Pages 41-49

Return to History 8 Environment Bone From a Dry Sea

Geographic Imagination

Geographic imagination is essentially how one person views the relationships between that person's place/home and a different place, as well as the entire world. Geographic imagination includes how a person compares his/her mental images and thoughts of a place to a different place's spaces and characteristics. An example of this comes from Bone From a Dry Sea: "At home the bathroom was right next door to her own room, and she could find her way there with her eyes shut, almost without waking up. Here it was way down the hill, and there might be leopards, and she had to wait till it was light"(41). Vinny is saying here that she could find her way around her house half asleep, yet in Africa she had difficulty navigating in the dark. This shows how Vinny compares her home to the campsite in Africa.

Dating

Dating in archaeology is when archaeologists put a "time-stamp" on an artifact or when they approximate when an artifact was created. An example of dating comes (once again) from a Bone From a Dry Sea. "The numbers read 1.6, 1.8, 2.0, and so on up to 4.8. These must be Dr. Wessler's pigs, she thought, and the numbers would be millions of years.More than half the fossils seemed to be somewhere around the four-million-year mark." Vinny is saying here that Dr. Wessler and the other archaeologists had marked and categorized the various fossils based on the time period they were buried, which is dating.

Sources

Gilley, Jessey. "Geographical Imagination." Sage Knowledge. Sage Knowledge, 2013. Web. 18 Sept. 2014. <http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/geography/ n477.xml>.