Australian Archaeologist: Collected papers in honour of Jim Allen

by ANDERSON, ATHOLL and TIM MURRAY, eds (2000), 454pp., ISBN 0 7315 5214 8.
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Professor Emeritus Jim Allen is an eminent archaeologist of Australia and the Pacific. The papers collected here were written by his friends and colleagues, authorities in their fields, to honour his formal retirement in 1998 and celebrate the range of his archaeological interests.

The first group of papers considers his academic origins and various theoretical issues to which he has contributed such as the uses of historical archaeology, the writings of Gordon Childe, meaning in material culture and the nature of prehistoric trade. The second group takes up questions in the archaeology of Australia and Papua New Guinea, and for the most part represents intellectual sparks struck by Jim Allen's two great field projects, the Lapita Homeland Project centred upon the Bismarck archipelago in Papua New Guinea and the Southern Forests Archaeological Project in western Tasmania. The third group of papers takes up similar problems in Remote Oceania, a region in which Jim Allen's interests in Lapita archaeology, maritime economics and prehistoric colonisation have also been directed at a deeper understanding of the history of human settlement in the south Pacific, which has been, throughout, his principal concern.

Jim Allen is a distinguished Australian archaeologist. His formal career began upon graduation from the University of Sydney in 1966 and ended with the conclusion of is tenure as an Australian Research Council Senior Fellow in 1998. He served on the staff of the University of Papua New Guinea (1969-1971), The Australian National University (1972-1984) and La Trobe University (1985-1998), where he was the Foundation Professor of Archaeology and became Professor Emeritus in 1999. His research career, which emphasized the integration of substantial fieldwork and painstaking laboratory analyses with theoretical perspectives, ranged over the immense region of Australia and Near Oceania, with interests extending from the Pleistocene to the historical era. Although in retirement at Mossy Point, on the south coast of New South Wales, Jim Allen remains very active in archaeology and is a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University.