ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the historical background to ontological building block, and seeks to situate it in reference to the means of mapping that went before. Antiquarian chorography from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries is especially important to the development of landscape phenomenology, the branch of archaeological thought pioneered by C. Tilley, which holds that a landscape must be experienced directly and personally in order for its meaning to be properly understood. If the spatial humanities have come to rely on geospatial technologies and the GeoWeb as a medium, then it follows that they have also come to rely on – and be shaped by – the Internet’s connective infrastructures. A broad historical spectrum thus links the early descriptions of place in the context of the printing press with the seamless representation of place on the GeoWeb. The history of place as a philosophical concept has always co-existed with the history of human technological communication networks.
