24. Maps.

I love maps. There's a bitter irony here because I am appalingly bad at reading them, and equally bad at drawing plans:


It makes no difference, though, because maps are beautiful. The most gleeful I've ever been was when I managed to snag a copy of a stone-by-stone plan of an archaeological site. To this day, I don't know which site it was, but boy, was it beautiful.

Also, maps are useful. I like having maps on my walls so whenever I'm reading about a place I can turn my head to the side and see where the place in question is. It's useful when I'm planning trips, but also when I'm studying. A good map provides an abundance of information for the historian or archaeologist (as long as geographical changes are taken into account, of course): the newly-formed delta near Thessaloniki still shows up as a green spot on a map of Greece and cuts off exactly where the ancient city of Pella used to lie - on the coast, but now inland. In many places, modern roads lie on top of ancient ones, showing where old trade routes used to run. Sometimes, terrain is much more important than distance: even with the shiny and new extention of the Via Egnatia, it's still tricky and slow to cross over to Epirus. In Scotland, the difference in terrain influenced livelihoods, social structures, and created a divide between the Lowlands and Highlands that didn't exist, say, between the mainland and the Isles or Ireland. Early maps often contain valuable information about farms, estates, family income and social divisions - as well as looking fantastic. Alas, I don't have any 17th-century maps, but I'll settle for what I can get: