American Indians in the Pacific

Record summary

Thor Heyerdahl’s 1952 American Indians in the Pacific expanded the Kon-Tiki argument into a large comparative case for South American influence in Polynesia. It assembled motifs, traditions, plant distributions, archaeological comparisons, and navigational possibilities. The book is an important historical document in twentieth-century diffusionism, but many of its comparisons were criticized for weak chronology, selective evidence, and inadequate treatment of Polynesian languages and settlement archaeology. Later research has replaced its simple model with evidence for Austronesian expansion and some episodes of contact.