"For millennia, humans have developed different kinds of watercraft to travel across the world’s seas and oceans to settle new lands. The contacts they made with both pristine island ecologies and indigenous peoples dramatically changed the scope of human history in myriad ways that we are only beginning to understand. What environmental and social reasons influenced how humans traveled over open-ocean and how is archaeology and other scientific fields helping to decipher these clues? Here I examine how computer modeling, archaeological research, and other lines of evidence are providing answers to these questions, with a special focus on events that occurred in the Pacific and Caribbean."

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.