A finely preserved rongorongo-inscribed artifact has resurfaced after more than eighteen decades in private hands. The artifact, here dubbed the “Boucher wooden rongorongo pendant” after its original collector, was acquired—probably in a trading or “gift-offering” act—from Easter Island (Rapa Nui) by a crewmember of the whaling vessel Margaret Rait during her five-day stopover in late December 1843. This newly uncovered piece, despite not being categorized as a tablet or staff typical of the extant core corpus of the rongorongo tradition, offers insights into the broader cultural context of the rongorongo phenomenon, the handiworks, and the ingenuity of the pre-missionary Rapanui. Concomitant of the descriptive and structural analyses regarding its short inscription, and in order to cogently align the glyphs along the pre-missionary Easter Island era, various ethno-historical sources and phonetic or semantic propositions are conferred with. While some might contend that examining the inscription it bears is unlikely to significantly enhance our understanding and interpretation of the rongorongo script, we argue that the “Boucher pendant”, i.e., its real-world application of glyphs, takes us closer to the discernment of the “mystery” of the classical script of Easter Island.
Melka et al. (Thu,) studied this question.