COLEGIO NUESTRA SEÑORA DEL ROSARIO - BOGOTA

“Hacia la construcción del pensamiento crítico – social” - “Piensa, Ama y Transforma”

WORKSHEET Nº: 1 GRADE: TERM:2 DATE: February 22nd

SEVENTH 7th
EC: I recognize that the phenomena studied can be observed from different points of view.
EC: I identify and take into account the various aspects that are part of the phenomena I study (geographical
location, historical evolution, political, economic, social and cultural organization ...).
EC: I use coordinates, conventions and scales to work with maps and representation planes.

BLR Understand that some representations about world have changed based on the visions of those who make
TOPIC: Representation of Earth - Cartography
PROFICIENCIES: Social thinking, interpretation and perspective analysis.
STUDENT: TEACHER: Andrés Ignacio Rodríguez Rodríguez

EARTH REPRESENTATION: CARTOGRAPHY

Objectives:
 Analyze historical maps to determine how they inform our understanding of time and place.

 Analyze maps to learn how world views from medieval times through the Renaissance informed
cartography.

 Evaluate how cultural assumptions influenced the process of mapping the American West.

 Evaluate what present-day maps can tell us about changes over time and contemporary world views.
Time of the lesson: 140 mins/Two Classes.

Dear students, in these CISA you will be learning issues about evolution of Cartography and its uses in different
eras. Remember that this worksheet will be developed step by step where you have to focus on the instructions
of each point. The teacher every class will explain which activities you have to do in class in a synchronic and a
synchronic mode. When you finish, you will submit and upload all the evidences on the school platform in a
digital document (PPT or DOC).

This lesson provides students with opportunities to work with historical maps as cultural artifacts that reflect
the views of particular times and places. Students begin by examining European world maps from three eras
-- the Middle Ages, the Age of Discovery, and the period of New World exploration -- in order to discover how
people of those times understood their world and interacted with it. Then students look at maps that record the
early exploration of the America. Finally, students collect present-day maps, using library and/or Internet
resources, to investigate the range of perspectives we adopt toward our world and how our maps reflect our own
cultural concerns and aspirations.

1. CONTEXT
So, geographers, on maps of Africa,
they fill their lagoons with wild photos;
and in the absence of towns they put elephants
in the habitable hills.
Jonathan Swift

Historically, cartographic errors have been ignored. This perhaps it is because, when considering as mere
failures, there is a tendency to dismiss them as insubstantial. However, just take a look, for example, at the
letters claiming that California was an island, to the mysterious black mountains of Rupes Nigra on the pole
North or representations of Patagônia as a region with 2.7 m tall giants, so that we realize that these Made-up
lands are crying out for reexamination. How did those ideas come about? Why was so strongly believed in
they? And how many equally strange examples can we find?

Look at the following examples about this idea of Myths and Lies in Cartography

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Figure 1 Sebastian Münster’s “Tabula novarum insularum, quas Diversis respectibus Occidentales & Indianas uocant” (1554), the first printed map
of the American continent, showing North America bent over to accommodate Verrazano’s description

Figure 2 The 16th-century Carta Marina features the mythical Tile (or Thule) near the Orkney Islands

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ACTIVITY #1:

a. Watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCXnYnZ_CkA about Edward Brooke-Hitching’s

addictive book The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps and take notes on
your notebook.
b. Select one map of the book The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps ,
take an screenshot and explain in a document (Word, Powerpoint) your opinion about this blunder
representation of a place on earth in 1 parragraph.
Note: The teacher will share with you the text in pdf.

c. Answer in the same document of the point (b) : Which are the intentions of this type of Cartography?
What do you consider was the consequence in human knowledge of this maps?

HISTORICAL CARTOGRAPHY

The history of cartography traces the

development of cartography, or
mapmaking technology, in human
history. Maps have been one of the
most important human inventions for
millennia, allowing humans to
explain and navigate their way
through the world. The earliest
surviving maps include cave
paintings and etchings on tusk and
stone, followed by extensive maps
produced by ancient Babylon,
Greece and Rome, China, and India.
In their most simple form maps are
two dimensional constructs,
however since the age of Classical
Greece maps have also been
Figure 3. Ptolemy’s maps: the father of modern Geography
projected onto a three-dimensional
sphere known as a globe. The
Mercator Projection, developed by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator, was widely used as the standard
two-dimensional projection of the earth for world maps until the late 20th century, when more accurate projections
were formulated. Mercator was also the first to use and popularise the concept of the atlas as a collection of
maps.

Modern methods of transportation, the

use of surveillance aircraft, and more
recently the availability of satellite
imagery have made documentation of
many areas possible that were
previously inaccessible. Free online
services such as Google Earth have
made accurate maps of the world more
accessible than ever before.

Figure 4 Possibly the oldest surviving map has been engraved on this
mammoth tusk, dated to 25,000 BC, found from Pavlov in the Czech Republic.

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ACTIVITY #2:

a. Through a copy of the Map Analysis Worksheet available on the platform look how you can use the
worksheet to discover various kinds of information in an historical map, including facts about the map
itself (date, creator, purpose, etc.) and facts about the past. You will use the worksheet to examine a
variety of historical maps.

b. In groups of 4 students use the "Map Analysis Worksheet" and complete it to prepare a class report in
your work document on the significance of one of the following historical maps:

 Group 1: The Psalter Map (c. 1250)—a religious representation of the medieval world with Jerusalem at
its center—can be accessed through the British Library.
 Group 2: Higden's Polychronicon (c. 1350)—a more secular medieval map that appeared in a history of
all times since creation. It can be accessed through the British Library.
 Group 3: Ptolemy's World Map (1482)—a map combining the classical view of Ptolemaic astronomy with
geographic information from the early voyages of the Age of Discovery (British Library).
 Group 4: The "Christopher Columbus" Chart (c. 1490)—a Genoese map sometimes attributed to
Columbus that shows a world map based on geographic information from the early voyages of the Age
of Discovery within the concentric spheres of Ptolemaic astronomy.
 Group 5: Waldseemuller's Global Map (1509)—the first map to show the New World as two continents
and the first to designate this area "America"—
 Group 6: Speed's World Map (1627)—a richly detailed representation of the eastern and western
hemispheres after more than a century of New World exploration.

References

 This document is based on the material: Mapping the Past available in

https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plans/mapping-past consulted on Feburay 21 2021

 BROOKE-HITCHING, E. (2018). The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps.
Blume: Barcelona.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJOOoLzj-W8