Tag Archives: Sigmund Freud

Mapping the Presence of Rome’s Pasts


We may be compelled to apply the same data driven images to ancient Rome, driven due to our own continuing and increased disorientation on the proliferating data maps.  Despite the limitations of their coverage of space, and the limited benefits of imagining the ability to measure times of travel or distances to monuments as a record of ancient space or Roman life, it is tempting to be satisfied with placing it in a network.  To do so offers a way of envisioning ancient Rome as a mega city and hub of transit.  But the erasure that this brings in humanistic experience of the map is striking.  The risk is to lose a sense of the presence of the map of the city, visualizing the distances of travel, costs of economic transit, and time of travel in a web of commercial exchange we both project back our own sense of disorientation.  In doing so, we may be trying to find mooring in the mapping of the past.  We avoid the problem of mapping the presence of the ancient form of the city so long returned to be mapped, as a key to presence of the ancient city in the city, in ways that Rome was so long understood.

When we use modern notions such as that of the urban mobility fingerprint as Moovel labs did in concretely visualizing the medieval saying that “all roads lead to Rome” in its  project of mapping distances from the ancient city, we run the risk of insisting on the transparency of data, reducing maps and the patttern of mapping to a substrate of spatial relations sufficient in an almost ahistorical sense, and risk asserting the authority of an app over material processes of building and mapping Rome across time.  The reipscription of the authority of Rome in the map–or the mobility fingerprint–takes the city as fons et origo in almost encomiastic terms, not reading its space, or its location, but asserting its pride of place in a network that is presumed to exist, and celebrating the construction of its almost vegetal organic network of modernized roads in order to bring it closer to the viewer.


mobility fingerprint ROme


While we do want to illustrate or understand flows from the city–


Flow from Rome

–the dataset performs a trick of topographic rendering that also flattens the complex human patterns of the past, and does so by obscuring the deeply humanistic layered nature of the map and of the past.

The alternative might be to consider an enhanced topographic rendering, able to call attention to the intense interest that the mapping of the city’s place has held, to the extent that it became understood as a vessel of memory, and such an approach might begin from the broad symbolic authority with which it was encoded in maps.  In ways that are erased by a data map, or an app that sizes vector files to suggest flow in an organic or unobstructed fashion, the distinctive material practices of mapping Rome have their own history, and material presence,neglected in data visualizations’ relatively flat space,–not to mention the sense of a space removed from history that they create.


If practices of mapping demand to be placed in their distinct media, the media of mapping Rome has a particular sensitivity, as preserving access to the past, and of orienting viewers to a presence no longer present in the present, as most all maps of Rome effectively do.  By considering the mapping of Rome in relation to datamaps, and the sense of presence that they encode, one almost seems obligated to begin from what may be the primary image–if not primal image–of the way that all roads lead to Rome, or were described to.    If all roads lead to Rome in a deeply ahistorical sense in the middle ages, when the statement seems to have first appeared, the possibly medieval rendering of the ancient “Peutinger Map” or Tabula Peutingerianawhich presents Rome at the center of an acient road network–across the empire–and was suggested to be  copied from the form of a large frieze on a building, but survives in a paper copy of distinctively distorted elongated form, reduced oceans to strips to foreground its road network.  The trick of topographic rendering of privileging the disposition of roads and their distances–measured in local units, but spanning the Empire–do not radiate, but extend laterally across mapped space.  The form of the antique led to the eager the recovery of the prized Peutinger map of the peninsula, surviving in the copy of the Tabula Peutingeriana, that preserved, showing east-west routes at greater scale than north-south in dimensions of a marble frieze, more than a sheet of paper; its collapsing of a collection of routes inscribed into a peninsula as a seat of empire, placing the enthroned figure of Rome holding a globe at the head of a cursus publicus–as if to demonstrate how all roads lead Rome-ward or, more accurately, from Rome, emphasizing its legibility by replicating the left-to-right reading of space .



