Edmundo Edwards has been living in the hills above Hanga Roa, on Easter Island (Rapa Nui), for more than 40 years. Originally from Santiago, Chile, Edwards went to Easter Island as an archeologist, but he has been variously employed as a news correspondent, lobster fisherman, tour guide, diplomat and agitator (this last occupation after General Augusto Pinochet put a price on his head).

Today, Edwards is one of the pre-eminent archeological experts of Polynesia, from his work studying the moai of Easter Island, to discovering lost cities in the Marquesas and Tahiti, to unearthing the sacred tikis of Raivavae in the Austral Island chain. He is also one of the very best raconteurs alive and has been a first hand witness to the weird modern history of Rapa Nui: frozen turkeys dropped from US bombers during the Cold War, mysterious CIA airplanes spiriting Che Guevara’s compatriots out of Bolivia, and his father in law disappearing in a stolen rowboat only to return five years later.

Andrew Gregg interviewed Edwards for his CBC/Nature of Things documentary “A Story Told in Stone.” In this excerpt Edwards challenges the theories of Thor Heyerdahl, and explains how Islanders went overboard to appease the Norwegian ethnologist, who was anxious prove a historic link between the Incas and Polynesia. Towards the end it reads like something from a Herzog documentary.

EDMUNDO EDWARDS: … and Thor Heyerdahl, of course, continued with [his ideas about] the Inca  going to the Pacific, and all this and that. Several times I asked him, “Do you really believe this?

ANDREW GREGG: Can you tell me that story? I know you were friends with Heyerdahl. Why was he staying on the Kon-Tiki, what was that all about?

EDWARDS: Heyerdahl believed that the first people to arrive at and settle Easter Island were Polynesians. And that these people were not very bright people, they were just sort of fishermen. Then one day there was an expedition of Incas that left from Peru, and they arrived on these islands. They taught the people of Easter Island how to build the statues, how to build alters, how to build everything.

So Heyerdahl believed all the knowledge on Easter Island came from the Incas. He really believed this. And he thought that these people had spread all across the Pacific, all the way to Samoa, Tonga. And if it wasn’t for the Incas, or these people that come from Peru, nobody would know anything in the Pacific.

GREGG: But wasn’t it fairly easy to disprove that?

EDWARDS: He argued that because [the Easter Islanders] had sweet potato, and since he thought sweet potato came from South America, evidently it must have been carried there by some of these expeditions.

And there was an oral tradition in Peru at the time that the Spaniards arrived there. That there had been an expedition organized by one of the Incas to Paki Panki. And they are going into the Pacific and they had found two islands, Nina Chumbe(?), and Auachumbe(?). And they had come back from these islands, and they are brought all kinds of slaves and gold… they had even seen an animal that looked a horse. And I’m sure that these were stories that were invented so the Spaniards would go and search for gold some other place, and get rid of them.

They told the same story to another conquistador, they said all the gold came from Chile. So this guy went south, didn’t find anything. It was a way of getting rid of Spaniards.

But Heyerdahl believed that these stores were true. That’s why he organized the Kon-Tiki expedition. And in the Kon-Tiki, he and five others travelled across the Pacific for 101 days. And they landed on the island of Raroia in the Tuamoto Archipelago. This convinced him the Inca’s trip was possible and that the Incas had been into the Pacific.

GREGG: How did the rest of the world react when Heyerdahl spoke?

EDWARDS: No serious archaeologist or ethnographer, or anybody who had ever worked in the Pacific believed this story. Because, to begin with, if the Incas had been in the Pacific, and they had been living together with the Easter Islanders, Heyerdahl supposed that for about 700 years at that time, there would have been a mixture in the language.

Go to any city in the world where you have a large community of Spanish Latinos living there, and you see there already is a mixture. But here, in Easter Island, these Peruvians had been living for 700 years, but there was not one word in the language that had anything to do with South America. And every word that you get in the Easter Island language is connected to the rest of the Pacific, to Polynesia.

And there was nothing, nothing that you can see. I mean, the technologies that the Polynesians used for carving stone and everything are completely different from the Peruvian ones. And there was nothing that you could ever say that it was anything in common between these two groups.

GREGG: What did it do to the sense of self, the sense of culture, the sense of identity of the Polynesians, when Heyerdahl wins the National Geographic medal, and he wins an Oscar for a documentary, and gets all this attention?

EDWARDS: Well, in the case of Easter Island, the Easter Islanders were very isolated. I mean, there was only one ship a year that got to Easter Island. And the islanders were open to anything that came from the outside. So, when Heyerdahl arrived there, he arrived in a little freighter… I mean, that… fishing boat or freighter, I don’t know what it was that had been lent to him, and he camped in the beach of Anakena.

