Ancient World Mapping Center

SCS Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, January 4, 2019

Invited Sesquicentennial Panel

Mapping the Classical World Since 1869: Past and Future Directions

Organizer & chair: Richard Talbert, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

1 Greek and Roman Mapping   Georgia Irby, College of William and Mary, VA

2 Modern Mapping Before Digitization   Richard Talbert

3 What Difference Has Digitization Made ?   Tom Elliott, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University

4 What Has the Ancient World Mapping Center Done for Us ?   Lindsay Holman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Center Director)

5 Rome’s Marble Plan: Progress and Prospects   Elizabeth Wolfram Thill, Indiana University, Purdue University Indianapolis

 Panel Overview

A 1980 APA/SCS committee report (Research Tools for the Classics) was correct on both counts to declare cartography at that date “an area of extremely great importance, where the state of our tools is utterly disastrous.”  The panel briefly discusses the disappointing lack of progress made during the previous past century, and advances reasons for its limitations (Papers #1, 2).  The main focus of the five papers, however, is on the transformation successfully achieved since around 1980, and still ongoing.

Three shifts may be identified as the keys to this transformation.  First, as Paper #1 explains, the more open, culturally sensitive approach to pre-modern cartography generated by the geographers Brian Harley and David Woodward has unlocked a fruitful, far-reaching re-appraisal of the purpose and value of ancient maps which is by no means yet exhausted.  Second, Paper #2 recalls the decisive insistence by the 1980 APA committee that, in view of the inadequacy of existing efforts worldwide to produce a major classical atlas or equivalent, the APA itself should take the lead in sponsoring one.  After initial failure, a decade-long international collaborative project to create such a reference work was successfully launched and funded, resulting in the publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World by Princeton University Press in 2000.  Third, the fortuitous transition from film-based mapmaking to digital during the 1990s made it practical to convert the Atlas and its data – with the use of digital technology – into a far more flexible and versatile resource than previously envisaged.

This technology, which has itself continued to develop, has given cartography a scope, complexity and richness unimagined in 1980.  Paper #3 in broad terms appreciates and illustrates this capacity for the advancement of the ancient field.  Paper #4 does likewise, but with specific reference to the expanding range of the Ancient World Mapping Center, the first institution of its type to be established (in 2000) for promoting cartography, geographic information science and historical cartography in the ancient field.  The Center was an unforeseen, visionary outgrowth of the project to create the Barrington Atlas, one which has amply fulfilled its promise.  Paper #5 offers an outstanding instance of how state-of-the-art digital technology can now bring to the study of a Roman monument a depth of insight unattainable until recently.  Moreover, this exciting new work on the Forma Urbis Romae fragments and the surviving wall to which they were once attached is a model of collaboration between Rome’s Musei Capitolini and the Ancient World Mapping Center.

The coherent, logical sequence of the panel’s five papers demonstrates to SCS not only that cartography today remains more than ever of extremely great importance to the ancient field, but also that the state of tools for it has now changed from disastrous to extraordinary, with further creative developments to be confidently anticipated.

N.B.  Because of more or less certain difficulties in obtaining permissions, the images shown at the panel to accompany each paper are not included here.