Maps and Mapmaking

8/8/2019 Maps and Mapmaking

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Maps and MapmakingD E N I S W O O D

School of Design, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina

Growth, Development, HistoryRANDALL and Chandler, my two fine sons, havelived with me since before they were born. Foreighteen years I have supported their growth andparticipated in their development, helping them turn fromall but helpless infants into the assertive and all but autonomous hulks who last summer roamed around Manhattan on their own. I think, though, that they alwaysfelt like this, that is, capable of purposeful action. Theyalways felt more or less powerful, more or less autonomous ... or at least no less so than they do now. Therewas never a time when they felt like the babies or toddlersor little kids they appeared to be from my perspective.'Baby' and 'toddler' an d 'little kid,' after all, are adu lt w ordsfor children who, however small and muscularly undeveloped, hardly ever say of themselves, "See how weak weare," but usually, "Look at us! See how strong we are!"Tom Watterson plays in the gulf between these perceptions. In one of his Calvin and Hobbes strips Susie asksCalvin if she can play with him and his tiger. "Hobbesand I are not playing," Calvin archly informs her. "We'redoing important things, and we don' t need you to messthem up ." '

Which is exactly how I felt about things when I wasgrowing up, mat is , mat I was competent, mat I wasstrong, mat what I was doing mattered, was important.I don't mink I was that different from other kids I knew,but I was sufficiently secure in my feelings to send offmy idea for a rocket to Charlie Wilson, then Eisenhower'sSecretary of Defense. And the response I received from theDeputy Director for Special Activities did nothing to diminish my sense of being, at age nine ... on the cuttingedge. But I know I am different today. Looking back Isee that I can do things now that I could not do then,however grownup I may have believed myself. I have morepracdce at thinking. I can reverse operations and startmem in the middle to work my way out in either direction.I have a bigger vocabulary and can make more subtle dis-criminadons. I can get into movies mat once I couldn' t .Because I have a job I can even pay my way. There area lot of things I can't do too. I can't sit on my mother'slap like I used to, or fit into the clothes I wore whenI was nine. I can't play with toys the way I did, insinuating

myself unselfconsciously into the very cab of the little truthat once filled my hand.If I try to disentangle the threads twisted together this braid of my experience, I can easily grab hold of threThe most obvious is simple physical growth: I weigh 15pounds more than I did when I was born, and stand fofeet taller than I did then. But I'm not just bigger: I'better integrated. I can do things that require the subodination of one part of my body to another, that forme to differentiate short-term lusts from long-term needNot only can I ride a bike and dance and do aikido, bI can type and speak and write, as now, in complicatsentences. So the second thread is that of developmenthat is, my increased differentiation, articulatio n, and hiearchic integration. This development did not occur in vacuum but in the United States in the fifties and sixtiwhen certain things were possible and certain things ween't. No matter how often we dressed up in what wwanted to believe was the costume of a medieval knighI could never ride off to King Arthur's court. That wa historical possibility ... foreclosed, precisely as RussiaSputnik opened the way to the scholarship moneys thpermitted me to attend graduate school. And obviousthe third thread is history, the way my growth and dvelopm ent was - a nd continues to be - shap ed by thceaselessly changing social and physical environmenthat I at the same time collaborate on bringing into bing.

These changes in me and my kids constitute the centrreality of my experience and I see these thiree faces of tunfolding we call life at every scale. Systems, processethings of every kind seem to get bigger or smaller, to gromore or less hierarchically integrated, to interact witother things engaged in similar processes to make our hitory.2 We see such an unfolding taking place at the scaof atoms and molecules in the stories we currently teabout the early history of the universe.3 A similar unfoling at the scale of biological organisms makes up the stowe call evolution.4 It is similar processes we see occurriin colleges and corporations, in families and cities, in ntional governments. In each domain I cannot help seeinthe same three threads of growth and decay, of develoment and pathogenesis, of history.


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2 D E N IS WO O DMaps Themselves Don't Grow (or Develop)Though it would be s illy to ignore the way maps comeinto being and subsequently disappear, I do not wish toclaim that the map artifacts themselves grow or develop.Sanborn insurance maps may have grown, layer uponpasted layer, as the cities they mapped changed - as theygrew and developed - the maps interacting with the insurance and firefighting systems of the cities they represented to help bring forth the history they would in timecome to embody.5 The stick charts of the Marshall and

Caroline Islanders also grow this way: they literally getlarger, coconut palm rib by cowry shell, and suck bystone.6 The ephemeral maps of the Inuit, scratched in thedirt, traced in sand and snow, or allowed to evaporatein the air, also grow this way, 7 to say noth ing of the sketch-maps we casually make, mark by mark. 8 And yet there'san important sense in which all of these undoubted mapsare quite marginal to what we mean when we talk aboutmaps in an unselfconscious way. The reference then isto printed maps, typically produced in enormous numberson high-speed offset presses. Except at the edge where theink is being laid onto the paper at a hundred miles anhour, these maps don' t grow, at least not in the way weordinarily use that word. They are slapped out - shh!shh! shh! - onto the paper elevator at the end of the press,and except as they fall apart from constant use or arechewed up by the dog or rot (or fail to rot) in a landfill,they don't decay either. Nor do they much develop. Wemight scrawl a note or a route or a destination on a map ,and so increase its level of differentiation, but this is notoften the case and usually the map artifact itself neithergrows nor develops.

