Cartographic Evidence Research Articles

Ptolemy’s Chorographia in the New World: Revelations from the Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España of 1579–1581

The art‐historical issue raised here concerns some forgotten formal sources for a distinctive cartographic format once commonly informing European map‐making, and the specific proposition examined here in some detail is ‘chorographic’ description. Our immediate point of departure are those maps called pinturas which accompanied the Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España (Mexico) of 1579–81. Modern students of the history of cartography recognize that current knowledge of classical map‐making is highly speculative for the lack of any significant surviving examples. Even though the physical products are largely missing, we do know some classical terms for regional to world maps: tabula, forma, figura mundi, orbis pictus, or orbis terrarum descriptio, to which I would like now to add another term, tabulae chorographicae, making reference to a variant cartographic convention for which by far the most complete description is to be found in Ptolemy’s Geography (I, 1). From antique textual references, mainly ekphrasis (descriptions) of lost frescoes with landscape scenes, plus some scanty surviving, specifically cartographic evidence, mostly Roman, precise conclusions can now be drawn about that ancient representational mode – the tabulae chorographicae– which, besides describing the fossilized cartographic technique employed in the Mexican pinturas of c. 1571, likely represents an unrecognized functional precedent for the medieval orbis pictus.

Settlement and Monasticism at Ripon, North Yorkshire, From the 7th to 11th Centuries A.D.

Archaeological investigations of a number of small sites, combined with information provided by antiquarian writers, indicate the existence of a number of churches and/or cemeteries in the vicinity of Ripon Cathedral. In two cases these demonstrably originate in the 8th century or earlier, and in the other, less well documented instances an early origin seems likely. It is suggested that these sites are early ecclesiastical nuclei associated with the known 7th.-century monastery at Ripon, and a tentative reconstruction of the original monastic enclosure is proposed on the basis of archaeological, antiquarian and cartographic evidence.

Woodland origin and 'ancient woodland indicators': a case-study from Sidlings Copse, Oxfordshire, UK

A pollen sequence spanning the last c. 9500 years is presented from Sidlings Copse, a wood in Oxfordshire with a large number of vascular plant species generally taken to be indicators of 'ancient' (often assumed to be primary) woodland. The sequence provides evidence that the present woodland is secondary, resulting from regeneration on open land which commenced approximately 1000 years ago. Textual and cartographic evidence is used to shed additional light on the recent history of Sidlings Copse, indicating that it is a remnant of a much larger block of woodland present throughout the mediaeval and early postmediaeval periods up to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The work demonstrates that ancient woodland cannot be assumed to represent relicts of the original post glacial woodland cover and that large assemblages of 'ancient woodland indicator' vascular plants can occur in secondary woodland. It is suggested that such plants tend to be absent from recent secondary woodland because they are slower to colonize new sites than other species.

Ancient land divisions in the parish of Lesmahagow

Abstract A detailed case‐study of the evolution of territorial divisions in part of central Scotland is presented. Ancient land divisions in the parish of Lesmahagow drawn from eleventh and twelfth century records of the monastery of Kelso are identified, and their relation to the conditions of the time are discussed. The interpretation of the original charters is supported by cartographic and other evidence from later periods, and wherever possible boundaries are delineated with reference to modern maps. A remarkable degree of continuity of these territorial divisions, from monastic times to the present century, is demonstrated.

Everest, 1951: Cartographic and Photographic Evidence of a New Route from Nepal

Until 1949 topographical information about the Nepal Himalaya was almost nonexistent. Following a less than optimistic report by an Anglo-American trekking party to Sola Khumbu, in 1950, on the possibility of a new route up Everest, research in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, in early 1951, revealed ground and aerial photographs of the Nepalese side of Everest taken between 1921 and 1950. These photographs, combined with the RGS (Milne-Hinks) map, 1933-45, of the Tibetan and Nepalese side of the mountain showed a possible 'line' to the summit. This paper describes an important period in Himalayan exploration, the existence and importance of much of the information has neither been recognized nor credited in the literature.

