The Wikipedia article on the Roman Empire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Roman_Empire
has an animated map of the Empire's extent (500 BC to 1650 AD). It shows expansion from 500 BC to about 300 AD, then a collapse through 1650 AD. It might be interesting to see such a map for the lute. A lute map would not have borders, as with geo-political entities. Instead, we might have something like "one red dot for every 100 lute/vihuela players, one green dot for every 100 viol players, one black dot for every major composer, ... ". I suppose compiling data for a lute map would be prohibitively laborious. Nevertheless, it is interesting to ask whether the data exists. Could one examine receipts, guild records (eg string makers), diaries, histories, notebooks, paintings and other documents and eventually compile data (by year and location) that a computer expert could convert into a reasonably accurate animated map? To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
