are extremely few historic maps that are more than five hundred years old. So, even if there were lots of great maps around way back when, they are gone now. Thanks, entropy. 5 Digital Worlds [ 90 ] P a r t I I Most of the surviving examples of old maps were made by Western explorers and surveyors in the centuries that followed Columbus making his way to the New World. There is something charming in their imperfections, with coastlines that almost look right, but not quite, and huge blank spots. There have been a number of
Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Part I 1 Historical Curiosity 3 2 Finding Things Out 17 Part II 3 Views from Above 45 4 Scans of the Planet 68 5 Digital Worlds 89 Part III 6 Retracing Our Steps: Migration, Mobility, and Travel 117 7 Food and Farms: How Our Ancestors Fed Themselves 149 8 Living in the Past: Reverse Engineering Ancient Societies 169 Contents Conclusion 9 Archaeology as Time Machine 191 Glossary 205 Notes 209 References 229 Index 251
in Modern Kenya (Cambridge University Press, 1995), coeditor (with M. Priscilla Stone and Peter D. Little) of Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives (Rowman and Little- field, 2000), and coeditor (with Marc Edelman) of Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism (Blackwell, 2005). Stefan Helmreich is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. His book Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998) examines the practices
