5 - Models and methodology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2010
Summary
This chapter starts by presenting one current view or model of what happened in the Pacific in prehistory. This view and some of the contributing methodology are then scrutinized against the evidence from human biology, including that from gene studies, which over the past decade have greatly expanded our understanding of human relationships in the Pacific. Other perspectives on the Pacific past are then discussed. The chapter closes with a further look at the results of the simulation of human survival at sea, and their implications for Pacific settlement.
Before setting down this view or model of the Pacific past, a few comments are needed on some of the terms, particularly those that derive from physical anthropology and linguistics. One pervading theme in the study of Oceanic prehistory has been to see the wide range of human variation in terms of the movement into and across the Pacific of people of differing physical characteristics. Oliver gives the flavour of these: ‘All interpretations of racial differences in Oceania, including the most recent and best informed ones, include at least two or three distinct ancestral strains; and some interpretations include four or five or more’ (1988: 49).
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- People of the Great OceanAspects of Human Biology of the Early Pacific, pp. 130 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996