Voyagers
The Settlement of the Pacific
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cambridge University anthropologist Thomas (Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire) delivers a brisk and intriguing account of how the islands of Oceania came to be inhabited by humans. He begins by documenting the first contacts between Pacific islanders and European explorers including James Cook, who documented linguistic and cultural affinities between the inhabitants of islands thousands of miles apart. Contending that 19th-century maps dividing the Pacific Ocean into regions including Polynesia and Micronesia were based on "invidious and overtly racist contrasts" between natives, Thomas draws on the latest findings in archaeology, genetics, climatology, and linguistics to chronicle the settlement of present-day Australia and New Guinea by people from southeast Asia 45,000 to 50,000 years ago, and tracks the subsequent migration of their descendants across vast stretches of ocean to colonize Hawaii, the Marianas, Tahiti, and other islands and archipelagos. Throughout, Thomas highlights the work of Indigenous scholars, including Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau‛ofa, and makes the case that the region has been more central to world affairs than is widely known. With lucid explanations of modern advances in historical anthropology and evocative reflections on the author's own fascination with Oceania, this is an accessible introduction to an astounding chapter in human history.
