Thor Heyerdahl: Voyages of the Sun

An archival delve into the remarkable life, expeditions and voyages of Thor Heyerdahl, author of the bestselling adventure classic The Kon-Tiki Expedition Norwegian archaeologist, anthropologist, migration theorist, author and explorer Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002) spent decades substantiating unorthodox migration theories, with equally unconventional research methodologies: namely, practicable experiments that employed the construction of ancient vessels, driven across open oceans and waterways to retrace the movement and settlements of our ancestors. With October 2022 commemorating the 75th anniversary of Thor Heyerdahl’s extraordinary 1947 voyage upon a balsa-wood raft, Kon-Tiki, from coastal South America to Polynesia across the Pacific Ocean, an enviable opportunity arises to reexplore Heyerdahl’s innovative yet frequently contested theories and expeditions. Afforded unprecedented access to Oslo’s Kon-Tiki Museum’s extensive Heyerdahl archive, Thor Heyerdahl: Voyages of the Sun assembles a wealth of little-known and previously unseen correspondence, expedition logbooks, journals and photographs. Offering readers new and unexamined narratives from an explorer famed for his radical ideas and vehement rejections of abstracted academic theory, Thor Heyerdahl: Voyages of the Sun reviews the enduring relevance of the explorer’s research and assesses it within larger narratives of modern archaeological, anthropological, marine science and migration research; international conservation initiatives; evolving globalization; and essential human–nature symbiosis.