Special Feature: Thor Heyerdahl
His voice announced the opening of the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics. He has been called: Explorer. Environmentalist. World Citizen. Author. Anthropologist. Archaeologist. Administrator extraordinaire.
All of these describe Norway’s indisputably most famous son of our day, Thor Heyerdahl, who died on Thursday.. Citizen. Author. Anthropologist. Archaeologist. Administrator extraordinaire.
All of these describe Norway’s indisputably most famous son of our day, Thor Heyerdahl, who died on Thursday. He placed fourth in a poll of Aftenposten readers in 2000 for The Norwegian of the Century.
Thor Heyerdahl became known to the world for his 1947 voyage from South America to the Polynesian islands on board the balsawood raft Kon Tiki. This voyage, documented with a primitive movie camera, was later made into a documentary that won an Academy Award in 1952.
His other voyages were made on the reed boats Ra I, Ra II, and the Tigris, which he set fire to on the coast of East Africa, in protest of a war that prevented him from continuing the voyage.
Born in Larvik, on October 6, 1914, Heyerdahl spent the last years of his life on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Until the very last he led an active life and pursued a number of projects, the most recent of which were the 1988 and 1994 excavations of pyramid-like structures in T
