ABSTRACT
With the concept of emplacement we come to the most fundamental issue of geosemiotics – where in the physical world is the sign or image located? The first consideration is whether or not a particular place in the world is expected to have semiotic systems. We noted in Chapter 5, for example, that in North American mountain parks, we would be surprised to find writing on the faces of a mountain such as shown in the photo taken at Sulphur Mountain in Banff National Park, Canada (5.03). We contrasted that with 5.04, taken at one of China’s traditional sacred mountain wilderness areas, Huangshan, which showed by contrast that writing on the rock surfaces is an essential aspect of the semiotics of wilderness there.
