Quiz 3 · Reading Maps — Ancient America to the Singularity

Who made this?

1. Who made it?: The shell in the photograph is a pututu, carved over its whole surface by a Chavín artist whose name is not recorded: a trumpet made from the shell of a large sea snail by cutting off the pointed tip to make a mouthpiece and grinding it smooth. The twenty pututus found at Chavín de Huántar were made about 3,000 years ago by the people of Chavín, whose own name for themselves is not recorded. “Chavín” is the name of the town that stands there now.
2. When, and where?: Between about 1000 and 500 BCE. The shells grew in warm Pacific water about 500 miles to the northwest, off what is now Ecuador; the snail does not live in the cold water off Peru. Someone carried each shell over the mountains to a temple that stands more than 10,000 feet above the sea. A map of where the shells came from and where they ended up is a map of a road, and the road is older than the Inca by two thousand years.
3. Why, and for whom?: To be blown in the temple. The stone carvings at Chavín show figures holding shells like these, and the temple’s inner passages carry and bend the sound. Two thousand years later, under the Inca, the relay runners called chasquis carried a pututu and blew it to warn the next runner to be ready.
4. Who has it now, and how did it get there?: In the Museo Nacional Chavín, at the site, in the highlands of Peru. A team led by John Rick of Stanford University found the twenty shells together in July 2001, in an underground room now called the Gallery of the Conches. They were dug up, not bought, and they stayed where they were found. The trumpet in the photograph is a cousin from the same tradition, incised with figures and dated 400 to 200 BCE, on anonymous loan to the Brooklyn Museum in New York, where a student of this series can stand in front of it.
5. Whose voice is missing here, and where can we hear it?: The players. In 2008 a Peruvian musician, Tito La Rosa, played one of the Chavín pututus for researchers, so the sound can be heard again. What the sound meant to the people who built the passages is not recorded.

For your notebook: a road exists because someone wanted what was at the far end of it. What did the people of Chavín want badly enough to carry shells five hundred miles over mountains?

Sources: Stanford University, Chavín de Huántar Archaeological Acoustics Project; Cook and others, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2010); ReVista, Harvard University, “El Pututu” (2016).

First, the idea

A map is a drawing of a place as if seen from above, made by someone who chose what to show and what to leave out. The test will give you maps of voting results, of population, of trade routes, of borders, and ask you to read them. Before you read any map, read four things.

The title says what the map is about and, usually, when. The legend is the box that says what each mark means: this line is a road, this dot is a city, this shade is a density. The compass says which way is north, and it is not always up. The scale bar says how far a length on the page is on the ground.

A legend is a promise. The mapmaker promises that every mark means what the legend says it means: if the legend says a triangle is a storehouse, every triangle on the map is a storehouse and nothing else. Reading a map is holding the maker to the promise. When a mark is not in the legend, the map has broken its promise, and you read it with care.

Test questions about maps come in a few kinds. Locate: where is this thing. Direction: which way is one thing from another, read from the compass, not from the top of the page. Distance: how far, measured against the scale bar. Pattern: where things cluster or thin out, which is where the test hides its reasoning questions. And what the map does not show: a map of roads says nothing about how many people used them, and the test will offer you an answer that assumes it does.

The card’s questions apply to maps as well. A map made by conquerors shows roads to march on and towns to tax. A map made by a people of its own land shows other things: the Nahua painters of Mexico drew the story of a journey as a line of footprints with the places named in pictures. Who made this map, and why, is part of reading it.

Worked example — thinking out loud

A small sketch, drawn for this example only. The full map waits in Part B; this one has just two cities, a compass, and a scale bar.

The question: From Cusco, in which direction is Quito, and about how far in a straight line?

My first pull is to say “up,” because Quito is above Cusco on the page, and to write “north.” Before I do, I check the compass: the arrow points up, so up is north on this sketch. Good. But Quito is not only above Cusco; it is well to the left, and left on a north-up map is west. North and west together: the answer is northwest, and “north” alone would have been the half-answer the test loves to offer.

Then the habit worth building: the scale bar is 500 kilometers, and the dashed line from Cusco to Quito runs a little more than three bar-lengths. Three bars is 1,500, so call it about 1,600 kilometers, about a thousand miles, which a chasqui relay is said to have covered in about a week. Direction from the compass, distance from the bar, and neither from the top of the page or the size of the dots. In Part B the real map of the whole state works exactly the same way, with a legend added.

