Putting Themselves on the Map...

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Joyce Winslow
jwins@uoregon.edu

Esther Jacobson-Tepfer points to a squiggly blue line on the large map spread out before her on a table in the UO Department of Geography's InfoGraphics Lab. Her finger moves rapidly as she traces its path, citing points of interest along the route.

Weaving up, down, and around in an intricate pattern, the line follows approximately 300 miles of rugged terrain in the Altai Mountains of Northern Asia. It is the route taken by V.V. Sapozhnikov, a Russian geographer whose fascination with this area predates Jacobson-Tepfer's by a hundred years.

The few seconds it takes to trace the Russian's journey with her index finger belie the formidable obstacles travelers face in this remote region, including unpredictable extremes in weather, primitive roads, aggressive insects, and lethal outbreaks of marmot plague.

Jacobson-Tepfer's voice quickens as she recounts some of Sapozhnikov's discoveries and compares them to her own. For the past twelve summers, Jacobson-Tepfer and her colleagues have been documenting the surface archaeology and studying the ecology of ancient cultures in the Bayan Ölgiy region of northwestern Mongolia. Now, thanks to a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the fruits of their labors are being preserved in two complementary forms: a richly illustrated interactive website and a published Cultural Atlas of the Mongolian Altai, both of which are designed and produced by the UO's award-winning InfoGraphics Lab.

Serendipity, passionate commitment, and a pioneering spirit have marked the Altai project from the beginning. Jacobson-Tepfer's interest in Chinese art history--the field in which she earned her doctorate--eventually led her to explore the interconnections between the Chinese artistic traditions of the Zhou-Han period and those of early nomads inhabiting the steppes on China's borders.

An invitation to a professional conference in Mongolia and her scholarly exchanges with Vladimir Kubarev, a Russian colleague with similar interests, were the catalysts for her first expedition to the Russian Altai region in 1989. Five years later, with a team that included Kubarev, Russian archaeologists, and the director of the Mongolian Institute of Archaeology, Damdinsurenjin Tseveendorj, she began to focus her research on the Mongolian Altai.

Initially the team was attracted to the wealth of petroglyphs in the area, but in recent years Jacobson-Tepfer has been increasingly drawn to the rock art and ritual sites of the Mongolian Altai. She is captivated by what she wistfully calls "the expressive nature of this work...the mystery.” Who were the nomads who made this rugged land their home? What was the meaning of their ritualistic stone circles and Stonehenge-like monuments, and why did they site them where they did? The answers to these questions may never entirely be known, but it is obvious from her fervor when she speaks of them that Jacobson-Tepfer has found her life's work.

But along with the fervor there is also an unmistakable note of urgency in Jacobson-Tepfer's voice when she speaks of her mission. The Altai region was recently opened to tourism, inviting vandalism and theft of precious artifacts, and its fragile ecology faces threats from both mining interests and climate change. Priceless cultural resources are in danger of being lost forever. Jacobson-Tepfer's research, first with her Russian and Mongolian colleagues and now with the Mongolian Altai Inventory team, is the only link to thousands of years of Altai culture dating back to the late Pleistocene period, and the only resource for future scholars. In recognition of this, the Mongolian Altai Inventory project has become part of a larger international cultural preservation effort sponsored by UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and several Mongolian institutions.

Context is important in this work. The team does not simply document the surface archaeology of the study area, but takes into account its relationship to the landscape. The great stone altars and burial mounds, the ancient petroglyphs, and the ritual sites and stone images, were all sited deliberately. Jacobson-Tepfer notes that the ritual sites were frequently located in a plain, near rivers, facing eastward toward the mountains. "They seem to be interrelated to elements of the landscape between earth and sky,” she says.

Preserving and interpreting all this data might have been more difficult were it not for web technology ("a great way to archive photos!”), advances in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software, and two lucky personal connections: Jacobson-Tepfer's close working relationship with Jim Meacham, the director of the UO InfoGraphics Lab, and her marriage to photographer Gary Tepfer.

