ECCENTRICITY - Maphead - page 5

wasn't aware of the ecology and geology and history manifest on maps at first; I was just
drawn to their scope, their teensy type, and their orderly gestalt. My dad liked maps too,
but he preferred the black British atlas in the living room, a Philip's one from the 1970s in
which the maps were all “hypsometric.” Hypsometric maps are those ones that represent
terrain with vivid colors: greens for low elevations, browns and purples for high ones. He
likedbeingabletovisualizethephysicallandformsbeingmapped,butIpreferredtheclean
political maps that Hammond and National Geographic published, where cities and towns
stood out neatly on lightly shaded territory and borders were delineated in crisp pastels.
In fact, I dislike hypsometric maps to this day. They look stodgy and old-fashioned to
me, something you might see a matronly 1960s schoolteacher straining to pull down in
front of a chalkboard. * But it's more than that. I have to admit that I still like maps for their
orderanddetailasmuchasforwhattheycantellusabouttherealworld.Agoodmapisn't
just a useful representation of a place; it's also a beautiful system in and of itself.
Mapsareolderthanwriting,soofcoursewehavenowrittenaccountofsomeNewton's-
applemomentincartography,someprehistorichunter-gatherersaying,“Hey,honey,Idrew
the world's first map today.” Every so often, the newly discovered “world's oldest map!”
will be announced to great fanfare in scientific journals and even newspaper headlines.
But whether the new old map is a cave painting in Spain or a carved mammoth tusk from
Ukraine or petroglyphs on a rock by the Snake River in Idaho, these “discoveries” always
have one thing in common: a whole bunch of annoyed scholars arguing that no, that's not
a map; it's a pictogram or a landscape painting or a religious artifact, but it's not really a
map. When a cryptic painting was unearthed from the Neolithic Anatolian settlement of
Çatalhöyükin1963,itsdiscoverer,JamesMellaart,proclaimedtheeight-thousand-year-old
artifacttobeamapofthearea.Thedomino-likeboxesdrawnatthebottomofthewallrep-
resented the village, he claimed, and the pointy, spotted orange shape above them must be
the nearby twin-coned volcano of Hasan Dag. Cartographers went nuts, and historians and
geologists even combed the painting for clues as to the history of prehistoric eruptions at
the site. There'sjust one hitch: subsequent researchers have decided that the spotted thingy
probably isn't meant to be a volcano: it's a stretched leopard skin . That's not lava spewing
forth, just a set of claws. Ergo, the mural was never a map at all. Archaeologists' embar-
rassinginabilitytotellaleopardandavolcanoapartturnsouttobethesamesyndromethat
had me seeing coastlines in my grandparents' wood paneling. It's called “cartacacoethes”:
the uncontrollable compulsion to see maps everywhere.