The Ambivalence of Maps: A Historical Perspective on Sensing and Representing Space in Mesoamerica
Imaging and spatial analysis technologies are revolutionizing archaeological methods and archaeologists’ perceptions of space. Rather than view these innovations as inevitable refinements and expansions of the archaeological toolkit, it is useful to criti
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Abstract Imaging and spatial analysis technologies are revolutionizing archaeological methods and archaeologists’ perceptions of space. Rather than view these innovations as inevitable refinements and expansions of the archaeological toolkit, it is useful to critically assess their impacts on theory and practice. In this chapter, we consider what spatial data—data that appear to represent an objective reality— tell us about past and present human experiences of the physical world in terms of abstraction, temporality, and power. We draw on archaeological cases from Mesoamerica to illustrate how these subjective perspectives on space are revealed through technological innovations and how historical and current efforts to map this region play out in the political sphere.
The map is not the territory —Samuel Hayawaka
Imaging and spatial technologies are revolutionizing archaeological methods and archaeologists’ perceptions of space. From high-resolution satellite data to 3-dimensional image processing software, archaeologists have access to spatial resources of greater scope, detail, accuracy, and precision than ever before. The traditional barriers to collecting these kinds of data—high costs and steep learning curves —are falling as instruments produced for the consumer market become smaller, less expensive, and more user-friendly. Greater access to spatial data is facilitated by the internet, the development of free and open-source software for analysis and visualization, and the establishment of digital data curation and sharing repositories. These tools and techniques are becoming customary, and progressively compulsory, in archaeological projects. Rather than view these innovations as no more than
J.K. Millhauser (&) North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA e-mail: [email protected] C.T. Morehart Arizona State University, Tempe, USA © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 M. Forte and S. Campana (eds.), Digital Methods and Remote Sensing in Archaeology, Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40658-9_11
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refinements and expansions of the archaeological toolkit, it is useful to critically assess the impact they are having on the questions archaeologists ask and the ramifications of the choices we make as scholars of the past and, moreover, of space. We begin this chapter by considering maps as the products of efforts to collect spatial data at a variety of scales and to distill that data into concise, meaningful, and useful representations. Our discussion of maps exposes a tension between the goal of collecting data to produce objective representations of space and the fact that such representations are subjective abstractions. This tension cannot be resolved by appealing to a difference between objective data and subjective information—as if the former were raw, unorganized, and useless until processed and organized into the latter (Kent 1978). Our technological means of observation may improve, but spatial
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