Best style for Historical Atlas?

[Naima]

HEllo , I was looking for styles of map making an historical Atlas and I see that most of them do not portray elevation , is that so ? DO you have any sugestion of a possible style for best looking and nice historical atlas?

[Mouse]

Hello Naima

I'm not a historian, but the matter of how to depict relief or altitude when using a historical style came up over at the Profantasy forum just recently, when one of the members was wanting to do just that, but using a John Speed style. The trouble is that not a lot was ever done back in the 16th century about these things, and so John Speed's style was to impose side views of hills onto his ISO and top view maps.

There are no rules that say you can't modify a style to include such things as hachures, contours, or hill shading - though it would be difficult to incorporate them into an older traditional style, such as John Speed's, and have the map appear to be of that age, because representations of relief and altitude are a relatively modern concept.

The links going from this page will give you a few dates regarding the history of each of the modern techniques.

[waldronate]

What constitutes a "historical atlas"? History is a long time and styles have varied widely.

One of the definitions of a map includes the concepts "for a client" and "for a purpose". Historically, someone has to pay for the very expensive process of making the map and typically that person gets to dictate what goes on the map. If the purpose of your map is for navigation, you probably don't care about elevation except as it relates to your intended routes and landmarks. If your map is a political one, you are again likely to only indicate elevation if there is something to see like cliffs, rivers, waterfalls, and so on. Historical military maps, on the other hand, may show elevation because elevation can be important to the activity (again, such maps are more likely to show landmarks and roads than elevation).

One reason why maps have historically not shown elevation is that information on elevation is hard to get except for very limited areas. It's comparatively easy to get distance across the landscape: you stretch a thing with a fixed length (rope, chain, fellow who's paid to have a constant stride) out repeatedly along a straight line and that gives you your distances. Elevation is much harder to do, because there is no good way to get a solid zero altitude when you're inland from the ocean. Even if you're good at math and have some accurate surveying equipment, you are still likely to get enough error that marking elevation on the map except in a very general sense won't do much good.

There is also the issue of representation. The use of contour lines on maps is a very recent thing in historical terms. Hachuring to show slopes was more common when maps began to show elevation information because you care about how sloped the terrain is because (wagons and trains can't go up slopes that are too steep).

So the answer to your question about elevation on historical maps is "absolutely", "maybe", and "no", depending on period, client, and purpose.

[Naima]

Thankyou , I have selected the style I am going for, a mixture of modern shaded reliev , bilateral illumination , light overlay and a gray brownish tone for land , so I can have the height information but without distracting too much from the political info as well as recalling this style ...

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