SEA PEOPLE: The Puzzle of Polynesia

Christina Thompson Hardcover, 376 pp. Across the central and southern Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand islands make up the sprawling region of Polynesia. For over a millennium—long before the “discovery” of the Pacific by Europeans in the 16th century—Polynesian peoples inhabited the islands and were the only ones ever to have lived there. The question of where exactly they originated, and how they were able to traverse the vast Pacific has always been a difficult one to answer, made all the more intriguing by the absence of written records from the Polynesians themselves. In SEA PEOPLE: The Puzzle of Polynesia (Harper; March 12, 2019), Christina Thompson presents a multifaceted account of how, over the course of centuries, people have tried to answer what came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins. From an outside perspective, it seemed extraordinary that a people without writing or metal tools had been able to conquer the largest ocean in the world—especially when navig