Well, that time there was only one ship a year that arrived to Easter Island. And when a ship arrived over there, it was the greatest partying that you’ve ever imagine; everybody went sort of crazy. They would send people, when they knew a ship was coming, on top of the hills to watch the horizon for weeks to see if the ship arrived. The first person that saw the ship, he would start building a fire and then once you saw that fire, they will build another fire. Then everybody in the village would learn that a ship was coming. And then everybody would jump on top of the corrugated and iron roofs and start jumping and shouting, “The ship is coming, the ship is coming.”

And then the men would run into the homes and grab all the souvenirs that they had carved during the year, put them into the boat, go out and row out to the ship. And it was the greatest excitement. So imagine this little boat arriving there. And Heyerdahl comes ashore, builds a camp, everybody arrives to the camp. And he says, “I come here to prove that your ancestors come from a place called Peru.” Now the islanders, the only thing they knew about Peru, that was a place where all the diseases arrived from.

And Heyerdahl said, “I’m sure that here on this island, there must be petroglyphs of llamas and pumas, and all these things. And anybody who finds a petroglyph of these animals or has a figure of these animals in stone, will get a prize. And the prize is 200 cartons of cigarettes.”

At that time a cigarette was a status symbol on Easter Island. People used to smoke tobacco. A carton of cigarettes was worth a cow. A package of cigarettes was worth a pig, or about 20 chickens, or 200 eggs, more or less. A cigarette was worth at least two chickens. You could get anything with cigarettes on the island. It was a real good status symbol. So imagine offering 200 cartons of cigarettes, 200 cows for a prize for anybody.

Well, what did people do? They started carving all these things in the afternoon. Heyerdahl came out with a package of Camel cigarettes, I was told. And because they asked him what does a llama look like, he said, “Well, it looks like this animal but doesn’t have this hump over here.” So, well, they carved these camels with no humps, so they became llamas. They carved pumas that were South American lions. Well it looked like a cat, so they carved cats. They carved everything.

And Heyerdahl would buy these things. Turtotan(?) was the mayor of the island; he was a very intelligent old man. So, he used to spend a lot of time in Heyerdahl’s camp. And he would, sort of, interview Heyerdahl and Heyerdahl would say, “Oh I would like to find this.” And he would say, “Hmm. Well what a shame. What a shame. What a shame it’s terrible that… what a shame.”  Heyerdahl would say, “What’s a shame?” “Oh, no. I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you.” And… then Heyerdahl would say, “I would like to know.” “Oh, what a shame. What a shame.”

He said, “Well, you know I have to confess,” after about five days he told him, “I have to confess that everything that you’re searching for I have it.” “How you have it?” “Yes. It’s in my secret cave!” “A secret cave?” “Yes. Every family has a secret cave here. And in these caves, they have all these things that were left by our ancestors—all these carvings, all these things. Just like the ones you’re talking about. And they are in these caves.”

“How can I see the cave,” Heyerdahl asks.

“That’s the problem. That’s why I say, Oh, it’s a really a shame. I can’t show you my cave, because it’s so secret. And if I took you over there, my brothers would kill me; if not, the spirit of my grandfather would kill me.”

Heyerdahl says, “but can’t you convince your brothers…”

“Oh I have to talk with them.” Okay. So after a long talks and negotiations—meanwhile, he’s telling all the brothers, “Heyerdahl wants this and wants that.” And they’re all carving all these figures and arranging them inside a cave in which they place mats, in which they brought skeletons that they stole from another burial cave.

And that’s grandmother and grandfather and my great great uncle, and my father, and I don’t know what. And they have all these skeletons, in all this neat, set-up cave.

Then they agree and Heyerdahl is taken over there. He is taken by jeep. They take him off the jeep. This cave you could go from the land side, you could just walk in. But they took him in over the cliff in a rope. In a rope, they hang him over the cliff. He arrives down. All the brothers are there.

They have all these candles—it’s very dark inside, you can just see skulls and figures. And Heyerdahl is really surprised that all these figures, all these ancient carvings, look like they were brand new, like they had been made yesterday. So he says, “You know these stones are… they look like they were made yesterday. They’re so well preserved.” And Turtotan says, “Of course, we have to go and wash them once a week in the ocean. If not our grandfather would kill us. That’s why they look new, because we polish them. We clean them. We keep them clean, but they are… oh, ten generations old.”

So, well, Heyerdahl agrees on a price to take them aboard the ship at night, so he never sees them again until they get to the Kon-Tiki Museum (in Oslo). Where they are? They are there in the showcases at the Kon-Tiki Museum, all these things carved by modern Easter Islanders. And Heyerdahl then, of course, he finds balsa rafts with sails and things that look Peruvian. And by that time he is fascinated. He has proven what he was searching for.

And he writes his book Aku-Aku, in which he says he describes everything. And it’s all fakes.