“Car­tog­ra­phy was not born full-fledged as a sci­ence or even an art,” wrote map his­to­ri­an Lloyd Brown in 1949. “It evolved slow­ly and painful­ly from obscure ori­gins.” Many ancient maps made no attempt to repro­duce actu­al geog­ra­phy but served as abstract visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions of polit­i­cal or the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. Writ­ten geog­ra­phy has an ancient pedi­gree, usu­al­ly traced back to the Greeks and Phoeni­cians and the Roman his­to­ri­an Stra­bo. But the mak­ing of visu­al approx­i­ma­tions of the world seemed of lit­tle inter­est until lat­er in world his­to­ry. As “medi­a­tors between an inner men­tal world and an out­er phys­i­cal world”—in the words of his­to­ri­an J.B. Harley—the maps of the ancients tend­ed to favor the for­mer. This is, at least, a very gen­er­al out­line of the ear­ly his­to­ry of maps.

Harley’s def­i­n­i­tion occurs in the first chap­ter of Vol­ume One of The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, a mas­sive six-vol­ume, mul­ti-author work trac­ing map mak­ing from pre­his­toric times up to the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; “the most ambi­tious overview of map mak­ing ever under­tak­en,” Edward Roth­stein writes at The New York Times.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go project, begun in the mid-80s, com­bines “essays based on orig­i­nal research by author­i­ta­tive schol­ars with exten­sive illus­tra­tions of rare and unusu­al maps.” Unlike his­to­ries like Brown’s, how­ev­er, this one aims to move beyond “a deeply entrenched Euro­cen­tric­i­ty.” The project includes non-West­ern and pre-medieval maps, pre­sent­ing itself as “the first seri­ous glob­al attempt” to describe the car­tog­ra­phy of African, Amer­i­can, Arc­tic, Asian, Aus­tralian, and Pacif­ic soci­eties as well as Euro­pean. In so doing, it illu­mi­nates many of those “obscure ori­gins.”

You might expect such an ambi­tious offer­ing to come with an equal­ly ambi­tious pric­etag, and you’d be right. But rather than pay over $200 dol­lars for each indi­vid­ual book in the series, you can read and down­load Vol­umes One through Three and Vol­ume Six as free PDFs at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press’s site. In these extra­or­di­nary schol­ar­ly works, you’ll find maps repro­duced nowhere else—like the Star Fres­co from Jor­dan just above—with deeply learned com­men­tary explain­ing how they cor­re­spond to very dif­fer­ent ways of see­ing the world.

At the links below, see images of maps from all over the globe and through­out record­ed human his­to­ry, and begin to see the his­to­ry of car­tog­ra­phy in very dif­fer­ent ways your­self.

Vol­ume 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions

Vol­ume 2: Part 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 25–40)

Vol­ume 2: Part 2

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–16)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 17–40)

Vol­ume 2: Part 3

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–8)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 9 –24)

Vol­ume 3: Part 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 25–40)

Vol­ume 3: Part 2

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 41–56)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 57–80)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“Now when I was a lit­tle chap I had a pas­sion for maps. I would look for hours at South Amer­i­ca, or Africa, or Aus­tralia, and lose myself in the all the glo­ries of explo­ration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked par­tic­u­lar­ly invit­ing on a map (but they all look that) I would put my fin­ger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’”

                     —Joseph Con­rad, Heart of Dark­ness

In his post-WWII his­tor­i­cal sur­vey, The Sto­ry of Maps, Lloyd A. Brown observes that “the very mate­r­i­al used in the mak­ing of maps, charts and globes con­tributed to their destruc­tion.” Paper burns, rots, suc­cumbs to water-dam­age and insects. Maps and globes made from sol­id sil­ver, brass, cop­per, and oth­er met­als made too-tempt­ing tar­gets for loot­ers and thieves. In this way, maps serve dou­bly as sym­bol­ic indices of what they represent—lands that, in the very act of map­ping them, were often despoiled, over­run, and stolen from their inhab­i­tants.

