Con-ticci and the Bennett Monolith of Mocachi

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’.