New Book
An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account. 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.
About the Author:
Nicholas Thomas is professor of historical anthropology at Cambridge and director of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Originally from Australia, he has written and edited numerous books over the years, including Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire, for which he was awarded the Wolfson History Prize in 2011. He lives in Cambridge.
Voyages of James Cook in the South Pacific
Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific by Nicholas Thomas Reviews:
“A scholarly survey of the current state of knowledge on the ancient peopling of Oceania. Blending ethnohistory, archaeology, and linguistics, anthropologist Thomas asks the big questions about ‘a civilization that has seldom been recognized as such.’…[Thomas’s] view that the Polynesians have long been ‘archipelago dwellers’ well aware of their distant relatives on other atolls and high islands brings a welcome world-systems approach to Oceania, an understudied region.” – Kirkus
“A brisk and intriguing account of how the islands of Oceania came to be inhabited by humans. 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.” – Publishers Weekly
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