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Mark D. Ruffner
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My challenge to you on Friday was to identify this curious structure. Rosemary gets credit for using the word "indigenous" and Gina and Steve get credit for guessing that it's related to fishing. But astute
Rugby E. Root knew the answer:
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| click to enlarge | http://www.freeworldmaps.net/oceania/ |
This interesting construction comes from the Marshall Islands, southwest of Hawaii and northeast of Australia.
It's actually called a "stick chart" and it's a map once used by Marshallese fishermen to chart the prevailing currents around their islands. The shells represent the islands, and the sticks (which are usually the spines of palm fronds) represent the currents.
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| links below |
It's interesting that the chart that I displayed (which belongs to my brother and sister-in-law) is very close to the image on the stamp. Because of that, I'm guessing that it might represent the entire Marshall Islands area. Usually, though, these stick charts were made by individual fishermen for their own fishing locales, and therefore could not be read by other people. Their designs varied greatly, as show above. Sacrificial Materials blogspot (the middle link below) correctly describes these stick charts as mnemonic, more memory guides than maps.
After World War II, modern marine technologies reached the Marshall Islands, and stick charts were fazed out.
The three maps above come from these sites:
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