Mapping

<p class="p">What is thought to be the earliest map was found in the caves of Lascaux, France. Painted 16,500 years ago, the caves are famous for their spectacular drawings of bulls, horses and antelope but the drawings may also be the first recorded star map. In a region of the Lascaux caves known as the Shaft of the Dead Man, according to researchers, paintings of a bull, a bird-man and a bird on a stick form a map of the sky with the eyes of each figure representing the three prominent stars Vega, Deneb and Altair.<span id="footnote-008-backlink"></span></p> <p class="p">These drawings, and similar findings in other pre-historic sites, suggest that maps of the night sky have been used for navigation for millenia. More recently, cartography took a new precedence as, from the 16th to the present day, colonial expansion saw map-making that catered to governments and commercial enterprises with a vested interest in controlling land, people and resources. As such we cannot view maps created under these conditions as objective representations; they are in fact laden with subjective views of the world.<span id="footnote-007-backlink"></span> For example, the Mercator map, one of the most popular maps in the world, was devised in 1569 to aid navigation along colonial trade routes by drawing straight lines across the oceans; the map places western Europe in the centre and exaggerates the scale of the northern hemisphere, making North America and Europe bigger than South America and Africa, when in fact South America is almost twice as large as Europe.</p> <p class="p">As Laura Lo Presti makes clear in her piece for this edition, maps are not simple abstractions, they are rather “visual events” or “unstable practices” which emerge “through acts of seeing and sensing.” Maps change over time. Borders and boundaries are constantly in flux, shifting with wars and politics and in response to changes in international relations…</p>