Introduction: The Study of Cartographic History and Its Core Significance

The interdisciplinary mind map presented above makes explicit the porous boundaries that have historically defined cartographic history, but it also underscores the field’s distinct epistemological commitments: rather than treating maps as mere passive reflections of geographic reality, cartographic history interrogates them as active, material artifacts that mediate between human cognition, technological practice, and socio-political power. This commitment to analyzing maps as dynamic, context-dependent objects distinguishes the field from adjacent disciplines, even as it draws on their theoretical and methodological tools. To formalize these boundaries, we can operationalize disciplinary differences through a comparative framework that centers core research questions, methodological priorities, and normative concerns, as outlined in Table 1.1.

| 学科 | 核心研究问题 | 核心方法 | 核心关切 | |------|--------------|----------|----------| | 制图学（史） | 地图的生产、传播、使用如何随时间演变？其物质形式与表征逻辑如何反映特定时代的认知与实践？ | 地图文本分析、技术史分析、物质文化研究、语境化解读 | 地图作为人类空间实践的物质载体的意义 | | 地理学 | 空间格局与过程如何塑造人类与环境的互动关系？ | 实地测量、空间统计分析、地理信息系统（GIS）、遥感解译 | 空间现象的成因、分布规律与演化机制 | | 科学史 | 地理知识如何作为科学知识体系的组成部分被生产、验证与传播？ | 文本考据、思想史分析、知识社会学研究 | 科学知识的合法性建构、范式演化与跨文化传播 | | 人类学 | 不同文化的空间表征系统如何反映其社会结构、信仰体系与地方性知识？ | 民族志、参与观察、跨文化比较 | 文化相对性、非西方知识体系的合法性与多样性 |

This comparative framework clarifies that while cartographic history overlaps with geography in its focus on spatial representation, it prioritizes historical change and material form over spatial analysis of contemporary phenomena; while it shares ground with history of science in its attention to knowledge production, it centers the material artifact of the map rather than abstract scientific ideas; and while it aligns with anthropology in its interest in cross-cultural spatial practices, it emphasizes diachronic change rather than synchronic cultural description. These boundaries are not rigid: as the case of Marshallese stick charts (discussed in Sidebar 1.1) demonstrates, objects once classified as anthropological curiosities have been recontextualized as core objects of cartographic historical study, expanding the field’s scope to include non-Western, non-literate mapping traditions that were previously excluded from dominant narratives.

Sidebar 1.1: Case Study – Marshallese Stick Charts and the Decolonization of Cartographic History

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Marshallese *rebbelib* (stick charts) were classified as “primitive navigational tools” and housed in anthropology museum collections, excluded from standard histories of cartography that framed map-making as a uniquely Western, literate, scientific practice. It was not until the 1970s that cartographic historians such as John H. McCoy re-evaluated these objects as sophisticated material representations of spatial knowledge: rather than depicting literal geographic space, *rebbelib* encode wave refraction patterns, island chain relationships, and seasonal wind dynamics, allowing Marshallese navigators to traverse 1,500 kilometers of open Pacific Ocean without compasses or astronomical instruments. This re-evaluation forced the field to confront its longstanding Eurocentrism, expanding the definition of “map” to include non-literate, non-perspectival, and functionally specific spatial representations, and integrating indigenous knowledge systems into global cartographic history. For the digital edition, an interactive 3D model of a *rebbelib* is available, with annotations linking each stick and shell to its corresponding spatial meaning.

The three core research questions that structure this volume emerged from this expanded, decolonized understanding of the field, and are designed to integrate both Western and non-Western mapping traditions into a single, comparative framework. The first question—*How have human conceptions of space and place evolved over time?*—centers spatial cognition as the foundational driver of cartographic innovation. Spatial cognition refers to the suite of psychological processes humans use to perceive, encode, store, retrieve, and manipulate information about spatial relationships, including orientation, distance, direction, and the categorization of places into meaningful spatial units (e.g., territories, regions, nations). To illustrate the evolution of spatial cognition through cartographic evidence, we can compare two foundational world maps: the Babylonian *Imago Mundi* (c. 600 BCE), the oldest surviving world map, etched onto a clay tablet, and Claudius Ptolemy’s *Geographia* (2nd century CE), the foundational text of mathematical cartography in the Western and Islamic worlds. The Babylonian map centers the city of Babylon as the cosmic and geographic center of the known world, surrounded by a “bitter river” (the Ocean) that marks the boundary of the habitable realm, with triangular regions beyond the river labeled as “lands where no one lives” and associated with mythical beasts and divine punishment. This representation reflects a spatial cognition rooted in theological cosmology and administrative centrality: space is organized around the seat of political power, and unknown space is defined in relation to sacred narrative. By contrast, Ptolemy’s world map uses a latitude-longitude grid and conic projection to represent the entire known world (spanning from the Canary Islands to China, and from the Arctic to the equator) as a mathematically consistent, measurable space, with locations plotted based on astronomical observations and traveler reports rather than theological doctrine. This shift reflects the rise of Hellenistic rationalism, which prioritized empirical observation and mathematical reasoning over sacred text as the basis for geographic knowledge. Neuroimaging research from University College London (2019) provides further evidence for the cognitive continuity between historical map use and modern spatial navigation: fMRI scans of participants viewing ancient maps show identical activation patterns in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex as those observed when participants navigate real-world environments, confirming that historical maps are not just records of spatial knowledge, but material extensions of human spatial cognition itself.

The second core research question—*How have technological innovations reshaped the production and use of maps?*—centers the material and technical dimensions of cartographic practice. Technological change does not simply improve the accuracy or efficiency of map production; it transforms the social function of maps, the audiences that can access them, and the types of spatial knowledge that can be represented. For example, the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century reduced the unit cost of map production by over 90%: before 1450, a hand-drawn world map on vellum took a scribe 3–6 months to complete and cost the equivalent of a skilled artisan’s annual wage, limiting access to maps to elite political and religious institutions. After 1450, woodcut and copperplate engraving allowed printers to produce hundreds of copies of a map in a single day, reducing the cost to less than 1% of a hand-drawn map. The 1477 printed edition of Ptolemy’s *Geographia*, which included 27 engraved maps, had a print run of over 1,000 copies, compared to fewer than 100 surviving handwritten copies of the text from the previous millennium. This technological shift did not just make maps more accessible: it enabled the standardization of geographic knowledge, as printed maps could be distributed uniformly across political boundaries, creating a shared spatial imaginary that underpinned the European age of exploration. A second, more recent example is the launch of the Landsat 1 satellite in 1972, which marked the beginning of operational satellite remote sensing for cartographic purposes. Prior to Landsat, large-scale topographic mapping required years of ground-based surveying, with global coverage taking decades to co