HTST 489 Lecture Notes - Protection Racket, Vikings, Archaic Humans
11 Feb 2014
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Ancient humans had clear sense of space and territory, often very sophisticated. A general sense of how to reach a location. Can see by 1000 bce that some ancient near eastern states have forms of mapping that involve drawing a permanent record of where locations are in relation to one another. Then taking other people"s observations and adding them to this pictoral representation. According to ptolemy, the world was much smaller than we though, there was one continent, etc. despite this errors, still an attempt to commit a view of the world to record. Main way in which geospatial knowledge was represented was verbal descriptions. Itineria - how to get somewhere by land. Periplus how to get somewhere by sea. Descriptions of travel would be given by day the roads you"d take in one day of your journal. With periplus, more problematic storm can blow you off course, no landmarks (obviously).