But Mapping and Mapmaking DoWhat do grow and develop, however, are the systems orprocesses or things we refer to when we say 'mapping'or 'mapmaking. ' These words do not mean the same thing."Mapping," as Robert Rundstrom has pointed out, "isfundamental to the process of lending order to theworld." 9 W hat he is spea king of here is the way we hum an smake and deploy mental maps. Maybe thirty years agothe unqualified assertion that humans created and usedmental maps could have been greeted with caution (if notdownright skepdcism), but not in an age when it is possible to assert without being in any way provocative thatbees make and use mental maps. ' Remarks being madeby biologists today eerily ech o those ma de by psychologiststwenty years ago. In 1969, the psychologist David Stea,pondering the geometry of mental maps in humans, assumed that "all persons form conceptions of those significant environments too large to be perceived, i.e., apprehended, at once."" In 1989, the biologist TalbotWaterman, pondering the geometry of mental maps inanimals, observed that "whatever its modality the basicgeometry of animal maps is a matter of great interest butlittle certainty ." 12 What is remarkable here is the absolutelytaken-for-granted existence of the animal maps in ques

tion. Given today's widespread assumption that animalsmake maps , '3 i t is hard to imagine that adult humansdon't; and, evidently, humans and their immediate predecessors have used mental maps for millions of years, anability selected for by their self-evident utility to an increasingly mobile genus. That is, the growth, developmentand history of the mental map are questions of evolution,the gradual appearance of the trait taking place over themany generations it took anatomically modern Homo sapiens to evolve.'4 It remains an ability that flowers in usnow - today - as we grow, develop and interact with theworld in our modulation from fertilized egg to adult.Whether ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny may be moot,but the universal ability to make and deploy mental mapsin all human populations is not.

There is, therefore, no doubt of the mapping abilitiesof those we still term 'primitive.' It is time to acknowledgethat people like Cadierine Delano Smith and MalcolmLewis are simply wrong when they speak of humangroups with cognitive abilities less than ours. Relationships among spatial cognition, the ability to make maps,and their actual production is not straightforward, andthe failure of the latter cannot be taken to indicate anabsence of the former. Anyone who has tried to collectso-called 'mental sketch-maps' from college studentsknows how often maps exhibiting no more than 'topological relations' are collected from individuals who havemanifestly mastered 'formal operations.' Everywhere wefind examples of those whose behavior in this or that localdomain is more like that exhibited in earlier developmental stages than the level achieved and exhibited globally.It is simply not possible to assess general levels of intellectual development from the 'sophistication' of this orthat isolated gesture. This is not only because we developabilities over different contents and in different domainsat different rates, but because we enter each new contentarea and do main in some sense as if each time we werestarting again from scratch. 15 We then proceed, microge-netically, as fully operayional adults, to pass thirough sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete and formal operadonal stages - to refer only to Piaget's typology.

How disturbing, then, to read in Lewis's "The Originsof Cartography" of "cultures in which cognitive development, even in adults, terminated at the preoperationalstage."16This would mean, for every content domain, thatthese adults could repeat but not reverse operations (forexample, they wouldn't be able to reverse a route to returnhome), would fail to justify assumptions (even in pointeddebate), would find it difficult to de-center from a givenaspect of a situation (that is, to take another's point ofview, including those of gods or animals in rituals andcelebrations), and would be unable to coordinate perspec-dves (which is to say they wouldn't be able to create an'areal view') among other limitations. Such adults, in otherwords, would be behaviorally indistinguishable from say,your five-year old, and therefore (presumably) incapableof producing anything we might recognize as a map.


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MAPS AND MAPMAKINGBluntly put, no such culture of Homo sapiens is everknown to have existed.But if the cognitive attainments of individuals is invariant across culture, what is it that is 'primitive' about'primitives'? Very little probably. Certainly the use of'primitive' which was widespread to describe non-Europ eans w hen the his tory of cartography was s trugglinginto existence was unjustified. 17 Such judgments concerning the sophisticated worlds of the Dogon and Hopi canonly be explained by ignorance fueled by chauvinism (abehavior evidently preoperational in its inability to de-center from the labeling social group). Yet rejection ofthe pejorative implications of 'primitive' cannot be allowed to mask the reality that differences exist amonggroups. Just because a squirrel can map its environmentdoesn't me an it can comm unicate this knowledge to others.Just because bees can both map and, through their notorious waggle dance, communicate their knowledge toothers, doesn't mean they can make maps, that is, producethe artifacts we unhesitatingly accept as such. And justbecause humans ca n make maps, doesn't mean that theydo, at least as a matter of course, in their everyday taken-for-granted world. Although 'development' may seem appropriate only for describing systems that change overtime, the term, as used by physicists, biologists, and psychologists (Heinz Werner,18 Piaget19 ) characterizes thedegree of organization of any system. In this way it maybe used to compare different co-existing systems, and I willbe using 'development' in this way to compare the degreeof organization of the mapmaking systems of different so-ciedes. Yet at the sam e tim e it is the sense of transformation,from being unable to map the world, to being able to,to being able to communicate it to others, to being ableto produce artifactual maps, to living map-immersed inthe world that I am most drinking of when I speak ofthe growth, development, and history of mapping andmapmak ing .

