This talk presents work in progress from a book project on the maps of Semen Remezov (ca. 1642–post-1720), the Siberian cartographer who produced the first atlas of Siberia. In this talk, I examine Remezov’s maps for clues into what they tell us about imperial dynamics along the southern edges of the Russian empire in the late 17th and early 18thcenturies. While boundaries and borders are rarely explicitly depicted in Remezov’s maps of Siberia, these maps do nonetheless convey clues about the geopolitical dynamics of the region. Scholars have recognized well that Remezov’s maps include Indigenous settlements, names, and ethnographic information. Building on work by other scholars and pushing a methodology worked out in a previously published article, I find that the symbols on the maps conveying ethnographic details convey political information as well. In conjunction with corroborating sources, I attempt to read maps from two regions in Siberia—the Baraba steppe and Altai region surrounding Lake Teletskoe—with the aim of better assessing geopolitical dynamics in those places. While these maps may not convey a comprehensive picture of geopolitical dynamics in early modern southern Siberia, they do reveal that the Russian empire did not exercise full sovereignty in any modern sense over these territories.

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