In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nick Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between the Americas and the western coast of Asia from late prehistory onwards: firstly the colonization by speakers of Austronesian languages of the western Pacific littoral, from around 3000 BC, of the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia; followed by the later settlement, by Polynesian peoples, of Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and eventually New Zealand, up to AD 1250.

Alongside a compelling narrative of this remarkable sequence of long-distance migrations, Nick Thomas describes the sea-going technologies that allowed these epic voyages to take place; the nature of the cultures that embarked on them; and the societies that emerged across Oceania in their wake.

Nicholas Thomas

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