ORIGINS OF THE OCEANIA BATTLEFIELD BETWEEN #PRC AND #US: 1/4: Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific, by Nicholas Thomas. @MAACambridge.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Voyagers-Settlement-Pacific-Nicholas-Thomas/dp/1541619838
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.
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Huyall. |
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| 0:40.2 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:47.0 | I welcome a great privilege. Professor Nicholas Thomas, Professor of Historical Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, Director of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, to help me with his new book, wonderful story about the Pacific Rim |
| 0:56.1 | Basin where I've been several times in my life ignorant of the questions I |
| 1:00.4 | didn't know existed about where this wonderful culture came from that I visited in Hawaii, |
| 1:07.0 | where it's going now in the 21st century given its history. |
| 1:12.0 | The new book is Voyager's, the settlement of the Pacific. |
| 1:14.9 | Professor, a very good evening to you. Thank you very much. |
| 1:17.6 | Congratulations. And I take you to a moment in your explication of the vastness of this landscape called Oceania. |
| 1:27.4 | This is, I believe, 1821, a missionary, John Williams, is deploying Christianity throughout the islands, the Cook Group if I read correctly. |
| 1:39.6 | And at one point he comes across a chief, Rongo Matani, who offers to demonstrate to him how to |
| 1:46.7 | sail to the next point where he wants to go. |
| 1:50.5 | And herein lies the secret of the vast voyages across the Oceania. |
| 1:55.0 | What do we need to know about what Rongo Matani told John Williams |
| 2:00.0 | said he recorded so dutifully in the early 19th century. Good evening professor. |
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