To Live Map-Immersed in the WorldWhat exactly do I mean when I refer to being map-immersed in the world? I mean being so surrounded byand so readily and frequently consulting and producingmaps as to see them as no different from the food thatis brought to the table or the roof that is overhead orthe culture in general that is apparently reproduced ...without effort. Thre e years ago I tr ied to understand whatthis might mean by collecting every map my family encountered, used, or produced in its daily life. Intendingto keep this up for thirty days, I gave up after twenty,so numerous were the maps involved.

On the second day into the period my then fourteen-year-old son, Randall, produced two elaborate maps of"Rebel Insta llation SR 543k3" for th e role-playing u niverse he was then running for a group of friends; duringthe period in question he was obsessively involved withthese maps. My son Chandler, then twelve years old, made

two maps during the period for a school project on FranOne was of departments, capitals, and major rivers; otther for a tourist brochure of attractions along the Se("France: The Country of Romance"). He also spenlot of time during this period drawing elaborate plans water parks (he drew as many as four or five a day); pduced a map for a role-playing scenario; and quite sptaneously created a map of the world, apparently stulated by a visit from Tom Saarinen who projectedour dining room wall s lides showing maps from his Ntional Geographic Society study of world views. 20 Durthis period, nine maps were drawn for Pictionary gamin attempts to evoke 'Brazil,' 'Taiwan,' 'Los Angeles,' linois,' 'East Coast,' ' trip,' 'map,' 'area code,' and 'feigner.' Maps were used in the game, Risk, and showup on packaging, in advertising, and as editorial contin newspapers and magazines. Maps played central roin numerous social situations. On the first day, I gamy wife, Ingrid, maps of bus routes I had collected her in Spokane and Portland to use in her capacity a member of the Raleigh Transit Authority. On day twthe two of us consulted a pair of Amtrak maps to pour summer train trip. On the third day, I found my oldson with Volume 4 of The Mid-Century Edition of TTimes Atlas of the World. "What's up?" I asked him. "you think you could Xerox this? I need it for my repon the Canary Islands." Two days later, Ingrid took oGoode's off the shelf to show Chandler the route oftrip we'd planned for the summer. A day after that, Radall and his friend, G arland , used a city road m ap to clarthe bike route we'd taken to see Beverly Hills Cop II. Tled to a discussion of distances in which Garland usthe map's index to find Walden Pond Road, and then calculated the distance he'd biked to get there. Five dalater, Randall took a city road map with him on his Suday bike ride to Wake Forest. Five days later still, onbus trip wit h my father to pick u p som e replacem espeakers, we conferred about our route while consultithe map on a bus-stop kiosk. On the way home, whhe observed that we were following a different route, looked at the map on the bus schedule. Talking on phone two days later, we each consulted our own coof a city m ap as we tried to find various locations pertineto our discussion. Two days later, a friend came by deliver a pair of maps we needed to have mounted foam core for a presentation to the Raleigh City CouncOn our way to the stationers, we delivered to anothfriend a yard sign promoting our cause. The yard sihad a road map on it That night at dinner. Chandasked about Greenland on the Surrealist map of the woI was wearing on a T-shirt promoting R.E.M.'s LitAmerica album. On his shirt, over the left breast, waslogo constructed aroun d the outline of North Carolina.

How different all this is from the experiences I hahad in Zinacantan, a community of Tzotzil-speaking ntive Americans in southern Mexico's Chiapas highlanIn the many days I have passed there in the home of m


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MAPS AND MAPMAKINGso large. Certainly there is labor specialization among theZinacantecos - the women herd, the men hoe, and thereare shamans, musicians, others - but the greater part arefarmers, terrific generalists. There are no air conditionerrepairmen among the Zinacantecos, no lawyers whosepractice is limited to problems with pension funds, andcertainly there are no surveyors, cartographers, map engravers, copy camera operators, plate makers, pressmen,or sales representatives for commercial producers of maps.It is the development of this system of production - withthe technology it implies of generation, manufacture, anddistribution - that in the end most radically differentiatesmapmaking cultures from those that aren't.

Are societies with high degrees of labor specializationmore advanced ma n those that aren't? Doubtless this choiceof word is not simply wrong but subtly and probably intentionally misleading. Yet such societies are more developed, if by that we mean that they are more differentiatedand hierarchically integrated. In addition to simple growthin the size of the society and the sheer number of its maps,the varieties of maps - and the relationships among themand to the society drat generates and uses them - havegrown increasingly differentiated, articulated, hierarchically integrated.22 Furthermore, the mapmaking and dis-tribudon system is increasing in each of these ways evenas I type this. That is, not only is our society more developed with respect to mapmaking than that of the Mi-cronesians and the Zinacantecos, it is developing at a morerapid clip, that is, it is differentiating, articu lating an d rein-tegradng itself m ore rapidly in this domain of m apm aking .Stephen Hall's Mapping the Next Millennium constitutesa sketch of this wavefront. 23

But because of this are we better off in any deep waythan the Tzotzil? Are we happier? Are we more satisfied?Do our days pass with greater intelligence? Hard to say,though what is easy to say is that the Tzotzil are in ourorbit as we are not in theirs . The mapping impulse wasdeeply implicated in the Spanish Conquest, and the holdof the landlords over the subsequent centuries was insuredand perpetuated in maps. This is to say that it was thedifferential development of mapmaking - embracing inthis word the whole technology of generation, manufacture, and distribution - no less than other differences between the Spanish and, say, the Aztec, that resulted in thedomination of the latter by the former. Thus are we catapulted into history.