More­over, in map­ping his­to­ry, it often hap­pened that “if a map were old and obso­lete and parch­ment was scarce, the old ink and rubri­ca­tion could be scraped off and the skin used over again. This prac­tice, account­ing for the loss of many codices as well as valu­able maps and charts, at one time became so per­ni­cious” that the Catholic Church issued decrees to for­bid it. What bet­ter alle­go­ry for con­quest, the wip­ing away of civ­i­liza­tions in order to write new names and bor­ders over them?

The old impe­r­i­al tropes of “blank spaces” on the map and “dark places of the earth” (like “dark­est Africa”), used with such effec­tive­ness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness, hide the plain truth, in the words of Conrad’s Mar­low:

The con­quest of the earth, which most­ly means the tak­ing it away from those who have a dif­fer­ent com­plex­ion or slight­ly flat­ter noses than our­selves, is not a pret­ty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sen­ti­men­tal pre­tence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sac­ri­fice to.…

Blank spaces rep­re­sent those areas that had not yet been forcibly brought into the Euro­pean econ­o­my of prop­er­ty, the sine qua non of Enlight­en­ment human­i­ty. “Once dis­cov­ered by Euro­peans,” writes his­to­ri­an Michel-Rolph Trouil­lot—once clas­si­fied, mapped, and made sub­ject, “the Oth­er final­ly enters the human world.” For sev­er­al decades now, post­colo­nial projects have engaged in the pro­gres­sive dis­en­chant­ment of “the idea,” in the recog­ni­tion of messy rela­tion­ships between nam­ing, map­ping, and pow­er, and the recov­ery, to the extent pos­si­ble, of the names, bor­ders, and iden­ti­ties beneath palimpsest his­to­ries.

Such projects pro­lif­er­ate out­side acad­e­mia as tech­nol­o­gy ampli­fies pre­vi­ous­ly unheard dis­sent­ing voic­es and per­spec­tives and as, to use an old post­colo­nial phrase, “the empire writes back”—or, in this case, “maps back.” Such is the intent of the online project Native Land, an inter­ac­tive web­site that “does the oppo­site” of cen­turies of colo­nial map­ping, writes Atlas Obscu­ra, “by strip­ping out coun­try and state bor­ders in order to high­light the com­plex patch­work of his­toric and present-day Indige­nous ter­ri­to­ries, treaties, and lan­guages that stretch across the Unit­ed States, Cana­da,” the Cana­di­an Arc­tic, Green­land, and Aus­tralia.

Also a mobile app for Apple and Android, the map allows vis­i­tors to enter street address­es or ZIP codes in the search bar, “to dis­cov­er whose tra­di­tion­al ter­ri­to­ry their home was built on.”

White House offi­cials will dis­cov­er that 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue is found on the over­lap­ping tra­di­tion­al ter­ri­to­ries of the Pamunkey and Pis­cat­away tribes. Tourists will learn that the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty was erect­ed on Lenape land, and aspir­ing lawyers that Har­vard was erect­ed in a place first inhab­it­ed by the Wamponoag and Mass­a­chu­sett peo­ples.

The map was cre­at­ed by Cana­di­an activist and pro­gram­mer Vic­tor Tem­pra­no, founder of the com­pa­ny Map­ster, which funds the project. Tem­pra­no pref­aces the Native Land “About” page with a dis­claimer: “This is not an aca­d­e­m­ic or pro­fes­sion­al sur­vey,” he writes, and is “con­stant­ly being refined from user input.” He defines his pur­pose as “help­ing peo­ple get inter­est­ed and engaged” by ask­ing ques­tions like “who has the right to define where a par­tic­u­lar ter­ri­to­ry ends, and anoth­er begins?”

As neo-colo­nial projects like oil pipelines once again threat­en the sur­vival of Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties, and indige­nous peo­ple find them­selves and their chil­dren caged in pris­ons for cross­ing mil­i­ta­rized nation­al bor­ders, such ques­tions could not be more rel­e­vant. Tem­pra­no does not make any claims to defin­i­tive his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy and points to oth­er, sim­i­lar projects that sup­ple­ment the “blank spaces” in his own online map, such as huge areas of South Amer­i­ca being re-mapped on the ground by Ama­zon­ian tribes enter­ing field data into smart phones, and Aaron Capella’s Trib­al Nations Maps, which offers attrac­tive print­ed prod­ucts, per­fect for use in class­rooms.

