Some oral traditions, collected by early visitors to Easter Island, have been considered as possible keys to the decipherment. In particular those by William Thomson in 1886. Thomson had with him photographic reproductions of several tablets and he managed to acquire two tablets when on Easter Island. He eventually coaxed an old man, Ure Vaeiko, rumoured to have studied the hieroglyphic script when young, to read out the texts of several tablets. The texts were transcribed and translated by Alexandre Salmon, a part-Tahitian established there about 1877 by Brander, a trader and plantation owner in Tahiti, to manage his interests on Easter Island. Those texts are riddled with typographical mistakes, misreadings of Salmon's transcriptions, which seem to have been lost.   They are reproduced here in their entirety, as they appear in Thomson 1891.

• Texts collected by Thomson.
  • Atua-Matua-Riri
  • Apai
  • Eaha to ran ariiki kete
  • Ka ihi uiga
  • Ate-a-renga-hokau iti poheraa
• Genealogies

Some hieroglyphic texts have been proposed as possible keys to a decipherment:

• A genealogy, found in 1956 by Nikolai Butinov and Yuri Knorozov on Tablet G (or Small Santiago Tablet).
• A lunar calendar, found in 1958 by Thomas Bartel on two and a half lines on Tablet C (or Mamari). That it constitutes a lunar calendar, or even an astronomical canon, has been proved almost beyond doubt by Jacques Guy in 1991.
• The Santiago Staff has been proposed in 1995 by Steven Fischer as containing recitations of the same type as Atua-Mata-Riri. That interpretation is sorely disputed.
• The four tablets which Mgr Tepano Jaussen, Bishop of Tahiti, had his informant Metoro read out to him.