Sculptural Cartography: How The Marshall Islands Inhabitants Used Stick Charts to Map the Waves – SOCKS
▻http://socks-studio.com/2014/01/16/sculptural-cartography-how-the-marshall-islands-inhabitants-used-stick
The stick charts were the main tool the Marshallese used to navigate on canoe across the islands of the Pacific Ocean, until WWII. Lacking astrolabes, sextants or even a compass, they would rely on maps made up by midribs of coconut fronds tied together to form an open framework. The location of the islands was represented by shells tied to the framework or by the lashed junction of two or more sticks. The threads were used to map ocean swells, the prevailing ocean surface wave-crests and the directions they followed to approach an island. The stick charts represented a very interesting form of cartography encoding informations not traditionally included in navigation maps.
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