Our Histories - Entwined - are DifferentEvidently the making of artifactual maps originates inmany impulses, even as writing does, but neither seemto develop in the absence of a need to keep written records. 24 Denise Schmandt-Besserat's hypothesis for the development of writing in Mesopotamia invokes the necessity for accounting in long-distance trade; 25 Mary ElizabethSmith's hypothesis for the development of picture writingamong the Mixtec involves the complexities of land ownership amidst dynastic turmoil. 2 6 And there are others, but

almost all of them assume that what was at stake wcontrol of social processes in rapidly expanding groupA variety of media ranging from the linguistic througthe logographic to the purely pictorial - and includinmixtures of each - were used to record qualitative anquantitative information in bo t h spatial and temporal dmensions. Signs which originally developed as names narrative descriptions of lineages or routes were adapteas pictures on maps - and vice versa. Over time, in acordance with structuralist principles, the notation systemdifferentiated: temporally ordered information (such lineages and routes) mat was recorded using logographand linguistic means developed into what we recognizas writing (toward history and descriptive itinerarieswhereas spatially ordered information (like land owneship, the number of sheep in various fields belonging tdifferent owners, and routes) that was recorded using logographic and pictorial means, tended toward what wrecognize as maps. While these two traditions increasingldiverged, for numerous generations they were not readildistinguishable. The use by the Mixtec of strings of fooprints to link both places on the groundplane angenerations of rulers is a case in point, 2 7 but as DaviWoodward has shown, the two traditions are not firmlseparated, even in the European tradition, until the dawof the modern age.28

In societies in wh ich these graph ic systems ceased growing or shrunk, development of mapmaking likely sloweor ceased as well. This is in accordance with Jerome Bruner's insistence "that cognitive growth in all its manifestations occurs as much from the outside in as the insidout," and his observation mat "one finds no internal pusto growth without a corresponding external pull, fogiven the nature of man as a species, growth is as dependent upon a link with external amplifiers of man'powers as it is upon those powers themselves."29 By positing growth as the engine driving development and sproducing history,30 I am insisting that the three threadtwined together in my experience are indeed incapablof being meaningfully teased apart in human experiencgenerally. In growing societies, the continuous need foincreasing hierarchic integration first produces a simplenlarge men t of the m ap pin g function, bu t men its ceaseless branching. Thus the state, in its pre-modern and modern forms, evolves together with the ma p as an instrumenof polity, to assess taxes, wage war, facilitate communcations, and exploit strategic resources. In Brian Harley'words, "Stability and longevity quickly became the primary task of each and every state. Against this ba ckgroun dit will be argued that cartography was primarily a formof political discourse concerned with the acquisition anmaintenance of power."31

Smaller, less developed societies have no need to maland ownership, tax assessment districts, the topographof tank attacks, subsurface geology likely to contain oisewer lines, crime statistics, congressional districts, or anof the rest of tilings we find ourselves compelled to map


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6 D E N I S WO O DThis doesn't mean they don't create in their heads dense,multilayered, fact-filled maps of the worlds they live in. 32Writing recently of the Mayoruna and Maku, the Araraand Parakana, the Arawete and the Guaja - Brazilian"peoples so remote and little known that few outside theirimmediate geographic area have heard of them" - Katharine Milton has observed mat whereas life in any givenyear may revolve around the village for a while, sooneror later the groups she has worked with will spend monthstraveling through the forest and living on forest products. 3 3Such peoples carry everything with them at such times,but, "the most important possession the Indians carry withthem, is knowledge."3 4 In keeping with what I wouldimagine of a people who do not write, Milton also notesthat, "tropical-forest Indians talk incessantly, a characteristic I believe reflects the importance of oral transmissionof culture." 3 5 Others have made similar observations forgroups as far-flung as the Zaire Ituri and native Australians; and indeed the converse - the silence demanded bythe private act of reading - has been increasingly the subject of attention.3 6 In sum, the differences that exist between our mapmaking (and print reading) society and theoral societies Milton describes are not in fundamental cognitive abilities, but in the consciousnesses that different life-ways inevitably produce.

