Erin Becker’s Reviews > Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts > Status Update

Chapter on Rongorongo (Easter Island script) making me feel icky and just realized why - other chapters describe writing systems from cultures that were already dead. The Rongorongo authors were killed or enslaved in the 1860s. It's not an accident there aren't any speakers of this language around anymore. Author's description of Islanders being coerced into reading the texts for linguists is all sorts of gross.