Editing Rongorongo (section)

===Anthropological accounts===
British archaeologist and anthropologist [[Katherine Routledge]] undertook a 1914–1915 scientific expedition to Rapa Nui with her husband to catalog the art, customs, and writing of the island. She was able to interview two elderly informants, Kapiera and a leper named Tomenika, who allegedly had some knowledge of rongorongo. The sessions were not very fruitful, as the two often contradicted each other. From them Routledge concluded that rongorongo was an idiosyncratic mnemonic device that did not directly represent language, in other words, [[proto-writing]], and that the meanings of the glyphs were reformulated by each scribe, so that the {{lang|rap|kōhau rongorongo}} could not be read by someone not trained in that specific text. The texts themselves she believed to be litanies for priest-scribes, kept apart in special houses and strictly ''[[Tapu (Polynesian culture)|tapu]]'', that recorded the island's history and mythology.<ref>Routledge 1919:253–254</ref>{{refn|However, Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov (2007) believe that the limited and repetitive nature of the texts precludes them recording anything as diverse as history or mythology.|group="note"}} By the time of later ethnographic accounts, such as [[Métraux]] (1940), much of what Routledge recorded in her notes had been forgotten, and the oral history showed a strong external influence from popular published accounts.