Mapmaking cultures differ from non-mapmaking cultures by the need, among other needs driven by mapmaking, to fill in the blanks. It must be insisted upon matthis is not a disinterested cartographic activity, but the result of the same intertwining of polity and mapmakingjust described, an activity required for the stability andlongevity of the state. This is to say that, in a very important sense, the map requires and justifies as it recordsand demonstrates transformations in control over the land,that is, the appropriation of land in the name of scienceand civilization, the state and human progress.37 M apmaking societies ... reach out, not of course to make m aps morecomprehensive, but in the unfolding of the dynamic thattheir growth and development have helped to set in motion, and in which the cartographic enterprise is an essential and comm itted partner. In so doing, ma pm akin gsocieties subsume whatever they can - for example, thelabor and culture of those they encounter - and in thisway their growth is fueled and their development pushedfrom without (that is, by conquest, appropriation, and seduction) as well as from within. Stripped from those encountered by these mapmaking societies ... ripped off ...is not only their place, their energies, and their knowledgeabout plants and animals , but their language, myths, r i tuals, customs, and artifacts. It is not only explorers, missionaries, soldiers, slavers, trappers, miners, loggers, andcolonists who have encroached on such peoples, but an-diropologists and their predecessors.38 Characteristically,I am able to pull from my shelves, Xingu: The Indians,Their Myths (as the Xingu are unable to pull from theirshelves anything about me), and read from its dustjacketthat "as a source of ethnographic data for structural and

comparative analysis, [the myths] are invaluable." 39 Thereis nothing we of the ever-growing mapmaking societieswill not take and use. It is in this way that the great developing cultures - the 'West,' the 'East,' the 'Islamic nation' - increa singly differentiate them selves from the less-developed societies and c ultures they ever mo re voraciouslyconsu me . Wh at distinguishes 'the West' most tellingly fromthe Kamaiura or the Ainu or the Navajo is not this viewor that, but that in 'the West' ... there are so many views,that whatever it is - the origin of the world, or the relationship between humans and nature - it is seen so manymore ways than it is among the Hopi or the Bororo orthe Inuit. In the end there are not just so many more maps,but so unfathomably many more kinds of maps. It is inthis way that mapmaking fuses its growth and development with history, in the transform ation of the world froma mosaic of peoples to a mosaicked people.

A way in which I, driven by my own growth and development (interactively with the history of those aroundme), fathered two sons, who even as I write are sittingin the next room glued to a monitor where, in SimCity,thematic maps flash onto the screen to record and embodythe 'city' my sons are attem ptin g to create. I am not terriblyhappy about this. I would radier they were out in thewoods, or if not the woods then exploring the city whosepavement runs hard beneath their feet. But in the map-making society we live in this is what it's come to.

N o tes' Tom Watterson, The Revenge of the Baby-Sat, Andrews andMcMeel, Kansas City, 1991, p. 86.' For a general statement of this theme see Ilya Prigogine, FromBeing to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1980.3 The popular introduction is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of T ime: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam, NewYork, 1988.4 See Ronald F. Fox, Energy and the Evolution of Life, W. H.Freeman, San Francisco, 1988; but also Ernst Mayr's The Growthof Biological Thought, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,1982.5 See Robert Karrow and Ronald E. Grim, "Two Examples ofThemadc Maps: Civil War and Fire Insurance Maps," in DavidBuisseret, ed, From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: InterpretingNorth American History through Maps, University of ChicagoPress, Chicago, 1990.6 Th e classic texts here are Tho mas Gladwin's East Is a Big Bird,Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MAl 1970 and David Lewis's We the Navigators, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu,1972.' See, inter alia, Robert Rundstrom, "A Cultural Interpretationof Inuit Map Accuracy," Geographical Review, 80, April 1990,pp. 157 and 163-66.8 Robert Beck and I have closely analyzed the way sketch-mapsgrow, in the case of one individual studying several of her maps.See Denis Wood and Robert Beck, "Janine Eber Maps London,"Journal of Environmental Psychology, 9, 1989, pp. 1-26.


