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History Of Cartography

Maps are now such commonplace objects and geographical forms so standardized in our minds that it is hard to imagine a world in which this was not so. For example, we recognize the shape of a familiar landmass like Africa, whether it appears on a map, a coffee mug or on the back of a teenager's partly shaved head. When our standard view is challenged, we are disturbed and angry. Showing the Australian map of the world with south on top provokes a roar of outrage from a college history class: "Turn it right side up!" But there is a history of cartography, a history of the development of mapping, and it is not a simple story of forward progress. And there will be a history of future mapping, which may take forms as yet unimagined by us.

The field of the history of cartography has been transformed in the past two decades. A map has been traditionally defined by geographers as a "representation of things in space," a definition that implies a certain level of physical correspondence. A new definition, according to Harley and Woodward, reads thus: "Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world." This definition takes one away from seeing maps as objective representations of physical space into considering them as human documents with all their attendant biases and failings. Such artifacts as diagrams of imaginary cosmographies, landscape paintings, and "mental maps" may now be considered maps. The working out of this definition is seen in its widest form in Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies (volume 2, book 3 of History of Cartography), which discusses the dreaming diagrams of the Australian aborigines, the cosmographic calendars of the Mayans, and ritual sand paintings of the Navajos. These works are not "maps" in the traditional sense, but they do incorporate spatial relationships and individual places, often in...