| Description |
1 online resource : illustrations, maps |
| Contents |
List of Illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I. Intellectual Obstacles to the Notion of Early Transoceanic Contacts; 1. The Myth of the Oceans as Uncrossable Barriers; 2. Before Columbus, the Earth was "Flat"? Flat Wrong; 3. Conveyor Belts of the Seas: The Prevailing Winds and Currents; 4. Staying Alive While Crossing the Deep; 5. Getting the Drift: Accidental Voyages and Discoveries; 6. No Plague in the Land? The Alleged American Absence of Old World Communicable Diseases; 7. Why Most Domesticated Animals and Plants Stayed Home |
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8. Low Tech: The Absences of Many Old World Inventions in the New World9. More on the Whys of Technological Absences; 10. The Mystery of the Missing Artifacts; 11. The Supposed Silence of the Historical Record; 12. The "Silent" Historical Record Speaks: Documents Possibly Describing Pre-Columbian Crossings; Part II. Means: The Types and Availabilities of Watercraft and Navigation; 13. Some Nautical Myths and Issues; 14. The Myth of the Inadequacy of Pre-Columbian Watercraft; 15. It's Earlier Than You Think: The Antiquity of Seagoing Watercraft |
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16. Have Sail, Will Travel: The Origins, Types, and Capabilities of Sails and Rigs17. Products of the Paleolithic: Rafts; 18. Out of the Ice Age: Skin Boats of the North; 19. Mesolithic and Neolithic Legacies: Dugouts and Lashed-Plank Watercraft; 20. Hulled Wooden Ships East and West: The Junk and the Nao; 21. Modern Experimental Voyages: The Empirical Approach; 22. Asea without a Compass: Celestial Way-Finding; 23. A Matter of Course: Seamarks and Haven-Finding; Part III. Motives for Ocean Crossings; 24. Repellants; 25. Attractants |
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Part IV. Opportunity for Exchange: Concrete Demonstrations of Contacts26. Shared Physical Materials, Domesticated Animals, and Diseases; 27. Shared Cultigens: From New into Old (World); 28. Cultivated Plants: Old World Cropping Up in the New; 29. Tobacco, Coca, and Cannabis: The Mummies Speak, but the Scientists Stand Mute; 30. Old World Faces in New World Places; 31. Incongruous Genes in America; Part V. Conclusions; 32. Mission Possible: Crossings Occurred; Notes; Works Cited; Index |
| Summary |
In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans. More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth's two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently. Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact, did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography, linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics, medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new understanding of human societies and their diffuse but interconnected development |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Discoveries in geography -- History -- To 1500
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Voyages and travels -- History -- To 1500
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Ocean travel -- History
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Navigation -- History -- To 1500
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HISTORY -- Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies)
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HISTORY -- North America.
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Discoveries in geography
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Discoveries in geography -- Pre-Columbian
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Navigation
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Ocean travel
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Voyages and travels
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| SUBJECT |
America -- Discovery and exploration -- Pre-Columbian.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85004253
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| Subject |
America
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| Genre/Form |
History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780817390754 |
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0817390758 |
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