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Around 1850 an image of a mysterious cavern in the western country was painted on a vast stretch of canvas. It depicts an elaborate, subterranean realm with colorful stalactites, exotic mineral formations, and an enigmatic hieroglyphic inscription. The darkness is illumined by the flaming brands of a party of explorers, who move about in active curiosity. In the shadows beyond the torchlight a trio of mummies can be seen, propped up against the rocks. The Kentucky Mummy—and a few of her peers—patiently await the attention of Investigators. The description attached to the painting, however, suggests that its object is not Mammoth Cave, but another western grotto, located in a bluff alongside the Ohio known as Cave-in-Rock. In actuality there were no stalactites at this particular location, and no evidence for antiquities either. Early in the era of western exploration the cavern had been used as shelter by travelers: the walls were indeed inscribed, but—like the trees that had once risen atop the Grave Creek Mound—with the signatures of those passing through rather than with those of the ancient inhabitants. More infamously, the cave had been used by river pirates as a base for attacks on flatboat passengers. Eastern newspapers had carried accounts of the banditti of Cave-in-Rock. Thomas Ashe included the cave among his bone-filled catacombs, and a newspaper article of a few years later described the place as a “dark mansion of the murdered.” John Egan’s romanticized depiction of Cave-in-Rock—executed on behalf of Montroville Dickeson—illustrates the complex accretion of historicized landscapes in the American West in the era prior to the Civil War. For the mid-nineteenth-century audience such palimpests were relatively commonplace, representing the increasing time depth of settlement and the progressive integration of different types of historical experience. That the painter had apparently never seen the place itself was irrelevant: his canvas artfully joined the ancient dead with the casualties of more recent times, connecting past and present in equal degree, within a mythicized western setting. The nature of Egan’s work itself indicated that visual imagery was a potentially powerful strategy for engaging the material past in the antebellum United States.

This book focuses on the maps and mapping practices of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. It looks at several maps that stood as monuments of the history of cartography. It examines mapping and mapmaking initiatives in ancient Greece from Homer to Eratosthenes, spanning the earliest times to the third century BCE. It also discusses the intellectual background and outlook which led Ptolemy in the second century CE to theorize about making a world map based on the concept proposed by Eratosthenes. In addition, it considers the instruments and techniques employed in Greek and Roman surveying with special reference to the planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels. Finally, it explores how inhabitants of the Roman Empire used maps, constructed “mental maps” of it, and oriented their worldview.

This chapter examines the various cultural contexts for mapmaking in ancient Mesopotamia, focusing on maps on cuneiform tablets and how they served as expressions of terrestrial and celestial order during the period. It begins by looking at the history of mapmaking in the ancient Near East before turning to a discussion of evidence for plans of houses and other buildings. It then considers field surveys, city maps, regional maps, a map of the world, and the establishment of a spatial organization in the heavenly cosmos. It also comments on the representation of practical geography in literary form, in itineraries attested from Old Babylonian times up to Neo- Assyrian. The chapter shows how the maps of cities with their waterways and surrounding physical landscape combine cartography of sacred space, depicted in the temple plans, with that of economic space, seen in the field surveys.

This chapter examines maps in ancient Egypt which depicted not only topography but also the cosmos. It looks at the mapmaking activities of artisans and scribes in addition to their production of relatively detailed plans of either the projected or completed tombs of specific pharaohs. It focuses on one site, Deir el Medina, a village built to house the workers of the royal tombs and their families. It also discusses the maplike aspects of temple art during the period, a world map depicting the victories of Seti I, a map partially preserved in the form of fifteen fragments of papyrus in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, and a maplike product known as the “Book of the Fayum”.

