Kenneth Pike Emory (November 23, 1897 – January 2, 1992) was an American anthropologist who played a key role in shaping modern anthropology in Oceania.

He moved to Hawaii when he was two and grew up there,[1] traveling first to Dartmouth and then continued his education afterward at Harvard then received his PhD from Yale.

Proselytizing in the first half of the nineteenth century by Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Mormon missionaries had been so successful that by the 1920s Polynesians had abandoned their ancestral gods in all but a few isolated places.

Bottles, crates, and boxes are stowed below along with gallons of preservatives for insects and plant specimens for the Bishop Museum.

He then spent the next 60 years roaming the Pacific, seeking out Polynesian settlement sites, excavating relics, and photographing petroglyphs.

With Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl proved that ancient mariners could have sailed westward across the Pacific; Emory replied that Peruvians might have gotten as far west as Easter Island, but its culture was overwhelmingly Polynesian.

Emory disagreed, pointing out that contemporary copra schooners relied on wave direction, ocean currents, and seabirds to guide them to land, and Polynesian legends made frequent reference to celestial navigation.

Emory married a woman whose mother's family was Tahitian and whose father's was French; she considered Paris her second home.

[6] In 1947, Emory spent time on Kapingamarangi, a remote Micronesian atoll, which, from his description, approached Rousseau's ideal society: "This traditional lifestyle supported five hundred people on land .