Kon-Tiki Museum Kon-Tiki Museum The Kon-Tiki Museum () is a museum in the Bygdøy peninsula in Oslo, Norway. It houses vessels and maps from the Kon-Tiki expedition, as well as a library with about 8000 books. It was opened in a provisional building in 1949. In 1957, the current building—designed by architects F. S. Platou and Otto Torgersen—was opened. In 1978, an extension of the museum designed by Torgersen was opened. The museum was originally built to house the "Kon-Tiki", a raft of balsa wood of pre-Columbian model that Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl used to sail from Peru to Polynesia in 1947.
Mau Piailug prevent debate among scholars. Before the "Hōkūle‘a" voyage in 1976, academic debate about the settlement of Polynesia was divided between several schools of thought. Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl hypothesized that the Pacific was settled by voyages from South America and set out to prove that with his "Kon-Tiki" expedition. Scholars did not take Heyerdahl's hypothesis seriously. New Zealander Andrew Sharp proposed the accidental voyaging hypothesis in 1957, which (erroneously) argued that Oceania was too vast to have been settled by intentional voyaging so migrations must have happened by accidental drift voyages. Sharp granted that Polynesians likely settled the Pacific from