This chapter examines maps and mapmaking in ancient Greece, with reference to initiatives from Homer to Eratosthenes. It begins with a discussion of the challenges involved in the study of Greek cartography and the function of maps as an important expression of Greek culture. It considers Greek maps in relation to abstract philosophical theories and their depiction of topography and relative distances as well as cosmogony and humanity's place in the universe. It also looks at early Greek maps, like those made in Miletus and its thinkers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus. In addition, it describes the maps attributed to Aristagoras, Herodotus, Democritus, and Hipparchus and analyzes the representation of spherical earth in Greek maps. Finally, it describes the Museum at Alexandria, a center of learning founded by Ptolemy II Philadelphus.

This chapter explores how inhabitants of the Roman Empire used maps (if at all), constructed “mental maps” of it, and oriented their worldview. Drawing on a wide range of texts from Roman antiquity (in Greek and Latin), it examines signs of mapmaking and map consciousness as well as evidence of its nature. It considers the “Romanness” of the mapping encountered in Roman texts and the texts' relationships with maps, the Romans' knowledge of geography and cartography, fundamental differences between textual versus graphic mapping, and the organization of intrinsically geographic data based on a spatial principle. The chapter also discusses the use of itineraries for planning and recording routes, Eratosthenes's oikoumenē and how it influenced many educated Romans in terms of mapping their understanding of the world, the use of the terms superior (upper) and inferior (lower) in Roman political geography, and the ordering of tribes, regions, legions, and provinces in ancient Rome. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ancient writers' attempt to blend history with comprehensive accounts of geography.

This chapter begins the book’s exploration of Alsace-Lorraine’s cartographic archive with a discussion of scientific survey maps. Scientific mapmaking constituted an important first step in the visualization of modern European boundaries. In order to draw and demarcate their territorial borders, European states created new mapping institutions that trained professional corps of surveyors in the use of scientific instruments and triangulation techniques. Modern French and German governments both desired maps of Alsace-Lorraine that were mathematically precise, ordered, and void of any references to local cultural particularities. As a result, French and German surveyors—though they worked for rival states—produced nearly identical maps of Alsace-Lorraine and collaborated closely on joint border commissions. The French and German states’ gridded, homogenous maps of their disputed border territory were so similar, in fact, that they became objects of frequent transnational exchange, particularly in times of war.

This chapter analyzes the ways mapmakers drew on the techniques of Renaissance artists to insert their works into an already vibrant visual tradition. While previous historians have argued that the rise of accurate maps coincided with a decrease in the symbolic and contemplative function of maps, by repositioning cartography in relation to trends in art this chapter demonstrates that altered expectations for the accuracy of maps did not lessen the meaning that consumers attached to them. However, this shift did leave the message of maps increasingly ambiguous and open to interpretation, which allowed buyers to fashion their own meaning for maps.

This chapter first shows the diversity of the agendas underlying the survey of the Middle East–to-be in the mid-19th century. It examines the haphazard processes that lay behind the mapmaking. The position of fieldwork in the dynamic processes that shaped geographical imaginations is of central importance to the understanding of the cultural production of the area. It then looks into the factors and the technical restraints behind survey expeditions. It describes how the surveyors captured the topography and nomenclature of a place, how spatial knowledge was first collected and recorded before its translation into the printed authority of cartography. It also tackles the question of the interactions between the local population and British agents. It pursues one of the main lines of reasoning of this book: the dialectical elaboration of cartographic and geographical knowledge. The chapter goes on to consider one of the first systematic surveying campaigns in the region, that is, the Palestine Exploration Fund project, with a view to observing the interactions of the aforementioned processes through a case study. The last sections describe the final stages of the construction of knowledge, from mapping to mapmaking as such, from the field notes to the cartographic document.

This chapter examines the reception of the cartographies and geographies of the Orient by the wider British public in the 1850s and 1860s.It first considers commercial mapmaking and the contrasted history of its gradual modernization and inherent conservatism. It demonstrates that British mapmakers’ pretensions of to modernity were often contradicted by cost-related restraints and lack of updated data. It provides a detailed examination of how maps became integrated into increasingly widespread social practices. It explores the less-scholarly less scholarly forms of maps with a view to demonstrating how the exhibition of the world’s outlines became one of the facets of 19th-century leisure. Another focal point of this chapter is the issue of geographical literacy and the educational uses of maps of the East.

