Cartography in the Prehistoric Period in the Old World: Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa

As was made clear in the Introduction to this section on prehistoric maps, historians of cartography have had little to say on prehistoric cartography in the Old World. Neither Richard Andree nor Wolfgang Drober said anything at all. 1 In 1910 Bruno F. Adler discussed two decorated bone plaques that a German antiquarian, Fritz Rodiger, had suggested were maps, but he omitted both from his corpus. In 1917 Leo Bagrow followed Adler in referring to Rodiger and in citing, for European prehistoric maps, the work of only three writers (R6diger, Kurt Taubner, and Amtsgerichtsrath Westedt)3 among the 1,881 bibliographical items in his Istoriya geograficheskoy karty: Ocherk i ukazatel' literatury (The history of the geographical map: Review and survey of literature).4 Modern authors have scarcely improved on this: three topographical maps from the prehistoric period were published in the 1960s by Walter Blumer,5 though only two of these are included by P. D. A. Harvey,6 and one other has been described from the Middle East. 7 Thus, when research for this chapter was started, the number of topographical maps from the prehistoric pe-