TRAC 2011

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference

Maria Duggan, Frances McIntosh, Darrell J. Rohl, Frances McIntosh, Darrell J. Rohl

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781842178522
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

This volume was derived from the twenty-first annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, which took place at the University of Newcastle (14-17 April 2011).

Chorography: History, Theory and Potential for Archaeological Research

Darrell J. Rohl

Introduction

Chorography is a little-known field of theory and practice concerned with the significance of place, regional description/characterization, local history, and representation. A well-established discipline and methodology with demonstrable roots in antiquity and an important role in the development of antiquarian research, regional studies and the establishment of modern archaeology, chorography is useful for understanding the history of scholarship and may continue to provide sound theoretical principles and practical methods for new explorations of archaeological monuments and landscapes. This paper discusses the historical uses of chorography, beginning with practitioners from classical antiquity but emphasizing the uniquely British chorographic tradition of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Attention is also given to more recent efforts at exploring this tradition by literary scholars, historiographers and archaeological theorists. Careful analysis of works of—and about— chorography allows for the explication of key theoretical principles and practical methods, which are presented and elaborated upon. It is argued that chorography offers a coherent, viable and valuable approach to evaluating the long-term significance of landscapes, monuments and regions, crossing conventional disciplinary divides and connecting past and present. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the benefits of chorography for contemporary research and its potential role in modern archaeology.

History of Chorography

Chorography is rooted in classical antiquity. On etymology, the Oxford English Dictionary provides the Greek χωρογραφία as a combination of χώρα (chora, ‘country’) or χῶρος (choros, ‘space or place’) + γραφια (graphia, ‘writing’) (OED 1989: ‘chorography’). The discipline is attested to and described in a variety of classical texts, though few explicitly chorographical works have survived from antiquity. Chorographic thinking can be traced as far back as Homer (see Lukermann 1961: 196–98), can be seen in the works of Hippocrates of Cos, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Strabo, Eratosthenes, Polybius, Pliny the Elder, Arrian, and in a variety of fragments of little-known and now-lost works. Strabo (8.3.17) refers to his own work as chorography and several writers including Pomponius Mela and Eusebius of Caesarea authored works entitled Chorography (Pomp. Mela De Chorographia; Eusebius’ Chorography is unfortunately lost but mentioned in the preface to his Onomasticon). The best-known surviving descriptions are found in the works of Strabo and Ptolemy, emphasizing the distinctions between ‘geography,’ ‘chorography,’ and ‘topography,’ and highlighting chorography’s concern with regionality and the production of a ‘likeness’ of a place. Unfortunately, the tradition and its broad classical importance are largely masked by imprecise modern language translations wherein both γεωγραφία and χωρογραφία are commonly given as ‘geography’ (e.g. Strabo 2.4.1, 2.5.17; see also Prontera 2006). Chorography has suffered further erasure from the classical record in a variety of modern English translations; for example, while Diogenes Laertius refers to Archelaus ‘the chorographer,’ ὁ χωρογράφος, the Loeb Classical Library edition translates this as ‘the topographer’ (Diog. Laert. 2.4.17). More recently, in what is otherwise an excellent translation and commentary of Ptolemy’s theoretical chapters, the translators have largely replaced ‘chorography’ with the misleading ‘regional cartography’ (Ptol. Geog. 1.1).

Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth-century, chorography disappears for a millennium, with no known author continuing to use the term until the late fifteenth-century. It is then revived and reformulated during the renaissance, deriving from new readings of rediscovered classical texts, specifically Ptolemy’s Geographia and Strabo’s Geographica, each of which had been largely lost to the west since late antiquity. In fact, while copied manuscripts were present in Byzantine libraries, it is probable that they remained obscure in both the east and west. Ptolemy’s Geographia was probably rediscovered around 1300, when the Byzantine scholar Maximus Planudes credited himself with the discovery and claimed to have created a series of maps based upon the text (Diller 1940). Ptolemy’s work was brought to Italy in 1400 by Palla Strozzi, and then translated into Latin by Manuel Chrysolorus and Jacopo Angelus around 1406; its first real publication was at Vicenza in 1475, without maps (Crone 1953: 68), and soon thereafter editions with maps were printed at Bologna and Rome (p. 71). The works of Strabo were brought to Italy in 1423 and only fully published around 1469 (Diller 1975: 102, 117, 132). The originals of both Strabo and Ptolemy were probably written in Greek and, despite the rediscovery of Greek copies, they only became widely influential in Latin translations, leading a variety of scholars to rediscover the lost art/science of chorography and to seek to recreate new chorographies that fit classically inspired humanistic perspectives. Prime examples include Flavio Biondo’s (1474) Italia Illustrata, and Konrad Celtis’ (1502) Germania Illustra.

The continental renaissance came late to Britain, but is commonly referred to as ‘the Elizabethan era,’ ‘the age of Shakespeare,’ or ‘the English Renaissance,’ spanning most of the sixteenth-century. More recently, these designations have given way to the supposedly more neutral ‘early modern period.’ It is here when chorography—at least explicitly referred to as such—most visibly flourished in Britain. In this period, and within the works of the exact same authors, arose the more familiar tradition of British antiquarianism. An examination of these early antiquarian works reveals the close links between antiquarianism and chorography; while I would be relatively comfortable saying that British antiquarianism is largely synonymous with chorography, it is more difficult to dispute that chorography was a primary method of British antiquarian work (Mendyck 1986, 1989). Key chorographer-antiquarians include John Leland (1745), William Lambarde (1576), William Camden (1586), Robert Sibbald (1683, 1684, 1707, 1710), William Dugdale (1656), Alexander Gordon (1726), William Stukeley (1776), Thomas Pennant (1771, 1778), John Wallis (1769), and others too numerous to mention here. Of them all, Camden was the most influential, with his sweeping and much republished/revised Britannia setting a model largely followed for more than two centuries.

By the early nineteenth-century, the term had fallen out of use. In fact, while many eighteenth-century antiquarians can fairly definitively be labeled ‘chorographers,’ they rarely used the term, though their methods, organisational structure, and principle concerns continued to reflect earlier models that more explicitly stated their chorographic status (Rohl 2011). It has been argued that the historical novels of Walter Scott qualify as chorographic (Shanks and Witmore 2010), as well as the existentialist emplaced literature of the American Henry David Thoreau (Bossing 1999). By and large, though, the nineteenth-and twentieth-centuries saw chorography displaced by more narrowly-focused and concertedly empirical forms of topography and spatial analysis. In the same period, antiquarianism gave way to a more formalized discipline of modern archaeology.

More recently, especially since the mid-1980s, chorography has become the topic of renewed scholarship across several disciplines, especially in historical and literary research on early modern Britain. Key figures in this field include Helgerson (1986, 1992), Mendyck (1986, 1989), Cormack (1991), Hall (1995), and Withers (1996, 1999). Bossing (1999) has explored and considered chorography from a specifically American literary perspective, providing good theoretical discussion and retrospectively assigning several works of American emplaced literature to the tradition, while Pettinaroli (2008) has explored chorography and place-making in the early modern Hispanic world. Chorography has also found its way into recent archaeological discussion, with, for example, Hingley examining its role in The Recovery of Roman Britain (2008) and using a chorography-inspired model to explore the long-term biography and life of Hadrian’s Wall (Forthcoming), and Michael Shanks discussing it in a variety of places, including in collaborations with Witmore (Shanks and Witmore 2010) and Pearson (Pearson and Shanks 2001). The past twenty years has also seen two very different, but conceptually similar, ‘exercise[s] in chorography’ in Heat-Moon’s (1991) PrairyErth and Pearson’s (2006) In Comes I.

