Sea People Quotes

“In some traditions, Te Pō is associated with Te Kore, a word that in common speech expresses simple negation but here is elevated to mean something like “Nothingness” or “the Void.” Like Te Pō, Te Kore can be qualified—Kore-nui (the Vast Void); Kore-roa (the Far-Extending Void); Kore-para (the Parched Void); Kore-rawea (the Void in Which Nothing Is Felt)—suggesting that it is less a matter of true absence or emptiness and more a kind of liminal space between being and nonbeing—a “realm of potential being,”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“All the islands inside this triangle were originally settled by a clearly identifiable group of voyagers: a people with a single language and set of customs, a particular body of myths, a distinctive arsenal of tools and skills, and a “portmanteau biota” of plants and animals that they carried with them wherever they went. They had no knowledge of writing or metal tools—no maps or compasses—and yet they succeeded in colonizing the largest ocean on the planet, occupying every habitable rock between New Guinea and the Galápagos, and establishing what was, until the modern era, the largest single culture area in the world.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Vision is not so much about just looking but knowing what to look for. It's experience.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Two possible reasons for this might be that, like politics, all navigation is local, and that what is true in one geographical region is not necessarily true in another. The night sky in New Zealand is not the same as the night sky in Papua New Guinea, which is not the same as the night sky in Hawai‘i. The winds and currents in the Solomons are not the same as those around Rapa Nui or in the Marquesas. A second consideration might be that in many Oceanic societies, navigational knowledge is believed to have been privileged and known to only a few, which may mean that it was especially easy to lose once it was no longer central to a society’s survival.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“They had a constellation known as Big Bird, which overlaps our constellations Orion and Canis Major, and they gave the same name to the planet Venus that we give it: Morning Star. Not”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“perhaps to keep out the pigs. They had a large number of words for types of wind, including strong wind, storm wind, light wind, dry wind, winds from various directions, and wind bringing rain.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“The splitting off of the Oceanic branch of this language family is thought to have taken place in the neighborhood of the Bismarcks around the time of the first Lapita settlement, and it is strongly linked with the rapid colonization of the islands between there and Samoa between 1500 and 1000 B.C. Thus, the reconstruction of Proto-Oceanic opens a window onto the otherwise fairly mysterious Lapita world. Little survives in archaeological contexts in the tropics—none of the baskets or cordage or wooden housewares, no foodstuffs or clothing, no buildings apart from stone foundations and the dark impressions left by long-decayed posts. But something of the texture of these people’s lives can be extracted from their reconstructed vocabulary, working back through the ages via whatever was essential enough to pass on.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Proto-Oceanic is the theoretical mother tongue of the Oceanic peoples and the language from which all the Oceanic languages are thought to descend. It is a huge family, encompassing more than 450 languages, including those spoken on all the islands of Polynesia, most of the smaller islands of Melanesia, and all the islands of Micronesia except two. It is itself a branch of the larger Austronesian language family, a truly stupendous grouping of more than a thousand languages, which includes, in addition to all the Oceanic languages, those of the Philippines, Borneo, Indonesia, Timor, the Moluccas, and Madagascar. The very oldest Austronesian languages—and thus, in a sense, their geographic root—are a group of languages known as Formosan, a few of which are still spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island), an old Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan. Thus, at least from a linguistic point of view, the path back from Polynesia to the ultimate homeland proceeds through the Melanesian and Southeast Asian archipelagoes to an island off the coast of China, where the trail goes cold around 5000 or 6000 B.C.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Whoever they were, the so-called Lapita people appeared to be the first people on the scene in these places, and this, in turn, meant that not only were they the true pioneers of the remote Pacific—the first people to sail over the horizon to islands that were too far away to see—but they were also the first people to reach the Polynesian Triangle. And this meant that they were the immediate precursors and ancestors of the Polynesians.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN THE YEARS that followed, Lapita sites would be discovered on the Mussau Islands off Papua New Guinea, the Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, Tikopia Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Futuna, and Samoa—in other words, virtually everywhere between the Bismarck Archipelago and the western edge of Polynesia. Dates from these sites confirmed the age of the culture represented by these ceramics, but they also revealed an unexpected pattern: Lapita settlements across a 2,500-mile swath of the western Pacific—from roughly the Solomon Islands to Samoa—seem to have appeared almost simultaneously around 1000 B.C. Furthermore, east of the Solomons, they appeared to represent a cultural horizon: no one predated them in these islands, archaeologically speaking; no cultural artifacts underlay theirs.