The Authenticity of the Vinland Map

Kejlbo, Ib: The Authenticity of the Vinland Map. Geografisk Tidsskrift 92:1–13. Copenhagen 1992. The author is critical of the suggestion put forward by Skelton and Painter, (authors of ‘The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation’, 1965), that the Vinland Map and Resen's Map of 1605 might derive from a common, now lost, cartographic source. As Resen's map, and its precursor Stefansson's map of about 1590, were presumably compiled on the basis of legendary material rather than on already existing cartographic material, the author finds this theory untenable. A more likely source of the Vinland Map would, in his view, appear to be Claudius Clavus, the Danish cartographer, whose Nancy Map of 1427 remains the first map to bear witness of Norse geographical knowledge. Leaving the question of its authenticity to be settled, possibly by chemical or hitherto unknown cartographic evidence, the author recommends that the study of the original Norse sources remains central to any future discussion of the Vinland Map.

The Cartographic Evidence for the Columbus Landfall

(1988). The Cartographic Evidence for the Columbus Landfall. Terrae Incognitae: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 43-68.

The Cartographic Evidence for the Columbus Landfall

The Cartographic Evidence for the Columbus Landfall

An Examination of the Characteristics of Turloughs, using Muitivariate Statistical Techniques

An inventory of turloughs (temporary lakes) on the Irish Carboniferous Limestone has been made, and their characteristics examined from field observations and cartographic evidence. The characteristics of sixty turloughs which function at the present day were summarised by a series of indices, and subjected to cluster analysis and detrended correspondence analysis. Separate groupings of the turloughs on the basis of morphology, deposits and vegetation were compared, and these three aspects of the turloughs were found to be inter-related. The turlough floor vegetation is related to depth of flooding, becoming increasingly dominated by marsh plants as the depth increases to approximately three metres, but some of the deepest turloughs, and those with variable depth due to undulating floors, have a short duration of flooding, and a floor vegetation dominated by dry land ruderals. The relationship between deposits and vegetation also appears to be related to duration of flooding, peat and marl being associate...

The spatial economy of Jamaican sugar plantations: cartographic evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

A large collection of manuscript plans of Jamaican sugar estates, for the period primarily between 1750 and 1880, was analysed cartometrically. Contemporary ideal models of plantation organization were derived from an understanding of the economics of movement-minimization and concepts of social control. The actual location of sugar works, labourers' villages and great houses, and the zonation of crops, was distorted by variations in the size and shape of estates, available power resources and topography. Movement-minimization was more important than social control in creating the spatial economy, but estate works, villages and great houses all moved further apart after the abolition of slavery in 1838.

Two comments on “Historic cartographic evidence for Holocene changes in the Antarctic ice cover”] Antarctic ice cover

Readers of John G. Weihaupt's “Historic Cartographic Evidence for Holocene Changes in the Antarctic Ice Cover” (Eos, August 28, 1984, p. 493) may wish to consult Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Ages (Chilton, Radnor, Penn., 1966). The major part of this book is a presentation of the thesis that Weihaupt has independently developed: that early sixteenth century maps portray Antarctica, and in particular an ice‐free Ross Sea, and that such knowledge must have been obtained and transmitted from a remote, perhaps prehistoric, epoch. Hapgood is perhaps better known to the geophysical community for his earlier book, Earth's Shifting Crust (Pantheon, New York, 1958), which proposed that the growth of ice caps unbalances the crust so that it can, and during the Pleistocene frequently did, slide over the interior, displacing the poles several thousand kilometers.The more conservative literature on Terra Australis of the sixteenth century cartographers is extensive; Acta Cartographica, a collection of reprinted papers on historical cartography, has over two dozen references in its indexes. A plausible hypothesis by J. Enterline (Imago Mundi, 26, pp. 48–58, 1972) is that it reflects Portugese acquisition of Indonesian knowledge of Australia, the prominent embayment (Hapgood's and Weihaupt's ice‐free Ross Sea) being the Gulf of Carpentaria. Underestimation of the size of the globe forced Australia to extend over the pole, just as it forced newly discovered America to lie close to Japan.

