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Age of Exploration – Early Maps
Map / Manuscript / Art Exhibit — in the planning stages for possibly showing in the academic year 2012-13 — this project is a collaboration between the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (with Jill Hartz and Larry Fong, currently participating in the planning), the Museum of Natural and Cultural History (Jon Erlandson and Patty Krier), the Special Collections (James Fox), and the Oregon Humanities Center (Barbara Altmann). WHP is leading this initiative with the collaboration of a member of the board at the JSMA, Dr. James Walker. Numerous faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Journalism and Communication, and the Architecture and Allied Arts School have signed on to involve their students, teach related courses, and/or present their research at the related symposium.
Age of Exploration Digital Map Collection — In preparation for the potential map exhibit and as aid for advancing research and teaching about the Americas, we are digitizing James Walker’s private collection of maps from the Age of Exploration. We hope to have interactive tables and electronic kiosks for the exhibit, but we will also be publishing on line these atomized and annotated maps that highlight European conceptions of dominion, world view, and how the “other” was conceived and represented. These studies provide a counterpoint to our work with indigenous-authored maps and pictorial manuscripts.
Geographic Information Science (GIS)
- 2009–10, University of Virginia: UO library staff, including Jon Jablonski and Karen Estlund, collaborating with WHP Director, Stephanie Wood, and Technical Assistant, Ginny White, are taking part in workshops in GIS that will have a benefit for a number of projects on campus in coming years. This is under the auspices of an NEH grant, “Enabling Geospatial Scholars.”
- 2009, Oaxaca, Mexico: Stephanie Wood, working with Jim Meacham of InfoGraphics, and GTF Jessica Phelps at the Social Science Instructional Lab, began using GIS to inform our study of colonial Mexican indigenous-authored pictorial maps, doing field work in Guelacé, Oaxaca, Mexico, with help from Beatriz Cruz.
Historical GIS and the Codex Cardona
Work-study student, Aaron Lopez, a GIS major, is helping us compare the historical map of Mexico City in the Codex Cardona with Google satellite photos of the city today. Watch for the interesting result of his research!
Adding Historical GIS to the Mapas Project
Only a relatively few Pre-Columbian codices survived the onslaught of Spanish conquest and colonialism in Mesoamerica in the early sixteenth century, not to mention the subsequent centuries of decay and loss. But, fortunately, indigenous scribes and painters continued to paint and write in their own languages and about their lives under colonialism from about 1540 through the early 1800s. Hundreds of Mesoamerican, indigenous, community-centered pictorials (codices, mapas and lienzos) exist still today.[i] This is unique across the Americas. We, at the Wired Humanities Projects (WHP) of the University of Oregon, are digitizing and atomizing examples from these pictorial genres, making them available free for close study and publication (http://mapas.uoregon.edu). These manuscripts often have cartographic features, but they also reflect culturally distinct ways of conceptualizing space and time. We seek new digital tools for analyzing this data and displaying it in a way that will help us better understand such relationships with the natural and built world of indigenous communities, territorial claims, and adjustments that came with colonization.
East-West Primacy
Mesoamericans’ world was greatly influenced by the path of the sun. That east-west trajectory weighed far more in the awareness of their surroundings than any other alignment. In Nahuatl, the Aztec language, words for east and west were the “sun’s coming out place” (i.e. its rising place) and the “sun’s entering place” (i.e. its setting place or entry into the underworld). Mesoamerican indigenous languages do not always include terms for north and south. East-west primacy is reflected, therefore, in some cartographic expressions, such as mapas (usually on bark-paper, hide, or European paper) and lienzos (usually on cloth). But we also find a shifting, rotating perspective — perhaps the paper or cloth was held up as the painter faced one direction and added those features that he could see, and then it was turned with the painter, who added features facing another way, with no uniform “top” or “bottom” to the page.
We also find trails and roads marked by footprints, possibly evidence of the human traversal of the landscape in the reviewing of boundaries and their recording (an indigenous version of the “field survey”?). Can GIS help us understand the process through which these “maps” were made? And how were they viewed? Were they put on the ground for people to crowd around? Did audiences walk around the maps, viewing them from different angles while they periodically cast their gaze out to the horizons?
Cultural Factors in Conceptualizing Space
In the past year, WHP faculty and colleagues in Mexico have been conducting fieldwork, taking GPS waypoints for locations highlighted in these pictorials. It is our intention to compare these map-like documents with satellite photographs and topographical maps of the same vicinities, to see where we find coincidence and divergence. Both can be telling of the mind frame of the painter and the historical context in which he or she lived. Where we find maps created by Spanish colonists of the same vicinities, we will also compare these to the mapas and lienzos, looking for colonial practices, their influences, and possible resistance strategies expressed by communities striving to protect their ancient dominions.
We have questions about whether “rubber-sheeting” (ESRI ArcGIS) would be helpful for these comparisons. Will the historical data be spatially warped to fit modern maps, and will this serve as a useful indicator of the differing perspectives and methodologies of indigenous and Spanish map-makers? Perhaps a rubber-sheeted layer would be illuminating as a companion to our digital facsimiles. It may help us comment more fruitfully on degrees of uncertainty in trying to establish precise locations. Could it also help us see degrees of interest in forged maps with exaggeratedly far-flung boundaries?
