The Myth of the Neutral Map
One of the first things archaeologists do when approaching a site is look at a map. Even before a trench is opened or a survey begins, historic maps are often examined alongside aerial photographs, excavation reports, documentary sources, and environmental data. This process helps build a picture of a landscape before any fieldwork takes place. Historic maps can reveal former field boundaries, vanished settlements, old transport routes, waterways that have since been redirected, and features that have long disappeared beneath modern development.
Maps often seem like the most straightforward source available. They appear objective, authoritative, and factual. Roads are marked, boundaries are drawn, and places are named. The landscape appears fixed on the page. However, maps are no more neutral than any other archaeological source. Like pottery, buildings, or written documents, maps are products of human decisions. They are created by specific people, at specific moments in time, for specific purposes. Every map represents a series of choices about what should be included, what can be ignored, and how the landscape should be presented.
This becomes particularly clear when comparing maps from different periods. Features that appear prominently on one map may be absent from another. For example, boundaries shift, place names change, and entire settlements seem to appear and disappear. Sometimes, these differences reflect changes within the landscape itself, but they can also reflect changing priorities among those producing the maps. What one surveyor considered important enough to record may have seemed irrelevant to another. For archaeologists, this creates both opportunities and challenges.
As mentioned above, historic maps can preserve evidence of features that no longer survive. Often, former field systems, industrial sites, mills, quarries, and settlements are known only through cartographic records. In some cases, maps provide the only surviving evidence that such places ever existed (Petrie et al. 2019). At the same time, the absence of a feature from a map cannot automatically be taken as evidence that it was never there, and this is one of the central difficulties of working with historic cartography. Maps create an impression of completeness, and yet every map is selective. This makes sense of course, as a cartographer cannot record everything, and decisions must be made about scale, detail, symbols, labels, and priorities. Some features are highlighted while others are omitted altogether. Historian of cartography J. B. Harley argued that maps should be understood not simply as representations of geography but as documents shaped by social, political, and cultural contexts (Harley 1989). Maps communicate power as well as information. They reflect the interests and assumptions of the people who create them.
Few examples demonstrate this more clearly than the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Often celebrated as one of the most detailed mapping projects ever undertaken, the survey produced remarkably accurate maps of the Irish landscape. However, the project was also embedded within British colonial administration. Surveyors systematically recorded and standardised Irish place names, often translating them into English or selecting spellings that aligned with British administrative requirements. In the process, local meanings, linguistic nuances, and alternative understandings of the landscape could be altered or lost. The resulting maps remain invaluable historical resources, but they also illustrate how acts of mapping can become acts of colonial authority (Andrews 2001).
This perspective has become increasingly important in archaeology. Colonial maps elsewhere frequently prioritised administrative boundaries, economic resources, and imperial interests while overlooking Indigenous understandings of landscape. Across North America, for example, many nineteenth-century maps recorded forts, roads, railways, and settler communities in great detail, while leaving the settlements, seasonal land-use areas, and culturally significant places of Indigenous communities largely unrecorded. Such omissions created the false impression that these landscapes were empty or underutilised before colonial expansion, although of course archaeological evidence as well as traditional Indigenous knowledge has repeatedly demonstrated that this was not the case. The result is that some communities and some ways of understanding the landscape can become effectively invisible within the cartographic record.
Place names provide another reminder that maps are interpretations rather than neutral records. Names can preserve information about former environments, land use, ownership, or cultural memory. A woodland long since cleared may still survive in a field name, and a settlement name may preserve evidence of earlier languages or forgotten activities. However, place names are themselves subject to change, translation, and reinterpretation over time. Understanding them requires attention not only to geography but also to history and language (Rippon 2018).
For this reason, archaeologists increasingly treat maps as artefacts in their own right, and so the map itself becomes an object of study. Its symbols, omissions, conventions, and language can reveal as much about the society that produced it as it can about the landscape it depicts. And it should also be noted that recognising that maps are not neutral does not make them less useful; quite the opposite! Understanding their biases and limitations allows them to be used more effectively as archaeological evidence. It encourages a more critical approach to both what is shown and what is absent.
Archaeology is built on interpretation. No source speaks entirely for itself, and maps are no exception. They provide invaluable evidence for reconstructing past landscapes, but they also reveal the perspectives, priorities, and assumptions of the people who created them. Sometimes the most revealing aspect of a historic map is not what appears on the page, but what has been left out.
Further reading
Andrews (2001) A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Harley (1989) Deconstructing the Map
Petrie et al. (2019) Mapping Archaeology While Mapping an Empire: Using Historical Maps to Reconstruct Ancient Settlement Landscapes in Modern India and Pakistan
Rippon (2018) Kingdom, Civitas, and County: The Evolution of Territorial Identity in the English Landscape
Want to hear more about this topic?
And My Trowel episode 68 - Archaeology of The Hobbit: We're going to need a bigger map!