Sept.9th History Blog

A Journal of Pacific Maritime History:

The Deep History of Pacific Seafaring and Evidence of Prehistoric Native American Seafaring.

Both of the readings from this one packet, I felt, were pretty similar in their content. The articles similarly mention seafaring, the rise of sea levels, evidence of "maritime migration" and the estimations of how long the journeys could have been.

In the first article, " The Deep History of Pacific Seafaring", Erlandson points out the difficulties of grasping and understanding the antiquity of maritime peoples for so long. The problem with understanding and getting evidence of these voyages is that "humans evolved and spread around the world during Pleistoncene, a period dominated by heavy glaciation and dramatic changes in global sea-level and coastal geography". Another problem with understanding seafaring of history is the rising of sea-leves due to global warming threatening the coastal erosion. I bring up these points as part of my blog because I found the information in the article really interesting and it upsets me to know that so much of the information that could help piece this history together is becoming more fragile and lost. Cassidy mentions this too in his article. He writes, " Sea level rise of almost 400-feet since the last Ice Age, with the resulting costal erosion and silting in of all the river channels emptying into the Pacific Ocean has resulted in the destruction of the vast majority of early coastal and island sites."

In Dr. Dons Cultural Anthropology course, we watched a film ( I forget what its called) about how every human being can be traced back to Africa and how " Anatomically Modern Humans" spread throughout the world. I remember parts of the film that showed reenactments of AMHs walking miles and miles across land as well as sticking along coasts, living off of shellfish and adapting to living near the coast. Now that I think about it, much of the film was directly related the articles for tomorrow!

In other thoughts, besides writing about how sad it is to be losing precious information about how humans evolved and spread throughout the world, I also want to mention how I think these people were extremely brave, brilliant and resilient. It is mentioned more in "Evidence of Prehistoric Native American Seafaring" the measures these AMHs went through and how they adapted to become skilled shellfish hunters and oceanic explorers. The watercrafts that would have been necessary to "address significant open-water challenges from storms, winds, waves, and swells, currents, sea surface temperatures, and substantial distances between landfalls" are extremely impressive.

Overall I thought this was an extremely interesting packet of articles and I'm glad I read it!