My apologies.
I've been reading the Forum since 2000.
Some day I will make an entry for "bamboo pole" in the Ameliapedia.
For now, here is a Google search that turns up some of the material on the website. If you substitute "navigator's station" for "bamboo pole," that may bring up some other hits.
Here is an outline of articles in the Ameliapedia that should give a newcomer a good orientation.
Marty, Ric, Matt, John -
Thanks for the quick replies; I appreciate the added context and info. Thanks as well for being a "living repository" of collected knowledge that the site can only approximate. Marty, I recognize how much effort goes into adding content to the site and keeping things effectively tagged, indexed, and -- in the case of the Ameliapedia -- curated. It's an amazing resource and the effort is appreciated.
To John's suggestion, I have already read Ric's book -- I bought and read it more than a year ago when I first became aware of TIGHAR's work. Since then I've been staying up with the latest forum postings while trying to systematically backfill from archived postings, archived content like the research bulletins, and the Ameliapedia articles.
The biggest challenge for me, no doubt familiar to most here, is accurately tracing the evolving nature of the explorations, hypotheses, and evidentiary trails. For those who have been a part of things for 20+ years, that history has been lived, but for those of us coming to the mystery and TIGHAR's work more recently, we're confronted with an ever-growing documentary archive that often records the various stages of investigation and refined/updated interpretation, but the full chronology and latest positions are not always immediately apparent. For example, early on in my review of the site I somehow came across and was intrigued by the early reports of Bruce Yoho's recollections regarding the engine supposedly airlifted from Niku to Canton (
http://tighar.org/Publications/TTracks/13_1/cantonengine.html), but only later did I see the brief epilogue in the Ameliapedia and a link to a later Tighar Tracks that reported on the story being deemed apocryphal, or at least the Niku part of it.
That all just reinforces Marty's frequent (and well-intentioned!) admonitions to newcomers to read, read, read before posting. I take that to heart, but expect I speak for many others when I say that given the dynamic nature of TIGHAR's work and discovery and the inability of any textual archive to completely tie all those threads together in a foolproof way, there are likely to be many more slips and oversights to come. Thankfully there's a big community here to catch and correct.
Best,
Victor