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.
Wednesday Wiki: Captain James Cook
Captain James Cook FRS RN (7 November [O.S. 27 October] 1728 – 14 February 1779) was an English explorer, navigator and cartographer, ultimately rising to the rank of Captain in the Royal Navy. Cook was the first to map Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Mayan origins of Tahitian Vanilla
A nice example of 19th century trade in Polynesia:
The origin of the Tahitian vanilla orchid, whose cured fruit is the source of the rare and highly esteemed gourmet French Polynesian spice, has long eluded botanists. Known by the scientific name Vanilla tahitensis, Tahitian vanilla is found to exist only in cultivation; natural, wild populations of the orchid have never been encountered.
Now, a team of investigators led by Pesach Lubinsky, a postdoctoral researcher with Norman Ellstrand, a professor of genetics in UC Riverside's Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, claims to have traced Tahitian vanilla back to its true origins....
The BBC “Meads” Anuta’s Noble Savages.
Awww. The BBC Meads Anuta, where "Harmony thrives in Pacific Isolation". I can't believe we're seeing "Noble Savage" rhetoric in 2008.
When I asked Joseph what the biggest changes have been in the last 20 years he said "young people playing ukuleles".
Was this a problem? I asked rather jokingly.
"Well," he replied more seriously, "before the ukuleles the younger generation would dance every evening. Now it is rare."
I got the same response from at least half a dozen other adults.
As trivial as this sounds it does make one think about our own, supposedly advanced, society.
We worry about our children getting in with the wrong crowd, taking drugs, drinking, teenage knife crime. Anutans worry about their kids playing homemade ukuleles.
Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat
In the latest PNAS, Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat (doi):
The pristine island ecosystems of East Polynesia were among the last places on Earth settled by prehistoric people, and their colonization triggered a devastating transformation. Overhunting contributed to widespread faunal extinctions and the decline of marine megafauna, fires destroyed lowland forests, and the introduction of the omnivorous Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) led to a new wave of predation on the biota. East Polynesian islands preserve exceptionally detailed records of the initial prehistoric impacts on highly vulnerable ecosystems, but nearly all such studies are clouded by persistent controversies over the timing of initial human colonization, which has resulted in proposed settlement chronologies varying from ~200 B.C. to 1000 A.D. or younger.
Such differences underpin radically divergent interpretations of human dispersal from West Polynesia and of ecological and social transformation in East Polynesia and ultimately obfuscate the timing and patterns of this process. Using New Zealand as an example, we provide a reliable approach for accurately dating initial human colonization on Pacific islands by radiocarbon dating the arrival of the Pacific rat.
Radiocarbon dates on distinctive rat-gnawed seeds and rat bones show that the Pacific rat was introduced to both main islands of New Zealand ~1280 A.D., a millennium later than previously assumed. This matches with the earliest-dated archaeological sites, human-induced faunal extinctions, and deforestation, implying there was no long period of invisibility in either the archaeological or palaeoecological records.
See also: ScienceNews' coverage which over-hypes the controversy angle.
Beyond the Blue Horizon: how ancient voyagers settled the far-flung islands of the Pacific
National Geographic has a fantastic special edition on the Lapita culture and the settlement of Polynesia:
Much of the thrill of venturing to the far side of the world rests on the romance of difference. So one feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he "discovered" Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the British navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the sea, from lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island. This latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the Society Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the old Polynesians back on Tahiti knew nothing about it.
Imagine Cook's surprise, then, when the natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land he had visited. Marveling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he later wondered in his journal: "How shall we account for this Nation spreading it self so far over this Vast ocean?"
Continued at: How ancient voyagers settled the far-flung islands of the Pacific. Don't miss the videos of Jared Diamond and Pat Kirch either.
Modeling the prehistoric arrival of the sweet potato in Polynesia
The always wonderful Fiona has let me know that the Montenegro et al paper simulating the arrival of sweet potato (kumara) in Polynesia has come out. We first mentioned this in may last year.
Abstract:
The sweet potato is a plant native to the Americas, and its pre-historic presence in Polynesia is a long-standing anthropological problem. Here we use computer-driven drift simulations to model the trajectories of vessels and seed pods departing from a segment of coast between Mexico and Chile.
The experiments demonstrate that accidental drift voyages could have been the mechanism responsible for the pre-historic introduction of the sweet potato from the Americas to Polynesia.
While present results do not relate to the feasibility of a transfer by purposeful navigation, they do indicate that this type of voyaging is not required in order to explain the introduction of the crop into Polynesia. The relatively high probability of occurrence and relatively short crossing times of trips from Northern Chile and Peru into the Marquesas, Tuamotu and Society groups are in agreement with the general consensus that this region encompasses the area of original arrival and subsequent dispersal of the sweet potato in Polynesia.
Interesting stuff, but I think the evidence is getting stronger that the Polynesians did make it over to the Americas.