I've been interested in the story of the Moriori, Rekohu (Chatham Islands) and the carved trees for a long time, even before I read Michael Kings excellent but graphic 'Moriori'.
Now, there's an update on the dendroglyphs, featured in the latest University of Otago magazine that arrives regularly in our letter box, thanks to my wife's good University record (mine won't be discussed here).
Robyn's cousin Fraser Jopson was one of three researchers who went to the Chathams to record the figures that Moriori had carved into the trunks of Kopi trees on the island. The scanning of the eroding and faded images was done with a scanner that:
"Picks up millions of points where normal surveying picks up mere thousands. It measures distance and direction and then produces a mesh surface which shows the image in 3-d form."
The three post graduate students found several invisible-to-the-naked-eye figures with the use of the super-scanner:
"We were downloading one of the images and suddenly, out of the blue, this other carving appeared. We'd actually scanned this figure without really seeing the other one: it was a striking head and face."
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