Jon Turk. 2005. In the Wake of the Jomon: Stone Age Mariners and a Voyage across the Pacific. International Marine, McGraw Hill, NYC. 284 pages, three maps and a brief annotated bibliography.
In Search of the Past
Jon Turk’s In the Wake of the Jomon is a romance novel--not in the traditional sense, but in the adventurous, Indiana-Jones-like sense of a romance, in the sheer excitement of traveling uncharted waters and testing the limits of your physical endurance. In 1996, Turk, a seasoned science writer, heard the story of the Kennewick Man, and of the latest theories about the colonization of the Americas. Kennewick Man is an almost complete skeleton found eroding out of the Columbia River in Washington State in the northeastern United States. Kennewick Man, like many skeletons recovered from American archaeological sites dated 9000 years ago and more, has a Caucasoid appearance, leading some physical anthropologists to suggest that some of the early colonizers of the New World were related to the Jomon peoples of Japan. One of the possible theories of colonization of the New World is that Jomon people sailed around the Pacific Rim from Japan to Alaska. Fired by an almost incomprehensible urge to those of us who like warm computer keyboards, Turk takes off in the summer of 2000 to prove, I suppose, that such a voyage was possible.
The Romance of the Past
Turk’s premise, to retrace the route of the putative sailing colonizers of the American continents, is, I’m sorry to say, baloney. Ten to fifteen thousand years ago, the sea level was much lower, and the climate and coastline was quite a bit different from that of today. Although Turk travels in a kayak, he takes along a GPS unit, and rarely lands on an island without meeting people, whether local villagers, disgruntled Russians, American tourists in helicopters, or Russian army soldiers in tanks. When winter comes, he leaves his journey in the middle to fly home, like the sensible man he occasionally is; and when his companions decide to opt out of the experience entirely, there are several places fairly close in which to find a flight home.
Still, A Great Deal of Fun
Having said that… Turk’s book is still a great deal of fun. I personally believe the theory that includes at least some American colonization took place along the Pacific Rim, although I find Turk's arguments about the speed of the colonization unconvincing. If Turk couldn't sail through a winter safely, why wouldn't the Jomon have established outposts? The outposts would be underwater today, of course.
What In the Wake of the Jomon does do is provide what is probably a fair a physical reality on the maritime colonization theory. Turk’s progress is clearly not matched to the physical reality of the original voyages, but his encounters with rough weather, bears and walruses is still reminiscent of what the conditions might have been to people in dugout canoes tracing the Kuril Islands, and on the east coast of the Kamchatka and Chukchi peninsulas.
I appreciated the maps tracking his voyage very much as I read the book. I would have like to have seen some of the photographs Turk talks about having taken as larger than the thumbnails provided; and a map of the area that showed the sea level 10,000 years ago would have been useful as well.
What In the Wake of the Jomon does do is provide what is probably a fair a physical reality on the maritime colonization theory. Turk’s progress is clearly not matched to the physical reality of the original voyages, but his encounters with rough weather, bears and walruses is still reminiscent of what the conditions might have been to people in dugout canoes tracing the Kuril Islands, and on the east coast of the Kamchatka and Chukchi peninsulas.
I appreciated the maps tracking his voyage very much as I read the book. I would have like to have seen some of the photographs Turk talks about having taken as larger than the thumbnails provided; and a map of the area that showed the sea level 10,000 years ago would have been useful as well.
I also would have liked Turk to provide particulars about some of the archaeological sites he summarizes. He describes some sites without mentioning their names or enough information for the reader to find out more, unless you know the literature. For example, on page 39, Turk mentions (without naming them) the H3 site in Kuwait, where bitumen-covered reed boats dating to the 7th millennium were found, and Lake Mungo III in Australia, where a 28,000 year old skeleton was identified covered with ochre---those I could figure out. But I’m still not sure what the site with the 11,000 year old Jomon burial mentioned on p. 79 is, and elsewhere Turk mentions an unnamed South American site said to contain pottery that resembles Jomon. I have vague recollection of that, but not enough to find it again. It is too bad; a mention of the site name would have made a world of difference. Turk does include a brief annotated bibliography at the end, which helps.
This is an enjoyable book, full of adventure and peril, and it probably gives a fair description of the conditions that the early American colonists would have faced, if they really did travel the Pacific Rim through the cold and treacherous waters of the northern Pacific.
This is an enjoyable book, full of adventure and peril, and it probably gives a fair description of the conditions that the early American colonists would have faced, if they really did travel the Pacific Rim through the cold and treacherous waters of the northern Pacific.
