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By:
Wendy Ennes
e-Learning Consultant
Open up most world history textbooks and you will find a lot of maps –
maps with easy-to-read, color-coded cues to geographic features, longitude
and latitude, the movement and dissemination of cultures, and conquered
landscapes. As informative as they are, these instructional maps do little
to illuminate the era they are intended to reflect because they are but
present-day reinterpretations of the past.
The advent of the World Wide Web and digitization has ushered in a time
of unprecedented educator access to a global array of primary sources.
For educators who are interested in enhancing their World History curriculum
the new Mapping
Mediterranean Lands Website is worth a serious visit.
Originally conceived as a project to inventory the map collections of
independent American research centers in and around the Mediterranean
region, the Mapping Mediterranean Lands or MedMaps Project Website is
a rich resource for scholars, historians, and world history educators
alike. The head cartographer of the MedMaps Project, Leonora Navari, chose
the sixteen maps featured on this Website for their rarity and unique
attributes. Ranging from the exquisitely detailed Peutingeriana
tabula itineraria of 250 CE to Alain Mallet’s encyclopedic 1683
interpretation of the route
from Morocco to Mecca and a Trans-Jordan
track map: Sharq Al-Urdun-kartt Muasalat from 1945 of meandering footpaths
and goat tracks in a region east of the Jordan river, these primary source
maps act as social documents and witnesses to the past.
In the Teacher
Resources area of the Website is a grid listing all of the sixteen
maps in chronological order with links to downloadable high resolution
PDF’s of their images. Exemplary lesson plans from respected University
of Illinois and Chicago Public School educators accompany some of the
maps and adhere to National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) standards.
There is also an area listing curriculum ideas for the maps that acts
as a springboard for educators who wish to develop their own lesson plans
and submit them for posting onto the site.
Other resources can be found on the Website but require a little more
detective work. It was interesting to explore the various research center
links that can be found in the About
the Project section. While some of the smaller research centers don’t
have the resources to support online archives and collections, a few of
the larger ones do share their collections online. For instance, the American
School of Classical Studies at Athens features information on archaeological
excavations in the region and an online photographic collection. The Photographic
Archive of the American Academy in Rome consists of several valuable and
specialized collections of photographs on archaeology, architecture and
art, as well as landscape architecture and gardens.
While the original plan to catalogue and inventory all of the maps in
the collections of these institutions was completed in 2005, the digitization
of only sixteen of these maps was part of the pilot project. With adequate
funding and imagination the Mapping Mediterranean Lands Project Website
has the potential of expanding into a deeply interactive and exceedingly
rich online resource for scholars, researchers and educators all over
the world.
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Detailed Overview
The Program
