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Easter Island Decipherment
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Volume 49 Number 4, July/August 1996
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by Paul G. Bahn
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A major breakthrough in the decipherment of rongorongo, Easter Island's enigmatic script, has been made by Steven Fischer, a New Zealand scholar who believes most of the inscriptions represent the islanders' creation myths. Fischer says that contrary to earlier suggestions that the script was a mnemonic device to help priests commit ritual texts to memory, rongorongo was a sophisticated writing system, the only indigenous script in Oceania before the twentieth century.
The script consists of parallel lines of characters engraved on 25 wooden tablets now in European and American museums. It appears that the writing developed after the Spanish annexed the island in 1770. Since smallpox epidemics of the 1860s killed off the last aristocratic or priestly islanders who could understand the tablets, their content has remained a mystery. In the 1950s the German scholar Thomas Barthel concluded that individual rongorongo glyphs did not represent an alphabet or even syllables, but were cues for whole words or ideas. Each sign, he said, was a peg on which to hang a large amount of text committed to memory. Unlike Barthel, Fischer believes that rongorongo was a mixed writing system incorporating logograms (symbols denoting words) and semasiograms (symbols denoting actions).
© 1996 by the Archaeological Institute of America
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