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Then one day, as he was watching one of his workers sift a shovelful of earth, something among the rocks and sand caught his eye, “a flat fragment of some brick-red substance,” which appeared briefly and then disappeared. It looked, thought Suggs, exactly like a piece of pottery. But that couldn’t be—pottery was found throughout Island Southeast Asia and much of Melanesia, but it had never been seen east of Samoa. And yet, there it was: an unmistakable potsherd from the lowest level of the dark band of sand that indicated human habitation. Almost immediately, a second, larger fragment emerged, then a third: a piece of an ancient pot rim with a grooved and rounded lip and marks on the inner and outer surfaces, “from the hand of the potter who had smoothed this vessel in the dim past.” In all, five fragments of pottery were discovered, belonging to just three vessels: a poorly fired, crumbly brown pot with a coarse temper; a well-fired reddish-brown bowl with a flared rim; and a fine-tempered fragment, also reddish brown, with marks that showed it had been polished using some kind of tool. Modest though they were, these ceramic tidbits changed “the complexion of Polynesian prehistory”—though, as was so often the case, it was not immediately clear in precisely what way.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“The archaeologist attached to the Bayard Dominick’s Marquesan team had reported in 1925 that the Marquesas offered “few opportunities for archaeological research.” But in 1956, a new expedition set out to reexamine the possibilities in these islands at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle. An energetic Columbia University graduate student named Robert Suggs was sent ahead to reconnoiter, and he quickly discovered that the previous generation had gotten it all wrong. Everywhere he looked, he saw archaeological potential. “We were seldom out of sight of some relic of the ancient Marquesan culture,” he writes. “Through all the valleys were scattered clusters of ruined house platforms. . . . Overgrown with weeds, half tumbled down beneath the weight of toppled trees and the pressure of the inexorable palm roots, these ancient village sites were sources of stone axes, carved stone pestles, skulls, and other sundry curios.” There were ceremonial plazas “hundreds of feet long” and, high on the cliffs above the deep valleys, “burial caves containing the remains of the population of centuries past.” The coup de grâce came when Suggs and his guide followed up on a report of a large number of “pig bones” in the dunes at a place called Ha‘atuatua. This windswept expanse of scrub and sand lies on the exposed eastern corner of Nuku Hiva. A decade earlier, in 1946, a tidal wave had cut away part of the beach, and since then bones and other artifacts had been washing out of the dunes. Not knowing quite what to expect, Suggs and his guide rode over on horseback. When they came out of the “hibiscus tangle” at the back of the beach and “caught sight of the debris washing down the slope,” he writes, “I nearly fell out of the saddle.” The bones that were scattered all along the slope and on the beach below were not pig bones but human bones! Ribs, vertebrae, thigh bones, bits of skull vault, and innumerable hand and foot bones were everywhere. At the edge of the bank a bleached female skull rested upside down, almost entirely exposed. Where the bank had been cut away, a dark horizontal band about two feet thick could be seen between layers of clean white sand. Embedded in this band were bits of charcoal and saucers of ash, fragments of pearl shell, stone and coral tools, and large fitted stones that appeared to be part of a buried pavement. They had discovered the remains of an entire village, complete with postholes, cooking pits, courtyards, and burials. The time was too short to explore the site fully, but the very next year, Suggs and his wife returned to examine it. There”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“One of Libby’s key assumptions had been that the quantity of carbon-14 in the atmosphere was constant, but this, as it turned out, was not true. Changes in the earth’s magnetic field, sunspot activity, even human activities like burning fossil fuels, exploding atom bombs, and testing nuclear weapons, altered the atmospheric concentration of radiocarbon. Unless radiocarbon dates were corrected using a known formula (i.e., calibrated), they could be off by significant amounts (as much as seven hundred years in the case of dates around 3000 B.C.). Gradually”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“It was the artifact of choice for a technique called seriation, which involved sorting objects by shape or style or some other formal feature and then ranging them in series, on the principle that things that are alike probably belong to the same period and that changes in style are often incremental. Like stratigraphy, seriation is a means of establishing relative chronologies; combined with the new technique of radiocarbon dating, it could be used to nail down whole stretches of cultural time. There was, however, no pottery in Hawai‘i, and Sinoto wondered what else could be used as a “diagnostic” artifact. The answer was fishhooks. Like”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“The officer argued that even if they managed to find “a desert island,” they would certainly perish from starvation or thirst. Emory pointed out that Polynesians had been managing just fine for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and that there was food and water to be had on even the smallest islands if you knew where to look. Coconuts alone provided food, water, containers, and fuel for a fire; the problem was that most American servicemen had no idea how to husk one. Asked if he could teach them, Emory replied, Of course—all that was needed was a pointed stick. And so began his stint as survival instructor to the U.S. military in the Pacific theater. Emory compiled a little manual of the basics, entitled South Sea Lore (known in its first incarnation as the Castaway’s Baedeker to the South Seas).”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“In 1951, the first radiocarbon date from the Pacific was reported by Willard F. Libby’s lab at the University of Chicago. Based on a sample of charcoal from the lowest layer of an excavation of the Kuli‘ou‘ou rock-shelter, on the island of O‘ahu, it fixed the earliest occupation of this Hawaiian site at A.D. 1004, plus or minus 180 years.