Traditional cultures universally depend on their landscape libraries. Ancient Greek memory palaces are well known as incredibly effective aids to memory. In fact, all memory champions use them today as no-one has found anything better.
It is well documented that the Greek and Roman orators used memory palaces to recall complex speeches and arguments. Cicero wrote extensively about the method. Using the interior of a building or the streets, he would associate each point in the speech with a location in the building, such as a door or column, or a specific building as he walked along a street. When giving the speech, he would imagine himself walking the memorised route, recalling each point as he passed the relevant location.
A fresco by Cesare Maccari (1840-1919 CE) depicting Roman senator Cicero (106-43 BCE) denouncing the conspirator Catiline in the Roman senate. (Palazzo Madama, Rome)
I have been using memory palaces for well over a decade now and found them extremely effective, despite having aphantasia (no mental visual imagery). When I add lessons from my First Nations colleagues, the method becomes even more amazing.
Much more complex forms of these memory palaces can be found in Indigenous cultures the world over. Dependent on memory for everything they know, it is not surprising that the most effective cognitive method is found universally for cultures who do not use writing to outsource their memories.
These spatial skills are innate – we all have them buried in our brains. The2014 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to the researchers who identified the ‘place cells’ in the hippocampus. This is a basic and universal skill which the vast majority of people reading this do not use to anywhere near the full potential. It is the ‘reading this’ which is significant. We can do both – read and optimise our innate memory skills.
In Indigenous memory palaces, thousands of stories and performances are located in sequence, providing a journey through significant features such as rivers, lakes, cliffs, hills and huge rocks. Such physical journeys are known as First Nations American pilgrimage trails,1 Aboriginal Australian songlines,2 Polynesian ceremonial roads such as Ara Metua on Rarotonga,3 Inca ceques,4 and multiple landscapes across Africa.5
When the landscape is imbued with knowledge, characters and stories, it is no longer a matter of geography. The landscape has gained a living cultural presence. IN Aboriginal Australian terms, it has become ‘Country’.
Indigenous academic and author Tyson Yunkaporta, a member of the Apalech Clan in Far North Queensland, describes it in this way:
In Indigenous culture no information can exist unless it is located. The knower is always located within a map/territory of knowledge and story that is profoundly place-based and corresponds with real landscapes. Each point of interest on a path of travel represents part of a story and a repository for knowledge.6
This information can be retrieved at any time by returning to the location in memory. The landscape library serves its purpose as the ultimate repository of knowledge. It isn’t only the ground beneath us. First Nations cultures the world over use the celestial bodies that astronomy offers as memory locations for navigation, timekeeping and a repertoire of stories.7 There is an awareness of the sky and of cardinal directions that has been lost as humans have settled into bright-lit, built-up cities.
Should directions be given from the perspective of an individual, to my left or right? Or are they better defined in terms which suit social beings such as we are?
Australian Gurindji speakers, for example, would use expressions like: ‘The flour is to the west of the sugar on the shelf.’8 My eye doctor worked in remote Aboriginal communities. He found it difficult, but during eye tests he needed to ask his Aboriginal patients to look north, south, east or west, even if they had entered his rooms through many turning passages.
Sitting with a film crew in a Darwin restaurant, I mentioned this to the Aboriginal sound technician. He was surprised by the question. ‘You mean you whitefellas don’t even know which direction is north?’ The rest of us had no idea and had to confess that had we been able to see the night sky, it would not have helped at all.
Locations in the sky and on ground are stunningly effective hooks for information. They provide a fixed information structure which will never lose sequence. More and more information can be added to the ever increasing complexity as the child grows into a young adult, adult and eventually Elder.
The French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted the Indigenous attention to environmental detail.9 In his extensive research into Indigenous cultures all over the world, he recorded how they classified hundreds or even thousands of species. This knowledge is integrated, not departmentalised as in neat, tidy Western university faculties. Plants depend on the weather and animals depend on the plants while astronomy allows you to maintain a calendar of the seasons and so indicates the weather. It is all integrated.
Lévi-Strauss describes an ethnographer who lacked the interest, knowledge and vocabulary of botany to be able to understand what the Indigenous Africans were telling her. Using language typical of his time, Lévi-Strauss wrote that the ‘natives on the other hand took such an interest for granted’.
My husband, Damian, had a similar experience. He was working as an archaeologist on a dig at the famous site of Lake Mungo in south-western New South Wales (see his image left). The fascination for archaeology bound the team but when a wedged-tailed eagle flew across the windswept dunes, Damian was unable to interest his fellow archaeologists. His Indigenous Mutthi Mutthi colleague, however, was also looking skywards, watching the spectacular bird.
Everyone was amused when tourists arrived, a boat atop their dusty vehicle, at the ‘Lake’ which last held water over 10,000 years ago. During that time, the once wet environment had become permanently dry, but the ancestors of the Barkandji/Paakantyi, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa peoples stayed and, critically, adapted their understanding of the changing environment. Their culture continued and they survived.
They had stormed and adapted extensive knowledge, cultural, physical and of the changing natural history – all kept in memory. I find that amazing.
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1 D.L. Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian studies and traditional knowledge, Routledge, New York, 2003, p. 25.
2 M. Neale & L. Kelly, Songlines: The power and promise, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2020. There are very many references to Aboriginal knowledge being linked to songlines, but it is not only that of men. Women’s knowledge is often neglected. A fascinating work is C.J. Ellis & L. Barwick, ‘Antikirinja women’s song knowledge 1963–72: Its significance in Antikirinja culture’, in P. Brock (ed.), Women, Rites and Sites: Aboriginal women’s cultural knowledge, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 1989, pp. 21–40.
3 M. Campbell, ‘Memory and monumentality in the Rarotongan landscape’, Antiquity, vol. 80, no. 307, 2006, pp. 102–17.
4 D. Turnbull, ‘Maps, narratives and trails: Performativity, hodology and distributed knowledges in complex adaptive systems—an approach to emergent mapping’, Geographical Research, vol. 45, no. 2, 2007, p. 142.
5 J. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1985, p. 45; E.M. McClelland, The Cult of Ifa among the Yoruba, Ethnographica, London, 1982, p. 71.
6 Tyson’s words here come from a document he wrote for a research team in which we are both involved. He gave permission for me to quote him here.
7 There are many resources describing the extraordinary astronomical skills of First Nations cultures, all including the way the knowledge keepers decode the spatial knowledge from song. Four of my favourites on the topic are: R.D. Haynes, ‘Astronomy and the Dreaming: The astronomy of the Aboriginal Australians’, in H. Selin (ed.), Astronomy Across Cultures: The history of non-Western astronomy, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2000; J. MacDonald, The Arctic Sky: Inuit astronomy, star lore, and legend, Royal Ontario Museum/Nunavut Research Institute, Ontario, 1998; J.E. Reyman, ‘Priests, power, and politics: Some implications of socioceremonial control’, in J.B. Carlson & J.W. Judge (eds), Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Albuquerque, 1987, pp. 121–47; and D. Hamacher, The First Astronomers: How Indigenous elders read the stars, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2022.
8 J. Green, C. Algy & F. Meakins, ‘Tradition and innovation: How we are documenting sign language in a Gurindji community in northern Australia’, The Conversation, 12 December 2022, https://the
conversation.com/tradition-and-innovation-how-we-are-documenting-
sign-language-in-a-gurindji-community-in-northern-australia-194524?.
9 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966, p. 6.