along with archaeologist Dimitry Anson, undertook the reinvestigation of Lapita sites on Watom Island as part of the multi-institutional Lapita Homeland Project organized by Jim Allen, then of the Australian National University. The ongoing analysis of Lapita material from this project and from the Santa Cruz and Reef Islands absorbed Green over more than a decade.

In 1973 Green was appointed to a personal chair in the anthropology department at Auckland University, which he held until his retirement in 1992, and he then became professor emeritus. He has continued to exert an influence through his teaching and the supervision of numerous theses. He has played a major role in the growth of Pacific archaeology, and his culture historical approach has been influential. He has served on the council of the Royal Society of New Zealand and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1975 and a member of the American Academy of Sciences in 1984.

Janet Davidson

See also

New Zealand: Historical Archaeology; New Zealand: Prehistoric Archaeology; Papua New Guinea and Melanesia

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO 1999), pp. 835–849.

Griffin, James Bennett

(1905–1997)

Griffin was born in Kansas, the son of a railway worker who eventually settled his family in Illinois. Griffin originally studied law and business at the University of Chicago but changed to anthropology. In 1930 he received his M.A. and began his long-term association with the Hopewell culture, digging the Morton site near Lewiston, Illinois. In 1931 he excavated late Algonkian and historic Delaware sites in Pennsylvania. In 1932 Griffin began a doctorate in American archaeology at the University of Michigan and became one of the founding members of the National Society for American Archaeology. In 1936 he received his doctorate for his dissertation that focused on the ceramics from the Norris basin in Tennessee.

From 1936 to 1941 Griffin was a research associate and associate curator in charge of the Ceramic Repository in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. With this responsibility he began his lifelong investigation of eastern archaeology, characterized by specimen study and frequent travels to conferences