Norway’s Kon-Tiki Museum Returns Artifacts to Chile’s Remote Easter Island

People look at artifacts taken from Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, at the Kon Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway, on Nov. 12, 2024. Kon-Tiki Museum press service via AP

COPENHAGEN, Denmark—Artifacts taken by a Norwegian explorer and anthropologist in the late 1940s are being returned by a museum in Oslo to Chile’s remote territory of Easter Island in the mid-Pacific, the Kon-Tiki Museum said Wednesday.

In 1947, explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed on a log raft named Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 101 days to prove his theory—that the South Sea Islands were settled by seafarers from South America.