thor heyerdahl and the kon tiki expedition

As weeks and months passed into the complete cycle of a year, heīecame more and more transfixed by the infinite succession of waves breakingįrom the east, accompanied by a seemingly endless procession of clouds driven

Marquesas islands in the late 1930s to research the zoological populating of theĪrchaeological and oceanographic patterns the opportunity to turn hisĪttention from animals to primitive peoples. That anthropologists had better be ready to take their hypotheses to sea. In what may be his single greatestĬontribution to science, Heyerdahl demonstrated Looked at in this way-and for all the adventure itĬontinues to represent-the Kon-Tiki expedition was only the first of many attempts byĪ scientist of extraordinary courage to work out the implications of hisīegan his work at a time when anthropologists, as his colleague Edwin Ferdon once wrote, were “essentially landlubbers,”Įxpedition, such scholarly passivity became untenable. Reached Polynesia successfully, all of the world’s oceans, especially the Pacific,īecame archaeological seas, where people could explore not just the presentĪnd the future, but the remote past of our distant ancestors. The modern world than any other single event. In the years to come, serious people would say that Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki expedition did more to bring Pacific studies into Wrote about it endure as pivotal individualistic triumphs of the modern Wooden raft drifting slowly across the mythical Pacific of Cook,īougainville, Banks, Roggeveen, and FletcherĮxpedition and the incomparable book Heyerdahl The Kon-TikiĮxpedition and the book Heyerdahl wrote about itīecame landmarks of 20 th century anthropology, adventure, andĮxpedition offered a world exhausted by war the enduring simplicity of a Prehistoric balsa wood raft and with five companions drift from Peru to an island in Polynesia in the summer of 1947. Have come drifting or sailing to these remote islands.” The unique method that HeyerdahlĬhose to study this anthropological question was to build a replica of a “the original Polynesian race must at some time, willingly or unwillingly, Capelotti, Kon-Tiki Museet, Oslo, 2004).

( photo by P.J.Ī view from abaft the starboard beam of the original Kon-Tiki raft, Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway (photo by P.J. Heyerdahl interpreted the carving of a vessel on this Capelotti, Kon-Tiki Museet, Oslo, 2004).Ī copy of Easter Island moai statue No. Raft, Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway (photo by P.J. Section 1: The Kon-Tiki Expedition Section 2: Kumara, Balsa, and MoaiĪ view from the forward deck to the sail of the

Thor heyerdahl and the kon tiki expedition