W. Dirk Raat | Innovative Ways to Look at New World Historical Geography | The History Teacher, 37.3

Innovative Ways to Look at New World Historical Geography^*

W. Dirk Raat
SUNY Fredonia and Arizona State University

This is the beginning of the old traditions of this place called Quiché. Here we shall set forth the revelation by Tzacol and Bitol [Creator and Maker], Alom [the mother god] and Qaholom [the father god], and Gucumatz [Quiché word for "feathered serpent"; in Maya, Kukulcán and in Nahuatl, Quetzalcoatl].... Great were the descriptions of how the sky and earth were formed and divided into four parts; and the measuring-cord was brought and stretched in the sky and over the earth on the four corners as was told by the Creator and the Maker, the Mother and the Father of Life, of all created things that exists in the sky, on the earth, in the lakes and in the sea.

—Popul Vuh (Sacred Book of Ancient Quiché Maya)

ON FEBRUARY 11, 2000, astronauts in the space shuttle Endeavor extended a 197-foot radar antenna mast from the cargo bay.¹ Using this and another radar antenna, they scanned the earth below. They would eventually map more than seventy percent of Earth's terrain, surveying land as far north as Hudson Bay and British Columbia and as far south as Cape Horn. With the completion of the mission the astronauts had mapped forty-three and one-half million square miles of Earth at least twice. NASA and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency will eventually transform and analyze the resulting digital tapes into three dimensional maps of the planet. This is another example in the unending history of the use of technology to describe the realities of space and time, and to explain the nexus between humankind and our environment.² The Cape Canaveral endeavor led me to contemplate the history of cartography and the role of geographers and historians in describing the human-environment nexus. I was especially interested in the depiction of the Americas by world historians and geographers. I wanted to answer the question, "How do world historians and geographers conceptualize the western hemisphere in textbooks?"

In answering this question it soon became obvious to me that a tradition of Eurocentric scholarship characterized most of the global conceptions of historians and geographers. This was obvious to the late J. M. Blaut of the University of Illinois at Chicago who surveyed maps in European texts and atlases dealing with world history. His findings indicated that until the middle of the nineteenth century, historians and geographers in the European world held that history has a locus of movement in space. For them, pre-modern history began in the Bible Lands and moved westward and northward from western Asia into and across western Europe. By 1492 the world scope of history was Eurasia. Only after 1492 did the world expand to include areas outside of Eurasia. For these historians, Africa, Oceania, the Americas, and part of Southeast Asia had no history until Europeans brought it to them in the sixteenth century and afterwards. In other words, as Blaut says, "cartographically speaking, these regions do not exist until discovered by Europeans."³ Similar observations have been made by Jeremy Black who notes that the problem of Eurocentrism in mapmaking, while increasingly recognized by scholars since 1945, continues today with the publication of territorial historical atlases and "first world" atlases in which Europeans and North Americans dominate the research and publishing.⁴

I drew similar conclusions from my own experience as a world history teacher. As an "Americanist," it appeared to me that most of the current world history texts tend to ignore the western hemisphere before 1492. Pre-contact history of the Americas does not have the same level of conceptual reality as does post-contact history. For example, very few world historians seemed to know or care about the indigenous traditions of cartography that existed in pre-Columbian America. The post-Columbian world is filled with conceptual frameworks such as "the Columbian Exchange," "the Plantation Complex," "the Atlantic Slave Trade" or "Colonialism." Generally speaking, world history textbooks adopt an organic model of developing human societies, beginning with Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, ancient China and Egypt, the Assyrians and Persians, and ending with the Greeks, Romans and Byzantine Christians. American Indian civilizations, primarily those of the Aztecs and Incas, only form a backdrop to the post-conquest European themes of contact, settlement, and expansion. Even the more sophisticated world historians, such as Ross Dunn and the late Marshal Hodgson, who have done so much to develop a hemispheric approach to the Afro-Eurasian ecumene (inhabited world), neglect the early history of the western hemisphere, only studying the New World after Columbus.

Historian Michael Brescia has suggested that on some metaphysical plane or subconscious level these world history textbooks reflect the general medieval and early modern European ignorance of people, flora and fauna, places and topography of the New World. As Brescia notes, Christopher Columbus was looking for the Mongol emperor, the Great Kahn, in the Caribbean, and explorer Jean Nicolet, in 1634, after sailing across Lake Michigan to a landing near present day Green Bay, Wisconsin, spoke a few phases of Mandarin Chinese to the indigenous population. Brescia further suggests that this gap in the European global imagination was reflected in medieval European T-O maps (see Figure 1) that simply had no space for the western hemisphere.⁵

Figure 1
T-O Map. Adopted with modifications from Gerald A. Danzer, Discovering World History Through Maps and Views (N.Y.: HarperCollins, 1996, 2nd. ed.): S20.

Yet, although individuals in medieval Europe and classical America were unaware of each other, they were both able to eradicate their ignorance of each other after the time of contact. Acculturation and sharing of ideas and traditions continued throughout the colonial era of Spain in America. The lack of awareness of pre-Columbian America by Europeans is less a heritage of the medieval past, than a development that was created during the age of Exploration and Conquest when the vast "emptiness" of America became a Europeanized space that placed Europe at the center of the universe. Europe's post-contact world, with its imperial images of political and religious symbolism, assured itself that Europeans possessed their own centrally located continent, and, as a superior people, were within their rights to dispossess the inhabitants of the New World from a vacant or underused space. The sixteenth-century map maker, Gerhardus Mercator, provided the European world with just such a map.

