Research on the history of the Columbian encounter show that maps' social consequences are often more important than their intended purpose, as a record of events. The importance of Ptolemaic grids to Renaissance explorers and differences between European and Native maps are discussed. It is in this role, as the primary documents for locating historical events, that early maps are still most used by the historians of the late-twentieth century. Nowhere are these uses more visible than in the study of the maps what is sometimes still called the first great age of European exploration. But for many researchers maps still hold out the prospect of locating the elusive landfalls of a Columbus or a Drake, of reconstructing the routes of navigators or tracks of the explorers, or perhaps of identifying a place described ambiguously in written texts.
Maps are the coordinates of history.
During our researches inn connection with the History of Cartography project and the Maps and the Columbian Encounter Exhibition program, we have come to understand the place of maps in early American history in some alternative ways. Maps can still be analyzed as credible and articulate witnesses to some aspects of the European voyages and explorations to America and in that sense we continue to interrogate them as traditional record of events. First, we are seeking a new perspective that focuses on the use of maps and on the social consequences of their making. The research has shifted from a theoretical consideration of what maps were designed to do to what they actually did in society. The dramatic shift in ways of thinking about the world, and in the way that vision was constructed, can be seen by comparing two of the dominant traditions of fifteenth-century cartography.