In Central Asia, the introduction of mechanised farming and the transformation of the landscape caused by agricultural intensification over the last 50 years have resulted in the massive destruction ...of archaeological remains. In this paper, we focus on an underestimated and unexploited type of remote sensing for the study of landscape change and anthropic impact on cultural heritage: 1:10,000 Soviet military maps of the 1950s. We present their use in the case study of the Archaeological Map of the Samarkand region. We argue that their precision and the early date at which they were produced make it possible to employ them as a reference tool for systematic survey and archaeological heritage management in Central Asia and throughout the former Soviet Union. We discuss the results of an archaeological survey based on these maps and show how they can be used to evaluate the destruction of archaeological mounds during the last 50 years, by contrasting them with modern satellite imagery.
This note concerns an atlas of military maps dating from the middle of the seventeenth century. Almost certainly compiled in France, it came into the possession of the British Museum (now Library) in ...the early nineteenth century but seems never to have been described at length. Although manuscript military atlases are not rare, this one unusually includes maps of twenty-nine British and Irish towns and cities that seem to be scarcely known.
The Kis-Balaton Water Protection System (KBWPS) is a wetland restoration project of over 8000 ha in extent, established to protect the water quality of Hungary's Lake Balaton. The healthy survival of ...the wetland macro-vegetation is essential for processes of bio-filtration, thus regular vegetation surveys have been carried out since the project began, to monitor the macrophyte growth in correspondence with the re-flooding. This biomonitoring is now very sophisticated, using ortho-photographs and a GIS database. However, the processes of wetland survival and regeneration are not fully understood, nor are the timescales involved; but there does exist in Hungary much archive cartography, especially since the 1780s, as well as records of the water-levels of Lake Balaton and of wetland extent and condition, which could be of great value in managing the KBWPS. Archive maps contain much information about past environments and if viewed in a historical series, can depict environmental change and response in some detail. In the first part of our study we used the maps of the KBWPS area produced by the three Military Surveys of Austria-Hungary (1783-84, 1856-57, 1872-74) to quantify the changes in vegetation cover over the last two centuries. In the second part of our study, we produced a Digital Elevation Model of the area and applied overlays representing the range of values of water-level in the archive data: thus we produced a series of maps showing the extent of water-cover and its depth for each level. We compared these to our derived vegetation maps for the same periods and were thus able to make assumptions on the vegetation-cover of the past and how it changed.
The Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Croatia started producing military topographic maps that differ from the inherited cartographic system in the projection, ellipsoid, and the manner of ...designating the grid, format, margin contents and scale system. Since the maps will be used for purposes other than the military ones, the paper looks back on essential characteristics in map production in the new accepted cartographic system.
Karte I. vojnog premjeravanja, koje je habsburški dvor vršio krajem 18. stoljeća, autentičan su i vrijedan izvor povijesnih podataka o razvoju i promjenama naših prostora. Ovaj članak opisuje prostor ...izmedju Slavonskog gorja i Ilove, s naglaskom na naselje Daruvar i prometni pravac Bosna – Stara Gradiška – Daruvar – Virovitica – Barcs (Barč). Pojedine lokacije su uspoređivane s današnjim stanjem
Este artículo examina la actividad de la Sección Cartográfica del Estado Mayor Central, que era la principal institución cartográfica del Ejército de Tierra, durante la Segunda República. Se discute ...la tesis de la supuesta parálisis de los servicios cartográficos sostenida por la historiografía franquista, se valora el alcance de la reforma de la cartografía militar llevada a término por las autoridades republicanas, y se presentan evidencias de la labor realizada entre 1931 y 1936. Dentro de esta labor se destaca el proyecto y las primeras realizaciones del Plano Director a escala 1:25.000, y la actividad de la Sección topográfica de la 1.ª División Orgánica radicada en Madrid
Ministarstvo obrane RH započelo je s izradom vojnih topografskih karata koje se u odnosu na naslijeđeni kartografski sustav razlikuju u projekciji, elipsoidu, načinu označavanja u pravokutnoj mreži, ...formatu prikaza, izvanokvirnom sadržaju i sustavu mjerila. Kako će se karte, osim za vojne, koristiti i u druge svrhe, u članku je dan osvrt na bitne karakteristike izrade karata u novoprihvaćenom kartografskom sustavu.
This thesis examines the mapping of eighteenth-century Scotland in relation to the British state’s imperatives to know the spaces of the nation. It examines the idea of the ‘military landscape’—that ...conjunction of forts, roads, and barracks—represented and constructed by the military engineers, surveyors, and draughtsmen of the Board of Ordnance between 1689 and 1815. In total, 940 maps constitute the Board of Ordnance ‘archive’ housed mainly in the National Library of Scotland, the British Library, the National Archives (Kew), and the Royal Library at Windsor. The study of the Board of Ordnance military maps of Scotland is considered in relation to the epistemological foundations of map making in the Enlightenment, particular focus being paid to the relations between government institutions and military cartography. The thesis considers how political and military power was embodied in the engineers’ maps and plans. It explores the extent to which the Scottish landscape—especially the Highlands—was an unknown territory demanding intellectual and material civilisation in cartographic form. In its main chapters on forts, movement, and battles, the thesis is organised to reflect the purpose behind the creation of military maps. It includes representations of military activities that consistently had recourse to mapping—fortifying, intelligence, reconnaissance, marching, encamping, and battle—and explains why military maps were conceived thus and how they were used. Fortification cartography dominates the representation of Scottish military landscapes: 73% of the archive constitutes maps, plans, sections, and views of forts, barracks, and coastal batteries; 22% maps associated with military movement; and 5% battle maps. By examining the different genres of military mapping, the thesis offers an evaluation of the Board’s endeavours to rationalise and to codify military cartography in order to bring it in line with wider European practices. This review of the nature and extent of military mapping of eighteenth-century Scotland reveals the practice to be a result of institutional imperatives to assert territorial control rather than simply a cartographic enterprise. In (re)constructing the military landscape, the thesis extends current knowledge of military mapping in eighteenth-century Scotland and provides for the first time a substantive examination of the Board of Ordnance as an agency of state and cartographic authority.
Three 1605 manuscript maps of Ottoman fortresses, held in the Newberry Library in Chicago, are beautiful and technically proficient. They were drawn during the Habsburg-Ottoman Long War (1593-1606) ...by one Christofaro Tarnowskij, who is otherwise unknown as a cartographer, apparently in the context of plans for an anti-Ottoman uprising by Christian subjects in the western Balkans. While the maps help to illuminate decades of plotting against the Ottomans in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries and the continuing relevance of the ideal of crusade in early modern Europe, they do much more; for they demonstrate the artificiality for the period of two of our own intellectual constructs of East as opposed to West and medieval as opposed to modern. They also reinforce the centrality of the history of cartography in understanding Europe's past.
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