Jack Golson and the Investigation of Prehistoric Agriculture in Highland New Guinea: Recent Work and Future Prospects‪.‬

This collection of papers celebrates Jack Golson's influence on the investigation of prehistoric agriculture in the mountainous interior of New Guinea. The breadth of Golson's interests and his remarkable intellectual generosity have stimulated several of his former students to attempt to develop some of the lines of enquiry identified through his own work. Golson has already been the subject of a major festschrift volume (Spriggs et al. eds 1993), in which his personal history and professional career are charted, and his influence on several generations of archaeologists is amply demonstrated. However, a number of factors have prompted us to issue a further acknowledgment of Golson's influence, the first being his continued reluctance to disengage from scholarly debate and enquiry following his retirement as the Professor of Prehistory at the Australian National University in 1991 (Spriggs and Jones 1993). Golson continues to publish, to edit, and to challenge those around him. The authors of this collection represent a more recent generation of researchers than those featured in the original festschrift, all but one of us (John Burton) having worked with Golson in the period since 1991. It does also seem something of an omission in the original festschrift that only one of the papers--Doug Yen's contribution on subsistence systems in the Pacific (Yen 1993)--addresses in any substantial way the history of agriculture in the New Guinea Highlands, given the centrality of the topic in Golson's own work. Each of the authors in the present collection has worked in New Guinea and most have focused at some point on questions of early agricultural history and social transformation in the region.