Chorographic Theory

Despite the many works of and about chorography (only a selection of which have been discussed above), its theoretical depths remain insufficiently plumbed. This may be due to chorography’s protean nature. Here I use the term ‘protean’ in reference to three essential characteristics: chorography is broad in potential scope, variable in form and content, and constantly changing. Nevertheless, it should be possible to outline the dominant concerns and conceptions of chorographic thought, and several scholars have explored particular aspects of chorographic theory from a variety of perspectives. In this section, I summarize some of these previous theorizations and then offer a series of personal observations on theoretical principles that may be extracted from the chorographical corpus. These principles will not necessarily be evident in every work, but will be broadly observable across the spectrum from classical works through more contemporary chorographies.

A useful first step is to examine some of the various definitions and descriptions that have been given. The Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/32356) defines chorography with three senses:

1)	The art or practice of describing, or of delineating on a map or chart, particular regions, or districts; as distinguished from geography, taken as dealing with the earth in general, and (less distinctly) from topography, which deals with particular places, as towns, etc.
2)	A description or delineation of a particular region or district.
3)	The natural configuration and features of a region (which form the subject matter of its chorography in sense 2).

John Dee (1570) notes that:

Chorographie seemeth to be an underling and a twig of Geographie: and yet neverthelesse, is in practise manifolde, and in use very ample. This teacheth Analogically to describe a small portion or circuite of ground, with the contentes…in the territory or parcell of ground which it taketh in hand to make description of, it leaveth out… no notable or odde thing, above ground visible. (fol. a4a; also quoted in Cormack 1991: 643)

Fussner (1970) defines chorography as ‘the description of an area too large to come under topography and too small to come under geography…any combination of descriptive notes which might define an area and its inhabitants’ (p. 278). Mendyck (1989) identifies chorography as a limited subset or ‘version of geography…restricted…to impressionistically sketching the nature and identity of an individual region’ (p. 38), while elsewhere (1986) referring to it as a ‘topographical-historical method.’ Cormack (1991) states that:

Chorography was the most wide ranging of the geographical subdisciplines, since it included an interest in genealogy, chronology, and antiquities, as well as local history and topography…unit[ing] an anecdotal interest in local families and wonders with the mathematically arduous task of genealogical and chronological research. (p. 642)

Entrikin (1991) describes the tradition as ‘being located on an intellectual continuum between science and art, or as offering a form of understanding that is between description and explanation’ (p. 15). Bossing (1999) refers to chorography as ‘place-writing’ or as a ‘literature of place.’ Most recently, Shanks and Witmore (2010) refer to chorography as ‘the documentation of region,’ and, along with topography, as part of a ‘charged field of the representation of region and community’ (p. 97). These selected descriptions provide some sense of chorography but, unfortunately, may leave it too ambiguous for the uninitiated scholar or student, leading to confusion and misunderstanding of the term.

Before I offer my own observations, let us first examine a couple of attempts at a more complete consideration of chorography’s characteristics and theoretical concerns. Specific elements of these attempts at theorization will be included in my own, following, attempt to outline chorography’s theoretical bases and implications.

William P. Bossing, in a doctoral dissertation focused on American emplaced literature of the nineteenth-and twentieth-centuries (1999), outlines several ‘essential characteristics’ (p.152) of chorographic writing:

1)	‘Landscape, both topographic and cultural, is present not merely as setting, but as an essential presence in the text’ (p. 152).
2)	‘The text…call[s] places into being, not just by naming topographic features but by dramatizing in the process of revealing the landscape how they matter’ (p. 153).
3)	‘The text represents a “native” knowledge of environment that suggests an awareness shaped by frequent interactions and ethical considerations’ (p. 153). Even in cases where the chorography is written by ‘outsiders,’ they seek to ‘reflect[] the dynamic relationships between natives and their place’ (p. 154).
4)	‘The text goes beyond an anthropocentric sense of “community” to suggest a more inclusive, biocentric orientation…[where] the nonhuman environment plays a role at least as significant as a man-made landscape, and the interdependence of human and nonhuman elements of a specific place is often a central concern’ (p. 154).

Michael Shanks has articulated ideas about chorography in a variety of places, most completely in lectures, interviews and web publications. In an interview with Douglass W. Ba...