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roads-to-romeRoads to Rome


–traveling or journeying to Rome offers a limited orientation to the rich humanist history of the mapping of its space, or even of the space of the Roman Empire, if the mapping of Rome omits any traces of its historical inhabitation, or the palpable presence of its ruins.  These ruins, and their surviving remnants, drew many to Rome since the Renaissance, and has provided one of the most basic–if primal–forms of mapping the historical past, and of seeing evidence of the living presence of the concrete.  Attracted by the multiple presences that seem to coexist within Rome’s space, in ways an archeological map cannot do complete justice, as knows any visitor challenged to grasp and orient themselves to the abundance of its underlying pasts present in its ruins.  Was the close tie that Sigmund Freud has described to Rome–a site whose attraction he was tempted to see as a site of attraction to death–indeed informed not by his visits to the city, but rather his own close attraction to the maps of the ancient city’s archeological ruins?  Such maps would have provided the very horizon of expectations through which he oriented himself to the modern city, even before he had visited it for the first time.  While Freud famously had repeatedly deferred personally visiting Rome in his life,–when he was left explaining its disappointment “as all such fulfillments are when one has waited for them too long,” even though, in his previous writings on dreams and on the dream-life, he recorded five dreams of visiting Rome.  If he held the city as a seat of Christendom, however, he must have experience its historical wealth primarily in maps.


1.  The complex question about Freud’s relation to Rome is not only rhetorical.  For it gets at the presence of the past that are left on maps, and the traces of place that maps preserve, but that data maps omit in failing to preserve as humanly rich or intellectual rich a relation to space.  When Freud famously described how the “historical past is preserved in historical sites like Rome” that contain within its presence copious testimonies of the past, alongside and parallel to its actual human habitation, he seems to have been referring to the “unity” of the city not only in the present, but on a map.  As a psychical entity with a “long and copious past” as much as a physical entity or plant, Freud allowed himself a “flight of imagination” in treating it as a metaphor for the human unconscious in one of the most expansively literary passages of Civilization and its Discontents, as a site where one might imagine that “nothing that has come into existence will have [ever] passed away, and all earlier phases of development continue to survive and coexist [simultaneously] alongside the most recent.”  Writing these words shortly after his first visit to Rome, the passage reveals the huge impression that visits to the city made to his theory of mind, and was made at the culmination of Freud’s thoughts of memory processes and their location in the mind, the concrete metaphor is an echo not only of the personal fascination he felt when visiting the city and the famous “flight of fancy” that he asked readers of Civilization to indulge.

By imagining the city as a physical illustration of the continuity of memories in the human mind, Freud seems to have exploited the public imaginary of Rome, and the mapping of ancient Rome by which his own relation to the city had been deeply affected.  The travel to Italy–or tour of Italy–was long seen as a process of cultivation and civilization, albeit it was a visit that Freud had long resisted, not undertaking a visit until 1901, despite visiting Italy often, and even staying in the Roman Campagna before seeing the city.  It was perhaps no coincidence that Sigmund Freud seized on the city of Rome–and the plan of its archeological figures–as evidence of the ability to “bring to light” the past through what he termed “memory-traces,” which long survive, and which he imagines–while noting the insufficiency of such a visual image to represent the mind or mental states–to express how a visitor “equipped with the most complete historical and topographical knowledge,” can grasp even in the present the form of the Rome of earlier times, which retain its integrity–as does the individual–but which can be  mapped as it existed across different historical periods at the same time, despite “all the transformations during the periods of the Republic and the early Caesars.”

