‘Above & Below: Cartography Beyond Terrain’ charts beyond the Earth’s surface

Not all maps chart the Earth’s surface — and the David Rumsey Map Center’s newest exhibition in Green Library proves just that.

The exhibit “Above & Below: Cartography Beyond Terrain” opened on Oct. 8 in conjunction with the fifth biennial Barry Lawrence Ruderman Conference on Cartography. Nine contributors to the exhibition presented at the conference, leaving their collections, which were all focused on the theme of non-traditional mapmaking, to the center.

“They’re all connected by the fact that they do not have traditional surface terrain cartography,” said assistant curator Kristina Larsen, who spearheaded the exhibition. “But they all approach this topic from a pretty different angle.”

True to the exhibition’s name, some of the talks and corresponding collections dive below the surface, depicting the seafloor and underground caves. 

In his collection “The Limits of Early Modern Vision,” Austrian Academy of Sciences historian Johannes Mattes compiled historic cave maps from Slovakia, Hungary and Russia.

“All of these cave maps have accurate information in them that’s useful for navigating inside of the caves, but all of it’s got an element of invention to it because they didn’t know how deep they were,” Larsen said. “It’s kind of as they experienced it, not technically measured like contemporary cartography would be.” 

Other collections look upward. 

As part of “The Evolving View & Mapping from Above,” Colorado School of Mines professor Angel Abbud-Madrid collected historical maps of the moon and two samples of simulated moon dust. The map refers to the dark parts of the moon as “mare” or “the ocean,” and the light as “terra” or “the land,” the same names still given to moon dust today.

“His talk was interesting because it was about how we’ve made images of space objects, including the moon, and how those views have changed over time,” Larsen said. “It was like a long view of people looking at the sky.”

Historian Lucas Schultz’s collection “Mapping Anthropogenic Weather” pairs depictions of contrails and nuclear fallout with his own map about a 19th-century practice in the Alps in which small town residents shot cannons at storm clouds in an attempt to control the weather. Through the collection, Schultz endeavored to visually analyze this belief system.

“This diagram is basically about how this idea that they had seemed to be supported by the way the weather behaved but that it was all because of the topography in the area,” Larsen said. “They were shooting things at them and then cherry-picking evidence in support of the idea that this was working.”

Niles Dorn, the center’s cartographic collections and technology specialist, said this variety in topics made “Above & Below” unique.

“Since all of the different sections of the exhibition are drawn from or created from the different talks from the conference, there’s really a whole range of topics and ideas,” said Dorn. “You might find one that you don’t find interesting and look two feet to the right and there’s something that you think is really cool.”

Some visitors said staff like Dorn made visiting the exhibition a positive experience.

“The people here are very, very good,” said Paulo Moriconi, who attended a guided tour with his son. “They gave us a lot of information.”

Visitors can view the exhibit from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays and 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays. Guided tours are offered at 2 p.m. on select Fridays.

“We cater towards people who have never thought about maps before and try to get people excited to share our own enthusiasm about maps, both contemporary and historic,” she said. “[The exhibition] should be written at a level where it’s pretty understandable to people, even if they don’t have a lot of prior knowledge about these topics.”

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