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MAPS AND MAPMAK1NG9 Rundstrom, op. cit., p. 155." The claim is made explicitly and at length in James Gouldand Carol Gould , The Honey Bee, Scientific American Library,New York, 1988. See also F. C. Dyer and J. L. Gould, "HoneyBee Navigation," American Scientist, 71, 1983, pp . 587-97." David Stea, "The Measurement of Mental Maps: An Experimental Model for Studying Conceptual Spaces," in K. R. Coxand R. G. Golledge, eds., Behavioral Problems in Geography:A Symposium, Studies in Geog raphy, no . 17, Northwestern University, Evanston, 1969, p. 229." Talbot Waterman, Animal Navigation, Scientific Am erican Library, New York, 1989, p. 178. Waterman is explicit about theconnection (p. 182), noting mat psychologists refer to the sortof "remembered spatial relations" he is concerned with as "cognitive maps."13 The literature is extensive. In addition to that cited by Waterman, op. cit., and Gould and Gould , op. cit., see D. R. Griffin,Animal Thinking, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,1985, and J. T. Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals,Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980. More technical butno less useful are E. W. Menzel's "Cognitive Mapping in Chimpanzees," in S. H. Hulse et al., eds., Cognitive Process in AnimalBehavior, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1978, pp. 375-422,and M. Konishi's "Centrally Synthesized Maps of Sensory Space,"in Trends in Neuroscience, 9, 1986, pp. 163-68. There has beenan explosion of work implicating the hippocampus (part of meposterior forebrain) in mammal orientation, taking off fromJohn O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel's provocatively titled "Maps inthe Brain," New Scientist, 27 June 1974, pp. 749-51 (but watchfor the dual use of 'map' in this literature). Are animal mapslinear or areal? Waterman (p. 179) says, "No doubt animals haveboth linear and two dimensional types," where what strikes meis mat this question, so often raised about mapping in humans,is now asked routinely of mapping in animals. But the mosttaken-for-granted tone about anim al m app ing app ears in a recentissue of National Geographic where Eugene Linden quotes Swissbiologist Christophe Boesch to dus effect: "According to Boesch,the chimps maintain a mental map of places where they haveleft stones from previous sessions. When a panda tree is fruidng,they seem to know the direct route to the nearest stone hammer,often retrieving rocks out of sight more man 200 meters away.Boesch believes mat this feat is based on an 'evolved mental map,'a sense of Euclidean space that does not usually occur in a childbefore the age of nine" (Eugene Linden, "Apes and Humans,"National Geographic Magazine, 181, M arc h 1992, p. 26).Euclidean space!14 That is, mental mapping as we know it today appeared whenour brain as we know it today appeared. When was mis? It iswidely accepted that anatomically modern Homo sapiens originated in Africa between 100,000 and 400,000 years ago. See C.B. Stringer and P. Andrews's "Genedc and Fossil Evidence forthe Orig in of Modern Humans," Science, 239, 1988, pp. 1263-68, and, for a slightly different perspective, "The MultiregionalEvolution of Humans," Scientific American, April 1992, pp. 76-83. In answer to the more specific, "When does the mod ern brainevolve?" Philip Lieberman is to the point: "The reorganizadonthat makes voluntary control of speech possible is one of the

defining characteristics of the modern human brain. I t undouedly had occurred 100,000 years ago in anatomically modfossil hominids as Jebel Qafzeh and Skhul V, who had modhu m an vocal tracts ... . T he a rcheolog ical evidence associawith Jebel Qafzeh and Skhul V is consistent with their possessa fully modern human brain - one adapted for complex synand logic - but an earlier origin cannot be ruled out. Althoumuch of the enlargement of the prefrontal cortex may derfrom the specific contributions of speech and thought, it entinto virtually all aspects of behavior. Therefore any cognitactivity mat enhanced biological fitness could have contributo its development." Given the presence of mapping skillsphylogenetically prior organisms such as birds, fish, and becan it be doubted tha t ma ppi ng was one of these hum an cogniactivities? After all, the brain Lieberman describes as coming ibeing 100,000 years ago is our brain, one manifestly capablemental mapping. See Lieberman's recent, Uniquely Human: TEvolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior, HarvUniversity Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991, pp. 109-10. For a radicdifferent approach to the problem based on an analysis of stoartifacts, see Thomas Wynn's The Evolution of Spatial Copetence, Illinois Studies in Anthropology, no. 17, University Illinois Press, Urbana, 1989. Using an explicitly Piagetian framwork, he unequivocally states, "The most straightforward, aperhaps the most unexpected, consequence of this Piagetanalysis is that hominids had achieved operational intelligenby 300,000 years ago, an d p erh aps earlier" (p. 89).1 5That is, each time we enter a novel environment, it is in so

sense as if we were learning how to navigate all over again (mcrogenesis substantially recapitulates ontogenesis). On the morogenesis of geographic knowledge, see my doctoral dissertati1 Don't Want To, But I Will: A Real-Time Developmental Stuof Adolescent Images of Novel Environments (London, RomParis), 2 vols., Cla rk University Ca rtogra phic L aboratory, Wcester, MA, 1973; Robert Beck and Denis Wood, "ComparatiDevelopmental Analysis of Individual and Aggregated CognitMaps of Londo n," in G T . M oore and R. Golledge, edEnvironmental Knowing: Theories, Research and MethoDowden, Hutchinson and Ross, Stroudsburg, PA, 1976, pp. 1784; Robert Beck and Denis Wood, "Cognitive Transformatiof Information From U rban G eographic Fields to Mental Ma pEnvironment and Behavior, 8, 1976, pp . 199-238; W ood a nd Beop. cit., 1989; and Denis Wood a nd R obert Beck, "To ur Psonality: The Interdependence of Environmental Orientation aInterpersonal Behavior," Environmental Psychology, 10, 19pp . 177-207.16 G. Malcolm Lewis, "The Origins of Cartography," in JHarley and David Woodward, eds. , The History of CartograpVolume One: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and MedievEurope and the Mediterranean, University of Chicago Press, Ccago, 1987, p. 50. In "Semantics, Symbols, Geometries and Mrics: Causes of Misunderstanding in the Cartographic Commnication of Geographical Information Between Cultures,"paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association Ame rican G eographers, April 1992, San Diego (and publishin mis issue of Cartographica), Lewis disavowed his former psition, adopting one in most respects identical to that presen


