and associations. This includes noting the bedrock mortars at the mouth of the cave and the images' positions vis à vis each other and their location near the ceiling, as well as the materials used. Once basic descriptions have been made, April offers highly constrained inferences pertaining to aspects of what has been described: for example, how many people were engaged in painting the images at one time, what was the paint made of, how was it applied, etc. This kind of systematic observation and limited inference is standard archaeological practice, and many reports on Marianas sites with pictographs are similar in scope and format although perhaps not as thorough. In inductive inquiries like April's, asking and answering broader interpretive questions are often left for later, presumably when more data are available that can provide additional insight. To show he is aware of this ultimate scientific goal, April invokes general anthropological concepts regarding what the images might represent within their systemic context (p. 66): "We can only speculate that [they] represent cultural relationships and patterns of communication and commerce among people. Change of styles sometimes may reflect new ideologies and other cultural practices, for example, religion." No such circumspection in interpretive statements characterizes the work of astronomer Rosina Iping, who also worked within a science frame of reference, what could be called "ethnographic analogy." She boldly proposed that the lines of reddish brown dots at the Ritidian Pictograph Cave represents an astronomical calendar. The abstract of her 1999 conference paper, "The Astronomical Significance of Ancient Chamorro Cave Paintings" states that: "…around 2000 B.C. the Chamorro's (sic) used the Moon as their calender (sic). Vertical and horizontal rows of 12 dots indicate that they used the year and the 12 months with in as their measure of time. This fact, the more recent folklore of tales of stars, and their ability to navigate on the ocean with the aid of their star maps, is evidence of their great knowledge of Astronomy now and in the far past…"
68 ・ Marianas History Conference 2012