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Drawing Boundaries: Vernacular Architecture and Maps

The analytic potential of maps has never been fully explored in the discourse on vernacular architecture. This disregard for cartographic representations is unfortunate, as maps may provide researchers with valuable insights and open up new directions for inquiry and understanding. Using several examples, this paper aims to show how maps may be of particular value in charting the ways in which architectural boundaries sever or coincide with national, cultural or ethnic boundaries, and in identifying new areas for research and recording that go beyond a narrow focus on culture areas. In March 2001 the Taliban government of Afghanistan, using tanks, rocket launchers, and explosives, demolished two 1,700-year-old statues of Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley, evoking widespread condemnation from an international community that did not seem able to do more than remain a passive spectator. Some twelve months later, backed by the United Nations and Afghanistan's new interim government, plans to rebuild the monuments were put forward by the Afghanistan Museum in Bubendorf, Switzerland. Referring to the cultural significance of the statues and the economic need to restore the area, the latest computer technology was brought in to try and recapture some of the meaning and beauty of the statues. 1 Although the plans are welcomed by most Bamiyan residents, they have raised questions as to whether the resources needed to carry them out could not perhaps be put to a different, more urgent use, such as the provision of food and housing to the millions of homeless Afghans. The focus of international attention on the unique cultural significance of these monuments also threatens once again to obscure more modest components of Afghanistan's cultural heritage, including its vernacular building traditions. Surely, a redevelopment of Afghanistan's nonmonumental built environment is equally, if not more needed to provide economic stability and peace in the region.