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Heyerdahl, Thor
(redirected from Kon Tiki)

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia 0.39 sec.

Heyerdahl, Thor (1914-2002)

Norwegian ethnologist. He sailed on the ancient-Peruvian-style raft Kon-Tiki from Peru to the Tuamotu Archipelago along the Humboldt Current in 1947, and in 1969-70 used ancient-Egyptian-style papyrus-reed boats to cross the Atlantic. His experimental approach to historical reconstruction is not regarded as having made any important scientific contribution.

His expeditions were intended to establish that ancient civilizations could have travelled the oceans in similar fashion, but his theories are largely discounted by anthropologists, who rely on linguistic, sociological, and archaeological information. His voyages are described in Kon-Tiki and The Ra Expeditions. In 1978 he travelled from the River Tigris in Iraq to Djibouti, via the Gulf and the Arabian Sea, in a boat made of reeds. The voyage was documented in The Tigris Expedition.



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Not since Thor Heyerdahl's epic Kon Tiki has a voyage this improbable been attempted to solve an anthropological mystery.
Then there was the beach--source of endless fascination and involvement--canoes and other small boats, and the many rafts we built out of driftwood, which we imagined, to be the Kon Tiki.
The Kon Tiki routines are corny stuff, but the tourist appetite for them only reinforces Polynesians' view that the Western way of life must be insane if it requires such thin fantasies as relief from its work regimes.
 
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