In treating the question of Eurocentrism in world cartography, I have organized this essay into three parts. First, I will illustrate an indigenous tradition of American mapmaking by comparing the mappae mundi (world maps) of Mesoamerica and medieval Europe (in particular, the TO map of Europe). Not only do the pre-literate and literate societies of the Americas have a cartographical tradition, but their history of mapmaking is similar to that of the Old World. This I follow with two case studies: The Eurocentric tradition represented by the Mercator Projection is described, and I recommend that Mercator (and the Eurocentric tradition) be revised by substituting several applications of Miller's cylindrical projection in the classroom. Finally I argue for an abandonment of the sevenfold categorization of the earth into "continents," and its replacement with a regional scheme in which the Americas are divided into nine zones that reflect more adequately than the continental scheme the historical, geographical, economic, and cultural realities of Greater America.

T-O Maps, Mesoamerican Cosmology, and the Indigenous Traditions of Cartography

When comparing Old World (Afro-Eurasian) and New Old World (American) maps during the pre-contact era, the similarities and universality of humankind become apparent. The mappae mundi of both worlds have parallel concerns about territoriality, the heavens, and the cosmos. Both traditions, motivated by religious concerns, fused space and time. Maps were not simply visual descriptions of ground features, but as defined by the editors of The History of Cartography, "were graphic representations that facilitated a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes or events in the human world."⁶ In other words, medieval Europeans and their New World counterparts organized space according to philosophical and religious principles.

In exploring Professor Brescia's suggestion (above) that some of the roots of Eurocentrism could be found in medieval cartography, I discovered some interesting parallels between T-O maps of seventh century medieval Europe, and the cosmological views of Mesoamerican inhabitants of a similar era (compare Figures 1 and 2. In medieval Europe one of the most common forms of rendering the earth was the mappae mundi of which more than a thousand have survived. The T-O map is one kind of mappae mundi.⁷ The T-O image reproduced here (fig. 1 comes from the encyclopedia of knowledge produced by Isidore, Bishop of Seville, in 630 A.D., and was printed in Augsburg in 1472. Like other T-O maps, this one is schematic and as such was meant to provide a general view of the world as an allegorical statement in which material images represented theological and spiritual truths. The T-O map combines the Greek threefold continental system, in which Greek mariners gave the names Europe and Asia to lands on either side of the complex waterway running from the Aegean Sea through the Black Sea, and Libya (or Africa) to lands south of the Aegean, with the Biblical notion that the continents had been distributed to the sons of Noah. Shem (Sem), who was the oldest son, received the largest landmass, that of Asia, while Ham (Cham) got Africa and Japeth was given Europe. This tripartite organization echoed the notion of the Trinity, and promoted the idea that humanity descended from Noah through his three sons. Place and genealogy were depicted in a manner pleasing to the medieval sense of space and time (more correctly, space/time).⁸

Figure 2
The Maya Cosmos. Adopted with modifications from Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (N.Y.: William Morrow, 1990), p. 67, fig. 2:1. Drawing by Linda Schele, courtesy Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (permissions Nov. 7, 2002).

The world is depicted as a flat disc surrounded by a protean ocean sea (a common theme of many mythic traditions including the biblical stories of creation and the flood) forming the O shape. The O was internally divided by a T with east at the top. The stem of the T represented the Mediterranean separating Africa from Europe, while the crossbar of the T was formed by waters stretching from the Don River, the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Nile, with Jerusalem in the center. The map is oriented to the direction of the rising sun in the east. This was the medieval Christian notion of the terrestrial paradise, the Garden of Eden (thus churches were oriented east-west with the altars at the east). World maps, including this one, were drawn with east (Oriens) at the top. "True north," as Alfred Crosby reminds us, "was due east, a principle to which we pay respect every time we 'orient' ourselves." The other directional terms were Occidens (occident or west; "the setting sun"), Meridies (south; "the midday sun"), and Septentrio (north, "the seven stars" of Ursa Major).⁹

Like the medieval scholar, his or her Maya counterpart viewed the world as a sacred place. The Maya too used allegorical allusions in which the physical landscape reflected the parallel unseen Otherworld (sometimes called Xibalba) into which Maya kings and shamans could pass. The Maya model of the human plane of existence was depicted as a flat disc floating in the primordial sea (see Figure 2. The four cardinal directions provided a grid for the surface of the world and the Maya community. The principal axis of the human plane (or the Middleworld) was the path of the sun from east to west. Each direction was associated with space/time, a color, a special tree, domain gods, and rituals. East was red and the most important direction since it was associated with the birth of the sun. North was white and the direction from which the cooling rains of winter came. It was also the abode of the north star around which the sun pivots. West, the dying place of the sun, was black. South was yellow and the right-hand side of the sun. For the Maya, as in the medieval European world, east, not north, should be at the top of maps.¹⁰ This model of the world was concentric as well as quadrangular, with the four cardinal points seen in relationship to the center. Here the world tree plunged through the center, with its roots in the Underworld, its trunk in the Middleworld, and its branches soaring to the highest heavenly level of the Otherworld. The geography and world of human beings was connected to the Otherworld along the World Tree axis, a center symbolized by the interior of the Maya temple and materialized through temple rituals in the person of the Maya king.¹¹

