Write an essay that explores the puzzle of Polynesian culture and the colonization of the Pacific before 1000 C.E

Question

Discuss factors that contributed to this expansion, the archeological evidence that documents its spread, and the technology that made it possible. What common cultural traits and religious practices bound these people together even as the explored islands were hundreds of miles apart?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: In an ocean too big to traverse with the technology of the time, where the winds blew almost without stop from the southeast and where vast distances separated islands that could support human life, the Polynesians conquered this environment mainly after 500 . Polynesians are easily defined as speakers of closely related languages. It is harder to find a common cultural profile for them in other respects. Using archaeological and linguistic evidence, however, we can piece together how they lived during the early centuries of their dispersal through the Pacific. They grew taro and yams, supplemented with coconut, breadfruit, and bananas. They kept chickens and pigs. They named 150 kinds of fish, and exploited them for tools—files made of sea-urchin spines, fish hooks from oyster shells. They consumed kava, a fermented drink made from a plant whose roots have narcotic properties, to induce trances and celebrate rites. Although archaeology cannot retrieve their notions of the sacred, we can infer it from language and later evidence. Mana—a supernatural force—regulated the world. The mana of a net makes it catch fish; the mana of an herb makes it heal. The Polynesian culture was a frontier culture in origin. The chronology of Polynesian expansion is relentlessly debated and deeply uncertain. Like the Caroline Islanders and the inhabitants of most of the islands of the South Pacific, the Polynesians shared a genetic background with some peoples in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, but—to judge from such DNA evidence as has come to light—belonged to a distinct wave of migration from their neighbors in the Carolines and Melanesia. The Polynesians were, from their first emergence in the archaeological record, constant voyagers, venturing ever farther into the paths of the southeast trade winds, which restricted the range of navigation but which at least promised explorers a good chance of getting home. Oral traditions recall and presumably embellish their history.