Early on, Jacobson-Tepfer began recording the location of her Altai discoveries in the field, using an inexpensive hand-held Garmin mapping device. But how to transform these GPS points into actual maps? Fortunately, Jim Meacham and his team of cartographers in the UO Department of Geography had the answers, and an inspired collaboration was born. Meacham, who had been working with Jacobson-Tepfer since 1993, gradually enlisted the aid of his cohorts in the InfoGraphics Lab (Assistant Director Ken Kato, Interactive Cartography Project Manager Erik Steiner, GIS/Remote Sensing Specialist Nick Kohler, and Research Cartographer Alethea Steingisser), and they soon became an integral part of Jacobson-Tepfer's project, working closely with her to create the Cultural Atlas of the Ancient Mongolian Altai.

Each member of the InfoGraphics team has unique talents to contribute. In addition to his cartography chops, Meacham's love of backpacking and high country, as well as his experience as a surveyor for the Bureau of Land Management and the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, make him ideally suited for assisting with research in the field. Kohler holds up the technical end with his extensive knowledge of acquiring and processing remote sensing data, Steiner's web design and scripting skills and Kato's expertise in managing the geodatabase and dynamic web server functions are invaluable in creating the interactive Atlas website, and Steingisser's painstaking attention to fleshing out cartographic details help bring Jacobson-Tepfer's data to life.

Another essential member of the Cultural Atlas project is her husband Gary Tepfer. "Gary is a really good mountain man,” she says. "Without him, I might not have had the confidence to tackle this terrain.” Tepfer's decades of experience in both the craft of photography and survival in the wild make him ideally suited to meet the demands of this project. In addition to being published in the series of scholarly books produced by his wife and her fellow researchers over the years, Tepfer's striking photographs of the stark landscape of the steppes and its people have also been exhibited internationally, as well as at the UO and in local art galleries such as the White Lotus in Eugene.

Of the InfoGraphics Lab group, Meacham is the only one who has accompanied Jacobson-Tepfer and the team of American, Russian, and Mongolian researchers on their expeditions. He first traveled with them in 1997 to assist in gathering data. Since then he has joined the expedition twice, in the summers of 2004 and 2006, using a rugged TDS Pocket PC equipped with customized ArcPad GIS software.

"It was great working with Esther and Gary to tell their story with maps,” Meacham says. "Cartographers rarely have an opportunity to be in the field, and it's wonderful to be in touch with the material you're mapping and to be with the process from beginning to end.” He praises Jacobson-Tepfer's prodigious organizational and troubleshooting skills--essential in surmounting the hurdles facing travelers in Mongolia--and is appreciative of her instinct for geography. "Esther thinks about things geographically,” he says, and the two are in sync when mapping the points and attributes of the study area. The screens on their TDS units are large enough to show map details clearly. To record data about any given locale, they need only click on a point on the map to bring up a menu of more than 100 attributes describing the site, including location and elevation, monument types and numbers, chronology, petroglyph imagery content, and topographic features.

"The Mongolian Altai Inventory,” as the NEH grant project is called, is slated to be completed in 2009. Anyone familiar with the InfoGraphics team's Atlas of Oregon, which won top awards in international competitions conducted by the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, knows that their work is not only functional, but exquisitely beautiful. The printed and interactive web forms of the Cultural Atlas of the Mongolian Altai are expected to be a spectacular addition to their growing body of work.

Their cultural atlas of the Altai is likely to be well received and widely consulted. But over the past year Jacobson-Tepfer has been quietly working on a less heralded personal project: an album documenting her research. A testament to the deep friendship she has formed with the people of the Altai over the years, it is intended as gift for a Kazakh school director who is teaching the children of local herders about their own history.

Want to learn more about the InfoGraphics Lab and the Mongolian Altai Project? See http://www.uoregon.edu/~altay/ and http://geography.uoregon.edu/infographics/projects/altai.htm.