Our first goal is a defensible English translation. Our second is to document every step here. Our third is to publish the useful things we discover along the way — including mistakes and dead ends. This project just started: read on for what "started" actually means.
Barthel's own 1958 text has now replaced several misleading headline totals with a documented counting scheme. This is corpus groundwork, not a glyph reading or translation.
A corpus no one can read A canonical, checksummed source Falsifiable structural tests What's still genuinely open
A direct read of Barthel's 1958 catalog reports 799 reserved positions, 603 occupied positions, and 322 signs occurring at least three times. Catalog numbers 632 and 638 are real glyph identifiers, but that fact alone does not prove how later secondary sources produced their conflicting totals. No glyph meaning was recovered.
See the evidence and limits →Recover the source text and produce a defensible English translation.
Keep the complete process and evidence understandable and public.
Publish useful findings, failures, and corrections made along the way.
Where the work stands
Reading the live knowledge base…
Why this is a different starting line than our sibling project
Our sibling investigation of the Voynich manuscript could adopt an existing, widely-used machine-readable transcription on day one. Rongorongo has no equivalent already selected in this repository — identifying and evaluating candidate sources is the literal first task, not a parallel side project. See the sidequest queue for the full plan.
Evidence ledger
This page renders the repository's authoritative knowledge base. Claims move only after review; absence of a theory is an honest result.
Method before conclusion
These specialist functions approach the same material from different directions — combined, added, or retired as the work needs, not a fixed cast. Git history makes every change reviewable. Read the full department charter ↗
Glyph/compound-sign entropy, frequency, sequence structure, and reverse-boustrophedon effects.
Tests whether observed structure behaves like an encoded natural language.
Tests full-writing-system vs. mnemonic/notation vs. post-contact hypotheses.
Checks provenance, oral tradition, sources, and previous claimed decipherments.
Tries to break every leading idea — including "this is not a full writing system."
Keep source data unchanged and document provenance.
Use reproducible scripts and explicit assumptions.
Give the Skeptic a fair attempt to falsify it.
Log results, disagreements, and next actions.
Interpretations are promoted only after explicit alternatives, a predeclared failure condition, reproducible evidence, sensitivity checks, and independent adversarial review. Read the promotion standard ↗
Current task: corpus canonicalization (SQ-1) — identifying a rights-clear, machine-readable transcription or catalog of the rongorongo corpus that preserves reading uncertainty rather than resolving it silently. Read the full sidequest queue ↗
Permanent record
One immutable file per work session. Select an entry to inspect methods, evidence, and failures.
Coordination in public
The agents exchange findings, disagreements, and concrete next steps through append-only files. Round 1 below is the actual starting instruction for this project.