Word: incan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Every year thousands of pre-Hispanic objects-Mayan stelae, Aztec jewelry, Incan pottery, Olmec figurines-are smuggled out of Mexico, Central America and the Andean nations of South America. The illicit trade easily reaches millions of dollars annually and involves characters so bizarre they might have stepped out of an old Humphrey Bogart film: shrewd peasants, soldiers of fortune, venal archaeologists, dealers, diplomats and collectors who are ready to pay-or do-almost anything to satisfy their greed...
...April 28, 1947, an unknown Norwegian ethnologist named Thor Heyerdahl set off across the Pacific on a 45-ft. balsa raft he called Kon-Tiki, the Incan name for sun-god. Young Heyerdahl entertained a theory that Incan raftsmen might thus have freighted their civiliza tion to Polynesia. He failed to convince most fellow scholars that Peruvian-Polynesian cultural coincidences were more than just that. But by Aug. 7, when he cracked up on a coral reef 4,300 miles from Peru (and 250 miles east of Tahiti), Heyerdahl had proved indubitably that a balsa raft could cross the Pacific...