Mapping Seattle's Lost Landscapes

Founded on Indian ground by American settlers in 1851, Seattle is one of the most dramatically engineered cities in the United States. Its shorelines have been extended, lagoons filled, hills flattened and rivers re-routed. Built on an active geological fault near a large volcano, Seattle has also been jolted by huge earthquakes, washed by tsunammis, covered by volcanic mud and ash, fluted by glaciers and edged by rising seas. Enter here to glimpse this history through The Waterlines Project.

This attractive site from the Burke Museum takes a geographical approach to Seattle history.  At the core of the project are some neat GIS layers of traditional and historical shorelines, rivers, and other geographic features along with historic maps and place marks for significant sites. But GIS and the web are like oil and water, so the maps are rendered in flash (at least that is what I think is going on). I am not fond of flash but this site is really well-done, at least once you give up on trying to download anything and realize that the right click is no longer what you think. Fortunately a Maps and Images section provides downloadable copies of many (though not all) of the images used in the flash site.

The Duwamish River section (I would link, but it's Flash so I can't) has the richest collection of map overlays. On a modern map of Seattle you can click boxes to superimpose important native sites, maps of the shoreline at different eras, and maps showing how the rivers have been rerouted. Each layer brings up new interpretive paragraphs and a map key.

Waterlines is an ongoing project and will be more than a website: "In planning stages now are physical exhibits to be placed at sites in downtown Seattle and electronic broadcasts to handheld devices." Sounds great!

[Top Image: Plan of city during Battle of Seattle, 1856, Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries Image number: 2002.3.54.]

The Mannahatta Project

The Mannahatta Project: "The aim of the Mannahatta Project is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted." See a slideshow of their preliminary results over at the New Yorker website. The slideshow is an internet sidebar to an article about the project that was published in the October 1 2007 issue of the magazine and an abstract may be found here.

Historic landscapes reconstructions rely on history (old maps, land deeds, travelers' accounts) and science (soil and vegetation analysis, climatology) and anthropology (how humans used and altered the land). The latter is especially significant as we discard the concept of "wilderness" and come to understand the extent to which the American landscape was man made, even before Columbus landed. (see Charles Mann's article "1491" for an overview of the research).