Some interesting comparisons can be made between the two models (compare figs. 1 and 2. Both display the earth as a flat disc surrounded by a primordial sea, the source of all life. This image is typical of many mythic traditions. Both are schemata that represent the earth as a sacred place. Again, in both worlds, religious symbols are fused with cardinality. All directions of the compass are represented, with east at the top of the map. East, of course, is associated with the rising sun, while the midday sun and the descending sun are symbolized as south and west respectively. North is associated with winter and the northern stars. For both, the most important axis is the east-west one of a rising and setting sun. Because of mutual ethnocentrism, medieval scholars and Maya thinkers placed their most important religious image in the center of the map—Jersualem for the medieval thinker, the World Tree for the Maya. Finally, these schemas reflect the quincunx, an arrangement of five objects in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle (or as four cardinal points on a map placed about a center point). The quincunx is a pattern found in the natural world, especially in the geometry of petals or leaves of plants. It is also a universal design found in a variety of cultural and ethnic groups, from Roman coins, medieval maps, and New England farmhouses, to Teotihuacán frescos, Nahuatl calendars, and Maya crosses.

How does one explain these similarities between the medieval and classical worlds of Europeans and Mayans? Since the diffusionists have very little evidence to suggest contact between Europeans and Americans prior to 1492, these similarities obviously resulted from independent invention (or artifacts borrowed from peoples in their own cultural and geographical zones). A partial answer to the question posed above is human nature, or more correctly, human natures. Human natures are not abstract essences that influence human behavior outside of history, but are experiences in which history and nature mix to produce situations and traits shared by both Europeans and Americans. All people who live in nature are awed by the sight of the sun and the night sky, and the association of sun with heat, fire, and life are apparent. Botanical designs, such as the quincunx, are easy to copy. And again, ethnocentrism is typical of most groups, whether it is Christians associating their promised immortality with Christ's Jerusalem, or the spiritualization of the Middleworld through the World Tree.

But there is another feature of these models that is more important. Both reflect the continuation of a cartographical tradition in which space is represented on a flat surface, whether that surface is rock, animal skin, tree bark, cloth or paper. Both medieval scholars and their Maya counterparts knew that the particulars of these regularized patterns did not represent the harsh irregularities of the terrain, but were instead the relationships of genealogy to space. In medieval Europe, early religious geography was qualitative, yet in time the later delineation of coastal contours became more quantitative. As European navigators and mathematicians of the early Renaissance advanced the science of cartography, the compass and straightedge were used to create utilitarian drawings of coastlines. In addition, the influence of Claudius Ptolemy was appended to sketches of gods and monsters to produce the first world maps.¹²

As mentioned, the indigenous Americans had their own traditions of cartography. Cosmograms were incorporated into the dwellings of American Indians with, for example, Seneca longhouses and Navajo hogans becoming maps of the universe. Indigenous cartography of Lowland South America and the Caribbean consisted of celestial maps that encoded myths about the heavenly bodies that were incorporated in the layout of villages, artifacts, and basketry. Analysis of Mixtec codices of the post-Classic era (900–1500 A.D.) from south-central Mexico reveal geographical content, as well as traditional genealogical and historical content. The reconstruction of the geographical content of these manuscripts shows that Mixtec mapping amounted to "spatial histories" where space/time was projected onto a two-dimensional plane, and in which geographical perceptions were mingled with dynastic and migration history. The art of picture mapping was also known north of the Mixtec country in central Mexico, especially among the Teotihuacanos (200 A.D.–600 A.D.). In Mesoamerica, thanks in part to the Mayas, this tradition lasted into the conquest era. Post-Classic, Chontal Mayan speaking, Putun seafarers communicated with Yucatec Maya merchants and traders about the contours and coastal characteristics of their trade route that went around the Yucatán peninsula from the Bay of Campeche in the west to the Gulf of Hondoras in the east. And finally, expression of spatial knowledge took place in the Andes in both pre-Inca and Inca times as manifested through maps (e.g., abstract expressions found in counting devices such as the quipu, or the imagery reflected in the masks on a Paracas vessel) reflecting territorial claims, ancestral lines, militarism, and the supernatural world.¹³

In addition, European kings, explorers and settlers testified that indigenous peoples were the source of geographical knowledge for European maps. João II of Portugal and Hernando Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, acknowledged Indian informants for their maps of the Caribbean and Mexico. Other explorers, such as Jacques Cartier along the St. Lawrence in 1541, Samuel Champlain on the coast of Maine in 1605, and Captain John Smith in seventeenth century Virginia testified to the importance of Indian map makers for their geographical knowledge. After the conquest, many Indian groups who had been dispossessed of their claims to land prepared maps that reclaimed their lost territories and used maps as a conscious strategy of resistance to European control.¹⁴

