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.