The Mattang was a navigational teaching tool used by the people of the Marshal Islands. The Marshal Islands pictured below are a group of islands located in the South Pacific. These islands are quite far apart. The islands are a total of 70.05 square miles of land spread out in 772,000 square miles of ocean. The distances between these islands make travel between them difficult.Many of these islands are at the mean sea level and are not visible on the horizon for more than a few miles. There are records of European navigators not being able to find some of the islands. Having a tool to understand the affects of landmasses on wave attenuation enabled Pacific islanders to safely navigate between islands and accurately predict the locations of islands. Depending on the shape of the island and using wave piloting you can detect an island up to 60 miles away well beyond the edge of the horizon in all directions simultaneously. The Mattang was advanced beyond any European navigational technology of it's time. It was not until flights over the islands during world war II that westerners understood the concepts the wave pilots had been trying to convey. In fact our first understanding of wave mechanics (attenuation, refraction, and reflection) was entirely related to light and sound waves. We have more recently come to understand that these principals apply to all waves including water and earth waves (earthquakes, p-waves and s-waves). The Marshallese people had this knowledge for centuries and only had a neolithic level of technology, the Matang was fashioned from wood and palm leaves.
The Mattang is a stick chart used to teach Polynesian boys the principles of wave attenuation, refraction, and reflection. This tool measured wave height to inform native mariners how close they were to land and where to find islands that were at mean sea level.The apprentice navigator or potential Ri-meto would hold the Mattang up to measure the distance between waves. It is also a generalized form where the center of the cross represents an island and the upright bar to the right of the 'island' represents the direction the main trade current would come from. the different curved bars represent refraction and reflection of different oceanic currents and their interactions with the island. The Mattang really was a student tool because once someone was considered a Ri-meto they could lay in their canoe and feel the difference in wave attenuation and would often navigate while laying in their canoe. These skilled navigators could tell from the motion of the waves what direction and island lay in and about how far away it would be and a rough estimate of the size of the land mass that was causing the changes to the local wave mechanics.
The history of the Mattang and it's use were passed downorally. A master navigator would make a new Mattang for a new student to be able to have this visual aid to help him learn the basic techniques of wave piloting. It is estimated to date back to between 300-400 A.D. this time estimate for the invention of the Mattang is believed to be accurate based upon archaeological records for the initial habitation of some of the islands and atolls of the South Pacific. As late as the 1960's western scholars still insisted that the habitation of these islands happened merely by accident. This however is not the case. The Marshallese were true pioneers of navigation technology, the Mattang is part of the proof. The Matang allowed the Marshallese to trade among the islands and to find mates to whom they were not related, always an important proposition.
"Over the last several years, organizations like the United States military and the Federal Aviation Administration have expressed concern about their overwhelming reliance on GPS and the possibility that the network's satellite signals could be sabotaged by an enemy or disabled by a strong solar flare. The United States Naval Academy has once again begun training midshipmen how to take their position from the stars with a sextant. As researchers urgently explore what GPS is doing to our minds, wave-piloting -- a technique that seems to involve the subtlest environmental cues a person can detect -- is slipping, virtually unnoticed, from human consciousness." https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/magazine/the-secrets-of-the-wave-pilots.html?_r=0
Mattang
What is a Mattang
The Mattang was a navigational teaching tool used by the people of the Marshal Islands. The Marshal Islands pictured below are a group of islands located in the South Pacific. These islands are quite far apart. The islands are a total of 70.05 square miles of land spread out in 772,000 square miles of ocean. The distances between these islands make travel between them difficult. Many of these islands are at the mean sea level and are not visible on the horizon for more than a few miles. There are records of European navigators not being able to find some of the islands. Having a tool to understand the affects of landmasses on wave attenuation enabled Pacific islanders to safely navigate between islands and accurately predict the locations of islands. Depending on the shape of the island and using wave piloting you can detect an island up to 60 miles away well beyond the edge of the horizon in all directions simultaneously. The Mattang was advanced beyond any European navigational technology of it's time. It was not until flights over the islands during world war II that westerners understood the concepts the wave pilots had been trying to convey. In fact our first understanding of wave mechanics (attenuation, refraction, and reflection) was entirely related to light and sound waves. We have more recently come to understand that these principals apply to all waves including water and earth waves (earthquakes, p-waves and s-waves). The Marshallese people had this knowledge for centuries and only had a neolithic level of technology, the Matang was fashioned from wood and palm leaves.The image above taken fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/magazine/the-secrets-of-the-wave-pilots.html?_r=0https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/magazine/the-secrets-of-the-wave-pilots.html?_r=0
Rendition of a Mattang
Image above taken from http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Marshalls/html/essays/es-tmc-2.htmlHow is a mattang used
The Mattang is a stick chart used to teach Polynesian boys the principles of wave attenuation, refraction, and reflection. This tool measured wave height to inform native mariners how close they were to land and where to find islands that were at mean sea level. The apprentice navigator or potential Ri-meto would hold the Mattang up to measure the distance between waves. It is also a generalized form where the center of the cross represents an island and the upright bar to the right of the 'island' represents the direction the main trade current would come from. the different curved bars represent refraction and reflection of different oceanic currents and their interactions with the island. The Mattang really was a student tool because once someone was considered a Ri-meto they could lay in their canoe and feel the difference in wave attenuation and would often navigate while laying in their canoe. These skilled navigators could tell from the motion of the waves what direction and island lay in and about how far away it would be and a rough estimate of the size of the land mass that was causing the changes to the local wave mechanics.image above taken from http://vaka.org/2009/04/navigation-using-swells-and-waves-hokohua-loa-and-hokohua-kiko/
Image above taken from http://vaka.org/2009/04/navigation-using-swells-and-waves-hokohua-loa-and-hokohua-kiko/
History of the Mattang
The history of the Mattang and it's use were passed down orally. A master navigator would make a new Mattang for a new student to be able to have this visual aid to help him learn the basic techniques of wave piloting. It is estimated to date back to between 300-400 A.D. this time estimate for the invention of the Mattang is believed to be accurate based upon archaeological records for the initial habitation of some of the islands and atolls of the South Pacific. As late as the 1960's western scholars still insisted that the habitation of these islands happened merely by accident. This however is not the case. The Marshallese were true pioneers of navigation technology, the Mattang is part of the proof. The Matang allowed the Marshallese to trade among the islands and to find mates to whom they were not related, always an important proposition."Over the last several years, organizations like the United States military and the Federal Aviation Administration have expressed concern about their overwhelming reliance on GPS and the possibility that the network's satellite signals could be sabotaged by an enemy or disabled by a strong solar flare. The United States Naval Academy has once again begun training midshipmen how to take their position from the stars with a sextant.
As researchers urgently explore what GPS is doing to our minds, wave-piloting -- a technique that seems to involve the subtlest environmental cues a person can detect -- is slipping, virtually unnoticed, from human consciousness."
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/magazine/the-secrets-of-the-wave-pilots.html?_r=0
Sources
http://vaka.org/2009/04/navigation-using-swells-and-waves-hokohua-loa-and-hokohua-kiko/http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Marshalls/html/essays/es-tmc-2.html
http://vaka.org/2009/04/navigation-using-swells-and-waves-hokohua-loa-and-hokohua-kiko/
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1150272?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/magazine/the-secrets-of-the-wave-pilots.html?_r=0