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MAPS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Foreword by John W. McCarter Jr........................................................viiINTRODUCTION Robert W. Karrow Jr......................................................11 FINDING OUR WAY James R. Akerman...................................................192 MAPPING THE WORLD Denis Cosgrove....................................................653 MAPPING PARTS OF THE WORLD Matthew H. Edney.........................................1174 MAPPING AMERICAN HISTORY Susan Schulten.............................................1595 VISUALIZING NATURE AND SOCIETY Michael Friendly & Gilles Palsky.....................2076 MAPPING IMAGINARY WORLDS Ricardo Padrn.............................................2557 CONSUMING MAPS Diane Dillon.........................................................289References & Selected Bibliography.....................................................345List of Contributors...................................................................363Acknowledgments........................................................................365List of Illustrations..................................................................371Illustration Credits...................................................................379Index..................................................................................383

Chapter One

FINDING OUR WAY

James R. Akerman

The maps most familiar to Americans today are probably those we use to find our way by car through the nation's highways, back roads, and streets. For the better part of the past century, road maps have been extraordinarily easy to obtain in the United States. Since the mid-1920s, when many service stations adopted the practice of issuing free paper road maps (fig. 1) to their customers, until the present time, when high-quality digital road maps and trip-planning tools are widely available online (fig. 2), Americans have come to view these navigational tools as essential parts of their highly mobile lifestyle-so much so that a road map very likely is what most Americans mean when they use the word map. Our own comfort with the idea of using a map to help us navigate by automobile, and indeed with our own geographic mobility, should not color our expectations of wayfinding in other contexts. While the wayfinding maps made across human history share many common traits, whether and how societies used them depended on historical, cultural, and environmental circumstances. Wayfinding maps, it seems, do not just tell us where we are going, they also tell us who we are.

Maps showing roads and other pathways of movement on land or water are indeed ancient. One of the oldest surviving regional maps of any kind, an Egyptian map drawn on papyrus and dating from about 1160 BCE, is sometimes characterized as the earliest road map. Now preserved in a museum in Turin, Italy, it is in two large fragments, the first of which (fig. 3) shows three routes traversing a mountainous gold- and silver-mining region in the desert east of the Nile. What appear to be roads are actually generalized routes through valleys or along seasonally dry watercourses, or wadis. The more important of these is the lower route on this section of the map, Wadi al-Hammamat, which is speckled to represent the rocky character of its dry bed. A smaller valley connects this wadi to a parallel route, where a mining settlement and a well (shown as a red dot) are located. A second fragment, with an uncertain geographic relationship to the first, shows about 9 miles (14.4 km) of the Wadi al-Hammamat, leading to a sandstone formation whose stone was quarried for use in monumental constructions. The map may have been made to help Pharaoh Ramses IV obtain blocks of the sandstone for use in statuary (Harrell and Brown 1992; Shore 1987, 121-25).

There are also ancient Chinese maps showing routes. The oldest surviving regional maps made in China are seven maps drawn on wooden boards that were discovered in a Qin dynasty tomb dated about 300 BCE near Fangmatan in Gansu Province. Some of these depict specific roads, and accompanying inscriptions give the distances to the location of rich resources of timber marked on the map, suggesting that their maker shared one motive for creating a way-finding map-access to natural resources-with the maker of the Turin papyrus (Hsu 1993; Yee 1994a, 37-40). In some instances it is hard to tell whether the thin lines on these maps represent roads on dry land or river courses, and it may be that the cartographer had no need to distinguish between the two.

The greatest road builders of the ancient world, the Romans, left behind one rather spectacular route map, known as the Peutinger map (named for its early sixteenth-century owner). It probably shows geographic information dating from the fourth century CE, but it survives only in a copy dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century (fig. 4 A-L). The Peutinger map shows an extensive network of routes leading from Rome to all corners of the known world. Its distinctive notches appear to represent different stages or stops along each route, and it was long thought that the map served as a master map for potential travelers. Most contemporary scholarship agrees, however, that the Peutinger map more likely had a commemorative or ornamental purpose. Nevertheless, it was probably based on practical wayfinding information, including the oral reports of travelers as well as written itineraries, which are verbal (that is, not cartographic) written guides and lists describing particular travel routes (Albu 2005; Delano-Smith 2006, 58-59; Salway 2005; Talbert 2004).

The ancient itineraries of the greater Mediterranean world presumably served a broad range of travelers on military, political, and commercial errands. One of the most complete that survives from those times, the so-called Antonine itinerary (third century CE), includes detailed lists of the land and sea routes of the Roman Empire, staging places, and intervening distances, possibly of interest to the emperors of the Antonine dynasty for military and civil purposes (Dilke 1987b, 234-36). Although Roman civil routes maintained for public communication were marked with milestones listing destinations and distances to them, it is not unlikely that Roman travelers often carried simple itineraries with them on the road as well (Talbert 2006). Ancient and medieval travelers at sea wrote and used sailing directions that indicated distances between harbors and described navigational hazards and currents, prevailing winds, and coastal physical features that would help sailors confirm their location. Known to Greek sailors as periploi, to Italians as portolani, and to the English as rutters, these guides were especially useful to sailors in an era when they preferred to maintain close visual contact with the coast. The need for these guides did not decline after the invention of the sea chart, however. Predominantly verbal sailing directions such as the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey's annual United States Coast Pilot continue to be published to the present day.

The great significance many cultures placed on religious pilgrimage also spawned itineraries and guides more particular to the needs of travelers on spiritual journeys. Medieval and early modern European pilgrims to Rome and the Holy...