College of Liberal Arts
Sarah Manriquez, CLA Public Information OfficeMarch 30, 2026cla-pio@alaska.edu
When Dr. Erika Monahan studies ice, she is not looking at temperature charts or satellite imagery. She is reading seventeenth-century maps.
A historian of early modern Russia and Eurasia at the University of New Mexico, Monahan earned her BA in History from Dartmouth College and her MA and PhD from Stanford University. Since joining UNM鈥檚 History Department in 2008, she has built an international reputation as a scholar of empire, commerce, borderlands, and environmental history. Her scholarship spans merchant cultures, political economy, corruption, and the circulation of knowledge across Eurasia.
At UAF, Monahan brought that depth of expertise north for her talk, 鈥淪lippery Sources: Some Pages from the First Atlas of Siberia.鈥
Her lecture invited the audience to think about ice not just as matter, but as evidence. What can a seventeenth-century map tell us about sea ice? 91视频 climate. 91视频 empire. 91视频 how people actually moved across the northern world.
The answer, she suggested, is complicated.
A Mapmaker at the Edge of Empire
At the center of Monahan鈥檚 work is Semyon Remezov, a Tobolsk-based mapmaker who compiled what is often called the first atlas of Siberia at the end of the seventeenth century.
Remezov was not a university-trained scientist. He was a Siberian servitor, an administrator, a town planner, an icon painter. He worked in Tobolsk, near the confluence of the Irtysh and Tobol rivers, a place that even now feels far from metropolitan centers of knowledge. Yet from that vantage point, he and the information network around him produced a sprawling manuscript atlas mapping Eurasia鈥檚 least known spaces.
Three of his atlases survive. They chart river systems, trading posts, portages, hunting grounds, settlements, and coasts that, even today, remain sparsely populated and politically consequential. At a moment when Arctic waters are becoming more navigable and more contested, Monahan argues that these maps deserve a second look, not simply as relics of empire, but as documents that preserve environmental and geographic knowledge.
When Maps Lie and When They Don鈥檛
Historians of cartography have long taught us that maps are not neutral. They omit. They exaggerate. They serve power. They erase.
Monahan does not dispute this. In fact, she leans into it. Early modern maps often contain fantastical sea monsters and allegorical flourishes. They project imperial ambition across blank spaces.
But if we dismiss them entirely as fiction, she asks, what do we lose?
鈥淒on鈥檛 throw the baby out with the ice water,鈥 she told the audience, smiling at her own metaphor.
Remezov鈥檚 maps are part of an imperial project. They helped Moscow understand and administer a vast territory. Yet they are also deeply pragmatic documents. They record how long it takes to travel between settlements by dog sled. They note where rapids interrupt a river. They distinguish between regions where reindeer are ridden and those where they pull sleds. They mark where fox are trapped in winter and where polar bears roam.
These are not decorative choices. They document how people actually moved, traded, hunted, and endured in Siberia鈥檚 northern world.
Ice as Infrastructure
The most arresting images in Remezov鈥檚 atlas are the wedges of pale blue ice that fringe the northern coasts. At first glance, they seem simple. The Arctic is icy. That much we know.
But Monahan noticed something more precise.
In some places, Remezov marks coasts as ice-bound. In others, he labels tidal pools and navigable passages. On one map of the Ob River, he annotates a stretch near the mouth with a stark warning: here, travel is impossible because the water never freezes.
For modern readers, that sounds counterintuitive. But in seventeenth-century Siberia, frozen rivers and seas were highways. Smooth winter ice allowed sleds and caravans to cross terrain that was impassable in thaw.
In another region, Remezov writes that a coastal route may be passable one year and impassable for three. The note is brief. Its implications are not. It suggests an awareness of variability. Of seasonality. Of environmental fluctuation rather than static permanence.
This is not climate modeling. It is not data in the modern sense. But it is a record of lived environmental knowledge, gathered from travelers, traders, Indigenous communities, and state officials who moved through these landscapes year after year.
Remezov, Monahan emphasized, did not personally traverse every river he mapped. His atlas emerged from an information-gathering infrastructure. In a world without telegraphs or satellites, news traveled by boat, sled, and word of mouth. Officials routinely asked travelers where they had come from, how long the journey took, which tributaries they crossed, who they encountered.
The atlas is the sediment of those conversations.
Reading Between Empire and Environment
One of the enduring questions in environmental history is how to reconcile human systems of power with material realities. Remezov鈥檚 atlas sits squarely in that tension.
On the one hand, it maps a territory in the process of Russian expansion. It renders Indigenous lands legible to the state. It facilitates tribute, trade, and control.
On the other hand, it preserves traces of ecological patterns that modern science is still trying to reconstruct. Contemporary researchers acknowledge a relative scarcity of long-term sea ice data for northern Asia compared to the Atlantic world. Early modern ship logs from Europe provide some insight. Siberian sources are rarer.
Remezov鈥檚 work does not provide neat, georeferenced coordinates. It cannot be slotted directly into a digital model. But as Monahan suggested, even models rely on interpretation. They are never as exact as they appear.
Her argument is not that a seventeenth-century atlas can settle debates about climate change. It is that historians should not assume such sources are useless for understanding past environments. The maps show seasonality. They show navigability. They show where ice was expected, where it was absent, and how people adapted to both.
In that sense, they offer a qualitative baseline. A textured picture of how the Arctic functioned in daily life.
A Scholar in Conversation
What made the evening feel distinctly UAF was not just the subject matter, but the exchange.
Faculty asked about forest cover and permafrost. Students pressed on error correction and methodology. Questions came in about reindeer husbandry, kayak repair, and how thick ice must be to carry cannons. Monahan answered some with confidence, others with candor.
鈥淭his is a work in progress,鈥 she said more than once.
She has been reading these maps for years, zooming into digitized pages, tracing yellow lines that might indicate floodplains, counting rapids marked by tiny symbols. And still, she is listening for what they might yet reveal.
The Arctic has always demanded that kind of attention. Its surfaces shift. Its ice forms and dissolves. Its routes open and close. To study it, whether as a scientist or a historian, requires patience with ambiguity.
In the end, Monahan did not claim that Remezov solved the Arctic. She showed instead that seventeenth-century Siberians were careful observers of their world. They knew when the ice would hold and when it would not. They tracked rivers that flooded and coasts that breathed with the tides. They recorded travel times not in abstract units, but in lived experience.
In an era when the Arctic is once again central to global conversations, that historical lens feels less distant than it once did.
Maps, like ice, are slippery. But if we read them closely, they can still carry weight.
The UAF Department of History explores the forces that shape human experience across time and place, from 91视频 and the Arctic to global and transnational histories. Through research, teaching and community engagement, faculty and students examine how people have navigated power, environment, culture and change, building critical perspectives that inform the present.
The UAF Arctic and Northern Studies (ACNS) program brings together interdisciplinary perspectives to explore the cultures, environments and histories of the Circumpolar North. Through coursework, research and public engagement, ACNS connects local knowledge with global conversations about the Arctic, preparing students to navigate and contribute to northern communities and issues.
