This is about how the Pacific islands were settled over the course of several thousand years. Sort of. At times, Thomas seems more intent discussing theories than actual evidence, or spending lots of pages on what Europeans in the 18th Century thought.
That's not meant to be funny; the first chapter after the introduction is largely about conclusions various sailors and scientists drew about the relationships between the different island chains in the first several decades after Europeans actually started sailing there regularly. Captain Cook gets the assistance of Tupaia, a priest from the Society Islands, when he's supposed to take precise observations of Venus' transit across the Sun in Tahiti. During their subsequent travels to other islands, including New Zealand, it turns out Tupaia can converse fairly well with the Maori, despite never having been to New Zealand, because the languages shared many similarities. Then Thomas discusses what people made of that.
Maybe that helps set the table for later chapters that actually discuss the archaeological evidence for the dispersal and colonization of Pacific islands by Polynesian ancestors, but it's the overarching story of that dispersal I was interested in. So when Thomas gets to that the book picks up. The discussion of two different waves of human settlement, one far earlier than the other, the evidence for a particular style of pottery dating back well over 2500 years, the shift in pollen records implying deforestation in a particular area, likely due to humans clearing said area. That was very interesting to me, not just what it says, but the different kinds of evidence used to piece things together.
There's still a lot uncertain, or at least not covered in this book (though Thomas helpfully mentions other, more expansive books on archaeology, so I've got something to track down.) Questions of how community is defined when a people are scattered across islands that are sometimes hundreds of miles apart, even though there's evidence of continuing trade between them. (Knives have been found made from rock that was quarried those kinds of distances away.)
The one that intrigues me the most is, the Lapita people seemed to reach Fiji and Western Polynesia prior to 1000 B.C., and then, didn't really expand further until around 1000 A.D. Nobody seems sure why the expansion stopped, or why it suddenly took off again, reaching Rapa Nui (Easter Island) by 1100 A.D., and New Zealand maybe a century later. Thomas keeps making the point that when people theorize about what drives an ancient people to do something, it says more about the mindset of the one doing the theorizing, so he refuses to offer any possible explanations. At least he's consistent on that.
It's not as in-depth as I was hoping for, but it's not a bad place to start, and find some sources that might have the kind of information I'm curious about.
'But the settlement of Manus, at the northeastern extremity of the Bismarck Archipelago, was a challenge of an entirely different order. The shortest sea crossing, successfully made by twenty-five thousand years ago, was some 140 miles. For around a third of the voyage, both the land behind and the land ahead would have been out of view. So this was a speculative venture, towards islands that might not have existed, undertaken by people presumably confident in their capacity to explore and return home in the event that they encountered nothing by open water.'
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