Voyages of the Sun

With 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 re-explore 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Heyerdahl archive, Thor Heyerdahl: Voyages of the Sun assembles as many as ninety pieces of little-known and previously unpublished correspondence, expedition logbooks, journals and photographs.

Offering readers new and unexamined narratives from an explorer famed for his radical ideas and vehement rejection 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.