Alphonse Pinart

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name=Alphonse Pinart


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birth_date=1852
birth_place=Bouquinghem, Marquise, Pas-de-Calais
death_date=February 13, 1911
death_place=Boulogne-sur-Mer
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nationality=French
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spouse=Zelia Nuttall
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Alphonse Pinart (1852-1911) was a French explorer, philologist, and ethnographer. He was an early champion of the theory that the Americas were first populated by migration across the Bering Strait. To support his research, he made extensive travel in the Pacific, from Alaska and the Aleutian Islands [cite web |title=Alutiiq Masks Return After 136 years |url=http://www.kmxt.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&Itemid=2 |accessdate=2008-06-06] to Easter Island. He also pilfered numerous historical documents from the Spanish archives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, apparently for his own personal gain and aggrandizement, to the detriment of the people of New Mexico: [Ralph Emerson Twitchell, “The Spanish Archives of New Mexico”, Vol. 2, pp. 213-214 (1914).]

Large numbers of documents of this period [from 1743 to 1749] were . . . stolen and are now in the so-called “Pinart” collection. Pinart (Alphonse) was a Frenchman and visited New Mexico and Arizona in the early ‘seventies [1870's] , at which time this “collection” was made.

He recorded vocabularies of the Mission Indians in California, and also documented early rock art in Aruba.In 1875, he purchased a crystal skull and other ethnographic artifacts from Eugène Boban, which was later donated to the Trocadéro Museum. [cite web |title=Museum admits real-life Indiana Jones handed over a dud 'relic' 130 years ago |url=http://www.nationalpost.com/todays_paper/story.html?id=456303 |accessdate=2008-05-26]

Publications

* "Carverne d'Aknañh, île d'Ounga" Paris, E. Leroux 1875
* "Voyage to Easter Island" (in French) [ [http://www.rongorongo.org/pinart/225.html Alphonse Pinart 1878:225 ] at www.rongorongo.org] 1877
* "Vocabulario castellano-cuna" Paris, E. Leroux 1890

References

External links

* [http://www.islandheritage.org/eifpubs.html Easter Island Foundation] sells an English translation of Pinart's account of his visit to Easter Island, along with those of Eugène Eyraud, Pierre Loti and Hippolyte Roussel, under the title "Early Visitors to Easter Island 1864-1877."