Rongorongo as Distributed Administrative Ledger: A Data Science Approach to the Pictographic Origin Hypothesis

Abstract

Rongorongo is an undeciphered script from Easter Island (Rapa Nui) surviving on fewer than 30 wooden artifacts. This paper proposes that the surviving corpus constitutes the kohau tau, a named class of annual record tablets documented in Rapanui oral tradition and assumed lost. Computational analysis of 146 parallel passages from the Horley (2021) corpus identifies eight independent structural findings supporting a distributed administrative ledger interpretation: a universal list format across nine passages on multiple artifacts; a lozenge-series quantity notation system with power-law frequency distribution consistent with real resource counts; a standardized subject-quantity-subject ledger entry format on three independent artifacts; a calendar section delimiter encoding the Miru clan chief, lunar official, and fishing activity as a recurring administrative header; directional binary encoding recording resource arrival and departure status; an unsupervised two-zone structural classification showing a 10x difference in list-format rate (18.4% administrative vs. 1.9% ceremonial), cross-validated at 94.5% accuracy; a directional invariance property of the subject-quantity-subject notation confirming it was designed for multiple readers regardless of boustrophedon orientation; and a 20/20 universality score for five compound rules confirmed across Chinese oracle bone script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, and Mayan glyphs. A control test applying identical structural features to 58 Uruk-period Sumerian cuneiform tablets with known genre labels achieves 100% classification accuracy, externally validating the methodology. Thomson's (1891) tablet text explicitly listing five resource domains under chiefly control is identified as the administrative charter of the system. Ethnographic documentation from Metraux (1940) confirms the binary seasonal tapu/noa encoding predicted by the lozenge system. The most complete currently interpretable entry records one unit of turtle (honu) in Passage 123 on artifact Gr5, supported by Metoro's native speaker identification, corpus structural analysis, and quantity notation confirmation.