The Sameness of It All: Who Said It? (Easter Island Edition.)

Alternative theories never die... they don't even fade away. Below is a quotation about the alleged connection between Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) and Easter Island. Can you guess who said this?

I can positively assert that expressions are not wanting in the Peruvian tongue that bear as strong a family resemblance to the dialects spoken in the Sandwich Islands and Tahiti, where I resided a few months, as the ruins of Tiahuanaco to those of Easter Island, that are composed of stones not to be found today in that place. When I visited it I was struck with the perfect similitude of the structures found there and the colossal statues, which forcibly recalled to my mind those said by Pinelo to have existed in Tiahuanaco even at the time of the Spanish conquest. This similarity in the buildings and language of the people separated by such obstacles as the deep water of the Pacific, hundreds of miles apart, cannot be attributed to a mere casual coincidence. To my mind it plainly shows that communications at some epoch or other have existed between these countries…

Was it Helena Blavatsky? Ignatius Donnelly? Thor Heyerdahl? Erich von Daniken? Graham Hancock? All of them proposed the same theory, but this particular paragraph comes from Auguste Le Plongeon in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society for 1875.

The point, of course, is that the complete lack of evidence for a direct connection between Easter Island and Tiwanaku hasn't stopped alternative theorists from repeating the same tropes over and over again for a century and a half. That it's impossible to tell the difference between the alternative history of 1875, 1955, 1975, or 2005 speaks volumes.