Re-thinking the Conversation: A Geomythological Deep Map. Deep-mapping is a process. It is a process that does not strive to either please or attain authority, it makes no claim on definitive opinion. Rather, deep maps are the structure within which a conversation, or conversations, can flourish between multiple perspectives. Fluid, fragile, flexible, they morph and absorb new inputs, provoking new insights as a by-product rather than as an intentional aim. In this way, the deep map can become a conduit for rethinking geomythological research and representation. Traditionally, geomythology has been the study of landscape stories through the purview of geoscience with little regard for myth’s own voice. Bounded in the epistemic bias of orthodox perspectives storytelling has been dismissed as an inferior feature in the landscape; a source to be critiqued or stood behind as a bridge for public engagement but not as a partner to be afforded equal value. It is, however, possible to challenge that stance, to suggest that an alternative is possible. For ‘the world as it is’ does not stand still, it does not pose for a portrait; it is forever in flux. To map a landscape is more than geography, it is to facilitate a palimpsest of cultural narrative which struggles to be contained within the rigid parameters of a conventionally academic bracket. This chapter introduces such an approach. It seeks to give voice to one stretch of coastline across time, space and disciplines with the aim of not compromising integrity and to re-establish the very foundation upon which normative perspectives reside.

The antonymous relationship between fact and fiction is prevalent throughout archaeological discourse; with issues of authenticity leading notions of value and form, from whose authority such decisions are attributed being of intrinsic concern within the narrative voice. This heuristic praxis is never more apparent than within the resurgent discipline of geomythology. Standing upon over two and a half thousand years’ worth of related inquiry it still remains a nascent factor in today’s scholastic community due to its recent rebranding, predominantly having become catagorised within geoscience and having acquired an orthodoxy to suit. This thesis examines the geomythological path that has led to such an approach, positing a proof of concept methodology that seeks to address the inherent challenges this faces within current theoretical schemata. This methodology is then applied to a case study, linking aspects of the Second Branch of Y Mabinogi with Cardigan Bay based upon a deep map of the myth cycle. It examines three mythical inclusions and considers their scientific viability before postulating how best to express this information in the future via a transdisciplinary form of archaeological representation.

This talk will speculate on the gaping disjunction between experience and abstraction that came to characterise the modern experience, as carefully surveyed in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, and the form it took today in the current neoliberal condition of planetary urbanisation. In this context, the notion of site has lost any grounding, and in the process it has removed the ground under the map. As notions of map and territory lose their original meaning, both the old equation of map = territory, and the prematurely aged slogan: the map is not the territory, appears as no longer usable. Map and territory in fact disappear, and what remains is an abstract, impersonal mapping that may be better understood through he notion of 'plot'. Reflecting on this concept as well as on the growing need to 'map' this novel condition, and employing references to cartography and contemporary art practices, I will develop a proposition for ethnographic artistic practice that will reverse Walter Benjamin's exploration of the past through the fossils and ruins of the present, and instead will attempt to map (and thus act on) potential futures by means of the future fossils and ruins that are already present, if phenomenologically imperceptible, in the here and now.

Joseph Kerski has identified five converging global trends—geo-awareness, geo-enablement, geotechnologies, citizen science, and storytelling—which contribute to the increased relevance of geography for education and society. While these trends are discussed by Kerski in the context of the proliferating significance of geography in teaching and education, they also provide a useful lens for considering the increasing ubiquity of critical approaches to cartography both in general and in the context of teaching and education, where mapping can include participatory collaborations with individuals from a variety of knowledge communities and extend to the mapping of experiences, emotions, and Indigenous perspectives. In this paper, we consider these trends and related ideas such as Kerski’s “geoliteracy” and metaliteracy in light of some relatively current examples and in light of the evolution of research and teaching linked with a series of interrelated map-based projects and courses t...

For many scholars the theories on rock art cannot be verified due to lack of evidence. But a theory cannot be proved only by the facts. In the inductive process the truth of the premises is never a guarantor of the truth of conclusions (Hume and Kant). According to Popper a theory is not developed starting from the bare facts but from the deductions, our assumptions, which must be subjected to a strict control of the empirical basis (falsification). The Epistemology has drawn some logical tools that permit a control of the assumptions made by the rock art. Other tools are provided by the Hermeneutics. The use of these tools allows us to carry out further checks starting from the residue of meaning available in institutions, myths, traditions, games, artifacts still lives in contemporary society. I called this hermeneutical tool with the name of Archaeology of Knowing. The Archaeology of Knowing was finally tested on the theory of topographic maps that explains the meaning of a class of representations of rock art. The result of the survey was the refutation of the theory of Topographic Maps. This result was achieved with both the epistemological method and the Archaeology of Knowing.

