Oceanic and Pacific oral-dominant source worlds

Across most of this collection, the question is what happened to documents that once existed. Across Oceania, the question is different: much of the knowledge in view here was never committed to paper at all. Chanted genealogies, star-path navigation, carved stick charts, and specialist ritual lore were passed on by memory and live performance instead, with the Rapa Nui script known as rongorongo -- still undeciphered -- standing as this region's one real attempt at writing of its own. Whatever did eventually reach paper arrived late and filtered: sailors' journals, missionary write-ups, and later ethnographies assembled only once population loss and religious conversion had already snapped most of the threads connecting one generation's knowledge to the next. The conjectures gathered here test what can still be recovered about navigation, signalling, and belief from a record that was oral on purpose, not oral merely because everything written was lost.

Rongorongo as genealogy engine asks whether rongorongo's undeciphered signs function less like writing and more like a genealogical record-keeping device. Moai escalation and Proof-of-work in limestone both read the famous stone moai statues as a costly, hard-to-fake signal -- an escalating competitive display, or a proof-of-work standing in for currency. Compass climatology treats traditional wayfinding knowledge as encoding real, checkable climatological information rather than only navigational lore.