Worldbuilding Through Culture

INTRODUCTION TO CULTUREBUILDING - Maps

Okay, so world and culturebuilding may be more than just maps, but the maps are important, too. Geography and climate have their own unique influence on the genesis of a culture. Access to water, agriculture, hunting, fishing, plants for textiles, natural shelter, materials to build shelter, the harshness of the temperatures and seasonal changes, etc., all of these things have a direct impact on how and why specific aspects of your created culture exist as they do.

Going back to our Canadian provinces example, it's natural for a culture located on a rocky island with little pastureland like Newfoundland to have a cuisine that focuses heavily on seafood, fruit and vegetables that don't require a lot of arable land to grow (such as blueberries and tubers) and animals that can be raised without grazing, like poultry. And because this would make something like beef very expensive to raise or import, it becomes a special-occasion food, or a mark of high status or wealth. Conversely, in Saskatchewan, where significant portions of the arable land is given over for cattle ranching and cash crop, but the ocean is very far away, the status of cuisine could be assumed to be inverted. Beef is local and cheap, and fish and seafood must be imported and becomes the wealth-indicator or special-occasion meal.

Deciding where your culture is located geographically is quite important to the foundation of the culture itself. When creating your culture, consider the historic origins of the settlement and community. How long have these people lived here? Was there another settlement there first, which was abandoned and they built on? Or were there people living there already? If so, did your culture invade, or did they sneak in, or were they invited? Is it subsequently a melting pot culture, or are there clear divisions between cultural neighbourhoods and backgrounds?

Also ask yourself: why settle here specifically?

If you look at the locations of most major cities–especially capitals–you'll see that they have several things in common:

● Easy access to fresh water.

● Access to food sources; either good agricultural land, or abundant sea stocks, or plains and forests where food naturally grows and wild animals thrive, or a combination of the above.

● Access to building materials; an abundance of clay for adobe architecture, or stone to quarry, or wood for timber, etc.

● Access to materials to make clothing from; either hides and furs, or plants like cotton and hemp, or supple and weaveable grasses or tree barks, etc.

● Access and (more importantly), control of trade routes, ports and terminals, and markets. (What has to come through your city, in order to get to other places? What do your people have access to that they can trade / sell so their community thrives? How do they center or celebrate that commodity in their culture and festivals?)

Once you've figured out the where and the why of your culture's settlement (or non-settlement, if they are a culture that follows the resources as they move), it's time to name it.

As fun as it is to give places grand names that sound fantastical and will be the bane of your audiobook narrator's day, remember that humans tend to be extremely literal when it comes to naming places. I mean, the name of our planet is "Dirt".

Take a look at a map of your country, and see which names you can easily categorize by:

● Geographical Location or Notable Features

○ Big Hill, Little Falls, Forks, etc.

● Renamed from other languages

○ For example, there are so many rivers named Avon in the U.K. because the Ancient Celtic word for river was 'avon', and when the mapmakers of Rome asked the locals the name of the river, they replied: "the river."

● Named after someone or something important

○ For example, Trafalgar Road in southern Ontario is named after Trafalgar Square in London, England, which is named in honour of the Battle of Trafalgar, which is so named because it took place close to Cape Trafalgar, which itself is a bastardization of the original Arabic name for the promontory: Taraf al-Ghar / طرف الغار 'cape of the cave/laurel', or from Taraf al-Gharb / طرف الغرب 'cape of the west' (From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Trafalgar)

● Named after a place where folks used to live before

○ They may do this by adding 'new' to it, to differentiate from the 'old' (New York, New Orleans, New Zealand,) or they may just use the placename as-is (Scarborough, Ontario, Canada is named for Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England).

There's lots of map-building software and websites out there–and of course, drawing supplies so you can make your own physical version–so take a poke around at what's available. Or you can do what I did for my fantasy series–trace around a coffee stain on a napkin, start roughing in mountains and rivers, and go from there.

Of course, don't forget that your character will be leaving this place (either physically or metaphorically) to begin their adventure, so think about what they take with them that is important to their home culture, but may be useless or weird in the wider world. Or, conversely, extremely helpful if other characters have never seen the thing before.