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    Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
    Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
    Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
    Audiobook11 hours

    Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

    Written by Christina Thompson

    Narrated by Susan Lyons

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMar 12, 2019
    ISBN9780062897572
    Author

    Christina Thompson

    Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story, which was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Vogue, the American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History, and three editions of Best Australian Essays. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Writer's Grant from the Australia Council, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. A dual citizen of the US and Australia, she lives outside of Boston with her family.

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    Reviews for Sea People

    4.5/5

    206 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Heartily recommended. A constantly eye-opening read, sensitively tracking the attempts to understand Polynesian origins and culture, from the arrival of the first Western explorers to the growing Polynesian self-discovery and self-determination of the last 50 years. A treat to see the world from such a different perspective.
    • 3/5
      Pretty good, seemed,you know fairly pedestrian as these things go. No "David Graeber" world changer but a good start in fleshing out the process of the Polynesian island hopping expansion deal.It is just so fastinating learning about the humans com
      ing over that way towards south America
    • 5/5
      This was a lovely heartfelt book about the Polynesian people's origins that included some interesting documentation about ancient navigation & seafaring in the Pacific plus how the Polynesian language evolved. The narrator has a great voice & does not struggle with the Polynesian words. Its a wonderful read if you want to take a trip around the pacific from a native view. Highly recommend.
    • 5/5
      Very well researched. Thank you for an excellent book that is great to listen to and learn from.
    • 5/5
      Thompson brings together Polynesian history, anthropology, science and oral traditions in a way that keeps you reading. Her love of Polynesia is palpable. The reader of the audio book brings every word to life. A must read for travelers, explorers and the intellectually curious. And for those with a reverence for the great mysteries of the world.
    • 5/5
      So friggin fascinating. If you like natural history and mystery, read.
    • 5/5
      Excellent research and deep delving into history, science, and myth.
    • 5/5
      A well written story of the Polynesian people narrated with a measured voice that keeps you wanting to continue as the mysteries are unraveled. The depth and breadth of research to unveil stories that may seem like fiction is what makes this book a real joy. Only wish there was a final clean summary at the end on what is there current best explanation on the peopling of Polynesia.
    • 5/5
      Wish I could give this book 10 stars! So good!
    • 5/5
      Truly excellent. Not a history of Polynesia, but an narrative of the way the prehistory of the Polynesians has been thought about from the West's first interactions in the eighteenth century through to the present.Starting with endpapers that are the relevant maps for easy consultation - to quirky and informative title headings, the book is an absolute delight.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.
    • 4/5
      The Pacific is very big, as everyone who has had anything to do with it will tell you, and the islands in it are for the most part very small and a long way apart. Yet when the first European sailors reached Polynesia in the 16th century, they found people living on just about all of those tiny specks of land. What's more, those people all seemed to speak closely-related languages and share many of the same domestic animals, food-plants and cultural traditions, and in many cases they had obviously been settled where they were for a long time. 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.
    • 4/5
      I have a fascination with how isolated cultures like Polynesians have thrived. Christina Thompson places her fascination in a collection of accounts dating back to early European explorers to modern DNA revelations. It becomes clear that nobody has the exact answers but there is respect to be found in Polynesian oral traditions that contributed to their navigational and survival abilities. Sea People highlights the evolving narrative of Polynesian history. Thompson is concise but includes enough detail to appreciate each segment of discovery.
    • 5/5
      Pretty close to excellent. My only wish would have been for a summarizing chart or graph of some kind to make future reference easier. The basics I was familiar with, but much of the specifics I was not. Well written as well.
    • 5/5
      The author, having met, married, and had a family with a Maori man she met while conducting academic research in New Zealand, continues and expands her own exploration of Polynesian origins and culture in her second book. There's no geographical entity on the planet larger than the Pacific Ocean, nor any firm origin stories as to the background of its people and how they managed to navigate to and to populate so many distant, tiny islands even before European explorers appeared. Her writing style is simultaneously compelling and comfortable, a rare combination in a book of history and adventure - and still unsolved mysteries. She details modern attempts to recreate ancient voyages using techniques passed down via oral legends. If Thor Hyerdahl's Kon-Tiki was dry stuff, this is the fascinatingly juicy version.