Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia PDF Download

Author: Andrew Sharp
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category : Māori (New Zealand people)
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Author: Christina Thompson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062060899
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
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.

Author: Nicholas Thomas
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541620054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book 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.

Author: David Lewis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824815820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
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.

Author: Tommy Holmes
Publisher: Editions, Limited
ISBN: 9780915013159
Category : Canoes and canoeing
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Origins -- voyaging -- Materials -- Tools -- Canoe building -- Accessories -- Paddles -- Design -- Canoeing skills -- Canoe ladders -- surfing -- Fishing -- War -- Racing canoes -- Canoe racing -- Petroglyphs -- Burial canoes.

Author: Ben R. Finney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Insights gained into the ancient methods of travel by means of the canoe Hokulea have clarified early exploration patterns in Polynesia and convinced Finney that these explorations held relevance for the next phase of human outreach and colonisation, the investigation of space.--cf. Preface.

Author: Jeff Evans
Publisher: Oratia Media Ltd
ISBN: 1877514047
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This is the essential reference work to the traditions of Maori canoes that voyaged to New Zealand including lists of the waka, names of crew members and vessels, karakia and waiata, and maps. Jeff Evans collects the main information sources about travelling canoes into one volume. A must for lovers of history, students of Maori and nautical enthusiasts.

Author: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547525184
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 731

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Book Description
The author of The Great Railway Bazaar explores the South Pacific by kayak: “This exhilarating epic ranks with [his] best travel books” (Publishers Weekly). In one of his most exotic and adventuresome journeys, travel writer Paul Theroux embarks on an eighteen-month tour of the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines. Along the way, Theroux meets the king of Tonga, encounters street gangs in Auckland, and investigates a cargo cult in Vanuatu. From Australia to Tahiti, Fiji, Easter Island, and beyond, this exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming observations and high adventure.

Author: Jeff Evans
Publisher: Oratia Media Ltd
ISBN: 1877514152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
The science and stories behind the remarkable Polynesian settlement of the South Pacific and finally New Zealand, with plentiful illustrations and maps

Author: Sam Low
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824875249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Attuned to a world of natural signs—the stars, the winds, the curl of ocean swells—Polynesian explorers navigated for thousands of miles without charts or instruments. They sailed against prevailing winds and currents aboard powerful double canoes to settle the vast Pacific Ocean. And they did this when Greek mariners still hugged the coast of an inland sea, and Europe was populated by stone-age farmers. Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, this story had been lost and Polynesians had become an oppressed minority in their own land. Then, in 1975, a replica of an ancient Hawaiian canoe—Hōkūle‘a—was launched to sail the ancient star paths, and help Hawaiians reclaim pride in the accomplishments of their ancestors. Hawaiki Rising tells this story in the words of the men and women who created and sailed aboard Hōkūle‘a. They speak of growing up at a time when their Hawaiian culture was in danger of extinction; of their vision of sailing ancestral sea-routes; and of the heartbreaking loss of Eddie Aikau in a courageous effort to save his crewmates when Hōkūle‘a capsized in a raging storm. We join a young Hawaiian, Nainoa Thompson, as he rediscovers the ancient star signs that guided his ancestors, navigates Hōkūle‘a to Tahiti, and becomes the first Hawaiian to find distant landfall without charts or instruments in a thousand years. Hawaiki Rising is the saga of an astonishing revival of indigenous culture by voyagers who took hold of the old story and sailed deep into their ancestral past.