As the conquest continued, early European maps of America reflected the geopolitical concerns of the colonizers with the overseas territories delimited and defined in terms of the expansionist concerns of imperialism. The names New England, New France, or New Spain appeared on maps long before these areas were actually colonized. For Gerhardus Mercator the Americas became a "theater" for human activity, implying that the land was a stage for European actors. Similar to medieval times, cartography, filled with political and religious imperial symbolism, dispossessed the Indians by engulfing them with blank space. Coats of arms, national flags, and allegorical portraits of discoverers were as important to cartography as were boundaries. Along with these symbols were added pictures of the Crucifixion, the Garden of Eden, the Holy Family and the Christ Child, along with place names that commemorated shrines of the Virgin in Italy or Spain. The five black dots on Portuguese charts of the South Atlantic were the wounds of Christ. Through the rhetoric of maps, Europeans were slowly imposing their own image on the American landscape.¹⁵

Yet, even the imperial maps of early conquest America were not totally devoid of indigenous content. Many place names had indigenous origins. For example, Mexico was derived from the Nahuatl Metzlianan (meaning "in the navel of the waters of the moon"). Peru was named by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century after the name of a river, Biru, derived in turn from an Indian word for "river." Nebraska comes from Nibthaska, an Omaha Indian word for "a river in the flatness" (the Platte). Oklahoma is derived from some Choctaw word meaning "red people." Alaska comes from the Aleut A-la-as-ka, "the great country." The Algonquian word for "great waters" is Michigaman (Michigan). Mississippi comes from the Chippewa mice sipi ("big river"). Massachusetts is Algonquian for "place of the big hill."¹⁶ And, according to historian Inga Clendinnen, when the Spaniards came to Maya land they asked the Indians what this place was called. The Indians did not understand the question, and responded with uic athan, which means, "what did you say, we do not understand you." So the Spaniard wrote it down, uic athan, that is, Yucatán.¹⁷

The Mercator Projection and the Need for Revision

It would appear then, that the contemporary void of world historians vis-a-vis the pre-contact Americas is not due so much to the medieval European traditions of cartography as to the heritage of the post-contact world. It was the colonial mind that invented the idea of America, and it was an idea that reflected European desires, values, and images. And the greatest "inventor" of sixteenth century Europe was map maker Gerhardus Mercator whose 1569 summary map, publicized by the learned Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: 1589), liberated cartography from dependence on Ptolemy, and included a projection that allowed navigators to understand the coasts of the New World.¹⁸

But the Mercator projection tended to distort the size of the northern hemisphere, exaggerating the size of Europe in relationship to the rest of the world (see Figure 3. On this map South America and Africa appear smaller than Greenland. In reality South America is eight times as large as Greenland, while Africa is fourteen times the size of Greenland. Because Africa is shown so small in comparison to Europe on this map, Marshall Hodgson refers to it as the "Jim Crow projection."¹⁹ Absurdly, the British Isles appear to be almost as large as India. South America, in reality about seven/eights the size of North America (excluding Central America and the Caribbean), appears to be much smaller than North America. Until recently, Mercator maps were the most popular maps in the American classroom, and these maps silently promoted a Eurocentric view that privileged the Western image. Generations of European and American students were indoctrinated with the glories of nationalism and colonialism through this map.

Figure 3
World map with Mercator Projection.

A modern modification of the Mercator projection is Miller's cylindrical projection that decreases the amount of distortion in the high latitudes while setting the earth's surface on a rectangular grid. If the map is cut to place the center along the Prime Meridian, the result is a Eurocentric map useful for many purposes but not the only way to view the world (see Figure 4. Instead, a Miller map centered on the 90th West Meridian projects an American perspective on the world (see Figure 5. Note how the three major countries of North America, the United States, Canada, and Mexico, face both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (while in South America only Colombia has a two-ocean perspective). Obviously, the two oceans have affected the history of North America more than South America, where Chile and Peru are Pacific-oriented countries while Brazil is an Atlantic-oriented nation. Note also how the Arctic circle is mostly filled with land, with only a sea gap between Scandinavia and Iceland. Certainly Norsemen and Vikings would note this feature.²⁰

Figure 4
Miller World Map Centered Along the Prime Meridian. Adopted with modifications from G. Danzer, Discovering World History Through Maps (HarperCollins, 1996), R1.

Figure 5
Miller World Map Centered Along 90th West Meridian. Adopted with modifications from G. Danzer, Discovering World History Through Maps (HarperCollins, 1996), R3.

When viewing this map it is easy to see that the location of South America is to the east of North America. Draw a line from Cleveland, Ohio south and all of South America will be east of that line. It is also mostly south of the equator, unlike Africa to the east. If one rearranges the map to show a Brazilian perspective (Figure 6, it becomes obvious that Brazil has no frontage on the Pacific Ocean, is bordered in the west by the Andes, and is strictly an Atlantic Basin country. The equator intersects Brazil at the Amazon and Africa between Nigeria and Angola, with Brazil being closer in nautical miles to Europe and Africa than most of North America. With seventy percent of Brazil's 172.8 million people clustered near the Atlantic coast, it is no wonder that it has been more influenced by Europe (e.g., the national language is Portuguese) and Africa (a multiracial population in which African influences dominate music and religion) than North America. Again, the bulk of African slaves imported into the New World in the eighteenth century went to Brazil, a feature of the relative closeness of the equatorial region of Brazil to a similar climatic zone in Angola and West Africa.²¹

Figure 6
A Brazilian Perspective. Adopted with modifications from G. Danzer, Discovering World History Through Maps (HarperCollins, 1996), R27.

