Map a Cultural Landscape: Interview Someone You Love and Map Their Life

A cultural landscape is a place that is important to a person or a group of people — and it carries stories about the people who lived there. In this activity you get to be the historian: you'll interview someone about their life and turn what they tell you into a map.

1. Get ready

• Choose your person — someone who remembers what life was like a long time ago. You'll be asking them about their life.
• Arrange a time to talk.
• Gather materials: pen and paper for notes, and perhaps a recording app on a phone to make note-taking easier.

2. Ask questions

For a map, you need to know where things happened as well as what happened. Depending on the person, your map might show one town or many places. Some questions to try:

• When and where were you born?
• How many times have you moved?
• How has the place you live changed since you first moved there?
• Did you play sports or join clubs at school?
• Where did people get together for special occasions?
• Where did people in your town get their food?
• Where did you go for fun as a teenager?
• Where did you take your children to play outside?
• What was your first job? Which job did you have the longest?

3. Make the map

• Plan it. Did your person spend their whole life in one town, or cross the world to a new country? Will you draw one map or a series? What years will it show?
• Draw it. An aerial view found online can help you sketch the basic outline of the place. Then add the buildings, natural features and landmarks your person described.
• Label it. Add names of buildings, streets and towns — but most important are the things no ordinary map would show. If your person speaks another language, write down the words they use. If they fished at one spot on the river, mark it. Fill the empty spaces with pieces of their stories.

4. Keep it, and think about it

Store your map somewhere safe, and consider making a copy for the person you interviewed. Then ask yourself:

• Did you learn something new about how people lived in the past?
• Is there a place you now see differently?
• How was their life different from yours — and how was it the same?

Indigenous cultural landscapes

The Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail works with Tribes and universities to produce Indigenous Cultural Landscape reports. Read the reports.

Sources

Based on "Online Activity: Map a Cultural Landscape," National Park Service, Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The page's illustrations, which carry no credit, are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.