European Medieval trade routes

Taken from Penguin Atlas of Medieval History.

Some Vavilov updates [non-centers of food domestication]

The food hearth theory of  Nikolai Vavilov is obviously outdated. In searching for later insights I stumbled on the Dictionary of cultivated plants and their centres of diversity (1975) by a student of Vavilov, PM Zhukovsky together with AC Seven. The book lists domesticated plants (for food as well as fodder, industrial and medicinal uses) using a centers of origin list expanded on that suggested by Vavilov. The differences can be seen above, for South America three centers are contracted into one, the Chinese center incorporates Japan, the Ethiopian center has disappeared in a vast African one and Australian, North-American and Euro-Siberian centers are added.

The entire Vavilovian system came under criticism from JR Harlan who in Agricultural Origins: Centers and Noncenters (1971) argues for three separate origins of agriculture and three non-centers (spanning 5000 to 10.000 km) where domestication took places in dispersed areas. Resulting in the map below. Note that the three temperate climate centers (Mexico, Near East China) are all matched by a tropical non center, and that the three centers are all thought to have independently developed writing. Very Neat.

Maps of Vavilov's food hearths

Three maps freed with a little screen-shot magic from a Google Books preview of Vavilov's 'Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants'. Posted earlier were the later agricultural origin maps by Carl Sauer, now we can compare.

Click to enlarge.

Carl Sauer's maps on agricultural origins

Carl Sauer, cultural geographer, author of the brilliant New Spanish Main on the Spanish landnam of America after Columbus, also wrote one the origin and spread of food crops and domesticated animals. Vavilov suggested a number of centres of origin, the so-called hearths. Sauer preferred to talk about Centres of Dispersal. Sauer came later but Vavilov is still the better known name. I have no clue what the current scientific validity is of both theories but it is certain helps that Sauer's Agricultural Origins And Dispersals (1952) is available on Archive.

Great maps, click to enlarge.    

Map your Recipe [new website][updated]

Map your Recipe does a simple thing: enter the ingredients of a recipe and it will show you where the vegetables that went into it were first domesticated.

Map your Recipe shows that we are firmly after the Columbian Exchange and that no national cuisine relies only on truly local ingredients. But with interesting local patterns of usage and borrowing.

Map your Recipe will ignore those ingredients that can not be pinpointed to a specific centre of origin. 

Mail questions and/or suggestions to wilfriedhoujebek who has a yahoo account.

The discovery of America in 3 strange maps.

Included in the Penguin edition of the Vinland Sagas (two medieval Viking tales about the discovery and settlement of Greenland and further exploration into the Americas) is a map based on the sagas first created in 1590 by Icelandic teacher Sigurdur Stefansson. There is England, Ireland and islands on the right and Helleland (Baffin Island), Markland (New Foundland) and Skraeling land (Red Indian land, Labrador?) on the left. Greenland is shown as continues with it (pack ice?). It is clearly recognizable from the point of view of present cartographic knowledge.

Now take a look at these two books from the Zorzi codex reproduced in Carl Sauer's excellent book about the first years of Spanish expansion, "The New Spanish Main". They were made in 1525 at the latest and show the way Columbus' brother Bartholomew (and by extension Columbus himself) imagined their discoveries as part of the new cartography. Never able to come to terms with their landing on a new continent, they needed to account for it as outlying islands at the extreme perimeter of East Asia. A passage to the heart of it was only a matter of time. Sauer notes that observers at the Spanish court understood the fallacy at an early point and even at the time these maps were anachronistic.

Ancient Mesopotamian cities crumbled to dust

Many times I have been asked this question: How do archaeologists find the ancient cities? The should rather be: How can one who is not absolutely blind have any trouble whatsoever in choosing the right spot? Cities are all around.Every mound of dirt is a city. I have yet to find a place in the land of Iraq, except in the newly formed delta, on which one can stand and not see two or three cities outlined on the horizon. - Edward Chiera (They wrote on clay,1938)  

As Chiera explains: the land that is now called Iraq is all washed down from the mountains in the north by the Tigris and the Euphrates. This means that a) the land is flat and b) there are no rocks. Out of necessity clay was the prime material used by the ancient cultures (Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian) here living. Fired clay lasts very well as clay tablets show but it takes a lot of resources to bake them so for most practical uses, like building houses, clay was dried in the sun, which makes it usable but not durable. After thousands of years all those houses built on top of crumbled houses created large mounds that in our own time could easily pass for ordinary hills. 

