Norway has agreed to hand back thousands of artefacts removed from Easter Island by famed explorer Thor Heyerdahl during his trans-Pacific raft expeditions in the 1950s.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
An agreement was signed by representatives of Oslo’s Kon-Tiki Museum and officials of Chile’s culture ministry at a ceremony in Santiago as part of a state visit by Norway’s King Harald V and Queen Sonja.<\/p>\n
The museum pieces include carved artifacts and human bones from the Rapa-Nui, the first inhabitants of the remote Chilean island in the Pacific.<\/p>\n
Norway has agreed to hand back thousands of artefacts removed from Easter Island by famed explorer Thor Heyerdahl (pictured with artefacts from Easter Island) during his trans-Pacific raft expeditions in the 1950s<\/p>\n
The Rapa-Nui island community is also demanding the British government return the Hoa Hakananai, one of the most spiritually important of the island’s stone monoliths, or maois, from the British Museum.<\/p>\n
Hoa Hakananai translates to ‘stolen friend’.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/u><\/p>\n
The maoi was stolen from the island in 1868 by the captain of a British frigate and given to Queen Victoria as a present.<\/p>\n
‘Our common interest is that the objects are returned and, above all, delivered to a well-equipped museum,’ said the museum’s director Martin Biehl to the AFP news agency.<\/p>\n
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He warned however that the repatriation process ‘will take time.’<\/b><\/p>\n
Mr Heyerdahl’s family said he had long wanted to return the pieces he collected in expeditions in the mid-1950s and mid-1980s, currently exhibited in the Oslo museum.<\/p>\n
The signing ceremony was also attended by Thor Heyerdahl Jr. who accompanied his father on one of his expeditions to the island in 1955, when he was 17.<\/p>\n
He said: ‘The repatriation is a fulfillment of my father’s promise to the Rapa-Nui authorities, that the objects would be returned after they had been analyzed and published’.<\/p>\n
Anthropologist and adventurer Mr Heyerdahl became famous in 1947 when he and a crew of five crossed much of the Pacific on a reed raft, the Kon-Tiki.<\/p>\n
The Rapa-Nui island community is also demanding the British government return the Hoa Hakananai (which translates as ‘stolen friend’), one of the most spiritually important of the island’s stone monoliths, or maois, from the British Museum<\/p>\n