LANDS CARTOGRAPHY: A MESOAMERICAN HERITAGE

Land maps, like prehispanic mesoamerican maps, do notuse Euclidean projections, which are based on ahumanistic or social projection. The spatial reality inthese maps is defined and structured by socialrelationships. Thus, a land map represents a communityshowing its territory and history, and not only an area likein conventional technical maps. A land map is a“communicentric projection” of the “egocentricperception” of the peasant, and can be defined as theprojection in graphic symbols of the spatial relationshipsabstracted from the knowledge available in cognitivemaps of the environments known by the peasant, ratherthan the result of sophisticated techniques, such as thoseused in soil surveys or remote perception.