- 1989 first edition. 288 pages
- Published by Angus & Robertson Publishers, Australia.
- Hardcover with dust jacket. Brown boards.
- Very good condition. Minor creases to edges of dust jacket. Small owner stamp on first front page. Minor foxing to end papers.
The Peopling of the Pacific. The book of the ABC TV series. Illusrated and Indexed.
The four continents that make up the rim of the mighty Pacific Ocean were the last great areas on earth to be settled by humans. The first people to look out on the Pacific arrived on its western shores from Africa more than a million years ago, but their descendants only completed that occupation 1000 years ago, with the discovery of the islands of Polynesia.
The cultures which arose around the Pacific Rim have a history as rich and complex as any in Europe or the Mediterranean, yet until recently there was little interest in the West in the origins and achievements of half the inhabitants of the planet.
The historical and cultural background to this extraordinary change is the subject of this engrossing book, and the TV series that it accompanies. Alan Thorne and Robert Raymond have travelled around and across the entire Pacific basin - from Tasmania to Tierra del Fuego, from Siberia to Easter Island - to uncover the footprints of a tremendous cavalcade of human evolution, technological as well as biological.
They start at the very beginning, a million years aga, at the sites where Peking Man and Java Man - ancestors of all the Pacific people - were discovered. They follow the routes of the great migrations out of Asia.
They redidscover the cultural traditions which have survived and even strengthened around the Pacific Rim. They survey the amazing array of inventions out of China and in Japan they entere the private workshops of some of the world's finest craftsmen.
The authors also highlight one of the great unrecognised consequences of the peopling of the Pacific: the drastic modification of landscape by the original hunter gatherers, by forest clearance and 'fire-stick farming'. And they forecast the kind of exciting discoveries about the human past in this region that can be expected in the coming decade.
In this book the authors not only reveal, through recent finds in anthropology and archaeology, an extraordinary pageant of human achievement, but also offer a glimpse of the shape of the next momentous period in human history: The Pacific Century.
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