The identification of the collation of mental periods with the city’s actual topography was impressive, as was the sense of a city that held multiple cities within itself.  If the problem of mastering the historical discontinuity of the political epochs of Roman civilization were a problem of gymnasium education that would be very well known to the readers Freud sought to address.  Indeed, Freud’s arrival in Rome–which he seems to have deferred, in part due to historical circumstance, until he was in his mid-forties, may have been due to how Rome had provided a model to understand human history from the work of the German classical historian Barthold Neibuhr, if not the procedures of historical verification by scientific methods of historical investigation set forth in the work Leopold von Ranke.  For Ranke, the very project and prospect of visiting Rome transcended the mastery of the past based on archival written sources; Freud no doubt internalized and felt the centrality of any visit to Rome in ways that led him to postpone it until 1901, perhaps until his preparation for the task.  When Freud noted that he had dreamed of Rome at least five times between 1900-01, he registered deep imaginary ties he had developed to the city, undoubtedly through the engraved images he had studied from youth, and perhaps through the story of the archeologist who travelled to Rome to he must have seen as deeply other than his Jewish-Austrian identity, and even psychically dangerous.  He openly described his attachment to Rome as akin to a neurosis by 1897, and a longing that he actively willed to contain.  In describing himself as tragically “fated not to see Rome” in 1900, as if it were an affliction, Hannibal, but neglected to add he often indulged a penchant for Italian tourism.

Did this avoidance of Rome run against the exposure that he must have had to the rich archeological maps of the ancient city in his Vienna library?  Did the map provide a basis for his deferral of a visit to Rome, and investigation of its antiquities in the flesh, so impressed was he by the authority of archeological maps of the city, and the abundance of information that they contained?   It is very striking that Freud had visited multiple Italian cities at a younger age–touring Venice, visiting Pisa, Livorno, Siena, Rapallo, Florence, Gorizia, Verona, and Ravenna, the somewhat nearby site of Byzantine mosaics, as well as Naples; the visit to Rome may well have been intentionally deferred, less as a masochistic deferment, than a postponement of enjoyment of its pleasures.  He often dreamed of Rome.  Freud even once let himself to remain on a train that stopped in Rome, deciding against deboarding the train, but described the sensation as it pulled out of the station, even as he cultivated the image of the city in his head.  While he described his repeated dreams of visiting the city as “based on a longing to visit Rome,” perhaps the refusal to visit the place was based on fear of inadequate preparation of studying its plant, as much as a masochistic urge to deny himself the experience of the city.  Indeed, although his visit to Naples bypassed Rome, as if intentionally, and he visited the nearby Lake Trasimeno in the Campagna, he deferred any visit to Rome, as if intentionally; he wrote his  colleague Fleiss in 1898 that even if he had closely studied Rome’s topography, he deferring his visit, even if “the yearning [for Rome] becomes ever more tormenting.”

Such imposition of a regime of deferral occupied increasing mental energy, and seems oddly tortured, but may be interpreted in terms of his desire for fitting Rome into his sense of bildung, and indeed compels us to ask about his visceral sense of its materiality.  Freud hence described as the subject of recurrent dreams–and listing its appearance in five dreams.  Freud seems continually inspired by the hope of unpacking city of Rome, perhaps cowed by the prospect; the time that serious study of its presence might demand may have led him only to visit the city in 1901.  But even if he visited Rome late in life, it would be wrong to think that he had not encountered it previously multiple times, and even traveled to its ruins in the form of maps recreating the organization of its monuments.  He could have performed the visits by confronting archeological maps of the city’s ruins, as if training himself for his arrival, kept in his libraries.  And when later in life, when he even joked to Stefan Zweig that his avid collection of images of antiquity, he no acknowledge the thought he gave to assembling a substantial collection of objects from antiquity, including statuettes and fragments, as testimonies to partial remains, amply displayed in his office walls and on his desk, including the famous bas relief image of Gradiva–a reproduction of the ancient bas-relief of a young girl, who was taken as a physical embodiment of a past.   The Gravida figure, as imagined in an eponymous novel, was imagined as a trace of the past, was imagined in a contemporary novel as having been a girl killed by the ash erupting from Vesuvius, who presented a solitary archeologist with an elusive subject of desire; after the appearance of the young woman in a dream, the archeologist’s travelled to the ruins of the ancient city of Pompeii, where while wandering in its excavated streets he was struck by the uncanny appearance of the living presence of the woman, who he recognized by very gait, and whose encounter offered an occasion of psychic release.  The quite creepy story led Freud to value the image as an emblem of recovering repressed memories, and a talisman of recovering memories, and of the excavation if not overcoming of repressed memories.


