R+D+i project ‘Marcos de mapeo y prácticas de territorialización en América (siglos XVI-XVIII): espacios, categorías y representaciones’ (MAPWORKS)
PID2022-141020NA-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and by FEDER, EU.

The MAPWORKS project analyses the processes and practices of territorial apprehension through cultural artefacts and representations of a visual, textual, conceptual and topological nature in the Americas between the XVIth and XVIIIth centuries. It proposes a complex approach to the mechanisms of shaping geographical notions and ideas, in direct connection with the space of reference and its empirical experience.

This set of territorial representations is included in a new category of analysis that we call ‘mapping frameworks’; a broad spectrum of artefactual, cultural and symbolic products aimed at structuring and explaining the natural and human environment: maps, geographical descriptions, landscapes, interventions on the environment, spatial concepts and socio-territorial conceptualisations, the latter understood as constructions by human beings in relation to or as a consequence of the belonging of a group to a specific place.

From our field of knowledge, in the history of America and the history of cartography, American societies during the colonial period present themselves as a prone field for the development of this research, given the complex territorial and human processes of conquest, confrontation, hybridisation, aggregation or negotiation developed, during that period, in very dissimilar spaces and contexts.

In the shaping of the American territories and their immediate oceans and in the inherent processes of construction of geographical knowledge, representations were produced that operated as cultural systems that explained and structured the world (mapping frameworks), linking places and endowing them with meaning, but also interacting with other pre-existing knowledge, representations and territorialities or resulting from Iberian action in the American environment, whether from indigenous cultures or from other foreign nations. These mapping frameworks therefore played a mediating role between geography and human actions on lands and seas, as a result of some practices and as an agent or conditioner of others. In this way, maps, whether drawn or in prose, but also texts with geographical content, landscapes or socio-territorial categories, reveal a structured version of the geographical factors involved in human actions and decisions on the environment.

It is therefore necessary to adopt an inter/multidisciplinary perspective, with specialists in history, archaeology and anthropology in order to: 1) deepen the knowledge of the representations of the territories and oceans of the New World, beyond the cartography produced by Western science; 2) understand the uses and interrelationships of cultural elaborations of spatiality with processes of territorialisation; and 3) explain socio-environmental links, territorialities and representations of subaltern groups, indigenous, mestizo, European, Asian and African populations in colonial America.

In collaboration with:

• Red Geopam. «Geopolítica americana siglos XVI-XIX». The activity is carried out in collaboration with the Geopam Network, which holds its meetings within the framework of the congress.
• Grupo PAIDI HUM-680 «Estudios sobre Europa, el mundo mediterráneo y su difusión atlántica», Universidad Pablo de Olavide.