Aspects of Rongorongo Decipherment

Abstract

This article presents a summary of decipherment propositions for different rongorongo signs which have appeared in the relevant literature in recent years. Rongorongo, the native writing system of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), is shown to be a vibrant and active research area with over 100 scholarly articles published in the first quarter of the twentieth-first century. The article presents detailed arguments for the decipherment of 15 new signs, in an illustration of diverse methods that can be used to establish a decipherment proposition. The emphasis is placed on the combination of various arguments in order to arrive at convincing propositions, or cross-referencing, which is seen as eventually leading to cross-readings in a strict Knorozovian sense. A total of 80 different decipherment propositions are summarised in accompanying Appendices. The propositions are grouped according to low, medium or high confidence. Ten decipherments are classified as high-confidence propositions. The argumentation behind these ten propositions seems particularly robust and, as such, they are recommended as a point of departure for further decipherment work.