The Rongorongo Script: On a Listed Sequence in the Recto of Tablet “Mamari”

Abstract Rongorongo, the undeciphered writing system of Rapanui (Easter Island) has received a lot of attention in the last 12 months with new studies tackling the “Mamari” (see Horley, 2009a; Melka, 2010a) and the “Keiti” tablets (see Horley, 2010; Wieczorek, 2011). The “Mamari” section is a potential “lunar series” (see Barthel, 1958a; Barthel, 1971, p. 1183; Guy, 1990); however more work is needed to ascertain whether “Keiti” reflects to some extent the same genre. In this study we look to other inscriptions in the corpus for the possible presence of the îka and timo genres (see Routledge, 1919; Fischer, 1997). After a review of the ethnographic data, in combination with a statistical analysis, we propose that one group of tablets that may reflect these genres are Gv, Ia, and Ta. The analysis focuses on a number of identified sequences that show examples of glyph /700/ across the rongorongo corpus. A mixed-methods approach has been adopted since it has the potential to coalesce advantages in terms of ethnography, text analysis and statistics. This is especially true when one has a lot of factors to consider, and errors tend to build up in the company of the unidentified data, of possibly contaminated folkloric and fragmented informants' material, of abstruse glyphic combinations, and of an imperfect system of transliteration (see Guy, 2006, p. 53).

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