Tem­pra­no quotes Capel­la in order to illu­mi­nate his work: “This map is in hon­or of all the Indige­nous Nations [of colo­nial states]. It seeks to encour­age people—Native and non-Native—to remem­ber that these were once a vast land of autonomous Native peo­ples, who called the land by many dif­fer­ent names accord­ing to their lan­guages and geog­ra­phy. The hope is that it instills pride in the descen­dants of these Peo­ple, brings an aware­ness of Indige­nous his­to­ry and remem­bers the Nations that fought and con­tin­ue to fight valiant­ly to pre­serve their way of life.”

Vis­it Native Land here and enter an address in North or South Amer­i­ca or Aus­tralia to learn about pre­vi­ous or con­cur­rent Native inhab­i­tants, their lan­guages, and the his­tor­i­cal treaties signed and bro­ken over the cen­turies. Click­ing on the ter­ri­to­ry of each Indige­nous nation brings up links to oth­er infor­ma­tive sites and allows users to sub­mit cor­rec­tions to help guide this inclu­sive project toward greater accu­ra­cy.

The site also fea­tures a Teacher’s Guide, Blog by Tem­pra­no, and a page on the impor­tance of Ter­ri­to­ry Acknowl­edge­ment, a way for us to “insert an aware­ness of indige­nous pres­ence and land rights in every­day life,” and one of many “trans­for­ma­tive acts,” as Chelsea Vow­el, a Métis woman from the Plains Cree writes, “that to some extent undo Indige­nous era­sure.”

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

200+ Films by Indige­nous Direc­tors Now Free to View Online: A New Archive Launched by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

At its peak around the year 117 AD, the mighty Roman Empire owned five mil­lion square kilo­me­ters of land. It ruled more than 55 mil­lion peo­ple, between a sixth and a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion of the entire world. The empire, as clas­si­cist and his­to­ri­an Christo­pher Kel­ly describes it, “stretched from Hadri­an’s Wall in driz­zle-soaked north­ern Eng­land to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syr­ia; from the great Rhine-Danube riv­er sys­tem, which snaked across the fer­tile, flat lands of Europe from the Low Coun­tries to the Black Sea, to the rich plains of the North African coast and the lux­u­ri­ant gash of the Nile Val­ley in Egypt.” All that pow­er, of course, orig­i­nal­ly emanat­ed from Italy.

The builders of the Roman Empire could­n’t have pulled it off with­out seri­ous infra­struc­tur­al acu­men, includ­ing the skill to make con­crete that lasts longer than even the mod­ern vari­ety as well as the force­ful­ness and sheer man­pow­er to lay more than 400,000 kilo­me­ters of road.

Not long ago, map­mak­er Sasha Tru­bet­skoy took it upon him­self to ren­der Rome’s impe­r­i­al road sys­tem in the style of a mod­ern sub­way map; pop­u­lar demand put him to work on an aes­thet­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar map of Britain’s Roman roads not long after. Now he has turned his skills back toward the land where the Roman Empire all start­ed: above, you can see his “sub­way map” of the Roman roads of Italy.

“It was for­tu­nate enough that Italy’s Roman roads are quite well-stud­ied and doc­u­ment­ed, espe­cial­ly when it comes to their actu­al ancient names,” Tru­bet­skoy writes of this lat­est project. “This meant that I had to do less artis­tic inter­pre­ta­tion in order to make this look like a sen­si­ble, mod­ern chart. That said, there are still some cas­es where I had to cre­ative­ly recon­struct cer­tain roads, and I make it clear in the leg­end which roads those were.” As for the col­or-cod­ed sidelin­ing of Sici­ly and Sar­dinia, “this is a map of Italia (Italy) as the Romans saw it, which did not include those islands. On the oth­er hand, it did include parts of what are today Slove­nia and Croa­t­ia.”

