For Immediate Release PR Contact: 312.665.7100 or media@fieldmuseum.org Every Map Has a Story to Tell A compelling story could be told about almost any map in this exhibition. Here are a few. Cultures Cross in Tenochtitlan When Hernan Cortés entered the ancient city of Tenochtitlan he was stunned by what lay before him. The Aztec capital was not only enormous – bigger than Paris in its day – but politically organized and technologically advanced. A carefully planned city constructed in the middle of a mountain lake, it boasted broad avenues and causeways, busy canals, ornate temples and public buildings, wide bridges, aqueducts bringing water from distant mountains, bustling markets, botanical gardens…and armies of street cleaners and garbage collectors, something unheard of in Europe. How could Cortés describe to Charles V, King of Spain, the city he had conquered? And how could he boast of his conquest and at the same time justify holding captive the ruler of a civilized nation? His second letter to the king is exuberant and detailed – but the map he sent with it tells even more. Though the woodcut made from the map uses European techniques, including buildings shown in perspective, some scholars believe it is based on an indigenous Aztec map and embodies the culture’s idea of Tenochtitlan, grounded in the way the Aztecs viewed the cosmos. At the map’s center is the temple precinct, surrounded by a circular city set in the middle of a circular lake – ideal rather than actual spatial relationships. The temple precinct’s great expanse and dozens of buildings are reduced to its most significant and symbolic elements: two oversized pyramids with the sun rising between them, racks for human skulls, and a headless sacrificial victim or idol at the pyramids’ base. To the Aztecs, says one scholar, the ritual of human sacrifice is what made the temple precinct divine. To Cortés and King Charles, it would have meant something very different: that despite their great accomplishments, the Aztecs were barbaric, ignorant of Christianity, and corrupted by the sin of human sacrifice. Defining a New Nation How does a new nation define its borders? With rivers and coastlines…with walls and fences…in words and measurements…and in maps. For the American and British diplomats who negotiated the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War and created the United States, the defining map was one first drafted by John Mitchell more than thirty years earlier. Mitchell, a physician-botanist with no prior mapping experience, could hardly have guessed that his map would one day be used to separate the former colonies from British control. His intent had been quite different: to reinforce British control in North America. Born into a well-off family in colonial Virginia in 1711, Mitchell had studied medicine in Scotland and spent his spare time on botany. In his 30s, though, his interests turned to the French threat to the British colonies. In the late 1740s, many British colonists thought that the French were ignoring a treaty signed 35 years earlier and were encroaching on British territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. To publicize the threat, Mitchell drew a map of all the colonies – for a British public, and from a British point of view. Wherever there was disputed territory, Mitchell assigned it to the British. Though his first draft was crude, it came to the attention of the British government, which badly needed a large, detailed map of all of North America. The government had the colonial governors send their own maps and boundary information to Mitchell, who published a more detailed and annotated map of the colonies in 1755. Mitchell died in 1768, eight years before the start of the American Revolution. After the Revolutionary War, when British and American negotiators met in Paris to draft a peace treaty, their most important task was to set the boundaries of the United States. Though the treaty defined those boundaries only in words, the negotiators relied on Mitchell’s map to trace them out. Several versions were outlined: one by John Jay from the American delegation, who traced his understanding of the boundaries, and another by the British negotiator Richard Oswald, who traced the outlines of all earlier treaties. Finally, Oswald added a thin red line, in ink, marking the British interpretation of the new nation – the version that was at last accepted by all the parties. When the treaty was concluded, Oswald gave this “red line” map as a gift – no doubt a somewhat rueful one – to King George III. Continue>>