This chapter analyzes how specific spaces function in Gaiman's mirror-worlds in Neverwhere, MirrorMask, in conjunction with the main characters in each. A brief theoretical framework compares the general aspects of the two texts, and then moves forward to explore what space does in Gaiman's narratives along with how the main characters interact with specific, unique spaces. The results show impossible, almost unmappable spaces are the places where otherwise distinct and problematic characters can best thrive.

Chapter Three examines the creation of a new cultural image of Moscow in the eighteenth century, particularly under Catherine II. The chapter begins with a discussion of the peculiarities of Russian Enlightenment culture, especially its penchant for engaging social and political issues through deliberately idealized representations of reality and through allegorical imagery drawn from classical culture and mythology. A great challenge facing eighteenth-century Russians was the creation of a cultural idiom that permitted a realistic representation of Moscow and other Russian cities. The chapter explores the creation of this idiom by examining three areas of cultural production: mapmaking; the graphic arts, particularly the cityscapes of Fedor Alekseev; and history and statistics, particularly the work of Gerhard Friedrich Müller and Vasilii Ruban.

This book offers personal reflections on how human life revolves around fiestas and moves in pursuit of celebration yet encounters suffering, urgency, and fear at times. It compares the human effort to grasp reality with mapmaking, imagining human knowledge as an attempt at making “maps for the party”: a sort of guide for finding and opening pathways that will point us toward the good life, a life worthy of being frequently feasted with joy, pleasure, and gusto. It shows that the very act of concocting, constructing, comparing, and correcting maps can be a pleasant and festive process in and of itself—even though, as is often the case with most real human lives, such pleasure is frequently intertwined with and vulnerable to difficulties, frustrations, stagnation, conflicts, detours, limitations, and relapses. The introduction explains how the author of this book became connected with the movement which is called liberation theology and how he got the idea of writing this book.

Mapmaking is one research method that can be used to examine the socio-spatial lives of individuals throughout the lifecourse. Through mapmaking, researchers can facilitate an exploration of research participants’ diverse and complex lives by using a visual method to stimulate discussion. This is especially useful for research participants who may find it difficult to engage through traditional research methods. Though mapmaking can be used with diverse populations, this chapter introduces mapmaking as a new method that can be employed with young children who experience political violence. Drawing from research experience in the occupied Palestinian territories, the chapter critically reflects upon process-related challenges and ethical issues when working with young children and their. The chapter asserts that mapmaking is a promising research methodology to explore young children’s connection to place when used in conjunction with other methods of inquiry and when the whole family is included in the research process.

This chapter examines V. S. Naipaul's attitude towards Joseph Conrad by focusing on the complex manner in which colonial societies and colonial identity are revisioned in the novel The Enigma of Arrival. It considers how Naipaul destroys the colonial fantasy of ‘security’ in the novel — that is, the notion of ‘a fixed world’ where England is of timeless perfection and the disorder of ‘half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made’. It demonstrates how the dynamics of The Enigma of Arrival are sustained upon a series of translations and self-translations whereby Naipaul constructs himself as colonised subject, migrant, and postcolonial writer. Drawing on examples from the late essay ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, the chapter shows how Conrad ‘meditated’ on his world and draws geographical discovery into the province of romance. It also analyses Conrad's progressivist reading of geography, his place in the history of exploration, and his fanciful mapmaking in relation to the deeds of adventurous explorers.

Maps leave things out, abstracting from everyday experience to create a simplified representation, often at a scale otherwise imperceptible to humans. This chapter explores how such representations are produced by practices of abstraction and ontologizing—that is, the use of a representation to change the world or reimagine it for practical purposes.