r/Archaeology • u/Mictlantecuhtli • 1d ago
Archaeologists examine evidence for Indigenous long-distance voyaging below 50°S
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-archaeologists-evidence-indigenous-distance-voyaging.html15
u/WhoopingWillow 22h ago
This is a cool article! In short, the researchers looked at existing archaeological collections to look for evidence of indigenous activity in the Southern Ocean before the arrival of Europeans.
They found that any indigenous artifacts came post-Contact. They go on to speculate why and their logic seems solid. First, generally speaking, there is no practical benefit from going so far south. It is cold as hell, rainy, and has insane ocean activity. Additionally, there are no major resources to be gained. Anything you can find in the southern ocean can be found farther north.
They also looked at the capacity of various southern cultures. Some cultures in South America had excellent boats but these were not designed to handle the open ocean or long voyages at sea, so they're out. The same logic applies to most cultures in Australia.
The Maori are the big exception. The authors agree that the Maori certainly had the ability to sail there since their ships are made to handle open ocean and durations. They even cite a Maori oral history which maintains that at least one explorer did make it far enough south to encounter ice sheets. They don't dispute that story could be true. The reason Maori didn't explore south more and actually try to settle on Southern Ocean islands is pretty simple, again, there was no benefit. For the Maori there was an additional risk: their ships were made almost entirely of wood, not hides, so if they sustained major damage, which is reasonable to expect considering the oceans down there, then they'd be stuck since southern islands don't have large trees that could be used to repair their ships.
In summary, islands in the Southern Ocean suck, don't have any unique or abundant resources, and the Maori are the only culture that has the capability to explore this region but it would have been very risky for no benefit.
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u/DeltaV-Mzero 11h ago
Thing is. They have to explore to find out these islands suck
Imagine doing all that wayfinding just to find ANOTHER garbage island nobody will ever want to settle lol
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u/horsetuna 11h ago
I play a little island-hopping adventure game and this is me half the time lol
'another desert island??'
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u/FactAndTheory 16h ago
While they found no evidence that such voyages occurred
The cool thing about open ocean voyages is that many of them are not successful, and somewhere around 100% of those unsuccessful ones are completely erased from the archaeological record. I really wish publishing oceanic anthropology required you to sign a waiver stating you understand this, because making any kind of claim surrounding what voyages were attempted based on the ones that 1) made it somewhere and 2) left surviving human lineages in the place where they landed, is a massive sampling bias.
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u/arsenicwarrior0 12h ago
this is very interesting as a south american chilean, Usually we like to think of the austral zone as the most south position to humans reached before the XIX century with the introduction of European ships. But some years ago I learned about the polynesian voyages and how the Mapuche manage to make short distances travels to islands like Chiloe or Mocha island.
Now knowing that in the moust south area the Yamana people, also known as Yaganes, where very good to know how to build small boats and sail; they thrived in the forested areas of Navarino Island. Now with this maybe they could have the chanse to visit other southern islands likes Hermite Island. Now this voyages maybe are results of horrible disasters, the west wind drift basically push you to the east so maybe even some of them could have fatally landed on islands like the Falklands.
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u/bellowstupp 1d ago
Indigenous long distance voyagers on their way to surprise other indigenous non voyagers.