Book: American Indians in the Pacific

Overview
Thor Heyerdahl’s American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory Behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition (1952) sets out a sweeping diffusionist argument that parts of Polynesia were settled, or at least strongly influenced, by voyagers from pre-Columbian South America. Expanding the popular narrative of his Kon-Tiki raft voyage, the book assembles a dense, scholarly case that cultural, botanical, linguistic, and physical-anthropological clues point to trans-Pacific contacts moving from the Andean world toward the central and eastern Pacific islands.

Thesis and Approach
Heyerdahl argues for multiple streams of population and culture into Polynesia, with the long-recognized west-to-east Austronesian movement complemented by a lesser but significant influx from the east. He proceeds comparatively, drawing on ethnology, archaeology, oceanography, historic chronicles, and serology, and interleaves travelers’ accounts with museum collections and field observations to claim convergences too numerous, he says, to be coincidental.

Botanical and Cultural Parallels
Chief among the botanical pillars is the sweet potato (Polynesian kūmara/’uala/’umara), a New World domesticate securely present across Polynesia before European contact. Heyerdahl treats its distribution, names, and cultivation practices as evidence of movement from the Andes. He amplifies this with discussions of cotton species, gourds, and dye plants, arguing that shared crops and techniques signal directionality rather than mere drift dispersal. Cultural practices, sun-focused ritual, stone platforms, ear ornaments, reed craftwork, and feather regalia, are marshaled as motifs that, in his view, echo Andean patterns more closely than they match Island Southeast Asian prototypes.

Linguistic and Physical-Anthropological Claims
The book proposes lexical resemblances between Andean languages (notably Quechua and Aymara) and Polynesian tongues, highlighting terms like “tiki” and “kūmara” and suggesting parallel mythic figures and cosmologies. He supplements this with 20th-century measurements of body types and blood-group frequencies to claim a partial biological affinity between some Polynesian populations and South American highlanders. Although many of these linguistic and serological comparisons are tentative by modern standards, they are presented as cumulative corroboration.

Easter Island as Keystone
Easter Island (Rapa Nui) functions as Heyerdahl’s centerpiece. He links the island’s megalithic ahu platforms and moai statues to Andean masonry and sculptural traditions, notes traditions of “long ears” (Hanau epe) and earspools reminiscent of Andean elites, and draws attention to reed boats and houses that evoke Titicaca technologies. For him, Rapa Nui preserves a sharpened silhouette of South American influence within Polynesia’s broader Austronesian frame.

Seafaring and Oceanography
A major section evaluates the winds and currents that knit the Pacific. Heyerdahl combines Spanish colonial descriptions of balsa-raft trade off Ecuador and Peru with analyses of the Humboldt and South Equatorial currents to argue that controlled, downwind voyages from the Andean coast to Polynesia were practicable. The Kon-Tiki expedition is invoked not as proof of migration but as a demonstration of feasibility consistent with the proposed route.

Reception and Legacy
The book’s ambition and synthesis made it a landmark in public discussions of Pacific prehistory, but its central migration claim has been widely disputed by anthropologists and linguists, who maintain a primary Austronesian origin for Polynesians and explain the sweet potato as evidence of limited contact rather than colonizing settlement. Subsequent archaeology, historical linguistics, and genetics have reinforced the mainstream model while leaving room for episodic pre-1492 interactions. American Indians in the Pacific endures as a richly argued, provocative compendium, less a final verdict than a catalyst that broadened inquiry into the Pacific’s deep interconnections and the capacities of ancient seafaring.