Information from Maps

Maps of coastlines that were produced by the early explorers look vaguely like the real coastlines, but noticeably different to the accurate charts of today. The information they contained was relevant to the explorers such as possible places where they could go ashore, where they had encountered unfriendly indigenous people and so on.

As the science of mapmaking developed, map scales became increasingly accurate and cartographers used symbols to represent features of the landscape, buildings and so on. This allowed more information to be carried by a map, for example, maps of local parishes showing what land belonged to which person as well as the local tracks, paths, streams and other features were developed.

During the eighteenth century, the idea of drawing lines to join points of equal value became more widespread. By the end of the century, European maps with lines joining points of equal height were starting to appear. These were called contour lines and we take them for granted on modern maps.

Some of these old maps still exist and are a good source of information for geographers studying changes to the landscape over a period of time. In atlases, the use of maps was further developed and maps contained a wide variety of different information such as ocean currents, climate zones, population densities, agricultural and political zones and more.