ABSTRACT
Recent approaches to rethinking the map emphasize performativity and practice, both in terms of the meanings of mapping as a field of activities and in terms of the agency of maps as objects. In this chapter I explore the performativity of mappings and maps in archaeology through a historical case study. I examine the map-work of three individuals - H. J. Fleure, Harold Peake and O.G.S. Crawford - whose activities are crucial to investigating how maps operate in modern archaeology. I reconstruct some mapping networks of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that occulted mapping with personal as well as professional meanings in the lives of these individuals. I explore the discursive context of their map-work, revealing the debt modern archaeology owes to the history of geography, and, in particular, to the school of Regional Geography central to the institutionalization of geography in the early years of the twentieth century. The utopian politics of Regional Geography imbued mapping with moral virtues that could be harnessed to the mission of modernizing archaeology through the techniques of survey and map-making. Lastly I explore how archaeological maps were connected to the production of modern ‘citizen geographers’ in wider society, as the populace was encouraged to take up the new technology of popular archaeological maps (such as the O.S. Map of Roman Britain) and position themselves in the times and spaces of empire. I conclude by outlining the questions this history of mapping poses for the project of rethinking archaeological mapping today.
