Since Heyerdahl published his 'Maldive Mystery', many books, articles and guides about the Maldives mention sun worship, pyramids, waves of immigrants, attacks by lionpeople and other such fallacies in their historical outline of the Maldive archipelago.
These distortions of truth are common in all of Heyerdahl’s books, which are less about serious research than about displaying himself and his improbable theories as loudly as a film star would.
It is understandable that the writers of tourist guidebooks, for instance, would like to quote from as many sources as they can.
Tour guides try to give as much information as possible while keeping the book compact, and if the historical and archaeological information in those guides comes mainly out of Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘The Maldive Mystery,’ it is not a coincidence or a preference of the author.
Considering that those guides are printed in great numbers, being distributed throughout the world and taken as reference by a wide public, we are dealing with a serious anomaly concerning how Maldivian history, archaeology and ethnology are being reflected and propagated by the world media.
Regrettably, not all the books that give serious information about the Maldives are readily available. H.C.P. Bell’s monograph ‘The Maldive Islands’, A. Agassiz’s ‘The Coral Reefs of the Maldives,’ C. Maloney’s ‘People of the Maldive Islands’ and ‘The Voyage of F. Pyrard de Laval to the East Indies, The Maldives, the Moluccas, and Brazil’ translated and edited by A. Gray, are books which give excellent and well-researched information on the Maldives. These books are, however, rare and difficult to obtain and they are nowhere near to being as ubiquitous as T. Heyerdahl’s ‘The Maldive Mystery’ in bookstores and libraries throughout the world.
This aberration becomes especially acute when it comes to translations into other tongues. There are many languages in the world where the only book whose theme is the Maldives is Thor Heyerdahl’s book.
Tara figure etched on a cubic coral block.
The distressing fact is that serious scholarly books about Maldives don’t sell, and thus are not known, while Thor Heyerdahl’s books, beginning with his Kon-Tiki expedition, are the kind of highly commercial writing that finds a market. Therefore, although hardly more than a caricature of history and archaeology, the book published by Heyerdahl about the ‘Maldive Mystery’ has filled the void left by the lack of better quality books on this ancient island state.
Was it a blessing for Maldives that Thor Heyerdahl came to write the last book of his series on this coral atoll nation? It certainly has made the country a bit more well-known than it was before.
But in the light of the misrepresentations of reality inflicted on the Maldive history that have been, and keep being popularized by tourist guidebooks, and are staying there in print, it would have been better that Heyerdahl would not have come at all.
It is an undeniable fact that Heyerdahl is a celebrity. He rubs his fame to every place he has written a book about. Therefore, the Easter Island and the Marquesas would certainly not be as well-known if he would not have been there. Like the Maldives, these are small faroff archipelagoes and their only chance to increase their prominence in the world scene has been through being patronized by Thor Heyerdahl. But it would be wiser to be sceptical about his methods, especially considering the fact that Heyerdahl has misused the real anthropological and historical facts of those island countries in order to enlarge his own image.
This mishandling is tantamount to abuse, for Heyerdahl was not straightforward as an archaeologist and one sure outcome of his meddling is that he has made the job more difficult for future researchers that will visit those places where he has left his deep traces.
In the Maldives Heyerdahl thought he saw sun-temples and pyramids in the mounds or low hills that exist in certain islands, such as Gan in Southern Huvadu Atoll. In all of his later publications he refers to former books he wrote where he mentioned sun-worship, in order to promote their sales. But in fact the hills of all the Maldivian archaeological sites he visited were ancient Buddhist Stupas.
Since islanders took away stones from those Stupas for building their homes, when the round structure on top collapsed on the quadrangular base, it left shapes that could be said to be roughly conical or pyramidal.
The fact is that, as HCP Bell proved with his careful and learned research work, all ancient archaeological remains on the Maldives unearthed to date are distinctly Buddhist. The Hindu Maldivian Buddhist statue from Toddu Island elements that are present in those sites are not part of a former substratum, but part of Buddhist Vajrayana iconography itself. Buddhism may be regarded, in a sense, as a branch of Hinduism and both influenced each other mutually in their architecture and iconography along their history because their geographical and cultural origins are mostly overlapping. Concerning archaeology in the Maldives, I wish more people would read and refer to HCP Bell's monograph 'The Maldive Islands', a book has been reprinted recently and which despite being old is still the best work on the subject, instead of Heyerdahl's book ‘The Maldive Mystery’.
"Thor Heyerdahl is shrill but mistaken in many of his assumptions. Far from solving the Easter Island mystery, he has succeeded in making the solution more difficult for qualified scientists and made something of a fool of himself in the process. He is an amateur, a popularizer, an impresario, with a zoology degree from the University of Oslo. And his efforts in the Pacific greatly resemble the muddling attentions of, say, the hack writer of detective stories when faced with an actual crime scene --someone who ignores the minutiae of evidence, hair analysis, or electrophoresis (for typing bloodstains)-- and in blundering around a crime scene, muttering "The butler did it!", makes a complete hash of it for forensic scientists. The mention of Heyerdahl's name in academic circles frequently produces embarrassment or anger..." Paul Theroux
A further blunder of Heyerdahl concerns his insistence that large groups of people bringing with them the sun-worship had travelled across the seas of the world in rafts or crude boats, settling here and there and building up new societies that built pyramids and decorated them with sun symbols. He badly wanted to believe that Asehkara, the way Maldivians call the land of Aceh in northern Sumatra, was the land of the Aztecs, at the other end of the world.
But it is unlikely that people would have arrived to the Maldives in masses, and since a large fleet would have been needed, not even in sizeable communities. The Maldivian legends talk about some rulers or kingly people who arrived to the islands, probably about 2,000 years ago. But those may have only been a handful of people who took power, or were given the right to rule, and later intermarried. Mass migration of people from different ethnic groups would have created an enduring trauma that would necessary have been reflected in the oral tradition.
After 24 years of gathering and studying the oral tradition of the Maldive Atolls I can only say that Thor Heyerdahl’s inflated speculations are completely misplaced.
Source: https://independent.academia.edu/XavierRomeroFrias
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