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.
This paper combines novel archival research with a re-reading of the existing documentary record to reframe and investigate "the POW/MIA issue" as an ideological phenomenon. Prior research on the POW/MIA issue, or the widespread, persistent belief that US prisoners of war were secretly held in Vietnamese custody for years after the official 1973 prisoner swap, treats its persistence as the outcome of voluntarist factors like fraud and gullibility or the energy and innovation of grassroots activists. In contrast, this thesis argues that the issue's persistence in American political discourse is an artifact of the US national security state's ideological functions. It accomplishes this argument by first casting the National League of Families of Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia as an ideological state apparatus, then demonstrating that the League modeled a specific kind of state-sanctioned POW/MIA subjectivity organized through the feeling I call autonomic certainty, or the use of intense feeling as proof in-and-of-itself. The POW/MIA activism of Ann Fischer, a rank-and-file League member from Madison, WI, stands as an example of autonomic certainty in action. Ann's brother, US Marine Richard W. Fischer, was declared MIA in Vietnam in 1968, sending members of the Fischer family into a years-long quest to prove he was alive in captivity. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense withheld convincing wartime evidence that Richard Fischer was killed and buried on the day he disappeared. This thesis is the first piece of POW/MIA literature to stake its claims with DOD case files relating to a POW/MIA.