2.  The discussion of Rome as a site of antiquities and a site of memory was an image that was dear to Freud and which he cultivated.  The cultivation Freud may have led Freud to confess to the novelist Zweig about having more deeply studied antiquity than psychology; in addition to such studies, archeological maps of the discovery of the city’s strata seem to have provided a formative relation to the historical and personal past.  The city was famously portrayed, long after the appearance of the first guides of Baedecker of Rome in 1867, in a series of historical atlases as a stratigraphy of sedimented layers demanding deciphering–and as such maps were indeed intended to provide a basis through which one finally encountered the city, it is more than likely that Freud’s large library of antiquarian maps provided something of a resource with which he occupied himself before his travel.  As much as serve as a “flight of fancy” or metaphor, the image of the layers of Roman archeology was emblematic of the past, and a challenge of detection, as well as observation; once, while visiting the city, he sought it important to remember that he was deeply affected and “disappointed to find that the scenery was far from being of an urban character,” and at another time visited Rome only to express deep disappointment at seeing German-language posters in the city, rather than the image of the antique that he had privately treasured.  The city seemed far off from the detection of a removed past that lay in the maps of the city’s ancient ruins that remained in his private study.

The powerful image of actively discerning and unpacking layers of the presence of the antique was not only speculative.  They were archeological concerns by the time that he visited, and topics of sustained archeological study evident in how archeological maps by Tuebner and others were designed, and sought to allow viewers to orient themselves to the city’s historical layers in its actual buildings by imagining the assembly of its ruins.  For while for all his allowance of the inadequacy of any visual analogy for the human unconscious; his rhetoric and formulation was deeply cartographical in its visual layering of pasts in both the historical, antiquarian, and tourist maps of late-nineteenth and early twentieth- century Rome.  Indeed, the unique form of map literacy seemed to propose a powerful project of mapping a cognitive relation to the past as much as a metaphor.  When Freud  boasted to the author Stefan Zweig that he devoted more attention to “read[ing] archeology than psychology” to assemble antique fragments, as the Gradiva, even as he wondered if he were able to see Rome, was he implicitly modelling himself, as the historian David Lowenthal acutely noted, his own mental activities on the literary figure of the archeologist described by Wilhelm Jensen in his 1903 novel, desiring that “the environment [of Pompeii] rose before his imagination like an actuality,” seeking to escape a “lifeless, archeological view” in finding the woman he knew as Gradiva?  Freud seems attracted and tantalized by the possibility of recovering a palpable sense of the past through undertaking a similar mental exercize.  He analyzed  Gradiva as a story of trauma–and recovered memories–in 1907, exploring the uncanny emergence of an Italian girl possessing the very gait of the relief of the lost woman in Pompeii’s ruins as an encounter in the ruins expressing the model of a therapeutic cure.

Can one find in maps a similar sense of release in uncovering traces of ancient Rome?   Freud’s encounter with the city surely began from and was lodged in his reading of maps.  What would such maps look like, and could one describe a history of readers’ attachments to them, the better to appreciate the mapping of Rome’s pasts?  We are today far less concerned with streets or walking since we’re less concerned with such maps as guides of habitation, and hope to trace guides to the spatial futures of metropoles:  such maps’ scope capture the order of lived space, but obscure the individual neighborhoods that once occupied space, or lent them coherence.  Maps of ancient Rome, in contrast, excavate a formerly inhabited space, providing images of study to come to terms with the past habitation of the ancient world–an idealized urban space, removed from the present.  Indeed, coherence is less a quality of the visual accuracy of the “maps” of Rome from glorious mosaics of cloud-free satellite images, which, while providing a level of spatial comprehensiveness, but beg questions of their coherence or presence, since they offer viewers few cognitive guides, so much as they trumpet their own documentary abilities.  Yet they recall the older use of city maps of questions  as objects of study, and the value of the map as sites of observation.  In the new views of modern cities as Rome, the image of the metropole is super-imposed over the image of the ancient city.


