English 
Español Happy New Year!
Dear Friends of EISP,
This letter brings you special greetings for the coming year from all of us at EISP. Since our last Letter from the Director we have been on hiatus from excavation and hard at work doing all of the other important tasks you so rarely hear about but which are essential to good research: lab work, radiocarbon analyses, museum studies, and writing reports!
This has been an intense period of cooperative research with gifted colleagues, and we are grateful for their involvement. Beginning in early 2015 José Miguel Ramírez, co-investigator of EISP, arranged for Chilean scholar Pauline Peralta to examine our obsidian collections. Through Joan Wozniak we met Jon Krier, who studied our basalt collections. My UCLA colleague Tom Wake reviewed our bone collections.
Cristián Arévalo Pakarati accomplished detail drawings of important artifacts, and then he and I traveled to Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand to examine objects of comparative research interest. I reviewed Bishop Museum collections in Honolulu. Radiocarbon determinations on our charcoal samples were accomplished. Other botanical analyses were carried out successfully with very interesting results. We are now collating these findings in collaboration with soils micromorphologist Sarah Sherwood and geologist Richad K. Dunn.
Alice Hom and the EISP staff keep us on track with all of these data and Alice is hard at work completing our cartographic projects. She has collaborated closely with Pat McCoy on entering his 1968 archaeological survey data into Datashare. We are on deadline with our upcoming publication and looking forward to launching it in 2018!
So, as you can see, we have not been sipping Margaritas on the beach at Anakena… oh, wait… actually, in March, 2016 we had the pleasure of sharing our project with Jimmy Buffet and his party! We are grateful to the Singing for Change Foundation, our UCLA supporters and, especially, to all of you.
Happy New Year!
Jo Anne Van Tilburg
Cristián Arévalo Pakarati with Fuli Periera, curator at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira.
Jo Anne Van Tilburg with Jack Golson, Australia National University.
Surf’s up! Jimmy Buffet with EISP on Rapa Nui.
Jo Anne, Charlie Steinmetz and EISP supporters, Rapa Nui