Abstract
This essay presents an argument that the past is the set of all places made by human action. The past cannot exist in time: only in space. Histories representing the past represent the places (topoi) of human action. Knowledge of the past, therefore, is literally cartographic: a mapping of the places of history indexed to the coordinates of spacetime. The author's reply to published commentary emphasizes the multi-perspectival framework of his theory and the non-narrative potential of visual representation of the past.