3. Greenland Inuit cartographic devices: portable, tactile maps carved out of driftwood
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In 1885, Arctic explorer Gustav Holm encountered a number of Tunumiit—or Eastern Greenland Inuit communities—who never met Europeans before. One of them, named Kunit, a native of the Ammassalik Fjord, gifted him with this set of maps carved out of driftwood
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As tactile maps—or 3D strip maps, if you prefer—they can be read in the dark, too.
This inherent quality is crucial in an Arctic environment, since at those latitudes you can experience nearly 24 hours of complete darkness in winter
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4. The Marshall Islands stick charts, a kind of sculptural cartography used by the Marshallese to navigate by canoe the Pacific Ocean. These charts mapped the way islands disrupt deep ocean swells
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'In the Marshall Islands,' writes Ben Finney, 'and only there, navigators skilled at reading the way islands disrupt the patterning of the deep ocean swells made "stick charts" depicting islands and their effect on the swells.'
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5. Siberian sealskin map (c. 1860).
Drawn on sealskin by a member of the semi-nomadic Chukchi people, who live on the Asiatic side of Siberia's Bering Strait, it depicts the coastal topography of Chukotka Peninsula and its trade locations
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6. Early Chinese cartography: The 'Yu Ji Tu', or 'Map of the Tracks of Yu Gong', carved onto a stone stele in 1137
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7. Lukala wall map (DR Congo)
The map shows the location of the guardian spirits, chiefdoms, and waterways important to Luba kingship
and history. Map photographed in 1898 on the Charles
Lemaire expedition to the Lovoi River (History of Cartography III, p. 32)
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8. Another fascinating 'stone map': the Sayhuite monolith (Peru), probably a symbolic representation of the Inca hydraulic systems
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The felines carved into the stone, according to Peruvian archaeologist Federico Kauffmann Doig, are 'naturalistic representations of Qhoa in a fertilizing attitude'
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9. The Babylonian World Map (or Imago Mundi), probably the oldest map depicting the known world, discovered at Sippar, some 60 km north of Babylon on the east bank of the Euphrates (6th century BC) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonia
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10. A Burmese Map of the World, showing traces of Mediaeval European Map-making (17th Century)
instagram.com/p/CEyl0p0D7DJ/
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11. Maps drawn in the sand by Tuareg herders from the Sahel region, put on paper by Tuareg informants and modified for publication by French geographer Edmond Bemus
(from Edmond Bemus, 'La représentation de l'espace chez des Touaregs du Sahel', in 'Mappemonde' 1988/3)
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A Tuareg woman of the Kel-Adagh group in the Adrar des Iforas massif (Mali) drawing a map of the Ouzzeine Valley in the sand, showing its main axis and its perpendicular branches. Photograph by Edmond Bemus (1968)
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12. Saint-Bélec slab, Europe’s oldest known 3D map, dating from the early Bronze Age, between 1900 BC and 1650 BC. First uncovered in 1900, the slab was found again in a cellar in 2014. The engravings match a stretch of the River Odet valley theguardian.com/world/2021/apr
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