Rongorongo has been read many times and measured rarely. This paper measures it. It asks what the structure of the Santiago Staff (text I) and the Honolulu tablet (text T) can establish before any sign is given a meaning. Every structural claim is tested against a null model that keeps the signs and destroys their order, and the pipeline is first required to recover five structures already established in the literature. It recovers all five. The structure that follows is that of a register without numerals, with an open identifier slot coupled to its head. It does not decide between an administrative register and the ta'u, the traditional list of names and titles; a list of names with titles is itself a register of persons.
| Texts audited | Santiago Staff (I) and Honolulu tablet (T); the verso of the Small Santiago tablet (Gv) as the comparison case |
|---|---|
| Catalogue | Barthel's (1958) numeric sign catalogue |
| Sources | Three transcriptions, none by the author: the rongopy tablet transcriptions (de Souza), the Santiago Staff transcription distributed with de Souza (2025), and a derived compilation of the kohaumotu.org transcriptions |
| Null model | Keeps the signs of each text and destroys their order |
| Robustness | Every test run on two transcriptions where two exist, with damaged signs both removed and kept |
| Does not attempt | Decipherment. No sound or meaning is assigned to any sign, and the paper does not argue that rongorongo is not writing. |
Before any new result was reported, the same code and settings had to recover five structures established by earlier researchers.
Negative control. The central test was run on 2,508 words of connected Rapa Nui text, taking each of the eight most frequent particles as the delimiter. None is spaced more regularly than chance. The regular spacing found on the Staff and T is a property of those inscriptions, not of the test.
The earlier papers read Linear A, the Indus script and Proto-Elamite as structured records. For Rapa Nui, only the rows that were tested here are filled in.
| Entry head | X.76, opening each unit; 163 distinct heads in the Staff — tested |
|---|---|
| Entry template | Regular unit length; second slot coupled to the head — tested |
| Section divider | Carved bars, grouping 1–18 units — tested |
| Standard formula | F1, outside I and T, with a variable field — tested |
| Numerals | Not found — tested negatively |
| Closing operator | Not identified — not tested, not claimed |
The comparison runs in one direction only. It shows that the Staff has the architecture of a record. It does not show that the Staff records what a Minoan or Elamite archive recorded. Because the Staff does not count, its audit had to be built from structure and null models alone — a method that can now be applied back to the earlier papers in the series.
The paper lists the claims its own tests withdrew, among them:
Language models helped write the analysis scripts and were used adversarially to look for errors. No output was accepted because a model asserted it, only because it agreed with the data — the verification architecture argued for in No Argument for the World and developed as Reference Signal Engineering.
No sign was read from the wood. All transcriptions descend from one catalogue (Barthel 1958). The Staff results agree on two transcriptions, but these are not independent readings of the object; Horley's (2021) tracings are the obvious next source.
T has 114 legible words, 147 of 261 transcribed words are flagged as damaged, and only one transcription was used for the tests. T has the Staff's template on every test that T is large enough to take.
The structure fits a register of persons as well as an administrative register. An exploratory calibration is reported with its limitations, and a fixed protocol for deciding the genre is specified in advance for version 2.
Related: Excel in Clay I · Excel in Clay II · Excel in Clay III · Concepts glossary · All seven audits
Diener, Ł. (2026). Excel in Clay IV — The Rapa Nui Register: A Null-Tested Structural Audit of Rongorongo Texts I and T (version 1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23030356
Preprint, not peer reviewed by a journal. Licensed CC BY 4.0. The deposit includes the analysis scripts, a data-retrieval script that verifies every input against its commit or SHA-256 checksum, and the full output of every run reported in the paper.
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