You can buy a high-res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of Tru­bet­skoy’s Viae Ital­i­ae et Suae Vicini­tatis, or Roman Roads of Italy and Its Sur­round­ings, for $9.00 USD at his site. Print­ed at poster qual­i­ty, it could make a suit­able gift indeed for any of the car­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts, his­tor­i­cal­ly mind­ed tran­sit fans, Roman Empire his­to­ry buffs, or Ital­ian patri­ots in your life. And in a way, it shows his­to­ry com­ing full cir­cle, since much of our sense of how sub­way maps should look comes from a rev­o­lu­tion­ary 1972 map of the New York sub­way sys­tem. We’ve fea­tured it before here on Open Cul­ture, along­side an inter­view with its design­er, a cer­tain Mas­si­mo Vignel­li. And where do you sup­pose he hailed from?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Image cour­tesy of the David Rum­sey Map Cen­ter

Every­body knows a fact or two about the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, even those who’ve nev­er set foot there. At the very least, they know the US is a big coun­try, but it’s one thing to know that and anoth­er to tru­ly under­stand the scale involved. Today we offer you an arti­fact from car­to­graph­ic his­to­ry that illus­trates it vivid­ly: a 19th-cen­tu­ry trav­el­er’s map of the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er that, in order to dis­play the length of that mighty 2,320-mile water­way, extends to a full eleven feet. (Or, for those espe­cial­ly unfa­mil­iar with how things are in Amer­i­ca, dis­plays the river’s full 3,734-kilometer length at a full 3.35 meters.)

With a width of only three inch­es (or 7.62 cen­time­ters), the Rib­bon Map of the Father of Waters came on a spool the read­er could use to unroll it to the rel­e­vant sec­tion of the riv­er any­where between the Gulf of Mex­i­co and north­ern Min­neso­ta. First pub­lished in 1866, just a year after the end of the Civ­il War, the map “was mar­ket­ed toward tourists, who were flock­ing to the Mis­sis­sip­pi to see the sights and ride the steam­boats.” So writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Cara Giamo, who quotes art his­to­ri­an Nenette Luar­ca-Shoaf as describ­ing the riv­er as “a source of great awe. That kind of length, that kind of spa­cious­ness was incom­pre­hen­si­ble to a lot of folks who were com­ing from the East Coast.”

Luar­ca-Shoaf describes the map, an inven­tion of St. Louis entre­pre­neurs Myron Coloney and Sid­ney B. Fairchild, in more detail in an arti­cle of her own at Com­mon-Place. “The com­plete­ly unfurled map extends beyond the lim­its of the user’s reach, won­drous­ly embody­ing the scope of the riv­er in the time it took to unroll it and in the eleven feet of space it now occu­pies,” she writes. “At the same time, the care required to wind the strip back into Coloney and Fairchild’s patent­ed spool appa­ra­tus reit­er­ates the pre­car­i­ous­ness of human con­trol — either rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al or envi­ron­men­tal — over the mer­cu­r­ial Mis­sis­sip­pi.” We still today talk about “scrolling” maps, though we now mean it as noth­ing more than a dig­i­tal metaphor.

Unwieldy though it may seem, the Rib­bon Map of the Father of Waters must have struck its trav­el-mind­ed buy­ers in the 1860s — some 150 years before tech­nol­o­gy put touch­screens in all of our hands — as the height of car­to­graph­ic con­ve­nience. Despite hav­ing sold out their Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er map quick­ly enough to neces­si­tate a sec­ond edi­tion, though, Coloney and Fairchild did lit­tle more with their patent­ed con­cept. You can see a sur­viv­ing exam­ple of the Rib­bon Map in greater detail at the Library of Con­gress and the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion. The cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of riv­er tourists yearn­ing for an under­stand­ing of the sur­pris­ing breadth of Amer­i­ca’s land and depth of its his­to­ry may even con­sti­tute suf­fi­cient mar­ket for a repli­ca. But what hap­pens when it gets wet?

via Atlas Obscu­ra and Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All the Rivers & Streams in the U.S. Shown in Rain­bow Colours: A Data Visu­al­iza­tion to Behold

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

Learn the Untold His­to­ry of the Chi­nese Com­mu­ni­ty in the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.