Paul Rivet

Paul Rivet (born May 7, 1876, Wasigny, France—died March 21, 1958, Paris, France) was a French ethnologist who suggested Australian and Melanesian origins for the Indigenous peoples of South America and who founded (1937) a major anthropological museum, the Musée de l’Homme (“Museum of Man”), in Paris.

Early career

Educated as a physician, Rivet joined a scientific expedition sent to Ecuador in 1901. At the end of the mission, he remained in South America an additional six years, observing the peoples of the high Andean valleys.

Returning to Paris, Rivet became an assistant at the National Museum of Natural History. There he worked to classify his South American materials and publish Ethnographie ancienne de l’Équateur (2 parts, 1912–22; “Ancient Ethnography of Ecuador”) in collaboration with René Verneau, the chair of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History and curator of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (“Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography”). In 1926 Rivet helped to establish the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris, where he was instrumental in training many ethnologists.

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Musée de l’Homme and later career

In 1928 Rivet succeeded Verneau as museum director and department chair. He decided to attach the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro to the anthropology department of the National Museum of Natural History. The former museum saw another change in 1937 when it became the Musée de l’Homme, which would house not only a museum collection but also a research library. An ardent adversary of Nazism, Rivet used his position to facilitate resistance activities against the Vichy government. He wrote multiple open letters to Philippe Pétain, the head of the collaborationist government in France.

Because of his political activities Rivet was stripped of his positions in late 1940 and forced to flee France in 1941. He went to Colombia, eventually founding an ethnological institute and a museum there. In 1943 he published Les Origines de l’homme américain (“The Origins of American Man”), which contained linguistic and anthropological evidence supporting his thesis on the origins of early Americans. In the book he hypothesized that Asia was not the sole place of origin of the early Americans and that there had been migrations from Australia about 6,000 years ago and from Melanesia sometime later.

In 1945 Rivet returned to his Paris museum and teaching posts and continued his South American research. His linguistic work presented much data on languages that were otherwise little known, notably the Aymaran and Quechuan languages of South America.