Post #326208 by Tipua on Fri, Aug 17, 2007 1:58 AM

Aloha all!

Just thought I'd drop in some interesting pics of some soapstone carvings (by other people... I've done nothing new myself!):

Here's some African Long Eared Ladies :down:

And here's a beautiful soapstone carving of an eagle I found on http://www.alaskanativearts.com - a site for northwest American tribal art. :down:

For those of you out there who are thinking that I'm only posting these these pics on a site devoted to Tiki because they're soapstone, and I like soapstone - well you are right - but also please keep in mind Thor Heyerdahl's theory expounded in his book "American Indians in the Pacific".

He proposed that the Pacific (specifically Polynesia) was peopled not from Asia, but from the Americas.
He particularly points to the similarities in culture between northwest American coast Haida people and the Maori of New Zealand.
I won't go into the specifics, and in fact he was proven wrong when the genetics has since shown otherwise (Maori mitochondrial DNA can be tracked back to Taiwan. see http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s823810.htm ), but there's no reason why Polynesians could not have visited the Haida, or vise versa. They were both great sea-faring people (it has been proven that polynesians did make it to South America on at least one occasion - Polynesian chicken bones were found in Chile.
See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11987-polynesians-beat-columbus-to-the-americas-.html )

Also, check out this out:

It's quite close to something Maori in my opinion (although there's no spirals), even the colours are Maori, but it's Haida.
Interesting hey?