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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.… (more)
User reviews
Thus, Western science was confronted with the famous "puzzle of Polynesia" — how did "primitive" people, without access to metal tools, nails, compasses, sextants and Admiralty charts, manage to migrate effectively across such vast areas of ocean? And where did they start?
Thompson's approach in this book is not so much to resolve that puzzle but rather to tease out the history of the interaction between Polynesian peoples and western scientists, looking at it as far as possible from both sides, and focussing as much on the long tradition of false preconceptions and intercultural misunderstandings as on the occasional isolated outbreaks of serious research and willingness to listen to each other that eventually made it possible for the two cultures to gain some kind of mutual understanding. I was particularly struck by her observation that a major stumbling-block for western scientists was the blind assumption that Polynesian cultures, being "primitive", were necessarily static: in many cases a famous "mystery" stopped being mysterious as soon as you allowed for the possibility that the way of life of a community had changed over the centuries to adapt to changes in its environment.
Obviously, it's not really possible to present a completely balanced view when one of the two parties in the discussion has all the written records, but Thompson does what she can with the handful of Polynesian thinkers who did leave some trace, like the Tahitian navigator Tupaia who sailed with Cook and Banks, and the early 20th century Maori ethnologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter H Buck).
The book is pitched at general readers, and whilst making us look critically at some of the things we remember from our schoolbooks (and all of the things we remember from Thor Heyerdahl) it also seems to give a useful broad overview of the main topics involved and how they fit together in time and space, without going into very much detail about any particular place or particular technical or cultural aspect of Polynesian life.
Starting with endpapers that are the relevant maps for easy consultation - to quirky
The interaction between Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator and Captain Cook could serve as a paradigm for the entire book: the intertwining of traditional knowledge (legend, language and navigational techniques) have interacted with scientific knowledge (from linguistics, somatology to DNA and radio-carbon dating) is developed in a clear and accessible way for the lay reader.
ing over that way towards south America