Janet Davidson ONZM is an eminent archaeologist who had a long career first at the Dominion Museum and then at Te Papa. A graduate of the University of Auckland, in 1965 she was the E. Earle Vaile Archaeologist at the Auckland Institute and Museum, an honorary lecturer at University of Otago and later Senior Curator, Pacific, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She is now an Honorary Research Associate at Te Papa. Janets career combined active and often pioneering fieldwork across the Pacific with an imaginative approach to museum research and display that attracted young scholars. She has published extensively on the prehistory of New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. She edited the New Zealand Journal of Archaeology from 19852008. She was also a major contributor to the Journal of the Polynesian Society. In 2007, a major archaeology publication, Vastly Ingenious: The Archaeology of Pacific Material Culture in honour of Janet M. Davidson was published in her honour.