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8 D E N IS WO O Dhere. Catherine Delano Smith's article, "Cartography in the Prehistoric Period in the Old World: Europe, the Middle East, andNorth Africa," in the Harley and Woodward volume is far moreproblematic, for it was clear from the beginning that Lewis wasactually talking about consciousness rather than cognition, butwhat Smith is talking about is entirely unclear. See my reviewarticle of Harley and Woodward in Cartographica, 24, Winter1987, pp. 69-78.' ' The historical use of this term is traced by Catherine DelanoSmith in, "Prehistoric Maps and the History of Cartography:An Introduction," in Harley and Woodward, op. cit., pp. 45-49. Code words for 'primitive' that appear in the literature include 'pre-literate peoples,' 'native cartography,' 'naive cartography' and so forth and so on.18 Heinz Werner, Comparative Psychology of Mental Development, International Universities Press, New York, 1948. Werner'sidea of development is extremely powerful, but his treatmentof 'primitive man' is problematic. Unlike Lewis and Smith, hedoes not deny operationa l capacity: "So far as the primitive ma ncarries out technical activities in space, so far as he measuresdistances, steers his canoe, hurls his spear at a certain target,and so on, his space as a field of action, as a pragmatic space,does not differ in its struct ure from o ur o wn " (p. 167); but hedoes qualify this space once it is made a subject of representationand reflective thought (where Werner's use of 'representation' isnot Piaget's): "The idea of space for primitive man, even whensystematized, is syncretically bound up with the subject" (p. 167).I am not absolutely certain what to make of mis, but certainlyhe is speaking here of what others would refer to as 'consciousness' or even 'world view,' born of which are assumed to havedeep connections with lifeway in general, that is, with economicstructure and social organization (with what some economistsmight refer to as 'level of development'). Most theorists concurthat this nexus of forces - sh orthande d as 'hunti ng and gatherin geconomy' or ' feudalism' or 'post-Fordian capitalism' - has a decisive effect on the way those who reproduce it 'see the world,'that is, they concur that less-developed societies conceptualizetheir relationship to the world in a different way than more developed ones do. At this point it doesn't matter w hether we thinkof mis difference as one between a Buberian 'I-Thou' and '.I-It, ' an Eliadean 'sacred' and 'profane, ' a Connertonian ' incorporating' and 'inscribing,' or the Wernerian 'syncretic' and 'discrete' (or alienated, to put a less positive face on it), so muchas we acknowledge that in this we are not discussing intelligenceor cognitive ability but the consciousness engendered by a modeof production, mat is, by a ... living. The development of thisconsciousness can then take its rightful place within the theo-redcal structures used to describe the transformations of productive systems - as in Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space,Blackwell, Oxford, 1991 - radier than in those used to developthe biology of the brain (that is, refocus our attention on an-diropology, history, and sociology instead of neurophysiologyand psychology).19 Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Child's Conception ofSpace, Roude dge and K egan Paul, Lond on, 1956. Written in1948, this is the keystone text for the study of the developmentof spatial cognition. Also see Monique Laurendeau and Adrien

Pinard , The D evelopment of the Concept of Space in the Child,International Universities Press, New York, 1970.20 . T. Saarinen, "Centering of Mental Maps of the World,"National Geographic Research 4, 1988, pp. 112-27." Th e handiest general introduction to the project must be Victoria Bricker and Gary Gossen, eds., Ethnographic Encountersin Southern Mesoamerica: Essays in Honor of Evon ZartmanVogt, Jr., Studies on Culture and Society 3, Institute for Me-soamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany,1989. (In my treatment of the Zinacanteco I draw on my ownfield experience as well as on an extensive monographic literature.)" Again, what has been integrated here have been not only thetopo sheets, property maps, congressional district maps, and soon, but the maps of the ley-liners, the Flat Earth Society, thosewho believe in a hollow earth, and the like; to say nothing ofthe volumes of maps illustrating novels and games of fantasyand science fiction, ad infinitum.23 Stephen Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium, Random House,New York, 1992.24 Again , mapmaking may originate for navigational purposes- as among the Micronesians - or to represent the "footprintsof the Ancestors" - as among native Australians, or as cadasters- as (perhaps) among the Egyptians and Babylonians - but itdoes not seem to develop, that is, undergo differentiation, articulation and h ierarc hic integra tion, in the absence of a needto keep written records. I am arguing mat such developmentonly occurs when societies grow to the point where they needto keep written records; and that men such record-keeping pushesthe development of mapmaking. Mapmaking as a lifeway de velops as it becomes differentiated. This means that more societies will engage in mapping than will become mapmaking societies.25 See Denise Schmandt-Besserat, "An Archaic Recording Systemand die Origin of Writing," Syro-Mesopotamian Studies, 1, July1977, pp. 1-70. Her most recent synthesis is Before Writing: FromCounting to Cuneiform, vol. 1, University of Texas Press, Austin,1991. In his review of this book, John Alden observed that, "Theevidence presented in this book supports an important generalprinciple that is surely familiar to readers of this magazine.Hu m an inventions, like biological adapta tions, rarely appe ar outof the blue. Instead, they typically involve the modifications ofan existin g device or structur e to serve an expa nded functio n"(Natural History, Ma rch 1992, p. 67). My po int exactly.26 Mary Elizabeth Smith, Picture Writing From Ancient SouthernMexico: Mixtec Place Signs and Maps, University of OklahomaPress, Norman, 1973.27 There are many examples in Smith, ibid.28 David Woodward, "Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space inMedieval World Maps," Annals of the Association of AmericanGeographers, 75, 1985, pp. 510-21. Also see his more exhaustivetreatment in "Medieval Mappaemundi" in Harley and Woodward, op. cit., pp. 286-370.29 Jerome Bruner et al. , Studies in Cognitive Growth, Joh n Wiley,New York, 1966, pp . 2 an d 6.3 Population growth is widely accepted as the primary causalagent of many developmental processes, most notably as an es-


