Ancient Ocean Crossings

Paints a compelling picture of impressive pre-Columbian cultures and Old World civilizations that, contrary to many prevailing notions, were not isolated from one another In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans. More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently. Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact, did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography, linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics, medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new understanding of human societies and their diffuse but interconnected development.

Did the Polynesians, Chinese and others make contact with North American civilizations in prehistoric times? For many years, this question was as close to taboo as you could get in anthropology: even to ask it was to risk labeling oneself a racist. Now, however, hard physical evidence of such contact has mounted to the point where it is difficult to ignore.This groundbreaking work, by the single most prominent scholar on the subject of pre-Columbian contact, is sure to be controversial and will cause the standard textbooks of North American prehistory to be rewritten. Stephen Jett covers the maritime capabilities of Far Eastern and Oceanic peoples, the physical evidence for contact, and the cultural similarities between New and Old World civilizations that had previously been explained away. This is an important book that will force a reassessment of the entire picture of North American prehistory.

The origins of anthropology lie in expeditionary journeys. But since the rise of immersive fieldwork, usually by a sole investigator, the older tradition of team-based social research has been largely eclipsed. Expeditionary Anthropology argues that expeditions have much to tell us about anthropologists and the people they studied. The book charts the diversity of anthropological expeditions and analyzes the often passionate arguments they provoked. Drawing on recent developments in gender studies, indigenous studies, and the history of science, the book argues that even today, the ‘science of man’ is deeply inscribed by its connections with expeditionary travel.

People moved into America very early across the Bering Strait. By the fifth millennia B.C.E. tropical sailors brought diseases to America and took plants and animals in both directions. Long before Columbus, tropical sailors carefully selected crops from New World highlands and shorelines, wet and dry climates, and took them to the Old World where they were grown in appropriate environments. Medicinal and psychedelic plants were traded and maintained in Egypt and Peru during separate, 1,400-year periods. This implies that maritime trade was continuous. In this groundbreaking book, learn about: ● 84 plants that were taken from the Americas to the Old World. ● What plants and animals were brought to the Americas. ● Why world trade was essential for transfer of so many. ● Interconnectedness of civilizations had to result from world trade. ● Dating of 18 species by archaeology with radio carbon shows dispersal. ● And much more! Plants, diseases, and animals from America were distributed throughout the world, across the oceans before 1492. It is time for scientists, teachers, and students to reconsider their beliefs about the early history of civilization with World Trade and Biological Exchanges Before 1492. ABOUT THE AUTHORS: John L. Sorenson is an emeritus professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University. He earned a doctorate in archeology from UCLA. Carl L. Johannessen is an emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of Oregon. He earned a doctorate in geography from the University of California at Berkeley.

For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and as a battleground for European empires, while being shaped by monsoons and human migration. Integrating environmental history and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil S. Amrith offers insights to the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.

In Beyond the Blue Horizon, bestselling science historian Brian Fagan tackles his richest topic yet: the enduring mystery of the oceans, the planet's most forbidding terrain.This is not a tale of Columbus or Hudson, but of much earlier mariners. From the moment when ancient Polynesians first dared to sail beyond the horizon, Fagan vividly explains how our mastery of the oceans has changed history, even before history was written. Beyond the Blue Horizon delves into the very beginnings of humanity's long and intimate relationship with the sea. It willl enthrall readers who enjoyed Longitude, Simon Winchester's Atlantic, or in its scope and its insightful linking of technology and culture, Guns, Germs, and Steel. What drove humans to risk their lives on open water? How did early sailors unlock the secrets of winds, tides, and the stars they steered by? What were the earliest ocean crossings like? With compelling detail, Brian Fagan reveals how seafaring evolved so that the vast realms of the sea gods were transformed from barriers into highways that hummed with commerce. Indeed, for most of human history, oceans have been the most vital connectors of far-flung societies. From bamboo rafts in the Java Sea to the caravels of the Age of Discovery, from Easter Island to Crete, Brian Fagan crafts a captivating narrative of humanity's urge to seek out distant shores, of the daring men and women who did so, and of the mark they have left on civilization.

Until recently the theory that people could have traversed large expanses of ocean in prehistoric times was considered pseudoscience. But recent discoveries in places as disparate as Australia, Labrador, Crete, California, and Chile open the possibility that ancient oceans were highways, not barriers, and that ancient people possessed the means and motives to traverse them. In this brief, thought-provoking, but controversial book Alice Kehoe considers the existing evidence in her reassessment of ancient sailing. Her book-critically analyzes the growing body of evidence on prehistoric sailing to help scholars and students evaluate a highly controversial hypothesis;-examines evidence from archaeology, anthropology, botany, art, mythology, linguistics, maritime technology, architecture, paleopathology, and other disciplines;-presents her evidence in student-accessible language to allow instructors to use this work for teaching critical thinking skills.

This book examines the legends of who ‘really’ discovered America. It argues that histories of America's origins were always based less on empirical evidence and more on social, political, and cultural wish fulfillment. Influenced by a complex interplay of Nativist hatred of immigrants and Aboriginal people, as well as distrust of academic scholarship, these legends ebbed and flowed with changing conditions in wider American society. The book focuses on the actions of a collection of quirky, obsessed amateur investigators who spent their lives trying to prove their various theories by promoting Welsh princes, Vikings, Chinese admirals, Neo-lithic Europeans, African explorers, and others who they say arrived centuries before Columbus. These myths acted as mitigating agencies for those who embraced them. Along with recent scholarship, this book makes extensive use of archival materials—some of which have never been employed before. It covers the period from the sixteenth century to the present. It brings together separate historiographic ideas to create a unified history rather than focusing on one particular legend as most books on the subject do. It shows how questions of who discovered America helped create the field of historical scholarship in this country. This book does not attempt to prove who discovered America, rather it tells the story of those who think they did.