Part A · The skill by itself

1. Read the map and its legend.

According to the map, what lies along the royal road at this way station?

five storehouses, beside a stream five villages, beside a river a stream, crossing the road five times the map does not say what the triangles are

2. Use the scale bar.

About how far is the way station from Cusco?

about 20 km about 40 km about 80 km about 240 km

3. The Inca called their state Tawantinsuyu, “the four parts together.” Chinchaysuyu lay to the northwest of Cusco, Antisuyu to the northeast, Collasuyu to the southeast, and Cuntisuyu to the southwest. Lake Titicaca and the high plain of Bolivia lie southeast of Cusco. In which part was Lake Titicaca?

Chinchaysuyu Antisuyu Collasuyu Cuntisuyu

Part B · The skill in the wild

A sketch map of the Inca state at its largest, a few years before the Spanish arrived. Read the title, the legend, the compass, and the scale bar before the questions.

Sketch map drawn for this quiz. The ten places are plotted from their map coordinates; the roads are simplified lines between them; the coastline is not drawn. The scale bar is true for north–south distances. The four parts are named in italics around Cusco, where they met.

Places plotted from their coordinates. Road lines after UNESCO, “Qhapaq Ñan, Andean Road System” (2014), and the World History Encyclopedia, “The Inca Road System” (2014): two main trunks, one in the highlands and one on the coast, joined by cross roads the map leaves out.

4. From Cusco, Quito lies to the

northwest northeast southwest east

5. Using the scale bar, about how far is it from Cusco to Quito in a straight line?

about 400 km about 800 km about 1,600 km about 3,000 km

6. According to the legend, the dashed line shows

the border of the Inca state the coastal road the coastline a river

7. Which statement about the shape of the Inca state does the map support?

It stretched far more from north to south than from east to west. It was centered on the Pacific coast. Most of its people lived near Santiago. Its roads ran mainly from east to west.

8. Complete the sentence so that it matches the map.

The two main roads ran mostly [east and west / north and south / in circles around the lake], and they met at [Quito / Pachacamac / Cusco], where the four parts came together.

The key — and why the tempting answers tempt

1. A. The legend promises that a triangle is a storehouse and a wavy line is a stream. Five triangles on the road, one stream beside it. B ignores the legend and guesses. C misreads the stream as crossing the road; it runs beside it. D is the flat contradiction: the legend does say.

2. C. The bar is 20 km. Cusco to the way station is four bars long, so about 80 km. A reads the bar’s label as the answer. B counts two bars; measure, don’t guess. D multiplies by the wrong number; the mistake of a hurried reader who sees “240” and thinks it looks like a road distance.

3. C. Southeast of Cusco is Collasuyu, and the passage puts Lake Titicaca southeast of Cusco. This is a reading question in a map’s clothes: match the direction to the name. B tempts because “Anti” and “Titicaca” both sound like the mountains; sound is not direction.

4. A. Check the compass (up is north), then look: Quito is above Cusco and to its left. North and west. B is the half-answer: north is right, east is wrong. The test will often offer “north” alone; on this map it is not among the choices, so the reader who settles for the half-answer picks B. D ignores the compass altogether.

5. C. The bar is 500 km. Cusco to Quito is a little more than three bars, so about 1,600 km. (Measured from their coordinates it is about 1,650.) A and B come from reading the bar as 100 or 250 km. D doubles the measurement, which is the road’s length by land, not the straight-line distance the question asked for.

6. B. The legend says so. C tempts because the dashed line runs where the coast is; but the caption says the coastline is not drawn, and the legend says road. A invents a border the map never shows. The legend is the promise; hold the map to it.

7. A. From Pasto to Santiago is nearly 4,000 km; from the coast to the lowlands is a few hundred. The map is tall and thin because the state was. B is wrong about the center: Cusco is inland, in the highlands. C is not on the map: the map shows places, not how many people lived in them. D is the flat contradiction: both roads run north and south.

8. north and south; Cusco. Both roads run the length of the map, and the title and the italic labels put the meeting of the four parts at Cusco. “Quito” was the northern capital in the last years and tempts a reader who knows that; the map marks Cusco as capital. One more thing the map does not show: how long the roads were in all. UNESCO says about 30,000 km, other scholars say 40,000, and Peru’s Culture Ministry has said 60,000. A road is easier to walk than to measure.

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