20190727T090020190727T1145Europe/AmsterdamKnowing the Littoral: Heights and Depths Along the World’s Coast
Littorals are interfaces between worlds, where land and sea meet and mingle. The production of knowledge about these areas, pivotal for trade, travel, and interaction, as well as their graphic depiction and narrative representation, has had a crucial role throughout human history. Of particular interest is that they can be seen and visualized from radically diverging perspectives: for instance, very different aspects will be registered depending on whether littorals are observed from land or sea. In conjunction with peculiar local traditions regarding the way in which geographical reference systems are set up, this had affected the way knowledge about the boundary region between sea and land has been produced and registered. This panel aims, in particular, at offering a first attempt at a global comparison of the ways in which the vertical dimension has been perceived and represented along the world's coasts. How have littorals been depicted and described historically in different cultural settings and how have changes and variations along the vertical axis been illustrated? The topics discussed include the mapping of dangers at sea in early Qing China, the understanding of the Atlantic Ocean's depth and shallowness in the Age of Exploration, the conceptualization of the level of the sea as an average since the 18th century, and the marking of the memory of tsunamis along the coasts of Japan. The discussion will be rounded up by a commentary that will touch upon the scant knowledge available about pre-European representations of the vertical in the Indian Ocean.
Organized by Wilko Graf Von Hardenberg
Drift 25, Rm. 203History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.org
Littorals are interfaces between worlds, where land and sea meet and mingle. The production of knowledge about these areas, pivotal for trade, travel, and interaction, as well as their graphic depiction and narrative representation, has had a crucial role throughout human history. Of particular interest is that they can be seen and visualized from radically diverging perspectives: for instance, very different aspects will be registered depending on whether littorals are observed from land or sea. In conjunction with peculiar local traditions regarding the way in which geographical reference systems are set up, this had affected the way knowledge about the boundary region between sea and land has been produced and registered. This panel aims, in particular, at offering a first attempt at a global comparison of the ways in which the vertical dimension has been perceived and represented along the world's coasts. How have littorals been depicted and described historically in different cultural settings and how have changes and variations along the vertical axis been illustrated? The topics discussed include the mapping of dangers at sea in early Qing China, the understanding of the Atlantic Ocean's depth and shallowness in the Age of Exploration, the conceptualization of the level of the sea as an average since the 18th century, and the marking of the memory of tsunamis along the coasts of Japan. The discussion will be rounded up by a commentary that will touch upon the scant knowledge available about pre-European representations of the vertical in the Indian Ocean.
Organized by Wilko Graf Von Hardenberg
Shallow Water at China’s Coast: Depicting Dangers on Early Modern Chinese MapsView Abstract Organized SessionEarth and Environmental Sciences09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/27 07:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/27 07:30:00 UTC
Sailing in unknown territory is a dangerous matter. To make sailing safer, sailors all over the world created maps and rutters, sharing their experience and knowledge. Early modern Chinese seafarers are no exception and we know of several Chinese maps that include warnings of dangerous places along the coast of China and beyond. The maps mark sandbanks, rocky waters, and sometimes include information on previously sunk ships. To depict these dangers, the cartographers used a range of methods: Little dots, for example, are a typical symbol for sandbanks. Often, the cartographers were not seafarers themselves but had to rely on other sources for compiling the maps. Some cartographers talked to seafarers, others only relied on previous maps and written sources. This leaves the question how useful the maps were. Were they accurate enough (i.e. mapping all the dangers) for seafarers to actually use them or did they only serve to satisfy the curiosity of the learned elite? Comparing the Chinese coastal maps with other sources – contemporary European maps, as well as modern surveys of the coast – allows to establish the usefulness of the maps. Which dangers did the cartographers choose to depict, which did they leave out? By studying selected coastal maps from the 17th and 18th century, this paper aims to examine the relationship between seafarer, cartographer, and the dangers at sea in China.
