Roger Green 1932-2009

Mon Oct 12 02:38:14 UTC 2009

Roger Green, eminent Pacific prehistorian, died in Auckland on Oct 4, 2009, aged 77. He was probably the most influential figure in the field of Oceanic prehistory over the past 50 years, not only because of his own scholarship (including some 300 publications) but because of his enormous contributions as teacher, mentor and backer (in matters of grant-getting etc) to countless younger scholars and as a mover and shaker. Although best known for his archaeological work in Polynesia and Melanesia, Green also made important contributions to Oceanic historical linguistics and more generally to reconstructing culture history by integrating findings from diverse historical disciplines.
Roger Green was born in New Jersey and grew up in Albuquerque.  He did his PhD in Anthropology at Harvard, where Douglas Oliver diverted his research interests from the American Southwest to Polynesia. For much of his career he was based at the University of Auckland, with an interlude at the Bishop Museum and University of Hawaii.
Green’s contributions to Oceanic linguistics were of two different kinds. First, he was an academic entrepreneur and initiator of interdisciplinary projects in which there were archaeological, linguistic, ethnobotanical and other strands. After taking up a lectureship in archaeology at the University of Auckland in 1961 he encouraged Bruce Biggs, then primarily a descriptive linguist and Maori specialist, and Biggs’ student, Andrew Pawley, to get into Polynesian historical linguistics.  In 1965 Green, in association with Biggs and Douglas Yen of the Bishop Museum, obtained a large NSF grant for a Polynesian Culture History project. That grant funded the first few years work on POLLEX, the Proto Polynesian Lexicon database, compiled by Biggs and David Walsh. This grew into a monumental etymological dictionary that is still being expanded and refined (now in electronic form, under the wing of Ross Clark). The NSF grant also supported fieldwork by Biggs and several graduate students to record several little-known Polynesian languages In 1969 Green organised a pioneering interdisciplinary symposium in Sigatoka, Fiji, in which (among other things) he invited linguists to seek high-order subgroupings within Oceanic and to take the first steps towards reconstructing Proto Oceanic grammar.  Another major project led by Green in the 1970s investigated the prehistory of the Southeast Solomons. This funded fieldwork by Christine Cashmore and Peter Lincoln on the languages of the Eastern Outer Is.	
Green’s own publications in Oceanic (chiefly Polynesian) historical linguistics form his second category of contributions. The most important of these are listed below in an appendix.  In 1966 he published evidence for what has become the accepted subgrouping of Eastern Polynesian languages: there is a Central Eastern group exclusive of Easter Island, and within this, a Marquesic group that includes Hawaiian and a Tahitic group that includes Tahitian, Maori, Rarotongan and Tuamotuan.  He subsequently treated the position of Anuta.  He also wrote many works drawing together linguistic, archaeological and ethnographic evidence to reconstructs aspects of the material culture and social organization of the speakers of Oceanic languages who first settled the central Pacific.  His most important synthesis is undoubtedly Hawaiki; Ancestral Polynesia: an Essay in Historical Anthropology, co-authored with the archaeologist Pat Kirch. This 370 page book draws heavily on the cognate sets in POLLEX database to reconstruct the way of life of the Proto Polynesian speech community. It includes chapters on ‘subsistence’, ‘food preparation and cuisine’, ‘material culture’, ‘social and political organization’, and ‘gods, ancestors, seasons and rituals’, as well as on ‘Polynesia as a phylogenetic unit’. 
 Roger was honoured with many awards, among them membership of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Hector Memorial Medal and the Marsden Medal for services to science, and being made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He received a 700 page festschrift in 1996.
Roger will be greatly missed by colleagues and students who benefited from his generosity of spirit, as well as from his stimulating intellect.  
Andrew Pawley

Roger C. Green: Selected publications on Oceanic historical linguistics and culture history

The following is a list of Roger Green’s most important publications on Oceanic historical linguistics and on the intersection of evidence from linguistics, archaeology and other historical disciplines (the basis of what he called ‘culture history’). As Green published around 300 papers on Oceanic prehistory, a good many of them interdisciplinary in scope, it would be a tall order to list all those that touch on linguistic evidence and I will not try to do so here. (AKP, 10.10.2009)

