Map exhibits help navigate history and 'who we are'

— -- In an era when the Global Positioning System enables that calm voice emanating from the dashboard to tell drivers where to turn left or right, it's reasonable to wonder if maps could become obsolete.

But two major exhibits, one at Chicago's Field Museum opening today and the other at the Library of Congress in Washington premiering Dec. 13, spotlight maps not only as utilitarian devices but as art objects, historical artifacts and reflections of how a culture views itself.

The Field Museum show, staged in conjunction with Chicago's Newberry Library, features 130 original maps, globes and artifacts from around the world that graphically depict environments. But not all are maps in the conventional sense. Some are products of the imagination — J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and Thomas Moore's Utopia, for instance. There are cosmological diagrams of heaven and hell. There's a maplike memory board from the Congo that charts genealogy. And the oldest map is a 1500 B.C. clay cuneiform tablet from Samaria.

More contemporary inclusions are the first map of the Internet from 1982 depicting 40 linked computers. Among the cutting-edge models: a 4-by-10-foot six-screen interactive GPS map.

A major exhibit message is that maps don't just convey directions.

"You use a map to find your place, but a map is also a statement of your place in the world," says the Newberry Library's Bob Karrow, co-curator of the exhibit. Moreover, "every map says something about the person who produced it. There's a lot of personal authorial hand in mapmaking. They tell us as much about who we are as where we are."

The Library of Congress display emphasizes early American maps, rare books and other items from the Jay I. Kislak Collection. But the star of the show is the Waldseemüller world map, a 1507 cartographic treasure that was the first to label the New World "America," and the first to recognize the Western Hemisphere as a separate landmass. Dubbed America's "birth certificate," the map was hidden away for 400 years in a castle in southern Germany. In 2003, the Library of Congress bought it for $10 million. Since then, it has been displayed only briefly, but it will take up permanent residence in a hermetically sealed case at the library.