Posted by 
By Geoffrey Irwin
The exploration and colonization of the Pacific is a outstanding episode in human prehistory. Early sea-going explorers had no wisdom of Pacific geography, no tools for measuring time and none for exploration. 40 years of recent archaeology, experimental voyages in rafts, and computing device simulations of voyages have produced an normous variety of literature in this arguable topic. This publication represents a massive develop in wisdom of the cost of the Pacific by means of suggesting that exploration used to be quick, useful and undertaken systematically, and that navigation equipment gradually more suitable.
Read or Download The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific PDF
Best australia & oceania books
Circle of Death (Damask Circle Book)
In a single, vicious evening, Kirby Brown’s international is torn aside. Her ally is useless, killed through a madman who's now after her. and she or he has no proposal why. Doyle Fitzgerald has been despatched to Melbourne, Australia to seek down a killer. What he doesn’t look forward to finding is a circle of witches able of controlling the weather and a sorceress decided to take that continual for herself.
The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia
The e-book of this e-book in 1981 profoundly replaced the best way we comprehend the historical past of family members among indigenous Australians and ecu settlers. It has because turn into a vintage of Australian historical past. Drawing from documentary and oral proof, the publication describes in meticulous and compelling element the ways that Aborigines replied to the arriving of Europeans.
An Uneasy Relationship: Norfolk Island and the Commonwealth of Australia
The location of Norfolk Island, as a territory of the Commonwealth of Australia, is among the old anomalies in governance, which has continued considering 1914. It displays the direct ancient linkages among the British Crown and people Norfolk Islanders who have been descendants of Pitcairn Islanders of Mutiny at the Bounty reputation.
Waitangi & Indigenous Rights: Revolution, Law & Legitimation
This landmark examine examines concerns surrounding New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi, targeting fresh Fiji revolutions and indigenous conventional rights to the seabed and foreshore. during this revised variation, the writer ways those complicated and arguable concerns with a cautious, thorough, and principled strategy whereas facing the wide constitutional concerns and responding to reviews made through different students.
Extra resources for The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific
Sample text
Spriggs, pers. comm. 1990). It was perhaps, above all, the distinctiveness of Lapita ceramic design that led Golson to 'propose for the S. W. Pacific some early community of culture' (1961:176). However, that does not help much in the matter of origins. All sides agree that pottery was an introduction, even if Lapita did not take on its distinguishing decoration until it reached the Bismarcks, a possibility raised by Spriggs (1989a). Resolution of the question must await more field work on the north and west coasts of New Guinea and in eastern Island Southeast Asia.
The coherence of the evidence, although far from complete, now allows us to make general predictions for islands that still lack archaeological control. At this time, sites that we may reasonably associate with modern humans 30 PREHISTORIC EXPLORATION AND COLONISATION are no older in Island Southeast Asia than in Greater Australia. Jones (1989) suggests both could have been settled quickly after the first ocean crossings were made. The stone tool industries, consisting of generally amorphous core and flake assemblages, are similar over the whole region and reveal no origins (Bellwood 1989).
Early Austronesian speakers are seen as the source of Polynesian genes, but 'genetic data cannot discern whether the Lapita people were the first Austronesian speakers to arrive in New Guinea' (Hill and Serjeantson 1989:288). Polynesians are found to be homogeneous (Hill and Serjeantson 38 PREHISTORIC EXPLORATION AND COLONISATION 1989:288; Trent et al. 1990), and Micronesians to show evidence of hybridisation between Southeast Asian and Melanesian gene pools (Hill and Serjeantson 1989:91). These conclusions could be taken to support the Southeast Asian theory of Lapita origins in so far as such Lapita 'people' as reached Fiji and West Polynesia became ancestral to modern Polynesians there.