Cloud Free Rome Centro Storico.pngPlanet Labs 




roads-to-rome.jpgRoads to Rome










Roma Erklärung.pngHistory Blog, G. Droysens Allgemeiner Historischer Handatlas (1886)/ Wikimedia Commons





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Mapping Ancient Ruins

Few precedents of mapping historic ruins are as striking as the curious radial map for which Leon Battista Alberti provided instructions in the middle of the 1430s:  by plotting ancient ruins in Rome, the paradigmatic city of ruins, the Renaissance humanist recast the city of perpetual incarnation and of survival in the midst of recurrent abandonment, seeking to provide a guide to retain an image of the classical city’s monuments and topography in the mind’s eye of humanists, and his creation around 1450 of his extremely popular and innovative Descriptio urbis, a humanistic version of the city’s marvels–Mirabilia–a genre narrating the miraculous sights of the city which had circulated, as an early tourist brochure and keepsake from the 1100’s.  If the Mirabilia was a guide to the wonders, augmented by numerous early urban myths, listing its gates, hills, columns, statues, baths, arches, bridges, amphitheaters and temples, often including fanciful etymologies of their names, the Descriptio urbis provided an exact location of each, or as an exact a description as possible, setting out the minutes and degrees from which each could be observed from the Janiculum Hill in Rome, providing what many have argued constituted a model for drafting one’s own schematic map of monuments for ready consultation.  The popular manuscript survives in multiple copies.

A practiced architect and impassioned enquirer about the physical construction of ancient Rome, Alberti set forth directions for preserving their arrangement in an elegant radial map which plotted ancient ruins by a meridian and a circular calibrated arc, in order to better excavate and make present–or recreate–the ancient remains lying in the city in its reader’s mind, which circulated widely in manuscript form before the age of print.

Alberti's Meridian

Alberti significantly described the advantages of plotting such monuments according to a radial grid by using “mathematical tools” to survey monuments by taking sightings from atop the elevated Capitoline hill.  The finding of significant monuments on coordinates served to purify earlier travel books by selecting its authentic classical buildings, stripping away accreted legends like so many obscuring cobwebs, and creating a pristine media to understand the ancient world and the city’s physical plant.  Although the rubric by which Alberti mapped the ancient city on top of the new one–the half-inhabited Rome of the recently returned popes–his intent was not only to replace the handbooks orienting pilgrims and visitors to Rome’s marvels but refine his admiration to a veneration of antiquity and the city’s ancient design, which he preserved in traces in its contemporary layout; his booklet may have provided a model for contemporary views of the ancient ruins in the city’s walls such as this Florentine fifteenth-century illumination from the workshop of the Renaissance mapmaker Pietro del Massaio, who made several maps of the region of Tuscany and of Italy that were destined for inclusion in a codex of Ptolemy’s treatise on world geography–an ancestor of recently undertaken efforts of digital archeology of the city.  (The maps of Pietro were also known in several independent sheets, some of which are stored in the Vatican libraries.)  But the city views that he included in the most precious codices were the most similar to the transcription of archeological highlights that Alberti, who sought to share his own passion for the antique with a generation of humanists with whom he corresponded in other Italian courts, had noted:  they gave the monuments of the ancient world a new plastic form, and complemented the image of Rome–its coliseum a bit above its center, as seem below, but the Janiculum and Senatorial palace closer to the center–with images of other ancient Mediterranean cities, including Cairo, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Venice.