1966.  Linguistic subgrouping within Polynesia: the implications for prehistoric settlement. J. Polynesian Society 75:6-38.
1967. The immediate origins of the Polynesians. In Highland, Genevieve, R.W. Force, A. Howard, 	M. Kelly and Y. Sinoto (eds),  Polynesian Culture History. Essays in Honor of Kenneth P. 	Emory, 215-240. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.
1971. Anuta’s position in the subgrouping of Polynesian languages. J. Polynesian Society 80:355-370.
1973.  (Andrew Pawley and R.C. Green) Dating the dispersal of the Oceanic languages. Oceanic 	Linguistics 12:1-67.
1981. Location of the Polynesian homeland: a continuing problem. In Jim Hollyman and Andrew 	Pawley (eds), Studies in Pacific Languages and Culture History in Honour of Bruce 			Biggs,133-158. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand.
1984. (Andrew Pawley and R.C. Green) The Proto-Oceanic language community. J. Pacific 		History 19:123-146. [Reprinted in R. Kirk and E. Szathmary (eds) Out of Asia:  Peopling the 	Americas and the Pacific, 161-184. Canberra: J. Pacific History (1985)]

1987. (Patrick V. Kirch and R.C. Green) History, phylogeny and evolution in Polynesia Current Anthropology 28:31-56.

1988. Subgrouping of the Rapanui language of Easter Island and its implications for East Polynesian prehistory.  In C. Cristino F., P. Vargas , R. Izaurieta S., and R. Budd P. (eds), First International Congress, Easter Island and East Polynesia. vol. 1. Archaeology, pp. 37-57.  Santiago, Faculdad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Instituto de Estudios, Universidad de Chile.

1994. Archaeological problems with the use of linguistic evidence in reconstruction of rank, status and social organisation in Ancestral Polynesian Society. In A. Pawley and M. Ross (eds), Austronesian Terminologies: Continuity and Change, 171-184. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

1997. Linguistic, biological and cultural origins of the initial inhabitants of Remote Oceania. New Zealand J. Archaeology 17 [1995]:5-27.
1998. From Proto-Oceanic *Rumaq to Proto-Polynesian *fale: a significant reorganization in Austronesian housing. Archaeology in New Zealand 42:253-272.
 1999a (R.C. and Andrew Pawley) Early Oceanic architectural forms and settlement patterns: linguistic, archaeological and ethnological perspectives. In Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds), Archaeology and Language, vol. 3, 31-89. London: Routledge.  [Abridged and slightly revised version appears in M. Ross, A. Pawley and M. Osmond (eds), The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: the Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society: vol. 1 Material Culture, 37-65 (1998)]
1999b. Integrating historical linguistics with archaeology: insights from research in Remote Oceania.  In P. Bellwood, D. Bowdery and 5 others (eds), Indo-Pacific Prehistory: the Melaka papers, vol. 2, 3-24. Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 18: Canberra
2001. (Patrick V. Kirch and R.C. Green) Hawaiki: Ancestral Polynesia: An Essay in Historical Anthropology.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2002. Rediscovering the social aspects of Ancestral Oceanic societies through archaeology, linguistics and ethnology. In S. Bedford and D. Burley (eds), Fifty Years in the Field. Essays in Honour and Celebration of Richard Shutler Jr’s Archaeological Career.  21-35. NZ Archaeological Society monograph 24. Auckland.
2003. The Lapita horizon and traditions – signature for one set of oceanic migrations.  In C. Sand (ed.), Pacific Archaeology: Assessments and prospects (Proceedings of the Conference for the 50th Anniversary of the First Lapita Excavation. Koné Nouméa 2002), 95-120. Nouméa: Les Cahiers de l’archéologie en Nouvelle-Caledonie 15.
in press.  The Outer Eastern Islands of the Solomons: a puzzle for the holistic approach to the anthropology of history. In  John Bowden, Nikolaus Himmelmann and Malcolm Ross, eds,  A Journey 
through Austronesian and Papuan Linguistic and Cultural Space: Papers in Honour of Andrew K. Pawley. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

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