Now back to Van Tilburg:

"In Hawaii, the rising of the Pleiades was the signal for the beginning of the Makahiki major harvest festival which centered upon Lono (Rongo).

For Rapa Nui, as for the Maori, the Mangarevans and the rest of the people of the Southern Hemisphere, the rising of the Pleiades is almost simultaneous with the Austral June solstice. 

The Rapa Nui calendar begins with the month of Anakena (the name of the landing site of Hotu Matu'a). 

Anakena was said by Thomson to mean August, but Métraux corrected that to July.

Taking into consideration the conflicting evidence of the timing of Orongo ceremonies and based upon consultation with noted Pacific astronomer Will Kyselka, I think it is probable that the Rapa Nui ritual calendar, as that of the Maori, Mangarevans, Samoans, Tongans and other Polynesians began in July following the rising of the Pleiades.

On Rapa Nui and many other islands, the Pleiades were called Matariki."

"The Orongo rituals are thought to have begun in the AD 1400-1500s, and the use of Orongo as a ritual site intensified some fifty years later. 

If we take AD 1500 as a baseline, we find that the sun's declination was 23^o26', while the declination of the Pleiades was 22^o37'. This means that the Pleiades led the sun into the sky by about two hours, and that the two risings were over the same geographical feature a mere 0^o49' apart. 

The ethnographies do not mention Orongo as a site from which the skies were watched. Let us presume however, on the basis of the site's special qualities and uses, that the old men may have watched the skies from Orongo.

In the year AD 1500, they would have seen the Pleiades at 18^o above the horizon at the end of astronomical twilight on hua, the twelfth night of the moon in the Rapa Nui month of Te Maro (The Loincloth).

The Rapanui word hua means 'the same, to continue' and 'to bloom, to sprout, to flower', with a germ sense of both plants and human progeny growing and thriving."

"The rising Pleiades led a twinkling procession of bright stars into the sky: Aldebaran first, then the stars of Orion (called Tautoru by the Rapa Nui). Sirius (Reitanga in Rapanui), at a declination of 16 ^o42', is the brightest star in the sky on this and every other morning, and travels a path that takes it over the centre of Polynesian culture, Tahiti.

The Pleiades set at 2:00 pm in the afternoon of that day and in the direction of the solstitial sunset, but the event was not visible. If the sunset was viewed from Poike it would have taken place in the direction of Anakena, the name of the first month of their calendar, the landing place of Hotu Matu'a, the birth place of the island culture and the traditional home of the ariki mau."