"Thor Heyerdahl: Sailing Against the Current" by: Thomas Moore in: U.S. News and World Report" (April 2, 1990) Thor Heyerdahl won't quit. At 75, he is deep in another adventure, organizing an archaeological dig of the biggest complex of pyramids in the Americas. Sifting sand on the coastal plains of Peru may not sound as exciting as crossing oceans on rafts or reed boats, but this dig could provide important clues to a mystery the author of Kon-Tiki has been investigating all his life: Was there a common cultural heritage that gave rise to all the world's ancient civilizations? The Norwegian explorer speculates that the ancient pre-Inca culture that created the pyramid complex in Peru may be a missing link in a chain of civilizations connecting Meso-America to Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and possibly the lost continent of Atlantis. This kind of wild speculation has always had Heyerdahl in trouble with established archaeologists, anthropologists and other scholars of prehistory, who claim he has scant scientific evidence to back up his theories. But over his lifetime, he has turned up a surprising amount of convincing evidence suggesting sea contacts among remote ancient cultures, for which he gets little credit. At the same time, the universally-trained zoolo- gist has learned to separate his scientific work from his grander speculative theories, hiring bona fide archaeologists to do spadework on digs and leaving them free to arrive at their own conclusions. The pattern of pearls. Still, what interests Heyerdahl most is the big picture. And his ruling thesis of a primordial culture of bearded, long-eared, sun-worshiping pyramid builders is a lollapalooza. One way or another, just about all his expeditions, from Kon-Tiki and the Ra's I and II to his excava- tions in the Maldives, Easter Island and now Peru, have sought to put together pieced of this elaborate puzzle. "People think I am just an adventurer," he says. "They don't realize that all the things I have done are like pearls on a string: They are part of one single pattern." Think of Heyerdahl as a time detective, a gumshoe of prehis- tory with an uncanny ability to ask obvious questions that lead to new thinking about old dogma. As a young university graduate in the Pacific just before World War II, he stumbled on what he concluded may have been the final resting place of an ancient and widely traveled seafaring civilization. He has since spent his life tracing back its roots, searching for what he calls the zero hour of civilized man. Heyerdahl first roiled the quiet waters of academia by sailing the balsa-log raft Kon-Tiki across the Pacific in 1947. Most scientists at the time dismissed, as they do now, the idea that such craft were capable of ocean-going trips and assumed the Pacific Islands were settled from Asia. "The only thing that Heyerdahl proved," remarked one noted archaeologist of the Kon- Tiki expedition, "was that Norwegians are good sailors." But Heyerdahl, then and now, remains convinced his raft trip and other evidence he has turned up establish a more obvious sailing route, one that follows the prevailing winds and currents from South America. Heyerdahl includes himself among a camp of prehistorians called "diffusionists," those who tend to believe that ancient civilization spread from a common source by land and by sea to other places around the world. The opposing camp of "isolation- ists" thinks ancient civilizations cropped up independent of one another and, because of man's natural propensities, developed similar characteristics, such as sun worship and pyramid build- ing. Today, according to University of Texas Prof. Richard P. Schaedel, a noted expert on Andean civilization, most pre- historians regard as outdated the notion of one original civiliz- ation diffusing to all others. "Enough evidence has been found to show that many ancient civilizations invented all that fancy stuff like pyramids on their own," he argues. Schaedel is nevertheless impressed by some of Heyerdahl's specific findings. Among them: The dressed stonework he un- covered in the foundations of monoliths on Easter Island, which suggests that ancient South Americans must have reached the island, even if they did not predominate. He is now collaborat- ing with Heyerdahl on a study of ancient Peruvian navigation. "Many orthodox members of our profession have pooh-poohed Heyerdahl without adequate justification," says Schaedel. "But others, including myself, think that his procedures have been scientifically satisfactory and his contributions substantial." Gun-shy from the flak he has taken from the scientific community, Heyerdahl has laid out the grand theory behind his work only in tentative bits and pieces that are scattered amid his writings and interviews like potsherds at an archaeological dig. He often comes back to the extraordinary coincidence that sophisticated civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley all emerged about the same time: 3000 B.C. "Why this impressive, seemingly overnight blossoming in three places simultaneously unless there was some link between them?" he asks in The Tigris Expedition. Heyerdahl suggests that the explanation may lie in the myth that the lost civilization of Atlantis perished in a flood. Should such a flood have occurred, swallowing up a continent in a day and a night as the legend says, it is plausible that some people managed hasty escapes by boat, landing after long voyages in such disparate places as the Nile, the Indus Valley, the Tigris and Euphrates and, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the Gulf of Mexico. There, they may well have proceeded to rebuild civilization as they knew it in Atlantis. As yet, little scientific research supports this thesis--or refutes it. But in Heyerdahl's view, lots of intriguing cir- cumstantial evidence justifies looking into it further. For instance, he cites evidence of a major geological catastrophe in the Atlantic around 3000 B.C.; he notes that the ancestral myths of almost all the ancient