Customer Reviews

Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society

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This review is of the 2nd edition, there is now a third edition.

Thrower concisely outlines the history of cartographic advances from a 2300 B.C. Mesopotamian map to modern day animated and GIS maps. Thrower is careful to highlight cartographic advances distinct from geographic discoveries in Classical Antiquity, East and South Asia, European and Islam in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and then advances in the 19th century to modern times. Perhaps as a modern map maker, I forget that there was an early inventor of map projections (probably Hipparchus of Niceaes), contour lines (1791), and representative fractions (in France in 1806). The history of projections is presented throughout the book, and concisely in an appendix. The initial chapter on maps of pre-literate people was perhaps most fascinating to me with the Bedolina petroglyph (Northern Italy, 2000-1500 B.C ) and Marshall Island stick charts. There is now a 3rd edition, so perhaps the book was updated with recent advances such as Google earth and a dynamic GPS maps. The book is well illustrated, but sometimes the maps suffer from reduction and being in black and white. Readers of this may enjoy the color maps presented in Mapping the World: maps and their history by Nathaniel Harris.