Massaio's Rome

More than a hint of Alberti’s Renaissance resuscitation and incarnation of the ancient city in erudite terms was present in the view that Michel de Montaigne in later took in 1581 pf “studying Rome,” whose plant was at that point still two-thirds uninhabited, by climbing the Janiculum to “contemplate the configuration of all the parts of Rome, which may not be seen so clearly from any other place,” lamented “that one saw nothing of Rome but the sky under which it had stood and the plan of its site” with knowledge of the city only “as an abstract and contemplative knowledge of which there was nothing perceptible to the senses” since the world, “hostile to its long domination, . . . [had] broken and shattered all the parts of this wonderful body and, since even quite dead overthrown and disfigured, the world was still terrified by it, had buried its very ruins”–and lamented the lesser nature of “the buildings of this bastard Rome which they were now attaching to these ancient ruins.”  These sort of maps preserved a city from its own decay, and created a powerful structure and physical design for mediating the past, as much as mark the situation of the city as a nexus of itineraries–such as the “Peutinger” chart (named for the Renaissance humanist who discovered it) depicted the city at the node of ancient Roman roads.


It’s interesting to think of Alberti’s booklet as an attempt to halt the burial of the past, or to excavate the lost history of a city whose buildings he had excavated and measured, but whose underlying plan was difficult to grasp:  the techniques he offered provided not only a basis to draw one’s own version of the “map” of the city, but to internalize the ratios among its monuments, even for those who would not visit the site itself, at a time when the preservation of the ancient past gained new premiums as a model of urban planning.  Alberti accorded the ruins a new language of wonder, and accorded a new wonder with the city that was associated with an unprecedented level of literacy with the map, using a graduated or calibrated circle reflecting his precision as an architect and classicist.  It provided interested readers with practical instructions to create a reproducible map on the eve of the age of widespread circulation of printed images–images that no doubt encouraged subsequent humanist men of letters like Pirro Ligorio to create his own detailed mappings of the ancient city by the 1550s, as Flavio Biondo had earlier offered antiquarians a more detailed written geography of the ancient city.  And it is the basis for projects of constructing an urban map of Rome’s monuments today by the same instruments.  The role of these maps as validating the emerging antiquarians by setting standards of proficiency and expertise for interpreting and deciphering its ruins as they encouraged admiration of Rome as a unity in ways that undoubtedly served to lend far greater concreteness to its dismembered past.  The distance of antiquity that one realizes in Rome today, accentuated by the proximity of its actual ruins, would provide Dr. Sigmund Freud in 1899 with a concrete metaphor for the simultaneous storage of multiple dispersed memories in the mind.

The medium is not always the message, but the personalized maps created by GPS (or, for that matter, Google Earth) dispenses with the intermediary of the cartography as a guide to orient viewers to a region.  Rather than viewing or privileging the map as the vehicle for accessing the coherence of the past–or assembling a desire for such coherence–the map becomes a mode to access meaning and location, isolating the part from the whole, or the object from the context.  And it may well be that the lack of coherence that we now have of our maps of ancient prehistoric sites in the United States is somehow informed by the media with we use not only to geo-locate but to pillage them.  It is odd that GPS provides us with a new method for exposing and accessing the ancient world of the Americas in quite a different manner:  if Alberti and Ligorio sought to provide readers a valued guide to antiquity, geo-location of Flickr images offer owners of GPS devices ready access to the coordinates of the cities of Ancestral Pueblos or Anasazi across the boundaries of Arizona, Colorado, or Utah–often to better pillage sites such as the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in Colorado, as well as to get access to the archeological heritage.

For the form of mapping that is used fail, unlike Alberti’s map, to preserve the sense of coherence that Alberti so prized, and that Montaigne sought to regain contact with, and, as such, preserved little sense of its fragility and cultural integrity as a patrimony.  Those visitors who arrive with GPS devices in hand to navigate these prehistoric sites, David Roberts reports in the New York Times, not only observe their structures but often to take a piece of its ancient artifacts home with them–or might well carve their initials beside rock art panels, and indeed validate their locations by the coordinates they’ve downloaded, if not disturb their contents unknowingly in a region where pueblos of Anasazi are often beside evidence of later Hispanic settlers.  One doesn’t need to be a Luddite to compare the relative poverty of meaning in most downloaded maps available online that promise ready geo-location of regions of Anasazi pueblos  to the pilgrims to such sites.

