Map and map-makers

Men doubtless tried in very early times to make a mental picture of their spatial horizons and of the principal natural features they came across when they journeyed by land, sea or river. Not that a need for landmarks is an exclusively human characteristic. When herds of wild animals make their annual trek across the vast distances that separate their winter quarters from their summer pastures, what do they do but follow a map of their territory mysteriously engraved in their memory?

Man, however, has made it his business to depict the world around him in durable form. Using rudimentary instruments he began to reveal a kind of mapping impulse by scratching symbolic representations of his environment on cave walls and the bark of trees. This impulse may have sprung from a need to record for later generations the location of hunting grounds and springs, hazards and havens. Perhaps it was also part of an innate human desire to achieve intellectual mastery over a world where unknown lands stretched far beyond familiar landscapes.

As the centuries went by, human knowledge and productive capacity increased, instruments for measuring distance were invented and improved, travellers covered ever greater distances. The need to record space visually according to increasingly formal rules was extended to continents and then to the Earth in its entirety. Methods and techniques of map-making gradually became more sophisticated and accurate thanks to the dedicated work of pioneering scientific map-makers engaged on projects which in some cases lasted for many years.

The story of cartography has been an epic of human perseverance in the face of natural obstacles - deserts, mountains, oceans. The longest and most arduous task of map-makers, however, has been that of overcoming the distorted visions and cultural prejudices inherited from a past in which each people naturally saw itself at the centre of the universe. This issue of the UNESCO Courier shows how cartographers have grappled with these and other problems and presents some of their remarkable achievements.

Discover this issue. Download the PDF.