As
Roger J. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent have argued, the use of surveying
and mapmaking can first be found sporadically throughout the
Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian eras (Kain and Baigent 1). From
2,300 BC, evidence of property building plans can be found inscribed in
clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, but few of these artifacts of
early mapping techniques have been located. Likewise, while the
Egyptians possessed the technical expertise and instruments to conduct
the measurement of land, selections of maps outlining landed property
have only been found between 305-330 BC (Kain and Baigent 1).
The
Roman Empire, on the other hand, is an example of a society which had
comprehensively used the surveying and mapping of land as a definitive
tool of state administration and organization. In an effort to
rationally administer their empire and the granting of land and the
extraction of taxes and revenues the Romans organized cities and rural
areas into grid systems (Kain and Baigent 1). Roman laws of 111BC
regulated the agrimensores (land surveyors), to keep formae
(maps), and tabula (registers) of land in Italy, while Roman text books
from the fourth century AD laid out processes for the use of surveying
techniques such as the groma, a cross like staff for the
measuring of land for map-making (Kain and Baigent 2).
With
the fall of the Roman Empire, the use of maps for the administration
and recording of property was essentially discontinued throughout the
medieval period. Instead of maps, Medieval scribes used written texts
to describe, rather than show, a given property regime (Kain and
Baigent 3). It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth
century that mapping was to reappear as a commonly held tool for the
administration of land and property. As Kain and Braigent have argued:
In the
emergent capitalist societies of Renaissance Europe, where land became
a commodity and power relations were expressed through control of the
means of production, which included land, there was now a clear reason
for mapping properties-namely as an aid to developing the new system of
exclusive rights to land (Kain and Baigent 3-4).
Therefore,
as capitalist social relations, which took as a presupposition a
definitive right to private property, replaced more communal forms of
feudal property, mapping and surveying were increasingly used both by
private individuals and state organizations as a tool to organize and
administer land.
