Con-ticci and the Bennett Monolith of Mocachi
Date
2020
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Abstract
In the late nineteenth century, the Spanish scholar Marcos Jiménez de la Espada
presented his ideas about the Inca god Ticiviracocha or Viracocha at the third
International Congress of Americanists. He argued that a group of white men had
reached South America via a maritime route on the coast of Arica (Chile) or Arequipa
(Peru). In 1932, more than half a century later, American anthropologist Wendell Clark
(W.C.) Bennett participated in archaeological excavations in the southern highlands of
the Andes where a series of stone monoliths were discovered. One of these monolithic
statues, known as the Bennett Monolith of Mocachi, was included on the sail of Thor
Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki raft. This paper explores two important elements of Heyerdahl’s
trans-Pacific contact theory: Kon-Tiki and ‘white bearded men’. First, it argues that a
similar idea to Heyerdahl’s conjecture about ‘white bearded men’ in the Americas was
explored by the nineteenth-century Americanist scholar Marcos Jiménez de la Espada,
albeit with a different interpretation surrounding Con-ticci and arguably unbeknownst
to him. Secondly, it explores and contrasts Heyerdahl’s differing view about the
presence of a beard on a monolithic statue from Bolivia with the perspectives of its
discoverer W.C. Bennett in 1932, and the Argentine scholar José Imbelloni. While it
appears that Heyerdahl was not aware of Jiménez de la Espada’s work, his apparent
resolute interpretation of Bennett’s ‘Monolith of Mocachi’ as bearded caused much
controversy among South American academics. It even led to Bennett’s explication of
how a simplified labelling to distinguish the monolith in question in relation to others
led to Heyerdahl’s regard as advancing an erroneous conception surrounding the
presence of ‘bearded white men’ on this continent prior to Columbus. The name Kon-
Tiki was a stylization of part of the name of the Inca deity ‘Con Ticci’ and that of the
Polynesian deity ‘Tiki’.
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trans-Pacific contact, history of archaeology, Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki
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