From the Index
Maps tell stories about how people understand, measure, navigate, and imagine the world. This growing collection brings together historic maps and map-like objects, with descriptions, creators, dates, source institutions, and rights information that help place each work in context.
Field Notes
The long title makes this map’s working methods unusually visible. Sketches made in 1804 were revised using triangulation, astronomical observations, and barometric measurements, with several contributors named. Cities,…
Field Notes
Instead of looking down on a landscape, this sheet looks across its height. Humboldt and Bonpland’s observations become an elevation profile in which plant names and geological information…
Field Notes
Sixty manuscript sheets radiate outward from the North Pole in Urbano Monte’s ambitious world map. This digital composite brings the separate sheets together with the diagrams and legends…
Field Notes
This nineteenth-century Japanese atlas looks backward to China’s Three Kingdoms era. Rather than recording the political world of its own publication date, it maps an earlier division of…
Field Notes
Dense hachures turn the walls of Yosemite Valley into a remarkably tactile landscape. The sheet draws on a topographical plat prepared under the Wheeler survey and names the…
Field Notes
Woodbridge’s chart organizes the world around temperature rather than political borders. Dotted isothermal lines connect places with equal average warmth, and color separates climatic regions associated with different…
Field Notes
The Caspian Sea closes this expanded copy of Piri Reis’s Book on Navigation. Its presence broadens a manuscript best known for Mediterranean coasts and ports, reminding readers that…
Field Notes
Gibraltar and Ceuta face one another across the narrow passage between the Mediterranean and Atlantic. In this Ottoman navigation manuscript, the strait becomes the subject of its own…
Field Notes
This oval world map belongs to an expanded Ottoman manuscript of Piri Reis’s Book on Navigation. The original work was composed in 1525, but this richly illustrated copy…
Field Notes
Published before San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and fire, this block-line map records streets, selected buildings, fire limits and waterfront facilities in the central city. Its key distinguishes construction…
