In the spring of 1941, the United States Army Corps of Engineers authorized an ambitious geological investigation of the alluvial valley of lower Mississippi. This project would occupy the Mississippi River Commission for the next three and a half years, and its final report would showcase the remarkable analytic and cartographic talents of Louisiana State University geology professor Harold Norman Fisk (1908-1964). This paper traces the impact of Fisk’s meander maps on a wide array of scientific and cultural domains. Beyond geology and engineering, where Fisk’s achievement was widely recognized, I examine how these maps have stimulated other scientific, humanistic, and cultural interpretations of the Mississippi River’s past. Archaeologists, for example, used Fisk’s periodization of the river’s various channel stages as a key technical tool for identifying the most likely locations where Amerindian and European artifacts might link to historical events. Now we come full circle, from historical applications, to esthetics, and back to science. Geomorphologists have long assumed that the sedimentary legacies of environmental change are indistinguishable from those from tectonic influences. In the context of recent attention to anthropogenic climate change, however, Fisk’s maps provide an exquisite basis for closer study of climate factors in river system dynamism.
