History of Geographic

Thought
 The Spatial Organization of Human Activity
• Geography is a “spatial science” (the study of
place/space)

• Human activities are:

 located in space at particular places
 regular (w/ discernible patterns)
 able to be described and understood
 Ancient Map-Making
Earliest maps: clay tablets by ancient Babylonians

Catal Huyük village map (Turkey); 8,000 yrs. old

China: silk maps from 2nd-century BCE

Mayans/Incas: maps of conquered territories
 Greek geographic thought:
“geography”(earth-writing): coined by Eratosthenes
 closely estimated Earth’s circumference
Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference:

Syene (S) is located on the Tropic of Cancer, so that at summer

solstice the sun appears at the zenith, directly overhead. In
Alexandria (A) the sun is south of the zenith at the same time. So
the circumference of earth can be calculated being times the
distance δ between A and S.
 Medieval Mapping
Chinese:
O Chinese geographers highly advanced
O Invented compass in 11th-century
O Burned sticks of incense to measure time

Muslim world:
O Arab geographers (700-1400) translated
O Greek geographic works
O Religious need for good maps?
O holy pilgrimage to Mecca & prayer facing
Mecca 5 times a day…
Muslim World in 1500
 Meanwhile, in Europe…
 The medieval Christian T-O map
 T = Mediterranean, the Nile, the Don
 O = encircling ocean

Crusader map of
Jerusalem, dating
from the 12th-
century (east is at
the top)
 “Modern” Geography
 Started during the Scientific Revolution
 From the late Renaissance to the Enlightenment
 From trust in a person’s mind  external observation
 Copernican Revolution (1543) to Newton’s Principia (1687)
 A Note on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
 Thomas Kuhn
 How science changes
 Normal science
 Anomalies
 Crisis
 Revolutionary science
 I Kant Believe It.
 Immanuel Kant:
 Human knowledge could be classified in three ways:
 Classify knowledge in terms of type (zoology, geology, etc.)
 Studying things in a temporal dimension (history)
 Facts relative to spatial relationships (geography!)
 Geography types
 Physical, mathematical, moral, political, commercial, and
theological
 A PHILOSOPHY OF SPACE
ABSOLUTE SUBSTANTIVE RELATIVE
1. knowledge 1. “a priori”: 1. knowledge is
gained through knowledge exists subjective
experience outside of us between objects

2. fundamental laws 2. reality is 2. we produce

(Cogito ergo sum) perception “space”

3. scientific or
religious
 By the end of the 19 th

century…
 Geography a discipline in world universities
 The Royal Geographic Society is founded in England
 The National Geographic Society is founded in the
US.
 In the 20th Century…
O Environmental Determinism
O People’s physical, moral, and mental attributes are directly
caused by natural environment
O Yeah. No.
O Regional Geography
O Simply looking at places (areal differentiation)
O Quantitative Revolution
O Numbers, numbers, numbers!
O Critical Geography
O Marxist, feminist, postmodern geographies
 Pattison’s Four Themes
(1964)
O Spatial Tradition
O True essentials: geometry and movement
O Location, place, distance, etc.
O Area Studies Tradition
O Nature of places, character and differentiation
O Human-Land Tradition
O Interaction between human and environment
O Earth Science Tradition
O Physical geography
 Today: GPS and GIS!
O Global Positioning System
O 24 orbiting satellites + tracking stations on the ground +
portable receivers
O Locations determined by time delay in signals received
from 3+ satellites
O Geographic Information System
O Software package + computer database
O Vector approach: precise location of each object is
described
O Raster approach: the study area is divided into a set of
small square cells, and the content is quantified/described.
 Let’s look at how this
technology is used!
O http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/m
edia/geospatial-revolution/?ar_a=1
The pioneering research of Paul Baran in the 1960s, who envisioned a
communications network that would survive a major enemy
attacked…the distributed network structure offered the best
survivability.
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET)
 Who has access to the
Internet in the US now?
http://broadbandmap.gov