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MAPS AND MAPMAK1NGsential m echanism in evolution generally. In hu ma ns it is associated with the development of agriculture, the developmentof urbanism, the development of colonialism, and so on, andof course with developments contingent upon these (such as thedevelopment of writing, and thence, mapmaking). See, for nomore than the agricultural argument, Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural G rowth: The E conomics of AgrarianChange under Population Pressure, George Allen and Unwin,Lon don, 1965; Nath an Coh en, The Food Crisis in Prehistory:Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture, Yale UniversityPress, New H aven , 1977; Allan H. S imm ons, et al., " 'Ain G hazal:A Major Neolithic Settlement in Central Jordan," Science, 240,1 April 1988, pp . 35-39; am on g othe rs.

31 J.B. Harley, "Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda ofCartography in Early Modern Europe," Imago Mundi, 40, 1988,p. 57. But this was me point Harley was making increasinglyin the final years of his life, that cartography was political discourse in the service of the state.31 In addition, of course, to the acknowledged stick-chart, dhulan,bark painting, and so on. The point, to reiterate, is not thatthese peoples do not make maps, but that the maps they makeremain relatively isolated, unusual, special, rare - in contrastto the taken-for-granted character of maps in a mapmaking, thatis, map-immersed, society.33 Kadiarine Milton, "Civilizations and Its Discontents," NaturalHistory, March 1992, p. 38.34 Ibid., 39.35 Ibid.36 Actually the most eloquent testimony comes from the AndrKertsz collection of photographs entitled On Reading, Grossman, New York, 1971, but it was Marshall M cLu han wh o firstcharacterized it as a problem of consciousness in The GutenbergGalaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of T oron toPress, Toronto, 1962. For McLuhan it was type - and reading- that silenced the human voice, producing the alienated consciousness we have today, making the modern state possible noless than the map: "print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition togovernment as such" (p. 235). For a more focused attack on theimpa ct on consciousness resulting from the reading (and writing)of printed books, read Alvin Kernan's completely convincingPrinted Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1987.37 Indeed it is precisely this process of appropriation and theconsequent acculturation that is the focus of Milton's researchamong the Mayoruna and the Maku.38 Nor did this happen only in the past. The .expropriation ofland and cultural capital from indigenous Americans continuesunabated in the rainforests of Brazil and Venezuela, as well aselsewhere.

39 Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas, Xingu: T he Indians, TheMyths, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1973.Abstract In much discourse about maps and mapmaking, cofusion reigns between the undoubte d and universal hu ma n abilto navigate and to store and represent routes and/or other iformation in conventional form, and mapmaking, that is, tregular social and taken-for-granted (if not universal) productiof conventional artifacts - 'maps' - embodying such knowledgOf the enormous number of human societies, only a few habeen mapmaking and of these most have matured during tpast five hundred years. That it is not ' traditional' but mode'advanced' societies that are mapmaking reflects not differentiabilities at any fundamental level, but different aims and goaIt is the territorial ambitions of modern states and their protstate predecessors, and the implicit resource exploitation anlong-distance trade that preeminently call mapmaking inbeing. The development of science in general and cartographin particular occurs in these rapidly developing societies to fudier their goals and ambitions.

Rsum Dans plusieurs traits sur les cartes et sur la cartgraphie, une confusion rgne entre l ' indubitable habilet unverselle de l'homme de naviguer, d'entreposer et de reprsentsous forme conventionnelle des parcours, d 'autres informationou les deux, et la cartographie que l 'on accepte normalemecomm e la production d 'artefacts conventionnels reprsentant untelle connaissance, soit les cartes. Des nombreuses socits hmaines q ui o nt exist, seulement quelques-unes ont confectionndes cartes et la plupart d'entre elles ne sont parvenues leumaturit qu'au cours des cinq cents dernires annes. Que ne soit pas des socits traditionnelles mais plutt des socitmodernes avances qui fabriquent des cartes reflte non pas dhabilets diffrentielles quelque niveau fondamental, mais biedes vises et des buts diffrents. Ce sont les ambitions territorialedes tats modernes et des tats primitifs qui les ont prcdainsi que l'exploitation explicite des ressources et le commercdploy qui exigent, en tout premier lieu, l'existence de la catographie. Le dveloppement de la science en gnral, et de carto grap hie e n particu lier, survie nt dan s ces socits qui se dvloppent rapidement dans le but de poursuivre leurs buts et leuambitions .

DENIS WOOD is Professor of Design in the School of Design, NorCarolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA 27695-7701. Hrecently co-curated the exhibit, "The Power of Maps," for the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design in NeYork City. His book, Th e Power of Maps, was published by GuilfPress in 1992.

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Maps and Mapmaking