This paper revisits the cartography of material folk culture from the point of view of a current cartographic project in science and technology studies (STS) known as controversy mapping. Considering the mutual learning that has already taken place between ethnological engagements with material culture and material semiotic strands of STS, we ask, what kind of cross-fruition could be gained from expanding the dialogue to cartography and mapmaking? We suggest that a shared focus on open-ended assemblages of cultural elements, rather than functional cultural wholes, provides a good basis for such a conversation. We argue that the capacity of the atlases of material folk culture to draw their own theoretical assumptions into doubt could serve as a useful prototype for controversy mappers. Vice versa we suggest that recent innovations in controversy mapping might overcome some of the problems that have troubled earlier ethnological mapmaking projects.

This paper attempts to link two distinct representational practices, maps and narratives, with reference to long fieldwork in an Aegean insular community; it investigates how the experience of space permeates collectivity through narratives and how it ultimately, and largely, mediates the community’s values in terms of a system. Here, the concept of “narrative maps” acquires both the meaning of collective representations and of a complex cognitive function for memorising and mapping space through bodily transfers and collective memory. To what extent is a community able to preserve collective memory with its maps spontaneously, without imposing “realms of memory”?

It is not clear either that the categories “given” to us by our senses, or those abstracted out for us by the processes of scientific investigation, constitute the most “real” or even the most “useful” modes of apprehending the fundamental nature of being or experience. It appears, instead, that the categories offered by traditional myths and religious systems might play that role, despite the initial unpalatability of such a suggestion. Such systems of apprehension present the world as a place of constant moral striving, conducted against a background of interplay between the “divine forces” of order and chaos (Peterson, 1999a). “Order” constitutes the natural category of all those phenomena whose manifestations and transformations are currently predictable. “Chaos” constitutes the natural category of “potential” – the potential that emerges whenever an error in prediction occurs. The capacity for creative exploration – embodied in mythology in the form of the “ever-resurrecting hero” – serves as the eternal mediator between these fundamental constituent elements of experience. Voluntary failure to engage in such exploration – that is, forfeit of identification with “the world-redeeming savior” – produces a chain of causally-interrelated events whose inevitable endpoint is adoption of a rigid, ideology-predicated, totalitarian identity, and violent suppression of the eternally-threatening other.

If there is anything that radically set the 20 th century apart from what had gone before, it is the two unprecedented developments: the birth of psychology and the rise of the fantastic. The two processes were not unrelated: psychology came in the wake of discovering that the human mind contains a dimension that is only partially accessible to consciousness. The literary fantastic, in turn, was an attempt to explore this dimension and its influence on the human mind. Both psychology and the fantastic identified myth to be foundational for their fields, either as a record of alternative modes of thought or as a narrative strategy hardwired into human cognitive architecture. One result of this rediscovery of myth has been the proliferation of myth theories. In this chapter I look at four approaches to myth that have not made it into the myth theory canon. These include Immanuel Velikovsky's euhemerist reading of world myths as a memory of cosmic catastrophes and near-extinction events witnessed by various human societies in the past; Julian Jaynes' proposal about Greek myths—especially those recorded in the Iliad—as narrative accounts of bicameral consciousness that preceded our modern subjective consciousness; Sean Kane's comparative perspective on world mythtelling traditions as forms of humanity's dialogue with nature; and Jonathan Gottschall's social Darwinist reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey that positions these texts as narrative testimonies of a struggle for Darwinian fitness within an exacting eco-cultural niche. Starting with a brief taxonomy of myth theories, their types, and contexts in which they emerged and functioned, I call attention to the fact that any theoretical approach to myth is inescapably mythopoeic. Theories of myth are attempts to recreate the meaning of myths once their literal account is " no longer accepted, " 1 and also attempts to identify the source and urgency of specific myths both to the people Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem. Ed. Mythmaking Across Boundaries. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016