Paul Rivet

Who was Paul Rivet?

Paul Rivet was a French ethnologist, who founded the Musée de l'Homme in 1937. He was also one of the founders of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, an antifascist organization created in the wake of massive riot during the 6 February 1934 crisis.

Rivet proposed a theory according to which South America was populated by settlers from Australia and Melanesia. Trained as a physician, he took part in the Second French Geodesic Mission for survey measurements of the length of a meridian arc to Ecuador in 1901. He remained for five years in South America where he was mentored by Ecuadorian bishop, historian and archaeologist Federico González Suárez and began an ethnographic study of the Huaorani people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, then known as the Jívaro. When he returned to France, he was active with the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, directed by René Verneau.

He published several papers on his Ecuadorian research during and immediately following the trip, culminating in an extended volume co-authored with René Verneau between 1921 and 1922, under the title Ancient Ethnography of Ecuador.