The Polynesian voyagers

In a few centuries, Polynesian navigators in double canoes reached almost every island in a triangle from Hawai’i to Rapa Nui to Aotearoa New Zealand, steering by stars, swells and birds.

Date: About AD 900 to 1300VII · After the empiresVIII · Medieval networks and empires
Place: Ra’iātea · Hawai’i · Rapa Nui · AotearoaOceania
Laid out as: A migrationPeople on the move: where they set out from, where they went, and what they found.
Lessons: 7 planned, none written yet
Themes: Exploration and migration
Science and mathematics
Peoples, cultures and civilisations

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

From Ra’iāteato Aotearoa

IThe long pause ends
IIDouble canoes
IIIWayfinding by stars and swells
IVHawai’i
VRapa Nui
VIAotearoa
VIIHōkūle’a sails again

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Kupe (in tradition)
Tupaia
Mau Piailug
Nainoa Thompson

Objects

Stick charts (from Micronesia)
Adzes of basalt

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

AD 900 to 1300. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?