Alphonse Pinart

Who was Alphonse Pinart?

Alphonse Pinart 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 to Easter Island. He also pilfered numerous historical documents from the Spanish archives in Santa Fe, New Mexico:

Large numbers of documents of this period [from 1743 to 1749] were . . . stolen and are now in the so-called “Pinart” collection. Pinart 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.