Heyerdahl, Thor (hā`ərdäl', hī`–), 1914–2002, Norwegian explorer and anthropologist, b. Larvik. He carried out research in the Marquesas Islands in 1937–38 and studied the indigenous peoples of British Columbia in 1939–40. To support his thesis that the first settlers of Polynesia were of South American origin, in 1947 he and five companions made the crossing from Peru to the Tuamotu Archipelago on a primitive log raft. This voyage is described in the international bestseller Kon Tiki (tr. 1950). In 1970, Heyerdahl sailed, in a papyrus boat, from Morocco to Barbados, in an attempt to prove that ancient Mediterranean civilizations could have sailed in reed boats to America. This adventure is described in The Ra Expeditions (tr. 1971). In 1977, he sailed from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, following a route he believed was once used by the Sumerians; this trip is detailed in The Tigris Expedition (1979). Heyerdahl was an exponent of the diffusionist school of cultural anthropology, now largely discounted, and today most academics regard his theories as speculative and unproven. His other writings include American Indians in the Pacific (1952), Aku-Aku (tr. 1958), Sea Routes to Polynesia (1968), and Easter Island: The Mystery Solved (1989).

Bibliography

See biography by A. Jacoby (1967).

Heyerdahl, Thor

Thor Heyerdahl.

(credit: Pierre Vauthey—Gamma/Liaison)

(born Oct. 6, 1914, Larvik, Nor.—died April 18, 2002, Colla Michari, Italy) Norwegian ethnologist and adventurer. After a trip to Polynesia convinced him that Polynesian culture bore traces of South American cultures, he built a raft, the Kon-Tiki, and sailed it from South America to Polynesia in 1947 to demonstrate the possibility of such contact, a trip recounted in his best-selling Kon-Tiki (1950). In 1969 he sailed a reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian reed boat (the Ra) from Morocco to the Caribbean to show that the Egyptians could have had contact with the early peoples of Central and South America. In 1977 he took the reed craft Tigris from the Tigris River in Iraq across the Arabian Sea to Pakistan and back to the Red Sea to demonstrate the possibility of two-way trading journeys that could have spread ancient Sumerian culture eastward. Although he inspired many with his daring expeditions, his theories have not been generally accepted by anthropologists and his methods have been questioned.