Wednesday Wiki: Decipherment of rongorongo
There have been numerous attempts to decipher the rongorongo script of Easter Island since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. As with most undeciphered scripts, many of the proposals have been fanciful. Apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to deal with a lunar calendar, none of the texts are understood, and even the calendar cannot actually be read. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment: the small number of remaining texts, comprising only 15,000 legible glyphs; the lack of context in which to interpret the texts, such as illustrations or parallels to texts which can be read; and the fact that the modern Rapanui language is heavily mixed with Tahitian and is unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets—especially if they record a specialized register such as incantations—while the few remaining examples of the old language are heavily restricted in genre and may not correspond well to the tablets either
_edit1.jpg "Tablet B Aruku kurenga, verso. One of four texts which provided the Jaussen list, the first attempt at decipherment. Made of Pacific rosewood, mid-nineteenth century, Easter Island.")
Tablet B Aruku kurenga, verso. One of four texts which provided the Jaussen list, the first attempt at decipherment. Made of Pacific rosewood, mid-nineteenth century, Easter Island.
Migration: An engine for social change
In today's Nature, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that migration is an engine of social change because the movement of people into societies that offer a better way of life is a more powerful driver of cultural evolution than conflict and conquest (pay-access only, sorry!):
As cultural evolutionists interested in how societies change over the long term, we have thought a lot about migration, but only recently tumbled to an obvious idea: migration has a profound effect on how societies evolve culturally because it is selective. People move to societies that provide a more attractive way of life and, all other things being equal, this process spreads ideas and institutions that promote economic efficiency, social order and equality.
The great divide in Anthropology
Today, anthropology is at war with itself. The discipline has divided into two schools of thought - the social anthropologists and the evolutionary anthropologists. The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career.
Seventh Graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab
Who's the Scientist? - Seventh Graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab:
My picture of a scientist is completely different than what it used to be! The scientist I saw doesn't wear a lab coat. . . . The scientists used good vocabulary and spoke like they knew what they were talking about.
England’s rock art
The Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Pilot project has released a new website cataloguing England's Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Rock art. There's some truly beautiful pieces shown there - this is my favorite:
The Daily Mail also has an article on this project.
Dingle not An Daingean
James Harkin in The Guardian talks about overthrowing the 'yoke of ethnicity':
Dingle, for those of you who haven't been, is a remote but justly admired fishing port in Ireland. In a referendum held earlier today, its residents voted overwhelming to readopt its English name and save it from the imposition of the Irish placename, An Daingean. In the ballot, 1,005 people voted for Dingle and a mere 70 against. In an era in which democracy has lost much of its lustre, the ballot drew a massive response of 89.6%.
The local council had already begun replacing road signs bearing the word Dingle, but the residents found the name-change confusing and want to go back to living in plain old Dingle. The context for all this is potentially embarrassing to the Irish authorities. It defies the edict of the minister for rural, Gaeltacht and community affairs, for one thing, and comes amid plans for Irish to be tarted up as an official EU language next year.