Object Details
- Donor Name
- R. Naomi Cannon
- Square shaped stick navigation chart. Wooden sticks tied at intervals with brown twine. Cowrie shells attached at intersection of certain sticks. Sticks broken in 7 places. Some breaks wrapped with white string. Donor commented she had used string to hold broken sticks together.
- Long narrow reed materials tied together with twisted bast fiber twine and string, in a roughly square two-dimension depiction of water currents and eddies. At some of the intersections where the reeds meet, white cowrie shells are tied on top of them, also using twine. There are 28 shells.
- The chart is an abstract illustration of the ways that ocean swells interact with land. Curved sticks show where swells are deflected by an island; short, straight strips often indicate currents near islands; longer strips may indicate the direction in which certain islands are to be found; and small cowry shells represent the islands themselves. The stick chart is an instructional tool meant for use before a voyage, rather than something to be used for real-time navigation. See: "How Sticks and Shell Charts Became a Sophisticated System for Navigation" by Cari Romm, Smithsonian.com, January 26, 2015, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-sticks-and-shell-charts-became-sophisticated-system-navigation-180954018/
- Record Last Modified
- 24 Feb 2023
- Specimen Count
- 1
- Culture
- Marshallese
- Accession Date
- 24 Aug 2006
- Collection Date
- 1940 to 1959
- Accession Number
- 2040621
- USNM Number
- E432083-0
- Object Type
- Navigation Chart
- Length - Object
- 128 cm
- Width - Object
- 100 cm
- Depth - Object
- 4.5 cm
- Place
- Marshall Islands, Micronesia
- See more items in
- Anthropology
- NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
- Topic
- Ethnology
- Record ID
- nmnhanthropology_8552873
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/3715cc0ec-8f02-44ba-8bd7-00371fae6ab9
