History of Land Surveys

Georg Öder der Jüngere (II.) und dessen gleichnamiger Sohn verkörperten im ausgehenden 16. Jahrhundert als kurfürstliche Markscheider das amtliche Vermessungswesen Sachsens. Georg Öder II. erscheint im Zusammenhang mit seinen Vermessungen der landesherrlichen Wälder und Jagden Sachsens als Initiator einer kartographischen Tradition, die schließlich von seinen Söhnen fortgesetzt wurde. Zentrale Werke, die bisher Georg Öder II. zugeschrieben wurden, können als Arbeiten seines Sohnes Georg Öders III. herausgestellt werden. Dazu zählen die Forstzeichenbücher und die damit verbundenen Kartierungen der kurfürstlichen Waldungen, mit denen Georg Öder III. wichtige Impulse zur Entwicklung der kursächsischen Vermessungskartographie beisteuerte.

Many treatises on geometry were written in the XVI century. Ieronimo Pico Fonticulano in the sixty book of his treatise titled Geometria describes the surveying instruments and their methodological and operative use.
Aim of the paper is studying the instruments described by Fonticulano and, thanks to the numerous applicative examples, analysing the surveying methods. It focuses on instrument’s geometry and materials, their components, the using modalities, the instrumental positions, the working principles, the main application allowed. Last but not least instruments and methods are studied in relation to their historical context and to the ones presented in other treatises of the same age.

For Europeans, Patagonia was from the beginning a land of myth. So too was the Patagonia of the Welsh born on romantic mythology and dreams of national liberation and independence. Writers and poets, political and religious leaders, were the primary myth-makers of the remote colony – known in Welsh as Y Wladfa – and their texts, from the meticulous chronicles of Abraham Matthews to the idyllic travelogues of Eluned Morgan, are imbued with a promotional tone.

The travel accounts of Llwyd ap Iwan now published in Spanish by Tegai Roberts and Marcelo Gavirati, is an exception. Free of propaganda, these texts are vivid impressions of a vast territory which at the end of the 19th century remained largely untouched by Western civilization.

In excavating ap Iwan’s name and bringing it to the position it deserves, Roberts and Gavirati have made an immense contribution to the history of the Welsh colony in Patagonia. Part of the success of this book rests on a careful work of translation and editing. The historian interested in Welsh emigration sometimes sees his work linguistically hampered. For English and Spanish speaking researchers, the Welsh language condemns most documents to a cryptic existence. However, ap Iwan’s diaries were written not only in Welsh but also in English, showing the author’s intention to reach a wider audience. Here, Tegai Roberts’ ability to move across the territory of these two languages as well as Spanish, was crucial for the execution of this work.

I look at the Dominion Land Survey in western Canada as a set of textual practices, involving legal and literary writing as well as more “performative” inscriptions upon the landscape.  Surveyors both “wrote up” the landscape, often within the conventions of Imperial travel writing, and “wrote upon” it in an arcane notation of cairns, mounds and posts.  This surveyor’s penumbra of a Cartesian grid inspired a variety of counter-inscriptions from the guerrilla theater of the Métis, to an array of broadly pastoralist projects whose aim was to redraw the lines of cultivation and settlement and the vision of the landscape.  These re-writings of the landscape in the late 19th and early 20th century brought into question spatial constructions of gender, race and nation as well as individual agency.

Der Aufsatz behandelt die örtliche Bestimmung, Vermessung und Dokumentation der auf dem Wiener Kongress 1815 bestimmten preußisch-sächsischen Landesgrenze, die noch heute auf einer Länge von rund 100 km im Abschnitt zwischen Grünewald im Amt Ruhland und der Elbe bei Fichtenberg weitgehend der heutigen gemeinsamen Grenze zwischen dem Land Brandenburg und dem Freistaat Sachsen entspricht.

The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among nonelite Americans.

Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, this book recovers a vibrant culture of geography consisting of property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation's first atlases, and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By showing how this geographic revolution affected the production of literature, Bruckner demonstrates that the internalization of geography as a kind of language helped shape the literary construction of the modern American subject.