 

Strange Berlin 2nd hand bookshop grid map

In a TV documentary on Hendrik Lenstra, the Dutch mathematician, the man travels to Berlin to deliver the Euler lecture. His main concern in Berlin however seems to be to visit as many 2nd hand bookshops he can (he collects old book because they smell better than modern ones). He prepares his visit carefully by plotting shops on a map to find those hotshots where there are several shops in close proximity. They way he does this puzzles me though. As a mere mortal I would find all shops on a topographic map. Lenstra has a different technique: he creates a grid matching the Letters and Numbers from the map register (shop one in E13, shop two in F8 and so on) and then draws lines to connect the E and 13. The result, to me, looks a bit confusing.

Postman Pat Psychogeographix first Carto-Chaotic results

Overlay of four GPS traces of one of my three postal rounds, click to enlarge. The overlay was made manually by stacking the individual tracings for *artistic* effect. This round consists of two distinct parts. One part is a collection of five streets in the top left corner, the second part is at the right. You can clearly discern the difference between me biking back and forth and me delivering on foot. 

Even though I am recording points at maximum rate the device fails to keep up with my meandering through broad streets and garden paths.The trace below, from my round in Garden Village shows what I mean. Here the streets are all completely straight and nearly every house has a front garden and from the trace you would expect to see this, but instead the lines haphazardly average out as lines on a polygraph. Maybe I should slow down. Now You understand why things could have been worse.

OWS Cartography

Six high quality click-to-enlarge maps showing the services provided at Zuccotti Park during its #occupation. The self-regulated division of the camp into an uptown and a downtown (between Brooklyn college hipsters and their middle class library and the ghetto and their crack smoking) is in these maps if you know where to look. This process of social stratification has been called psychographic but that is nonsense; it's just good old fashioned human strife and animosity. The best source on emergent camp urbanism is 'Occupying Wall Street'.

Outrunning a bull Kalahari style

"Persistence Hunting by Modern Hunter-Gatherers" is a paper that deals with the outrunning of game, an ancient practise today only known to be used by Kalahari hunters. The paper does a great job describing the problems of persistence hunting, goes on to detail the environmental knowledge involved in a hunt before again moving on explain how all this is related to human energy consumption patterns. All that and more in nine pages. 

An average speed of 6.3 km/hr may not seem very fast, but the challenge to the hunter is not so much the speed as the difficult conditions that need to be overcome, including extreme heat, soft sand, and sometimes thick bush. The hunter may be slowed down when he loses the trail. The most difficult task for the tiring hunter is keeping on the right track when the animal joins the rest of the herd again, since its tracks must be distinguished from those of the other animals. When the animal is still running strongly, this can be very difficult, but when it starts to show signs of tiring it becomes easier to distinguish its tracks. Another difficulty is that the animal may circle back onto its own tracks and the hunter must decide which set of tracks to follow. The hunter does not always run on the tracks but often leaves the trail in order to pick it up ahead, and a number of times the hunter lost time following the wrong trail and then going back to find the right one. The trail may also be lost when herds of other antelope species cross the tracks. Losing the tracks was the main reason the hunters gave up in unsuccessful attempts. [The f]igure  plots the route of Karoha running down a kudu bull in October 2001, showing the kudu crossing back over its own tracks a number of times and joining other groups of kudu bulls.

...

When running down a herd of kudu, trackers say that they look to either side of the trail to see if one of the animals has broken away from the rest of the herd and then follow that animal. The weakest animal usually breaks away from the herd to hide in the bush when it starts to tire, while the others continue to flee. Since a predator will probably follow the scent of the herd, the stronger animals have a better chance of outrunning it, while the weaker animal has a chance to escape unnoticed.

Map and aerial photo of an Amazonian garden city [click to enlarge]

From the above aerial picture of the Canela village Escalvado you might think that it is the village of some isolated Indian tribe. If you look at the diagram below though you see that the spokes of the traditional village tell only half the story. The village is surrounded by a malakoian suburbia, a belt of modern utilities like a soccer field and a school and the houses of white people providing various services to the Canela. Both images are provided by William and Jean Crocker in 'The Canela: Kinship, Ritual and Sex in an Amazonian Tribe' (2004, earlier). The images are five years apart but from the book I don't get the idea that much changed in between.     

