Crandall Cemetery: Mapping Culture, Protection, and Gullah/Geechee Resilience in Northeast Florida
Glenda Simmons Jenkins, Gullah Geechee Cultural Community Trust
Kathie Carswell, Gullah Geechee Cultural Community Trust
Christopher Mader, University of Miami IDSC
Theresa Pinto, P.E.E.R. Group
At the turn of the Twentieth Century, northeast Florida's formerly enslaved population increased as Gullah/Geechee Peoples from the coastal Carolinas and Georgia migrated into the region for railroad and timber jobs. They established communities, inside now vanished tenant labor camps, where they worshipped and buried their dead. Human burials remain on these Nassau County lands purchased and owned by a private, multinational timber corporation. In 2022 the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Community Trust (GGCCT) began advocating for the protection of African American burials, as development and climate change impacts threaten these sacred sites. GGCCT authored a management plan, used historic documents to develop maps, and conducted LIDAR analysis and drone mapping for Crandall Cemetery, an environmentally sensitive site near the St. Marys River.
The Foundational Cartography of Climate Change
John Cloud, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Anthropology, Arctic Studies Center
Dr. Elisa Palomino (
[email protected]) scholar of historic and contemporary boreal and arctic cultures, Cuenca, Spain
All cartographers, especially if working at global scales, map climate change, whether they realize it or not. Elisa Palomino and I propose a project linking two of the greatest cartographers of modernity. Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), born into the depths of the Little Ice Age, had access to historical records from the preceding Medieval Climate Anomaly; he presented the Northwest Passage as though it were still open. Richard Edes Harrison (1901-1994) became an "accidental cartographer" on the eve of the Second World War. His novel azimuthal projections, especially of boreal and arctic regions, presented the Modern Climate Anomaly already underway, before it was commonly realized.
Enterprising Women: University Women, Fundraising, and Adventures in the Map Trade
Christina Dando, University of Nebraska Omaha
In the late 1920s, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) began a "Million Dollar Fellowship Fund" to create a scholarship endowment for women's graduate education. One of the activities that AAUW branches undertook to raise funds was the creation and sale of pictorial maps. The Hibbing Minnesota Branch created a historical map of "The Arrowhead," published in 1929, that was so successful that it is still available today. Using the Hibbing branch's records (meeting minutes, letters, newsletters, sales logs), I examine the women's intentional engagement in the map trade to further women's higher education.
How the Thirsty Have Fallen: A Look at the Changing Colorado Craft Brewing Industry Through Maps
Kristopher Kuzera University of Denver
For nearly half a century, the Colorado Craft Beer Industry has seen incredible growth. However, within the past decade, the industry has seen substantial change where once successful organizations have closed their doors and new locations are becoming increasingly scarce. Numerous factors contribute to the recent shift in the once vibrant Colorado trade, including changing consumption patterns, economic stress, ownership turnover, and slow pandemic recovery. Although this research focuses on Colorado, these patterns are largely universal around the United States. This paper will use mapping to explore how the industry in Colorado has reshaped in recent years, from competition to collaboration, from small community origins to nationwide accessibility and back again. We will look at spatial and temporal patterns of brewery distribution across different regions to see where the largest shifts are occurring and what impacts that might have. We celebrate diversity of ownership, production, and participation among women and members of minority communities, which has changed the face of Colorado craft beer. The future of craft beer as a unique cultural experience in Colorado will be explored.
The Mexico Valley After Conquest as Depicted by the “Map of Tenochtitlan”
Fatima Koli Barnard College
Gergely Baics, Barnard College
Caterina Pizzigoni, Barnard College
Ines Perez, Barnard College
What can a nearly 500 year old map reveal about a world transformed by conquest and its mapmakers? Created by Indigenous Nahua scholars, the Map of Tenochtitlan (c. 1530s) offers a rare Indigenous view of Mexico City and the Valley of Mexico. Blending Nahua and European cartographic traditions, it depicts interconnected urban and social worlds. While often studied as art, we examine it from a spatial history lens. Georeferencing this map, a challenge given its multiple scales, reveals the mapmakers’ underlying visions and priorities. Digitizing and creating an archive of the map opens up the possibility to reflect on the complex human and natural ecosystems of the Mexico Valley that survived and continued to thrive after conquest.
Visualizing the Complex World of 1492
Brandon Plewe Brigham Young University
Historical Geography is complicated, especially the pre-modern world where even basic concepts like "country" and "border" were less standardized than they are today. How can we map this world in a way that is simple to enter and store, intellectually honest, and easy for a broad audience to understand? The political geography of 1492 presents an especially fruitful case for this. To create a map of the world at this "Pivot of History," a strategy was developed (based on multiple past experiences with historical GIS and cartography) to represent uncertainty and vagueness in a simple form in GIS. Most notably, boundaries were stored with a general sense of width, ranging from modern-looking, legally defined lines to broad frontier zones that were dozens or even hundreds of miles wide, that were only vaguely defined and/or only loosely controlled. Using an algorithm of GIS analysis tools, this dataset is automatically transformed into a fuzzy set estimation of Territoriality, then visualized cartographically so that each state (or even different portions of each state) appear more or less "fuzzy." The net effect is that map readers get a rather complete view of a pre-Eurocentric World, but also get a rather honest view of where we have more or less knowledge of that world.
