Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era eds. by Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era eds. by Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer Dudley B. Bonsal Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era. Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 272, 80 maps, 25 color plates, index. $45.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-2267-1859-0. $44.99, eBook, ISBN 978-0-2267-1862-0. The cover of Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era shows a spiral map that illustrates the geological stretch of time from the Precambrian era to the present. Titled "The Geologic Time Spiral—A Path to the Past" and created and published in 2008 by Joseph Graham, William Newman, and John Stacy for the US Geological Survey, it is an evocative representation of geological time's advance, showing representative landforms, flora, fauna, and a river flowing through the middle, and all spiraling upward as if moving closer and emerging out and into the viewer's here-and-now world. The genesis of the book was a conference titled Time in Space: Representing Time in Maps, held at the David Rumsey Map Center in November 2017. Covering a period roughly from 1450 to the twentieth century, with chapters written by conference participants and offering an abundance of beautifully rendered color images, the book addresses various approaches to mapping and imagery for orienting the reader in time as well as in space. Although the cover illustration is emblematic of a linear conception of time, the book explores a highly varied and inclusive range of maps and images that often move beyond such linearity. Of five propositions put forth in the introduction by editors Caroline Winterer and Kären Wigen, two of them—"Diversity persists" and "All maps tell time"—best indicate the variety to be found in the subsequent chapters. Their introduction and the first chapter, William Rankin's "Mapping Time in the Twentieth (and Twenty-First Century)," provide the most wide-ranging discussions about the cartographic representation of time. Winterer and Wigen declare their aim to "interpret the advent of digital mapping as an invitation to explore older maps with fresh eyes" (5)—that [End Page 141] there are many ways for static maps to symbolize a map subject's or map reader's situatedness in time or in its passing. Rankin's discussion addresses directly the representation of time in maps—that time is never instantaneous. Instead, as with a camera's shutter speed, a span of time, or what he refers to as the "cartographic moment" (19), is always a feature. The passing of time is also inherent in how readers gradually move their focus from one part of a map to another. The eight subsequent chapters are more place-specific, as they address a variety of historical mapping practices from three different regions of the world: (1) East Asia, (2) the Atlantic world, with the focus being pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica and Europe, and (3) the United States, having the third section to itself. Winterer and Wigen describe these eight chapters as comprising an "archival sampler." The description is apt, in terms of both content and interpretive approaches. Maps from Japan surreptitiously skirt governmental dictates against portraying conflict-laden current events by disguising them as three-hundred-year-old history. Mapmakers in China and Korea look to Jesuit mapping practices during the Ming period to find relationships between their own historical and present moments. Aztec illustrations show footprints marking the territorial borders until they branch off to trace the temporal destinies of five different altepetl rulers. Francis Walker leads the US Census office to document the country's westward territorial expansion in the Statistical Atlas of 1874. The graphic representation of time in these and other chapters ranges from innovative representations, such as the spiral rendering of geological time shown on the cover, to more basic representations, such as the inclusion of an inset map from another time period, to much more subtle representations that require historical understanding provided by the authors. Two chapters stand out for providing understandings of visual symbology being closely tied to rapidly changing...