Crossing Shallow Seas: Muddy Imaginaries in the Age of ExplorationView Abstract Organized SessionEarth and Environmental Sciences09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/27 07:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/27 08:00:00 UTC
This paper examines the environmental history and cultural geography of the Atlantic during the Age of Exploration. How, it asks, did early modern oceanic imaginaries shape the contours of European expansion and cultural contact? From the ancient period through early modernity, numerous commentators posited that the Atlantic was a shallow, swampy place swirling with seaweed and debris. And this informed their ideas about Native American origins. As late as 1743 the American naturalist and explorer John Bartram concluded that America had been peopled not by way of heroic ocean passages, but via incremental advances. The seas surrounding North America, he concluded, could be better described as filled with networks of islands, gulfs, and capes that could be traversed step-by-step with minimal scientific expertise. Among Bartram’s seas—small, contained, and easily navigated stretches of water—the shore loomed large. An archipelagic America, in other words, was deeply connected, culturally and geographically, to the rest of the world. Drawing on the accounts of early modern explorers, naturalists, and cartographers, this interdisciplinary look at how culture, ecology, and geography became firmly entangled reveals that the material and conceptual complexities inherent in oceanic spaces played powerful roles in creating new human networks and identities.
Presenters Christopher L. Pastore Associate Professor Of History, University At Albany, State University Of New York & Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Fellow At The Trinity College Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, Dublin
Thinking in Averages: On the Conceptualization of the Level of the Sea as a MeanView Abstract Organized SessionEarth and Environmental Sciences10:15 AM - 10:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/27 08:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/27 08:45:00 UTC
In recent decades mean sea level has become the almost unavoidable reference point of an impending environmental cataclysm. Before that it had been naturalized as the most common, almost intuitive vertical datum. The idea to neatly conceptualize the vertical boundary between land and sea as an average is however a fairly recent one. By all its allure as a global baseline it is also the product of very specific local environmental and cultural conditions. As such it is the outcome of a process of social construction that begun in the early modern period in two very specific, quite muddy regions of Europe: Venice and the Netherlands. In this paper I explore how and why the idea to measure the level of the sea first developed where and when it did, discussing extensively the geographical constraints of its conceptualization. Furthermore I relate how the level of the sea was, around the turn of 1800, rethought as an abstract, averaged version of the different levels that can be physically apprehended along coasts and littorals. I proceed, in other words, in the analysis of a crucial case study in how local measurements were morphed into standardized, discrete, and more legible features to then become global in the wake of Europe’s imperial and colonial ventures.
Transgressions and Regressions: An Incomplete Atlas of StonesView Abstract Organized SessionEarth and Environmental Sciences10:45 AM - 11:15 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/27 08:45:00 UTC - 2019/07/27 09:15:00 UTC
In Japanese traditions there is continuity between nature and culture in so far as the sense of a place speaks directly to the intricate interplay between human and natural forces. This continuity is most clear in the historical practice of naming utamakura—storied places shared through literature and art, imbued with geologic history, human history, and cultural meaning. Since the 869 tsunami along the Sanriku coast of northern Japan, communities erected stone tables which perform a dual function; they are warnings–markers of the edges of inundation, they indicate where to build and where to flee when oceans rise; and, they are memorials, erected as part of a ritual that memorializes events and those lost. These markers make manifest geologic forces from past and certain events of the future. Now surveyed and mapped, this network of historical environmental data at the scale of 1:1 along the coast of Japan is legible elsewhere. These tablets—technologies of linear marks in stone—have a pressing relevance that is too important to be simply a marker of a past event or a memorial to lives lost. These tablets—each like utamakura—are part of a multivalent knowledge exchange through time and space, and with hundreds of tsunami stones planned in the coming years to commemorate the 2011 tsunami, and as Japan continues to build almost 14,000 kilometres of seawalls, they are critical in establishing an understanding that the crisis facing coastal landscapes is an ongoing project, not limited to the aftermath of emergency.
Commentary: Knowing the Littoral: Heights and Depths along the World’s CoastView Abstract Organized Session11:15 AM - 11:45 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/27 09:15:00 UTC - 2019/07/27 09:45:00 UTC
Associate Professor of History, University at Albany, State University of New York & Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Fellow at the Trinity College Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, Dublin
Christopher L. Pastore