Janet Davidson

Janet Marjorie Davidson (born 1941) is a New Zealand museum curator and archaeologist who has carried out extensive field work in the Pacific Islands throughout Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. She has been the E. Earle Vaile archaeologist at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and a senior curator at Te Papa Tongarewa.

Early life Davidson was born in 1941 in Lower Hutt to John and Christine Davidson. Her father taught classics and mathematics at Hutt Valley High School and her brother John became a professor of classics at Victoria University of Wellington. As a teenager she became interested in a career in museums and archaeology and commenced work at the Dominion Museum as a vacation assistant in 1958. Early archaeology work included excavations of middens at Porirua, the site of the Paremata barracks and at Sarah's Gully on the Coromandel. From 1964 to 1966 she was a Bernice P. Bishop Museum Field Associate in Anthropology. From 1974 to 1976 she was a Rhodes Visiting Fellow in Oxford; during this period her position at the museum was filled by the British archaeologist Aileen Fox. In 1980 she moved to Dunedin to join her husband, Foss Leach, continuing her association with the Museum as an honorary research associate in archaeology. 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 Curator of Pacific Collections, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from 1996 to 2002. her findings on settlement patterns challenged views current at the time.

In New Zealand Davidson did extensive fieldwork in Northland, Auckland and the Coromandel.

Davidson has had a public role giving talks promoting archaeology and educating the public. In 1972 she became the first woman president of the New Zealand Archaeological Association holding the office for two years. She had previously been the Association's secretary from 1966 to 1972. She was also a major contributor to the Journal of the Polynesian Society. She received the Elsdon Best Memorial Medal from the Polynesian Society in 1986 for outstanding scholarship in the study of the Māori people. In the same year the University of Otago awarded her a Doctor of Science.

The festschrift Vastly Ingenious: The Archaeology of Pacific Material Culture – in honour of Janet M. Davidson was published in 2007.

In 2014 Davidson received the Roger C. Green Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Zealand Archaeological Association. 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.

Selected works