Historic cartographic evidence for Holocene changes in the Antarctic ice cover

Roughly 125,000 years ago, the earth underwent a climatic warming trend [Bergen and Van Couvering, 1979] called the Sangamon. This occurred more than 1 million years after the commencement of the Pleistocene time of great glacial advances which brought ice sheets of continental proportions to North America, northern Europe, and Siberia. That interglacial warming trend is the most pronounced climatic warming that we know during the period of the Ice Ages [Mitchell, 1977]. The Sangamon was followed, however, by a time of lower worldwide temperatures when the glaciers advanced once more and until a new warming trend commenced some 20,000–30,000 years ago. Earth's glaciers and ice sheets then began to retreat again, and about 10,000 years ago the last vestiges of these northern continental ice sheets withdrew as the latest warm interglacial, the Holocene, began. The Holocene continues today. Earth's atmospheric and oceanic temperatures rose in this time, well after Neanderthal and Cro‐Magnon men lived in Asia and in Europe. The Holocene warming has been synchronous in both hemispheres and led to a worldwide climatic optimum, called the Hypsithermal interval, between 9,000 and 2,500 years ago [Deevey, 1957]. The Hypsithermal interval was the warmest part of the Holocene to date, and it largely preceded the Bronze Age, which commenced about 3,000 years ago. While the continental ice sheets of North America, Europe, and Asia disintegrated with the approach of the Holocene, the great ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antartica remained stable and largely unchanged at least since the warm Sangamon interglacial of 125,000 years ago.

Some phases in extending the cultivated area in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Egypt

The period 1953-1980 was marked by a number of different approaches to the of the cultivated area in Egypt. The 1950s were years of enthusiasm, the 1960s years of significant investment in the development of new lands and the 1970s were marked by re-evaluation and very modest investment. At the same time there was a continuously sustained official rhetoric claiming that land development was an important part of national policy. Awareness of these phases led the author to review the land development experience of nineteenthand twentieth-century Egypt. Cartographic evidence (maps from 1800, 1850, 1876, 1913, 1934 and more recent spatial records) pointed to a major phase of vigorous expansion, namely in the period of Muhammad Ali. Parallels will be drawn between the first half of the early nineteenth century and the 1950-1960s phases of horizontal expansion of cultivation, in terms of first the leadership and policy contexts, secondly the difficulties and achievements and finally with respect to the subsequent re-evaluation closely associated with foreign participation/interaction.

Unusual Buildings at Wood Lane End, Hemel Hempstead, Herts

The Roman site at Wood Lane End is situated on the east side of Hemel Hempstead (TL 082079) adjacent to the Industrial Estate and close to the MI intersection (FIG. I). It occupies the plateau on a 450 ft. contour about midway between the rivers Ver and Gade. Close by the land dips in a south-easterly direction to form the start of a shallow valley running across the Gorhambury estate towards Verulamium three miles away. The site is equidistant ( 2½ miles) between the Roman villas at Gorhambury outside Verulamium and Gadebridge situated alongside the Gade stream just to the north of Hemel Hempstead. The subsoil is of the Batcombe series—a pebbly loam over a bedrock of clay with flint. In places small pockets of gravel are encountered while occasionally fingers of chalk rise close to the surface. As elsewhere on the plateau the subsoil is surprisingly well drained, the drainage of the area being towards the Ver valley. The soil is suited to arable cultivation though its productive capacity is limited by the varying degrees of stoniness. The earliest cartographic evidence of the Wood Lane End area comes from the Tithe apportionment map of 1843 (DSA4/48). It would appear then that the site was located in a field called Hales Wood, but despite its name it was classified as arable, and was 7·021 acres in extent. None of the adjacent field names gives any indication of Roman or earlier features and neither do the boundaries of the 1843 map reflect the alignment of the Roman buildings. They relate solely to the roads, as shown on the nineteenth-century map.

The Scottish highlands outlined: Cartographic evidence for the position of the highland‐lowland boundary

Abstract From about 1700 onwards, several maps were produced showing the supposed position of the “Highland Line” — the boundary between Highland and Lowland Scotland. The paper assesses the cartographic evidence for the relative positioning of this division within Scotland apparent in a number of maps dating from 1700 to 1895. Several other sources are used to determine the accuracy of these mapped lines in relation to the actual extent of the Gaelic language in that period.

