Michael Shanks - site 2006: Chorography

A weblog from Michael Shanks

Topic - deep mapping and temporal topographies. Exploring the practice of describing, delineating, representing, mapping a region.

In the seventeenth century this was a term much used to refer to antiquarian studies of topography, place, community, history, memory. Camden's Brittania (1586) was a classic chorography from the English Renaissance.

With the consolidation of disciplines of space and place in the late eighteenth century, chorography was subsumed under geography and topography.

I am using the term to raise questions again of the way we conceive and how we relate land and inhabitation. And fundamentally to reconnect place and land with the the rhetorical features of "memorable places".

Connected terms are deep mapping and temporal topographies. These refer to the temporal and historiographical character of chorography.

"Reflecting eighteenth century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place …"
Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge 2001) page 64-65.