To be sure, the detailed topographic maps of the Anasazi lands provide accurate records of picturesque panorama for local hikers or explorers–if the routes of exploration are quite oddly rendered on websites as unfolded topographic map of the region, in which specific itineraries are highlighted on which one can track one’s elevation and descent, viewable as if an old USGS survey were extended before the viewer–but one that contains a far lesser level of density of meaning than that survey itself, whose legibility preserves but a fraction of the detail of the paper topographic map.

Picturesque Panorama

But most maps and handbooks they use to explore the sites offer few signs of warning–or cautions–that frame them as a site of similar historical or cultural significance, and the remains or objects that fill the site seem there for the touching, tagging, or taking.  Even the above visualization conveys a sense of unfolding a privileged map of the region for foreground specific sites of interest and views, as much as to track their relative distance.  Yet the users of this site, as Gary Gemberling, include imprecations enjoining readers to respect its integrity by advising them to refrain from vandalism and lack of respect for its original inhabitants, given the increasing use of trails as a form of prehistoric tourism and in situ observation of long-abandoned dwellings, formerly abundant pottery shards, in a tone that is all but absent from any earlier maps.

Here’s Gemberling, writing on the actually quite informative site of Jay David Archer, addressing visitors to the Anesazi ruins in Grand Gulch Park in Utah:  “I’ve done this loop 3 times and every time is like the first, this loop i feel has the best rock art and cliff dwellings of the whole stretch, GET A MAP! its easy to walk right by some of the dwellings, i missed perfect kiva the fist time in, walked right passed it, and now my fav[orite] site, RESPECT!!! there is some vandalism sadly, its easy to disturb ruins, they are fragile, but you will learn this in the ranger station, you must check in,this place is like a outdoor museum, and its my church, i love it there more than any where in the world and i have been to 36 countries and 47 states, i have changed my life style to be able to go back here for many years to come, cedar mesa, monument valley, goosenecks park,bridges nat park and grand gulch is the jewel area of south east utah . . .”   Yet the dense location of abundant wall-paintings or panels seem located on twisting path, with limited or little sense of their cultural uniqueness, even in the most detailed of maps of Jay Archer David, with limited signs of how best to negotiate its extremely fragile landscape:


fragile landscape

The sense of entering a privileged space seems diminished, partly as a result of the media, but also of the very accessibility of the ancient sites.  With GPS device and iPhone in hand, one compares where one is to the destinations others have already photographed, and which are readily downloaded from the internet and available as a sort of vicarious tourism that one can use to plans one’s own trips.  There is almost a popular confusion here with the rise of GPS geolocation of seeking to commune with the past–or realize concrete contact with its ruins–by leaving a sense of one’s presence their, or view the site as a treasure hunt, which lacks its own integrity as a privileged place where ruins continue to be in situ and, as much as they will ever be, alive.  If Alberti wrote a guide treasured by antiquarians, the accessibility GPS offers on exact coordinates allows a form of tourism without a sense of antiquity without any entrance fee save a GPS devices.  The accessibility of the map, and, indeed, of multiple posted photographs of the actual site itself, does not mediate the past, but seems to create a sense of entitlement that apparently justifies removal of loot found at the end of the treasure hunt, or the prize of the pilgrimage.  There is less of a sense of the marvel of the ruins as mirabilia with the transference to the Google Earth sense of wonder in the mappability of everything–and the problems of the accessibility of everything via photographs downloaded off smartphones and the GPS tracking of precise coordinates.  Perhaps access to wi-fi could be limited or circumscribed in these areas of reservations,  or national parks, in the hopes to preserve a sense of their wonders.


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Filed under Anasazi sites, GPS, Leon Battista Alberti, mapping ruins, Sigmund Freud