The relationship between geography and climate is very important for the history of humanity. Since the last phase of the last Ice Age ended around 10,000 years ago, the earth has been gradually warming. At times rapid climatic changes occurred that radically changed the course of history. One of these cyclical events, known as an El Niño, happens when warm water accumulating in the central Pacific flows east bringing warm, humid air to the west coast of South America. While an El Niño will bring torrential rainfalls and flooding to the coasts of Peru, as a global event it will affect conditions elsewhere, with simultaneous droughts in the sertão of northeastern Brazil and tinder dry conditions in the rain forests of Borneo. El Niño floods destroyed the civilization of the Moche in sixth century Peru, while global droughts led to the decline of the classic Maya civilization after 889 A.D. and the abandonment of Anasazi dwellings in the Southwest around 1300 A.D.²²

One accident of geography has produced geological good fortune for western Europe. The great eastward bulge of Brazil, the shape taken by South America when continental plates parted and sent South America drifting away from Africa, splits the warm south equatorial current and sends its northward to join the Gulf Stream and the northern equatorial current that washes the coast of Ireland and western Europe. The result is a moderate climate that gives Europe gentle rains and warm winds in all seasons. These ocean currents are one reason why winters in Bordeaux, France are far milder than those in Montreal, Canada even though these areas share the same latitude and altitude. Early colonists to the New World were dismayed to discover harsh winters on the east coast of North America when compared to the mild climates back home.²³

The era from 800 to 1450 is known as the medieval warm period, a time when more than 6000 Norsemen settled Greenland (named for its green and lush environment) and the islands of the North Atlantic, and Englishmen succeeded in cultivating vineyards that thrived. Then the climate switched and harsh winters and short, wet summers became the norm. During the Little Ice Age (1450–1850) the Vikings lost their colonies and the British their vineyards. The Viking's Inuit neighbors, however, who were not dependent on farming and livestock, continued their hunting-gathering ways and continued to survive. Since 1850, global warming has again become the norm, aided in part by the emission of industrial pollutants into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United States is the biggest polluter on the planet with only four percent of the world's population producing twenty-five percent of its greenhouse gases²⁴.

For geography and American history in the colonial and early independence eras, a map of Atlantic America would be most appropriate (see Figure 7. This map of the seventeenth century Atlantic Basin reveals that most of the countries of the New World emerged within the Atlantic World and that they shared their historical destinies with other continents, peoples, and seas adjacent to the Atlantic. The early themes of European colonization involved seafaring, conquering, and planting, three phases in the European encroachment upon the American seaboard. There are two traffic ways to the Americas, both made possible by gigantic wind wheels known as the westerlies in the temperate zones and the trade winds in the tropics. One pattern, followed mostly by the English, French, and Dutch, led to the northerly America of foggy seas and punishing winters, the other, pursued by Spaniards and Portuguese (and eventually some northern Europeans) reached the deceptively paradisaical America of warm climates with, however, the dangers of diseases and storms. European America was, to use D. W. Meinig's words, the "geographical emanation from these two earliest oceanic axes." Europe was the source of financial and commercial activity, while Africa was primarily important for the slave trade—so that the main cultural impacts were those of Europe upon Africa, and Africa upon America. This was the transoceanic arena in which an Atlantic World emerged in the Age of Empire, and the geographical stage for cross-cultural encounters, Spanish treasure fleets, a transatlantic slave trade, and the movement of European peoples.²⁵

Figure 7
Seventeenth Century Atlantic Basin. Lines indicate direction of movement of people from Europe and Africa to the Americas. Adopted with permission from D.W. Meining, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (Yale University Press, 1986), p. 56, fig. 8.

After 1850, a Pacific perspective must be added. If you take a Miller map and center it on the 180^th meridian (Figure 8, the image of the world is a Pacific one (especially if you turn it upside down placing south at the top).²⁶ With the United States acquiring Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii (and taking possession of the Philippines), followed by Pearl Harbor and the Pacific theater of World War II, the strategic importance of the Pacific for the United States becomes obvious. With China emerging as a major power, the twenty-first century may become the Pacific century.

Figure 8
Miller World Map Centered on 180 Meridian: The Pacific Perspective. South is at top of map. Adopted with modifications from G. Danzer, Discovering World History Through Maps (HarperCollins, 1996), R4.

Note that there are relatively few important ports located on the Pacific rim due to the mountainous nature of the Pacific coastline. For the Americas these mountains have been created by a collision of tectonic plates, the South American plate pushing up against the Nazca plate in the Pacific, and the North American plate crushing against the Juan de Fuca plate. This ring of fire around the edge of the Pacific basin makes it a major earthquake and volcano zone. Five of the largest earthquakes of the twentieth century have taken place in this zone, including the May 22, 1960 quake in Chile that registered 9.5 on the Richter scale, and the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 in Alaska (registering 9.2). Again, North America appears to be more involved in the Pacific Basin than South America (its eastward location pulling it toward the Atlantic). Finally, this map reveals a major truth about the earth, and that is that the earth is mostly water not land, the Pacific Ocean amounting to 64,000,000 square miles (over twice the size of the Atlantic Ocean).

