Community-Based Cartography

The Maya Atlas that you hold in your hands was conceived, researched, mapped and written by people from thatched roof villages in the tropical forest southeast of the Maya Mountains. The Atlas documents the land and life of 42 Maya communities located in Toledo and Stann Creek Districts, southern Belize. The 36 Maya communities in Toledo District and 6 in Stann Creek District worked together to produce the materials for their atlas. People from these villages designed and voted on the map symbols and colors, drew the maps, carried out the household surveys and analyzed the result, took the photographs, interviewed the elders, wrote the text, voted on the contents and layout, designed the cover, reviewed and edited the maps and text, and helped raise the funds to finance and to co-publish the Atlas. All of this was done with little or no map-making experience.

It took one year to produce the Atlas from the first community mapping workshop (June 12-18, 1996) to the last community review and edit of the completed pages (June 2-18, 1997). Much of the Atlas work was done according to the agricultural cycle. First the corn was planted. Then the maps and surveys were worked on until the corn was ready to harvest.

The Maya Atlas is the first community-made atlas. All other atlases are made by professional mapmakers who most often live and work far from the places on the pages. This Atlas is made by people who live in the maps, in the text, in the photographs. The task was to create a way that people who live in their geography could make maps of it; that is, to make their geography visible and accessible. Every people in the world have developed a capacity to gather, analyze and communicate geographic information about places in culturally appropriate ways. This information is in a people's language, in the names they give to physical features and to cultural places, in the experience of using the land, and in the stories and meanings they invent to provide an explanation of how things came to be.

To transfer geographic information such as this from the culture of a people to a map is challenging because professional cartographers don't usually understand the people's culture, and the people usually don't have professional cartographers.

When our UC Berkeley GeoMap group first met with Maya leaders to explore making a map of Maya land use, we reached the obvious conclusion that it would be much easier to teach Maya people to be cartographers and researchers, than it would to teach our cartographers and researchers to be Maya. We agreed to collaborate on developing a community-based cartography. The main work for the Maya Atlas collaborators would be to invent -- piece-by-piece -- a methodological bridge between the Maya and Berkeley for the two-way transfer of knowledge, technology and understanding.

The community-based cartography that we used was developed from five inflexible requirements:

1. The entire process must be transparent, that is, understood by Maya villagers and Berkeley student researchers, by Maya and Berkeley cartographers, by the editors and publishers, and by the atlas users.
2. It must be bi-technological, that is, both the Maya and Berkeley cartographers must be able to do some of each other's work.
3. It must be democratic, that is, participatory, collaborative, and representative.
4. It must be economically and technologically appropriate, that is, affordable, do-able, teachable, and accessible.
5. It must be accurate, that is, culturally, cartographically and geographically the atlas must be the best possible.

Because we had no chart ourselves to follow to make these maps, early on we made a decision that was always got us across uncharted territory: put the problem requiring a solution before all the collaborators and don't accept a short cut. Looking back over what has been accomplished in such a short time, what we now call a methodology is really but a string of solutions we developed together as we set out to map Maya land and life.

Together, we found a way to merge the geography in Maya lands and culture to the geography shown in the pages of the Maya Atlas by way of linking workshops that taught and invented community-based cartography to handmade colored pencil maps, tape recorders, disposable cameras and Global Positioning System receivers used in Maya communities in Maya lands, to Nikon N-90 cameras and Nikon slide scanners, Mac 8200 and Power Computing 225 computers, and Zip and Jazz drives, and Quark and PhotoShop software used in Berkeley, to Mac 3400 laptops and Sharp computer projectors used to return to Maya lands to review and edit the Atlas with the collaborators.

If it were possible to enlarge each of the village maps to 1:1, that is, to the same scale as the real place, and lay them out over southern Belize, then each map should closely match the geography underneath, and, fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, all of the maps should closely portray actual Maya lands and land use.