Joint Commission Seminar on Historical Maps, Atlases and Toponymy

Summary

This edited volume presents the proceedings of the Joint Commission Seminar on Historical Maps, Atlases and Toponymy, held at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig on 22–23 August 2013 as a pre-conference event of the 26th International Cartographic Conference. The seminar was jointly organized by the International Cartographic Association’s Commission on the History of Cartography and Commission on Atlases, together with the ICA–International Geographical Union body on toponymy. With approximately forty participants and seventeen papers, the event developed from an intended small workshop into a focused conference whose contributions were connected by the common theme of place names. The volume examines how historical maps, atlases, and toponyms produce, organize, communicate, and contest geographical knowledge. It presents atlas making not as the simple compilation of maps but as a complex intellectual and editorial enterprise involving conceptual design, thematic selection, financing, author coordination, data transformation, cartographic methodology, integration of texts and images, attention to users, and dissemination. National, regional, and urban atlases are shown to contribute to community formation, representations of national identity, regional self-understanding, and place branding. Toponyms, meanwhile, are treated as far more than marginal labels. They preserve historical memory, express cultural identity, exercise symbolic power, and may become objects of political dispute; their selection, translation, standardization, and replacement therefore demand both scholarly care and sensitivity to social context. Across the collection, historical map interpretation, archival research, historical geography, GIS-based analysis, atlas studies, and critical toponymy are brought together to investigate the relationships between cartographic representation, territorial administration, ethnic and cultural patterns, and social change. The concluding study of colonial southern Africa illustrates these concerns particularly clearly. It traces how surveying, boundary making, land titling, and place-name inscription helped colonial authorities render territory administratively legible and reorder landscapes and societies. At the same time, it emphasizes that mapped categories and imposed names were never accepted passively: local communities could reinterpret, appropriate, preserve alternative meanings for, or resist colonial spatial classifications. Such afterlives remain relevant beyond the formal colonial period. Overall, the volume argues for sustained collaboration among geography, cartography, history, and toponymy. By treating maps and atlases simultaneously as technical artifacts, historical sources, cultural representations, and instruments of governance, it demonstrates that cartographic scholarship can illuminate not only changing spatial knowledge but also the identities, conflicts, and power relations embedded in the naming and mapping of places.