For Immediate Release PR Contact: 312.665.7100 or media@fieldmuseum.org You Call That a Map? The lukasa, carved with ideograms…a clay fox astride a pot…an Inuit shoreline carving…an arrangement of sticks. Some of the objects in the exhibition scarcely look like maps at all. What are they doing here? “We deliberately set out to stretch visitors’ ideas of what a map can be,” explains Robert W.. Karrow, Jr., Curator of Special Collections and Curator of Maps at the Newberry. “We tend to think of geographic accuracy as the main goal of maps, but it’s important to recognize that there’s more than one way to view that.” An Inuit paddling his kayak along a shoreline in the dark, for example, has more use for a carved object with contours he can feel than for one with carefully drawn lines of latitude and longitude or boundaries drawn precisely to scale. The idea driving the exhibition, says Karrow, is to look at maps on their own terms. Maps are as old as language, he points out, and old maps are not primitive versions of our own but languages suited to their time and place. “We don’t read Chaucer and say he couldn’t write well,” Karrow says. “We read him and get a picture of his times, and a new perspective on ourselves.” Similarly, maps are windows into lives and times and cultures. And like all products of human culture, they show us people addressing needs that are as old as humankind. Expanding Our Knowledge One basic need addressed by maps is to convey information and knowledge. The exhibition offers many examples of map-makers developing ways to convey knowledge, especially new knowledge, about the world we inhabit: visible things, like the newly discovered continents of the Americas or the great city of Tenochtitlan, and things not yet seen, like the roundness of the earth, the realms of the spirit, and the geography of fictional lands. Scientists, in particular, often have the imagination as well as the knowledge to map things unseen. Leonardo da Vinci, Jim Akerman points out, was a cartographer as well as an artist, and his map of central Italy – the first to use color to indicate changes in elevation, today called a hypsometric map – was a breakthrough. “There was no precedent for it,” Akerman says, “and there would be nothing like it for another three hundred years.” Scientific maps can even create knowledge and make important discoveries themselves. For example, John Snow’s famous map of a cholera outbreak in the 1850s allowed him to pinpoint the source of the disease: a single contaminated well. A century later, Marie Tharp’s charts of the Atlantic sea floor provided evidence for plate tectonics, the movement of the earth’s crust. But perhaps the most famous was a geological map of England created 200 years ago by William Smith. In revealing the relative ages of layers of rocks, it laid the foundation for Darwin’s work a few decades later – and came to be called “the map that changed the world.” Continue>>