cultures speak of origins in the aftermath of disastrous floods, and he dwells on the remarkable number of similarities between these ancient cultures discovered by archaeologists over the years. In one essay, Heyerdahl lists 53, ranging from pyramid building and script to mummification and circumcision. The most significant in his view was the reed boat, which he has since proved could have transported settlers across the Atlantic and Pacific. Today, Heyerdahl has come full circle in his lifelong investigation. He has launched his latest--and most likely his last--expedition in Peru, whence he set off as a 33-year-old on Kon-Tiki. He remains captivated by the pre-Inca legend of Kon- Tiki Viracocha: A white, bearded sun king who came out of the sea from the north to teach the natives Indians an advanced culture, only later to be attacked by rebelling vassals and driven off on a raft into the Pacific. Satisfied that a South American culture such as that evoked in the legends of Kon-Tiki ended up on Easter Island and else- where in Polynesia, Heyerdahl now wants to dig up more evidence of the civilizing culture's passage in ancient Peru. Among other things, he will be looking for fair-haired mummies, some of which have been found in other pre-Inca ruins, and wood tablets such as those he found on Easter Island that are inscribed with an undecipherable picture language found nowhere else. "Common to all accounts of how culture reached Peru," writes Heyerdahl in an essay entitled "The Bearded Gods Before Columbus," "is the admission that the Incas lived more or less as savages until a light-skinned, bearded foreigner and his entourage came into their country, taught them the ways of civilization and departed." The implication that American Indians were not capable of civilizing themselves raises another set of objections to Heyerdahl's theory. But Heyerdahl, who sailed under the flag of the United Nations and always made a point of including members of different nationalities and races on his expeditions, dis- misses racial insinuations. In his view, the forebears of European civilization, the Egyptians and Greeks, picked up their early wisdom from the same source. Heyerdahl was introduced to the Peru site, called Tucume, two years ago by Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who had just opened a rich tomb at Sipan on the northern coastal plains of Peru. It was filled with remarkable gold jewelry and clothing and suggested that the Moche culture of chieftain-priests in power from 100 B.C. to A.D. 600 was more sophisticated that previously thought. Alva then took Heyerdahl to another place he had planned to excavate before he became involved with the Moche tomb. About 2 hours' drive north on the potholed Pan-American highway, Alve turned off at the small, impoverished village of Tucume. Behind the village are what first look like mud hills, crevassed by the torrential El Nino rains that come once every nine years or so. But as Heyerdahl moved closer, it became clear that the hills were man-made, part of a massive complex of ancient adobe pyramids. Grand entrance ramps, common to the Inca and Aztec stone pyramids in the subsequent epochs, rose to the tops. Huge courtyards and possible water reservoirs had been constructed inside the baked-mud-brick walls. The site was surrounded by smaller pyramids and a network of irrigation canals more than 1,000 years old that were fed from distant mountains and are still used by Peruvian peasants. Clearly, Tucume had been a major governing or religious center of an industrious people. Only a few archaeologists had ever done any digging at the site, barely scratching the surface. Grave robbers avoided it because local superstition held that the temples were inhabited by devils. Significant seashells. Alva speculates that Tucume could have 20 times the gold and other treasures found in Sipan. But Heyerdahl was intrigued by the sheer size of the place. It was the center of a bustling pre-Inca civilization near the time and place he figures seafarers set off from Peru across the Pacific. While the irrigation canals showed that Tucume was a major agrarian civilization, Heyerdahl is convinced it conducted oceangoing trade. The coast is only 12 miles away, seashells litter the site to this day, and he has already dug up a wooden steering oar. He agreed to organize the archaeological dig at the site under the auspices of the Peruvian government's National Institute of Culture, overseen by Alva, and persuaded the Kon- Tiki Museum in Oslo to come up with $180,000 in initial financ- ing. Heyerdahl has made a personal commitment to the place that is unusual in someone his age. He moved to Peru from his home in Italy and bought a farm on the outskirts of town, where he plans to settle. He designed and built a scenic two-story lodge he dubbed Casa Kon-Tiki. The White House, as it is called locally, overlooks a large vegetable garden he has planted and faces the majestic pyramids to the east. It didn't take Heyerdahl long to establish himself as a local chieftain in his own right. He has attracted a steady stream of important visitors and tourists, boosting the town's economy, and he hopes to persuade Peru's President to finance a sanitation system for the village. He has also befriended suspicious witch doctors. When night watchmen fled a guard post on the site, claiming it was inhabited by spirits, Heyerdahl brought in a top witch doctor to protect the place. Since then, the devils have kept their distance. At a time when modern man looks to outer space for new frontiers to explore, Heyerdahl believes contemporary civiliza- tion has evolved surprisingly little from its ancient roots, largely because it ignores the wisdom of those who have gone before. "We fumble ahead blindly with no idea where we have come from," he says. Faced with the stark contrast between Tucume's green, flourishing past and its dusty, impoverished present, it is not difficult to understand why Heyerdahl wonders whether civilization did indeed peak long, long ago. HEYERDA2.ART