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“They were polytheistic, and the name for their most securely reconstructible deity relates to the word for “sky.” Their word for human, on the other hand, was derived from their word for “earth” or “land.” Their poetry revolved around themes of fertility, reciprocity, immortality, and heroic deeds; a single famous phrase, best known to us from the Homeric epics, is glossed as “imperishable fame.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Te Po-nui The great night Te Po-roa The long night Te Po-uriuri The deep night Te Po-kerekere The intense night Te Po-tiwhatiwha The dark night Te Po-te-kitea The night in which nothing is seen Te Po-tangotango The intensely dark night Te Po-whawha The night of feeling Te Po-namunamu-ki-taiao The night of seeking passage to the world Te Po-tahuri-atu The night of restless turning Te Po-tahuri-mai-ki-taiao The night of turning towards the revealed”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“References to Te Pō occur in myths and chants throughout Polynesia, including one of the most famous of all, a two-thousand-line Hawaiian creation chant known as the Kumulipo, meaning “Beginning in deep darkness.” Composed at the beginning of the eighteenth century to mark the birth of the high chief Lonoikamakahiki, it begins, in Queen Lili‘uokalani’s translation: At the time that turned the heat of the earth At the time when the heavens turned and changed At the time when the light of the sun was subdued To cause light to break forth At the time of the night of Makalii [winter] Then began the slime which established the earth, The source of deepest darkness Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness, Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night, It is night, So night was born.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“According to many Polynesian creation stories, the origin of the universe begins in something known as Te Pō. Typically described as a period of chaos or darkness or a kind of night, Te Pō is what existed before any gods, sky, land, sea, plants, animals, or humans had come into being. It is associated not just with the dim beginnings of the world but with the time before birth, the time after death, and the mysteries of the spirit world. In the dualistic philosophy of the Polynesians, it is opposed to Te Ao, the world of light and ordinary human endeavor. We live in Te Ao, but it is from Te Pō that we come, and to it that we ultimately return. The”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“The first is that the relationships among all forms of matter are ones of kinship; everything that exists is, in a fairly literal sense, related to everything else. The stone that is the ancestor Raukawa is also, in its own right, an ancestor, being part of the same continuum of creation as the man and the ancestral hero. The second is that the mechanism of creation for everything in the world—not just humans, animals, and gods but even things that we would describe as inorganic, like sand and stones—is a form of sexual reproduction. Creation in traditional Polynesian myths is, fundamentally, a matter of procreation.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“In a world without writing, there are no inventories or statistics; in fact, writing, so far as anyone knows, was invented in order to make accurate lists of commodities like she-goats and oxen and amphorae of wine.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Although oral traditions often seem focused on the past, they are actually quite present-centered. In an oral culture, only what matters to the living is retained.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“It is almost impossible to imagine such a world today: one without books or calendars or accounts, never mind the Internet, one in which nothing has ever been documented and all the information that can be possessed is held in the minds of a few. But literacy has emerged only in the past five or six thousand years, and for most of human history this was how knowledge was stored and communicated. The advent of writing is often seen as one of the watershed developments in human history, and it can be argued that the presence or absence of writing shapes cultures in fundamental ways—some would even say it shapes consciousness itself. But even if that is too great a claim, it is certainly true that the ability to document what is known changes the way knowledge is constructed, including the kinds of information that can be transmitted and the shape that information takes.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“But it does have the merit of asking whether there is knowledge encoded in Tupaia’s chart that might be difficult for us to see because it is based on unfamiliar assumptions about how information is most usefully organized.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“The way a star compass works is this: You begin by envisioning the horizon as a circle marking the meeting point of the earth and the sky—which, of course, is exactly how it looks from a boat on the ocean or the high point of a small island. In the mind of an experienced navigator, this circle is dotted with points marking the rising and setting positions of particular stars. When the navigator imagines himself at the center of this circle and his destination as a point on the horizon, the star compass becomes a plotting diagram, giving the bearing of his target island in terms of the rising and setting points of particular stars. A “star path” is a course defined by the series of stars that rise over the course of a night in a particular direction.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Hawai‘i, for example, you go mauka, toward the mountain, or makai, toward the sea—directions that can point north, south, east, or west, depending upon where you are standing”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“This is what is meant by the Polynesian Triangle, an area of ten million square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean defined by the three points of Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and Easter Island.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“Polynesians were both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world. Seven’s”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia