Ancient Voyagers In Polynesia

A blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know. For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history. How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind. For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world. Sea People includes an 8-page photo insert, illustrations throughout, and 2 endpaper maps.

This new edition includes a discussion of theories about traditional methods of navigation developed during recent decades, the story of the renaissance of star navigation throughout the Pacific, and material about navigation systems in Indonesia, Siberia, and the Indian Ocean.

Nomads of the Wind and the BBC TV series which it accompanies tell the epic story of the Polynesians--the tenacious ocean voyaging people who settled the Pacific.

Pacific Encounters brings together for the first time many stunning Polynesian objects collected by voyagers and missionaries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Illustrated are over 270 items gathered from the major regions of Polynesia. Many are from the British Museum, which houses fine and rare material from the expeditions of Captain Cook, Captain Vancouver, and members of the London Missionary Society. Ranging from massive images of gods to small fish hooks, they are discussed in the contexts of their local use and meanings, and their journeys to museums all over the world. These pieces have remarkable stories to tell of encounters between humans and their gods, between Polynesians and Europeans, their respective chiefs and priests, beliefs, and technologies. Pacific Encounters is a groundbreaking book that conveys the wonder and excitement not only of the objects themselves, but of the fascinating Polynesian cultures that produced them.

An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account. One of the Best Books of 2021 — Wall Street Journal The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean? In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas from late prehistory onward. Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from genetics, linguistics, and archaeology, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the seagoing technologies that enabled them, and the societies they left in their wake.