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About Us
A Brief History Of Maps And Mapping
Mapping is an ancient skill. Babylonians drew maps on clay tablets the oldest of which dates to about 2300 BC. Egyptians claim the oldest geological map and representations of maps on tomb walls similar in age to the Babylonian tablets. Among the Aztec, Montezuma is said to have given Cortez a map of the Gulf of Mexico painted on cloth. Although records have not been preserved with much time depth, nonliterate peoples are commonly known to draw maps, hinting that map making ability may be much older than artifactual evidence alone suggests. In the 1840s when Capt. Charles Wilkes's was exploring the South Seas, an islander kindly drew for him an accurate sketch of the entire Tuamotu Archipelago on the deck of his ship. The North American Pawnee were reputed to have used star charts painted on elk skin. Numerous early Eskimo maps on skin, wood, and bone have been found. For more on Map History and the History of Cartography, see: The University of Wisconsin History of Cartography Project and The Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography.
Who Was Edwin J. Foscue?
Edwin J. Foscue (1900 - 1972) was chairman of the now defunct Geography Department at SMU from 1923 to 1965. A distinguished veteran of the Second World War, Dr. Foscue founded the map library and was instrumental in having SMU designated as a depository for the U.S. Army Mapping Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Geodetic Survey. His life-long interest in maps and the many forms of information that they can convey continues to inspire visitors to the collections named in his honor.
Named in honor of Dr. Foscue, SMU's Map Library is one of the preeminent collections of cartographic resources in the American Southwest. The library's current holdings include more than 260,000 individual maps, nautical charts, and aeronautical charts; approximately 3,000 aerial photographs and remote sensing images; more than 1,200 Soil Survey publications; several globes, including one of the moon; and over 1,250 atlases.
The collection continues to grow in support of key disciplines including geology, archaeology and anthropology, history, sociology, political science, and environmental science. Recent major acquisitions include the ARCO Petroleum Collection (over 3,000 maps and LANDSAT images, chiefly international in coverage). Enhancements include departmental initiatives to develop digital mapping tools via Geographic Information System (GIS) software.
As a geographic expert with the Army Map Service (a sub-agency under the Corps of Engineers) during World War II, Dr. Edwin J. Foscue participated in one of the most significant intelligence campaigns of that conflict — namely, the production of state-of-the-art mapping for nearly every region of the world, the almost constant revision of existing mapping, and the rapid deployment of these maps to the our military forces abroad. The sheer number of maps produced for the war effort, coupled with the large quantity of cartographic information captured by advancing Allied Forces, presented the Army Map Service with a problem of surplus by the war's end. Dr. Foscue and several of his colleagues successfully lobbied the Army not only to donate these maps to academic institutions at strategic locations throughout the United States, but also to establish a depository program in order to best maintain these collections. Thus, Southern Methodist University was able to acquire approximately 27,000 captured German and Japanese maps, and, until the end of the Army Map Service's depository program in 1954, to accrue over 54,000 maps. The map library was founded in 1942. In 1948, the University hired its first map librarian, Dorothy Bruton, succeeded by Eleanor Maclay, author of the first official history of the collection itself ("Southern Methodist University Map Library", 1957).