The Myth of Continents

Before concluding this essay it remains necessary to comment on, to use the title of a recent book, "the myth of continents." The current sevenfold categorization of the earth into the continents (that is, continuous, discrete masses of land) of Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), and Antarctica, is a recent convention beginning with the threefold system of the Ancient Greeks and modified over time into today's system. The problem with this kind of classification is that most people consider "continents" to be "real" geographical realities "discovered" through scientific inquiry, instead of what they are—the product of creative imagination and metageography.²⁷

Continents not only supposedly reflect physical reality, but natural and human features as well. North America (defined as running from Canada to Panama) is supposed to be a different floral and faunal zone than South America, but in reality the northern floral and faunal realm lies well to the north of the isthmus in central Mexico. In the field of geology, tectonic plates do not respect the geographer's continental system, with Europe and Asia sharing the same plate for more than thirty-five million years, and India being tectonically linked, not to Asia, but to distant Australia. Even though the nineteenth century geographer, Carl Ritter, conflated continents with races (i.e., Europe, land of white people; Asia of yellow people; Africa of black people; America of red people), his pernicious divisions, while lingering in the public imagination, are too simplistic to have any application. While it is ridiculous to conceive of Europe as a continent and India a subcontinent, the continental status of Europe (which shares a land mass with Asia), serves to reassure Europeans that their sense of western superiority and false dichotomies (Europe equals West; Asia equals East) will go unchallenged.²⁸

If Europe and Asia are part of the supercontinent of Eurasia, and historically and culturally part of Afro-Eurasia, then the question remains as to whether North America and South America are really separate continents rather than one supercontinent. Perhaps the notion of continents should be abandoned all together. Three million years ago during the Pliocene, North and South America, two very different land masses, joined via the isthmus of Panama. The collision brought two very different faunas into contact for the first time, with more migration northward than southward.²⁹ Since there is now a land bridge at the isthmus, and since no part of the sea east of the land bridge is deep ocean, it is logical to consider North and South America one landmass or continent. The inclusion of Greenland as part of North America, with Iceland belonging to Europe, is simply a political nicety.

The major problem with the classification of the Americas as two continents is that North Americans, like their European friends, tend to create false dichotomies between themselves and South Americans (Latin Americans). Latinos are dark and Catholic, while Americans are light, delightsome, and Protestant. This kind of nineteenth century Eurocentrism is not only out of date today when more than twenty percent of the United States population comes from Asia, Oceania, Latin America, or Africa, but it prevents North Americans from understanding the similarities of the historical experiences of the peoples of the Americas.

In the census of 2000, South America had around 344 million people, more than 172 million in Brazil, while North America, including Central America and the Caribbean, had more than 406 million individuals (the United States has more than 275.5 million, Canada 31 million, and Mexico slightly more than 100 million). While there are obvious differences between the peoples and landscapes of South and North America (e.g., the fauna of South America is somewhat distinctive), there are also strong geographical similarities between the two so-called continents (see Figure 9. First, they are similar in overall shape. Each is triangular, broad in the north and forming a narrow tip at the southern end. Second, because of tectonic activity, each has massive mountain ranges along its Pacific edge and belongs to the "ring of fire" with its active earthquakes and volcanos. Both land masses have eroded highlands along their eastern edges, from the Appalachian system and Laurentian Highlands in Canada to the Brazilian-Guiana Highlands in South America. Finally, both have vast plateau lands and plains that run from Canada through South America between the western mountains and the eastern highlands.³⁰

Figure 9
Similarities of the Americas: Mountains, Highlands, Plateaus and Plains.

This grassland country has seen the historical development of ranching and cowboy culture, from Calgary, Alberta (Canada) and Cody, Wyoming (United States), to the vaqueros of Chihuahua City (Mexico), the llaneros of Venezuela, and the gauchos of Argentina. Other parallel themes in historical geography can be noted as well, including national governmental assaults on indigenous peoples in the Great Plains of the United States, the pampas of Argentina, and the northern frontier of Mexico. Consider also the impact of British capital and railroad development for nineteenth century Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and the United States. The plantation complex was characteristic throughout the Americas, from sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, through the henequen and coffee plantations of Mexico and Guatemala, to the cotton cultures of the American South, Guatemala, Chiapas, and the Peruvian coast. A common urban theme is reflected in the numbers (e.g., the megalopolises of New York City [20.2 million], Mexico City [19.8 million], Sâo Paulo [17.9 million], Los Angeles [16.2 million], Buenos Aires [13.3 million], Rio de Janeiro [10.7 million], and Chicago [8.9 million]). Thus, in spite of the different heritages, there are many commonalities in the Americas

