Maps and Place - Geoff on Ecotone Wiki

Many years ago, while still a full-time student and despite meagre financial means I decided to buy the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Not for me the sensibly priced paperback edition, I had to have the hardback edition - for the maps. The paperback edition lacked the elegant fold-out maps boldly printed in red and black on crisp pure-white paper. For me these maps were not just an indispensable aid to finding my way around Middle Earth as I read the books, but beautiful artefacts themselves.
Maps and writing are inextricably linked. But just as language existed before writing was invented, so did the oral and mental equivalent of maps. Aboriginal Australians did not have writing or maps. Yet they were able to do many of the things we use maps for. In the more arid regions of Australia they lived a nomadic existence covering vast distances on foot. They survived and were able to find food and water because they had knowledge of the land. This knowledge was not just location knowledge, but ecological knowledge - for example the knowledge that near a certain type of tree you only have to dig a little to get water. There was in fact a kind of kinship with the land that is described as “Sense of Place”.
It might be tempting to think that maps were invented elsewhere as a consequence of people abandoning the nomadic lifestyle and living in more permanent settlements. After all, the earliest known map in existence is a depiction of a neolithic village in what is now Iraq (Catal Hyük). It has been suggested that the earliest ancient Egyptian maps were developed in response to the need to define land ownership because the annual flooding of the Nile removed landmarks. However in many areas Aboriginals lived in villages (which they often abandoned according to the season, but were able to return to the next year). Throughout Australia the Aboriginals knew and respected tribal boundaries. The Aboriginals had villages, boundaries, travel and trade, and their spirituality was linked with “Place”. They did all this without maps of any sort. The knowledge that allowed all this was of course passed from generation to generation by oral tradition.
But in our culture the use of writing can enhance the use of language, and maps can enrich our experience of place, whether the place is real or fictional.

Comments

[Coup de Vent]

Hi Y'all! Interesting post. I feel so moved by people's relationship with place in other cultures. It's so humbling and exciting - touches something in me. I guess we are very street sign bound in the westernised world. We don't know where we are unless we're told!

I also like maps in books - espcially those relating to railways and tube maps in London.

[beth]

Thanks for this piece reminding me that non-written, mental maps are maps all the same; our arrogance in forgetting this is like dismissing oral tradition story-telling as if it must be fiction, simply because our minds aren't trained to remember and transmit knowledge that way.

[Chris]

Hey CdeV...do you remember a board game from the late seventies that was based on a map of the tube system? I've never forgotten the likes of Cockfosters or Marylebone as a result.

[Christina recollet]

This is very interesting to read.

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