Early Tongan prehistory : the Lapita period on Tongatapu and its relationships

Abstract

Jens Poulsen was born in Copenhagen in 1932 and graduated with an MA in Scandinavian archaeology and European prehistory from the University of Copenhagen in 1962.During his student years he had training in fieldwork and museology (at the Danish National Museum) and directed an archaeological survey in northernmost Norway for the Trams� Museum.His MA thesis on necklaces of the pre-Roman Iron Age in Scandinavia was supervised by Professor C.-J. Becker.In earlier years, from 1948-51, Poulse n sailed as a deckhand on small trading vessels in the Baltic and on the full-rigged training ship Danmark in the Atlantic.It was inevitable that as a sailor and a Scandinavian he should be inspired by Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki voyage.It was thus logical that when as a student of prehistory he was attracted to work away from Europe, somewhere where archaeology was at its beginnings, his attention was drawn to the Pacific as a result of Heyerdahl's researches there.He came to the Australian National University as our second research scholar in prehistory in early 1963.His topic was to follow up promising indications revealed by previous rather small-scale excavations in Tonga for the study of what is now well known as the Lapita Culture of the Southwest Pacific.The appearance of the monograph is particularly appropriate in the light of current mt en•st III the manifestations of the Lapita culture throughout the Western Pacific, since it gives us t ht• details of one of the richest and most thoroughly investigated examples to date.

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