The continental classification of the Americas can be replaced with other designs that are less Eurocentric. Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen suggest that the sevenfold continental layout be supplanted with a heuristic world regionalism scheme in which the world is divided into fourteen regional divisions. Regions are defined in terms of historical processes and social institutions that ignore political boundaries and ecological features. Their classification divides the Americas into three parts—Ibero America, African America, and North America. It is understood that these regional divisions are only approximations and this scheme is essentially a pedagogical tool.³¹ A modification of the Lewis-Wigen model for the Americas can be made. In part, this would reflect the divisions found in Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America,³² but extended to include South America and modified to reflect historical, geographical, economic, and cultural realities (see Figure 10. For North America some of Garreau's divisions can be changed so that what Garreau calls "ecotopia " is called "Cascadia"³³ and his "The Islands" and "Dixie" are joined and renamed African America, "New England" is merged with "The Foundry" as the Industrial Northeast, and "MexAmerica" is given the historic label of the Gran Chichimeca. "The Empty Quarter" has been extended to overlap with MexAmerica because of the energy and oil resources of the Gulf coast. South of the Gran Chichimeca, a new category has been created known as Indo-Mestizo America to acknowledge the indigenous role in the Americas, while African America (called Afro-America here) extends from the American South to the coasts of Brazil.

Figure 10
The Nine Regions of the Americas. Adopted with major modifications from Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), map following p. 204.

The revised map of the Americas does away with the notion of continents, and divides the Americas into nine zones (Figure 10. The Northwest is called Cascadia, and reflects this area's wet climate, its financial and commercial ties to Asia, and the urban corridor that connect business elites in Portland with their counterparts in Vancouver. Adjacent to Cascadia is The Empty Quarter, the resource rich, cattle and mineral western dry country that extends from the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, through the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta and the office buildings of Denver, to the petroleum rich Gulf region stretching from Corpus Christi to the Bay of Campeche. This area, underpopulated and undeveloped, a colony of the financial and political centers of Ottawa and New York City, sits high and dry beyond the hundredth meridian. East of the Empty Quarter is the Breadbasket, a wet country of wheat, corn, and pork, with heavily equipped and capitalized large-size farms that run from the grain country of Saskatchewan to south-central Illinois and west Texas. To its east lies the hydro country of French-speaking Québec, a separatist nation with its cultural capital at Montreal, and the Industrial Northeast that has the meat packing and railroad centers of Chicago on Lake Michigan, and the financial giant of New York City on the Hudson River.

The Greater Southwest, or to use its historical name, the Gran Chichimeca, is the region of North America where the two nations of Mexico and the United States come together and overlap. It is often called MexAmerica, a shifting cultural zone known to the Aztecs as the "land of the uncivilized dogs" and to the Spaniards as the Gran Chichimeca (named for the nomads living in the area). During Mexican days it was called El Norte, and the northern part of this region is the American Southwest today. It has a "border culture," a mix of traits of both parent groups. Here Spanglish is spoken and Tex-Mex music is played. Like the American West, this is also ranching country, with vaqueros and cowboys sitting in the bars and cantinas of El Paso and Chihuahua. South of MexAmerica lays Mesoamerica, the indigenous part of Mexico that is a small part of the larger Indo-Mestizo region of Ibero-America. As Indo-Mestizo America journeys southward, the indigenous population is usually found in the high country while Europeans and Africans occupy the coast. This, at least, is the pattern for Peru. Afro-America, an area in which Afro-Americans comprise more than thirty-three percent of the population, runs all the way from the American South, through the islands of the Caribbean and the coasts of Central America and northern and eastern South America. The population center of the Africanized part of America is, of course, Brazil. Finally, those parts of the Americas occupied by Spain and Portugal are known as Ibero-America.

Again, these regions are suggestive only. This is a map that gets us away from the Eurocentric content of traditional cartography and the continental scheme. A major weakness is the tendency to generalize many of the characteristics of an area to fit a preconceived notion of what a region is. Other designations can and must be used when the pedagogical need arises, so that Middle America, Mesoamerica, Central America, the Andean Realm, the Southern Cone, the Caribbean borderlands, etc. should freely be substituted and employed from time to time.

Conclusion

The Eurocentric tradition of historical geography can be modified. World historians can begin by recognizing the global context of cartography and inserting a more inclusive understanding of the history and development of the Americas prior to the conquest era. There is not a good reason why pre-contact Greater American history should not have the same level of conceptual reality as post-contact history. World historians can become part of the solution instead of the problem by looking for the indigenous traditions of cartography that existed in both the pre-contact and post-contact eras. They can recognize that, not unlike their medieval European counterparts, early Americans used images on flat surfaces to explain the relationship of genealogy to history, and that indigenous map makers were used to develop the first European maps of America.

As has been noted, the Mercator map of the sixteenth century, so popular in American classrooms until recently, projects a Eurocentric perspective on the world. It is a map that assured Europeans that they possessed a centrally located continent and were a superior people who could rightfully dispossess the New World inhabitants. Through the rhetoric of the Mercator maps, Europeans imposed their imperialistic images onto the American landscape. Today's teachers can replace the Mercator tradition with maps, such as Miller's cylindrical projection, that decrease the distortion in the high latitudes but retains a rectangular grid. The center of these modern maps can be shifted to emphasize certain geographical realities and perspectives. Place the center along the Prime Meridian and you have a European perspective, but alter the map so the middle is on the 90^th West Meridian and an American outlook is accentuated.