We are similarly curious about the potential application of TimeMap (http://www.timemap.net) to the Mapas Project. If we could obtain enough historical data from archives to show indigenous communities’ changing boundaries over time, would this be a useful tool for bringing to light their possibly shrinking territories (or their successful defense of a minimum land base)? Our databases also keep track of possible changing boundary names (in multiple languages), which may allow for us to produce a gazetteer at some point, ideally with a visual rendering.
Mythic Time, Origins, and Migrations
Mapas reveal a mental mapping of community with sometimes deep temporal dimensions and strong ethnic identity features, including visualizations of mythical origins in far-away places in long-ago epochs. This would include, for example, representations of Aztlan, a place with an uncertain location using Western methods of mapping but believed to have been located in the far North of Mexico or in what is now the US Southwest. As with the Ghost Metropolis project with its focus on Los Angeles, we will explore the “intersection between the imagined and the lived” (http://hypercities.com), hoping to elucidate ways they overlapped or were knit together in the Mesoamerican cosmovision and how they were expressed in mapas — despite fuzzy data, ambiguity, and the imprecision[ii] that can characterize sacred history.
Mythical origins often find expression in historic, epic migrations, typically with multiple stops and starts, not always fully linear. A recent ArcGIS, award-winning study of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan (http://lienzo.ufm.edu/), which traces a conquering expedition from central Mexico into Guatemala, successfully tracks the movement of people in a way that could be adapted for migration patterns, as well, we hope, and possibly shed light on Mesoamerican understandings of temporal and spatial sequencing or progression in the process of settlement. What kinds of transformations were entailed in migration?[iii]
Tellingly, adverbs in Nahuatl that specify location typically work for spatial or temporal meanings.[iv] In indigenous-language glosses and descriptors applied to cartographic and landscape paintings we also find not only an equation of “here” with “now,” but also a shifting here and now. It is as though people moved through landscapes re-enacting historical and ancestral activities which they tried to capture in text and image. The shifting “and now this” or “and here this” recalls a possible performance element and an oral tradition that may have accompanied map readings before an audience.
Mapas Genre Hybridity
Indigenous-authored pictorials of Mesoamerica capture elements of pre-Columbian and European techniques, revealing a growing hybridity over time, although distance from the focus of Spanish activities is another important factor besides the temporal. An example of a recurring feature of mapas that harkens back to precontact times is the frequent inclusion of genealogies painted near the town center. These strings of couples and their offspring seem to add temporal depth to the hold of certain dynasties over local power structures and social consciousness.
Genealogies painted on mapas also draw attention to a vital relationship between people and landscapes, as do the pictorials that show individuals, families, and other collectivities on the ground, involved in both ceremonial and quotidian activities. One recurring element worthy of tracking is the pictorial presence of women, who might not be mentioned in the corresponding texts, allowing for tentative reconstruction of gendered uses of space that might be unknown if it were not for these mapas. Here is an example where the visual can add to what we can learn from the textual.
Layering and Multimedia
We have a colleague on campus, Jim Tice (Architecture) who, with the assistance of Erik Steiner of our InfoGraphics Lab, has created a spectacular digital representation of the Nolli map of Rome in 1748 (http://nolli.uoregon.edu/). Tice has offered to collaborate in helping us bring to our Mapas Project (http://mapas.uoregon.edu) a similar layering of datasets that would highlight natural features, architecture, social patterns, and cartographic practices. Still photography and narrative are rich dimensions Tice and Steiner have added to the landscape of late eighteenth-century Rome.
It is also our aim to spatially anchor to specific mapas some video clips and audio recordings from our fieldwork. One example is an interview we had with a schoolteacher who was able to identify an Amazon-like woman who appeared on the Mapa de Guelacé, Oaxaca, Mexico, giving us an accounting of the folklore that lives on today, more than two hundred years later, about a “matlatl-cihuatl” (net woman) by the river who casts spells on unsuspecting wanderers.
It was also in our fieldwork relating to the Mapa de Guelacé that we learned of the significance of some trees as the site of an ancient harvest celebration. Local officials also showed us the nearby pre-Columbian temple, now in ruins, that they believe contributed to the placement of this ritual. Perhaps we could render such ruins into something more tangible with 3-D modeling and digital elevations based upon archaeological studies.
[i] See John B. Glass, “A Survey of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts,” 3-252, in Howard F. Cline, volume ed., Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, Part Three, in Robert Wauchope, ed., Handbook of Middle American Indians, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975).
[ii] See Martyn Jessop’s comments on Humanities data of this sort in, “The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanitis Scholarship,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23:1 (2008), 44.
[iii] See Florine Asselbergs’ chapter, “A Claim to Rulership: Presentation Strategies in the Mapa de Cuautinchan No. 2,” in Davíd Carrasco and Scott Sessions, eds., Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuautinchan No. 2 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ), 125. In its whole, this book is tour de force study of time and space in a colonial Mesoamerican pictorial.
[iv] See James Lockhart’s translation of Horacio Carochi’s Grammar of the Mexican Language with an Explanation of its Adverbs (1645) (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2001), especially the Fifth Book.