21 - Polynesians in Central-South Chile

Summary

For about a century, observers explained the striking prehistoric cultural parallels between Polynesia and South America as cultural borrowings travelling from west to east. There are more than 5,000 references to trans-Pacific parallels in pre-Hispanic times.¹ They refer not merely to isolated elements of material culture, cultigens, linguistic features, or even music, but to a complex of traits representing a worldview and their representation in myth, astronomy, divination, and specific rites.² In 1829, the British missionary William Ellis was the first to observe a link between Polynesia and America. In 1835, Tahitian resident Jacques Moerenhout was the first to highlight specific ethnographic parallels between southern Chile and Polynesia which he observed during trading voyages between Tahiti and Valparaiso.³ Moerenhout thought these were Polynesian borrowings, including the sewn-plank canoe from Chiloé Island, but did not believe that these could travel such long distances. In 1924, John Macmillan Brown identified new Polynesian elements, mentioning quipu (means of recording information through knotted cords), cooking ovens, and toki (stone adzes), elements that had come from New Zealand or the Marquesas to southern Chile, thence to Peru.