World historians and geographers of the future should note the relationship between climate and geography, since the relationship has historical effects such as El Niño floods that destroyed ancient Peru or the Little Ice Age (1450–1850 AD) that led to the decline of the Viking colonies in the Atlantic. Geographical properties, such as winds and currents, are also part of the story that resulted in the transoceanic arena known as the Atlantic World of colonial times. Finally, the traditional notion of continents can be abandoned (or at least modified). The idea of a North American continent, separate from South America, encourages false dichotomies that do not reflect actual biological, geological, and cultural realities, and that overlooks many themes that parallel the history of both regions (from cowboy culture to urbanization). By substituting a world regionalism scheme for the continental one, today's teacher and historian will be using a regional classification that better fits the realities of ethnicity, culture, and history. This, then, would be the beginning of an attempt to look at the New Old World in a new way.

^* The author wishes to acknowledge and thank Charlotte Morse, Academic Information Technology Services, SUNY Fredonia, for producing the visual aids used in this article.

Notes

^1. Endeavour blasted off on February 11, 2000, and returned eleven days later Tuesday, February 22. See Marcia Dunn, "Shuttle Begins Mission to Map Earth," Lakeland, Florida Ledger, February 12, 2000.

^2. "Shuttle got good pictures," Charlotte Sun Herald, Feb. 23, 2000.

^3. Jim Blaut to h-world@h-net.msu.edu (February 11, 1997). See also the paper read by Blaut at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Atlanta, Georgia, April 8, 1993, entitled "Mapping the March of History," 12 pp. plus appendix of 33 maps.

^4. Ibid., and Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 199–203. Both Jim Blaut and Black do agree that as of 1997 the least Eurocentric historical atlas was the Times Atlas of World History (London: 1978).

^5. Michael M. Brescia, "In Search of the Western Hemisphere in an Age of World History," (unpublished paper delivered at SUNY Fredonia, February 28, 2000), 10 pp.

^6. As quoted by Evelyn Edson in Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: The British Library, Studies in Map History, vol. 1; 1997), p. 15.

^7. J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 188.

^8. Ibid., p. 189. See also Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 21–24. Also see Edson, Mapping Time and Space, p. 15.

^9. Gerald A. Danzer, Discovering World History Through Maps and Views (N.Y.: Harper Collins, 1996, 2^nd ed.), p. S20. The quote is from Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 38.

^10. Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (N.Y.: William Morrow and Company, 1990), p. 66.

^11. Ibid., pp. 66–67.

^12. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, pp. 222–223, and Crosby, The Measure of Reality, pp. 95–108.

^13. J. Brian Harley, "Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter," in The Americas Before and After 1492: Current Geographical Research (Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 [September 1992], Washington, D.C., ed. by Karl W. Butzer): 524–526. For the lengthy traditions of New World cartography see The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 3, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. by David Wood-ward & G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. the following: Barbara E. Mundy, "Mesoamerican Carography," pp. 183–247; G. Malcolm Lewis, "Maps, Mapmaking, and Map Use by Native North Americans," pp. 51–182; Neil L. Whitehead, "Indigenous Cartography in Lowland South America and the Caribbean," pp. 301–326; and William Gustav Gartner, "Mapmaking in the Central Andes," pp. 257–300.

^14. Harley, pp. 526–528.

^15. Ibid, pp. 529–532.

^16. Derek Nelson, Off the Map: The Curious Histories of Place-Names (N.Y., Tokyo, and London: Kodansha International, 1999), pp. 155–169 & 185.

^17. Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (N.Y. & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. vi.

^18. Norman J. W. Thrower, "New Geographical Horizons: Maps," in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, Vol. 2, ed. by Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley, L.A., London: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 665–666. See also John L. Allen, "From Cabot to Cartier: The Early Exploration of Eastern North America, 1497–1543," in The Americas before and after 1492, pp. 518–519.

^19. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, ed. by Edmund Burke III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5.

^20. Danzer, Discovering World History Through Maps and Views, R1 & R3.

^21. Ibid., R27.

^22. Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1999), pp. xiii–xvi and 119–177.

^23. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (N.Y. & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 18. See also Discovery Channel Weather: An Explore Your World Handbook (N.Y.: Discovery Books, 1999), pp. 72–73.

^24. Ibid., pp. 181–201. See also Discovery Channel Weather, pp. 85–86 & 94–95; and Jeffrey Kluger, "A Climate of Despair,"Time 157 (April 9, 2001): 30–36.

^25. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of history, Vol. 1, Atlantic America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. xv–xix, 3–8, 55–76. The quote is from p. 56.

^26. Danzer, Discovering World History Through Maps and Views, R4.

^27. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, see esp. p. 30.

^28. Ibid., pp. 30, 34–38 & 41–46.

^29. Colin Tudge, The Time Before History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 53–55.

^30. David J. Wilson, Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present: An Ecological Perspective (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1999), p. 44. See also Harold E. Davis, The Americas in History (N.Y.: Ronald Press, 1953), pp. 11–30.

^31.The Myth of Continents, pp. 186–188.

^32.The Nine Nations of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), see esp. the "Maps to the Nine Nations" found after p. 204.

^33. The idea of "Cascadia" is derived from Robert D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1998), pp. 322–328.

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Innovative Ways to Look at New World Historical Geography*