Monday, July 28, 2008

Road to Warehouse Landing?

In between mouthfuls of baba ganoush and tortilla chips (a boy's got to eat) and with Carole King singing in the background I've been conceptualizing and designing a traveling exhibit. To illustrate what the PTAP team has found at Port Tobacco, I thought that I would plot the historic sites that we have found relative to the river and the town boundaries. The graphic below is the result.







The red ellipses and circle represent the 18th-century sites we found in Mr. Edelen's fields. All of this work has occurred in the floodplain of the river, so it comes as no surprise that the distribution of historic sites should be roughly linear. But could the linearity reflect the course of the road from Port Tobacco village to Warehouse Landing during the 18th century?

The distribution in the illustration is skewed in that there is a large wooded area between the fields and the river (not shown on the map) that has not been surveyed. Undoubtedly there are Colonial period sites in that woods as well, especially just north of Warehouse Point. The only way to find out is to look.

Mapping our results, as you can see, is a useful analytic technique. Drafting electronically makes mapping easy...and I don't get baba ganoush and tortilla chip crumbs all over my drawings, just on the computer keyboard and mouse.

Jim

1 comment:

Dancing Willow said...

Carole King would be proud that she has inspired such a task. Love her!