In the Wake of the Jomon

In the Wake of the Jomon:
A Book Review
http://archaeology.about.com/od/paleoindian/fr/turk.htm
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.
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.

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