For Immediate Release PR Contact: 312.665.7100 or media@fieldmuseum.org Find Your Way – and Your World – through Maps Maps: Finding Our Place in the World takes visitors on a journey through time and culture, geography and imagination, art and technology – to discover how maps help us understand our world, our history, and ourselves. The exhibition explores innovative mapping technologies from the past, present, and future, and presents maps from cultures around the globe. Introduction The spectacular and rarely opened Atlas of the Great Elector is an apt beginning to the journey. Standing almost seven feet tall, weighing 275 pounds, and bound in fine leather and gold with brass fittings, it is obviously more than a geographic tool. It is a symbol of its owner’s learning and worldliness, of the power and wealth of the Prussian state, of national pride – and an early hint that the maps visitors will see in this exhibition will tell us more than how to get from “here” to “there.” Gallery One: Finding Our Way The groundbreaking graphic simplicity of the London Underground map has made it an icon among wayfinding maps. Like this example, many of the most familiar maps are designed to help us travel a route from one point to the next. But that doesn’t mean they all look like the road map in your glove compartment. In the first gallery, visitors will discover that diverse approaches to wayfinding reflect the scope of human experience. For example, visitors can follow a thirteenth-century map that guided pilgrims on an imagined spiritual journey to the Holy Land. They’ll see a “Photo-Auto Guide,” a low-tech ancestor of today’s in-car navigation systems, with its turn-by-turn pictures taken by a camera mounted on the hood of a car. And in a video illustrating the modern version, they’ll learn the role that satellites and geographers play in supporting in-car navigation systems. While maps for ground travel may use landmarks, other environments require different approaches. Visitors will encounter the fifteenth-century Carte Pisane, the earliest existing portolan chart that showed navigators precisely how to sail between points on the Mediterranean coastline; and they’ll see a navigation chart from the Marshall Islands, constructed of sticks and shells, that depicts patterns of waves and currents that helped sailors find their way from one island to another in the Pacific Ocean. Air travel takes off with an artifact from one of modern history’s most celebrated events: the map Charles Lindbergh assembled, annotated, and carried with him, charting the shortest course by air from New York to Paris. Continue>>