Historical antecedent to the reforestation of Utrecht

Click to enlarge the above map. It's shows a plan for the future growth of Utrecht as proposed by nobleman, poet, Catholic and rich boy Everard Meyster in 1670. The Dom church is still firmly in the middle of the city, and the old part is clearly demarcated as a dirty stain surrounded by a newly gridded oval-shaped new town, luscious and rational. Even the new harbour in the North-east is a circle. 

Meyster also proposed to make the new Utrecht a reforested city with the planting of 10.000 trees. Based on the map that would mean that Utrecht would be surrounded by an planted forest. Imagine that sight of that after 350 years.

To the west you can see the 'moes grachten,' garden allotment alongside the canals, as created by former Mayor Moreelse who died in 1666. 

Map and information found in Stadblad. 

The forest made human: the legacy of trail trees

Trail trees (or signal trees or thong trees) are trees "modified by the American Aboriginal peoples in order to signify trails, campsites, or special locations (water supply, food, safety, etc.). Often these were oak saplings that are given a unique bend, usually pointed in the direction of the point of interest." The scope and spread of these trees seems to be a recent discovery and a certain hesitance to affirm them as man-made abounds. There is a (or has been, the site is dated) fabulous project attempting to map the location of all known trees and the trails they collectively mark in order to confirm them as human artefacts rather than flukes of nature.

The locals know their way through the forest and I guess that these trees are meant for travellers and visitors. How wonderful it must be to have travelled for days through high forest, alone and out of reach of humanity and then to suddenly cross the path of a signal tree pointing you into the direction of a human settlement. These trees are historic artefacts and this humanising effect is even larger today. Now the forest is empty and the old ways have disappeared: the trail tree is a reminder of what has been, a melancholic marker, not the promising announcement of being welcomed by friends and family. 

An earlier post on wayfinding in the Amazon.

A map showing the location of signal trees and the trail they create. Wish it was bigger!

 

 

Eskimo Psychogeography

The first is a a map of the Cumberland Sound-Frobisher Bay region drawn from memory by an Eskimo named Sunapignanq, The second map is a modern cartographic map.

The above image and the quote below are excerpted from Barry Lopez fabulous 'Arctic Dreams, imagination and desire in a Northern landscape'. I opened it at random the other day and the following fragment about the definition of 'space', 'place' and how the transition from one to the other is brought about through narrative and long term contact seems to be in perfect alignment with forage psychogeography. It is a wonderfully compact quote, a large segment of the book is concerned with Eskimo (ethno)psychogeography but Lopez here manages to find universal facets. Italics are mine.

 The American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes in his writing between concepts of space and a sense of place. Human beings, he says, set out from places, where they feel a sense of attachment,of shelter, of comprehension, and journey into amorphous spaces, characterized by a feeling of freedom or adventure, and the unknown. "In open space," writes Tuan, "one can become intensely aware of [a remembered] place; and in the solitude of a sheltered place, the vastness of space acquires a haunting presence." We turn these exhilarating and sometimes terrifying new places into geography by extending the boundaries of our old places in an effort to include them. We pursue a desire for equilibrium and harmony between our familiar places and unknown spaces. We do this to make the foreign comprehensible, or simply more acceptable.

Tuan's thoughts are valid whether one is thinking about entering an unknown room in a large house or of a sojourn in the Arctic.  What stands out in the latter instance, and seems always part of travel in a wild landscape, is the long struggle of the mind for concordance with the mystery entity, the earth.

One more thought from Tuan: a culture's most cherished places are not necessarily visible to the eye - spots on the land one can point to. They are made visible in drama - in narrative, song, and performance. It is precisely what is invisible in the land, however, that makes what is merely empty space to one person a place to another. The feeling that a particular place is suffused with memories, the specific focus of sacred and profane stories, and that the whole landscape is a congeries of such places, is what is meant by a local sense of the land. The observation that it is merely space which requires definition before it has meaning - political demarcation, an assignment of its ownership, or industrial development - betrays a colonial sensibility.   

Fabulous eye candy: Greenland Inuit shoreline maps.