Landscape Parks and the Form of Small Towns in Great Britain

The occurrence and significance of landscape parks as elements in British town plans is reported. Parks in which medieval baronial castles form the residence are used to exemplify a four-part sequence of change in parks in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the concomitant effects of such change upon adjacent towns. This chronology is then expanded to formulate a general organizational framework applicable to all park-affected towns which, in addition, provides a qualitative measure of comparison between examples. THE landscape park's 'fundamental characteristic of spaciousness was impossible near a town'. So wrote Maurice Beresford in an essay on parks published in 1957;1 yet even the most cursory glance through the plans of the 1:25 000 series of the Ordnance Survey reveals many towns which have one or more landscape parks adjacent to, or even intruding into, their urban fabric. The early nineteenth-century printed maps of Britain provide similar evidence of places where the association of park and town has not continued to the present day. In all, the available cartographic evidence reveals a total of some 400 towns in Great Britain which have, or have had, a park as one element of their town plan. It is the aim of this paper to analyse the effects of one phase of the history of parks on the form of adjacent small towns; namely that period between the 1720os and the early nineteenth century when parks were being re-designed in the landscape mode. DISTRIBUTION AND CHARACTERISTICS In some areas towns with parks form a substantial proportion of the total number of towns in the region. This is most evident amongst the market towns of the Home Counties, but this is not entirely unexpected in view of the known concentration of parks in this region.2 In all, nearly one-third of all towns with adjacent parks are to be found in south-east England. Some towns in this area, Henley-on-Thames, Beaconsfield and Sevenoaks, for example, have as many as three large landscape parks in their immediate environs, as well as numbers of smaller ornamental villa estates. Other areas, most notably East Anglia and Devon and Cornwall, have few examples of such park-affected towns since they were dominated in their land ownership and social structure by the yeomanry and gentry. These smaller landowners, though responsible for some lesser landscape parks in the eighteenth century, generally concentrated their resources upon agrarian improvement before the 1820s.3 In more detail, some interesting groups of similar examples emerge. The small towns of the Tweed drainage basin in Scotland, for instance, each have one or two parks adjoining whose ownership and design chronology compare closely. A second group, distinguished by their owners rather than their location, are those landscape parks created by the successful entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. Such men often built their mansions and planted their parks to overlook the industry and associated urban development which was the basis of their

The road network of medieval England and Wales

The medieval road system of England and Wales has never been studied in any detail. This article attempts to bring together the cartographic evidence of the Gough and Paris maps and the more indirect evidence of three royal itineraries. This will suggest first which Roman roads were still in use in medieval times, and second what new lines of travel had come into use, thus distinguishing between the paved Roman roads which were still usable and the new routes which made and maintained themselves.

History and surveillance of volcanic activity on Jan Mayen island

Jan Mayen is a small isolated Arctic island located on or very near the junction of the southern end of Mohns ridge and the central part of the Jan Mayen fracture zone. The alkaline petrology and tectonic setting of Jan Maven are similar to some other volcanic islands along the mid-Atlantic ridge, particularly the Westmann Islands of Iceland. Both the Westmann Islands and Jan Mayen are underlain by a relatively thick oceanic(?) crust, about 15 km thick, and recent eruptions were initiated and accompanied by earthquakes with loci from 25 to 30 km deep. The northern hall of the island is dominated by Mt. Beerenberg, a major central volcano composed mainly of alkali olivine basalt. The oldest exposed lavas are of upper Pleistocene age. Flank eruptions on Beerenberg in 1732, 1818 and 1970, together with historic and cartographic evidence for similar eruptions in the 16th century and the middle of the 19th century, suggest an eruption frequency of 150 years ± 75 years. A three-station seismograph network, six surface tilt-measuring sites, and a gravity and levelling profile comprise the main features of the present surveillance system.

The Morphological History of Loch Leven, Kinross

SynopsisThe historical formation of the loch is described, using geological and geomorphological evidence. The changing areal dimensions from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries are discussed using historical cartographic and documentary evidence. Finally, a comparison is made between the results of the three bathymetrical surveys that have now been carried out in an attempt to determine the amount of silting.

The Fortress of Louisbourg and Its Cartographic Evidence

The Fortress of Louisbourg and Its Cartographic Evidence