Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James R. Akerman is director of the Newberry Library's Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography and editor of Cartographies of Travel and Navigation, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Robert W. Karrow Jr. is curator of special collections and maps in the Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections at the Newberry Library.

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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 Land occasionally created detailed accounts of their journey that provided practical travel information (Delano-Smith 2006, 24-29). Buddhists created guides for pilgrims making the circuit of sacred sites in Tibet (Schwartzberg 1994b, 657-59); and guidebooks for Islamic pilgrims, emphasizing the description of shrines, were common by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Rogers 1992, 239). Sanskrit texts that encouraged Hindu faithful to visit the many pilgrimage places, or tirthas, scattered about the Indian Subcontinent often included instructions on how to get from site to site (Schwartzberg 1992, 330).

Before later modern times, however, the construction and use of graphic wayfinding aids, of maps designed explicitly to guide travelers, were rare. The Turin papyrus, the Fangmatan maps, and the Peutinger map were made for the use of elites and would have been seen by only a small number of people. Each of these maps helped military, administrative, or political authorities comprehend and control the territories the drawings represented, and were not purely practical wayfinding tools. An understanding of travel routes was apparently important to the readers of these maps, but was not the only, or even their primary, purpose. With few exceptions, maps made explicitly for wayfinding by general populations simply did not exist. When most travel on land was on foot and horseback, travelers could expect to cover no more than 25-30 miles (40-48 km) each day (Delano-Smith 2006, 17). They had no need to form a comprehensive picture of the countryside beyond what they could see with their own eyes or learn from people they met along the way.

The chief mechanism of way-finding has always been oral. Once the traveller was on the road, all maps were redundant so long as he had his itinerary. Regular checks with other travellers and local people at meeting places such as inns, relay and coaching stations, and river crossings ensured that the traveller was following the right road or knew which branch of the track to follow at a bifurcation. There may have been signposts, or markers of some sort ... [but] the traveller was also told which landmarks to look out for. (Ibid., 45-46)

There could be little additional practical value gained from transforming written itineraries into graphic representations. Until the last two or three centuries, the practical value of maps to wayfinding, as we usually understand it, was largely confined to the planning of trips rather than to use on the road to solve navigational problems of the moment (ibid., 57).

We begin to understand, then, that the automobile road map so familiar to us is the product of, historically speaking, fairly unique circumstances. In the United States roads are mostly paved, well maintained, and well marked. Peaceful conditions prevail over a vast continent-sized space, and most Americans can both afford a car and (at press time!) the fuel required to power it. Our movement on land is not constrained by political or economic conditions like those that prevailed in ancient and medieval times or that prevail in many parts of the world today. When we travel by car today we have so many options and we can travel so far and so quickly that we truly need maps to grasp the territory into which we venture-and at a level of detail and comprehensiveness that perhaps only an Egyptian pharaoh or a Roman official could dream of in the past. Fortunately, far from being the valuable and exceptional objects like the Turin papyrus and the Peutinger map, modern road maps cost less than a sandwich and can be easily acquired at the nearest convenience store.

This said, we have much in common with travelers of the past. The ready availability of wayfinding maps has not eliminated the need or inclination of modern travelers to ask "the locals" for directions. The popular reality television series The Amazing Race pits apparently typical Americans against one another in elaborate worldwide races. Some of the more dramatic moments in each episode revolve around one or more of the teams getting lost, often by misinterpreting a map. Forced to ask the local inhabitants for directions, the teams eventually find their way, but sometimes too late to avoid being eliminated from the competition. Such moments add dramatic tension to the narrative of the television series, but they also appeal to the show's audience, because each of us-even those of us who think we are expert map readers-has had the experience of getting lost in an unfamiliar place and finding our map momentarily indecipherable. Even in our cartographically rich society, there are limits to the utility of maps as wayfinding tools.

PUTTING WAYFINDING MAPS IN CONTEXT

Simply put, wayfinding refers to the act of moving along a path or through space from one point to another effectively and successfully. Usually, this requires answering three fundamental questions:

1. Where am I? That is, where am I now, at the beginning of my journey in relation to the larger space I wish to navigate?

2. Where do I want to go? That is, what is my destination and where is it in relation to where I am now?

3. How do I get there? That is, what are the means by which I will get there? What pathways can or should I take? What are the specific instructions that I need to follow that will ensure that I complete this journey successfully?

It may seem that the third question is the most essential one for a wayfinding tool such as a map or written itinerary to answer. We always know where we are in the most immediate sense. I don't need a map to tell me where I am when I'm at home or at my office, but when I walk in the door of an unfamiliar shopping mall in search of a children's shoe store, a map that obligingly tells me "you are here" is most welcome. Likewise, I won't begin my journey toward my destination if the map doesn't tell me which shoe stores are in the mall and where they are.

We also know from our own experience that we do not always need way-finding tools to find our way. When we move about our homes, workplaces, and schools, we do not refer to maps because we have long ago committed "mental maps" of these environments to memory that we recall instantaneously and unconsciously. Neither do we need maps to execute successfully our routine journeys out in the larger world to well-known destinations, such as the local supermarket, or even to familiar places several hundred miles distant. Three or four times each year, my family drives to suburban Atlanta to visit my parents and extended family. We always have a road atlas handy, just in case, but we hardly need it. We've made the journey so often that even the most minute details-the unusual highway bridge at Columbus, Indiana, the distance in hungry miles from Nashville to the Smoke House restaurant in Monteagle, Tennessee, and the fact that the average speed of drivers on Georgia's Interstate 75 is 85 miles per hour (136 km/hr)-are well known to us.

We usually only refer to wayfinding maps when we must navigate unfamiliar territories and spaces. Large urban hospitals, for example, are often complex spaces that are difficult to navigate. Fortunately, most of us do not visit hospitals often enough to become very familiar with them. Moreover, navigation is further hampered by the tendency of hospital buildings to grow new wings, each of which may have been designed in a different decade, according to a different plan, and to serve a different function or medical technology. Consequently, many hospitals supply visitors with floor plans-like this one showing the plan of Evanston Hospital in Evanston, Illinois-as they enter the building, or else display these prominently at entrances and near elevators (fig. 5). We keep road atlases in our cars or refer to Internet wayfinding services for the same reason: to guide us to and through unfamiliar places. As skilled as I think I am with wayfinding, I would not dream of traveling by car to Yellowstone National Park from my home in Chicago without referring to maps of Wyoming (fig. 6) and several other states, both to plan the trip and to execute my plan.

In each case, these maps help me determine a proper pathway by orienting me in the space the map describes, helping me locate my goal, and describing possible pathways between my initial location and my destination. Their approach, however, is unique to their specific wayfinding contexts. To begin, Evanston Hospital is a confined space surrounded by walls, and so its plan presumes that I will enter the building from relatively few locations. Because of their wayfinding importance, the map marks these entrances with prominent dark rectangles and large labels. Wyoming, in contrast, has open boundaries. Motorists are free to enter the state from any direction, and consequently it would be absurd and counterproductive for a road map to limit the number of possible starting points. (In fact, the map identifies about seventy roads leading into the state.) But note that "where we are" to start on this map is a question not just of geographic location, but also of belonging and identity. If the user of this road map is a resident of the state, their starting point could be anywhere on the map. Here the map helps out by naming most of the populated places in the state and locating them in relation to the state's highway system. Though it is permeable, the boundary drawn around the state on the map reminds all other travelers (residents of Illinois, California, or Ontario) that they may be in Wyoming but they are not of Wyoming; their origins and a major part of their identity lie somewhere on or beyond the light-green margins of the map.

(Continues...)

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