Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Land Survey as Essential to Ancient City-States and Modern Countries, Nations and Unions

Land ownership and land survey go hand in hand as a matter of law.

Land surveying plays an essential role in nation-building, and some understanding of land survey is essential to comprehend any ancient city-state or modern country or nation, neither of which could exist without some kind of land survey.

The measurement problems posed by land surveying on a large scale prior to the age of GPS follow us from early technological eras down to the present day, and this applies even to the borders of some States of the United States.

Ivars Peterson at the Mathematical Tourist in Rectangular States and Kinky Borders talks about the fact that some of the borders of U.S. States have land surveying anomalies and are not as perfectly straight as they are shown on maps. Take a look at at that short but informative piece.

See also:
  • The Mathematics of Surveying Part I by Tony Phillips of Stony Brook University.
     
  • The Mathematics of Surveying: Part II. The Planimeter by Bill Casselman, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

  • C.A. White, History of the Rectangular Survey System, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT, Pdf Version modified from scans by NATIONAL TECHNICAL INFORMATION SERVICE, SPRINGFIELD, VA 22161. The 46MB searchable PDF takes quite a bit of time to load.

    Bernard Hostrop, Surveyor General of the United States in 1983, writes there by way of introduction:

    "With its beginning more than two hundred years ago, the United States Rectangular Survey System is typically, and yet somewhat uniquely, a record of the American frontier spirit blended with the concept of government for the people."
Read all that and you will appreciate the land survey accomplishments of the ancients.

See my two previous postings about alleged Old World surveyors and ancient land surveying.

See also Three Mount Rushmore Presidents Were Land Surveyors: The Territorial Imperative: You Have to Understand the Importance of Property in Law, Politics and History: LAND not POTS ruled

Most Popular Posts of All Time

Sky Earth Native America


Sky Earth Native America 1:
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Sky Earth Native America 2:
    American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
    Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy
    ,
    Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.

  • Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
    The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.

    -----

    Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
    "Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
    that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America, e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
    geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
    See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
    American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
    Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
    "These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
    drawing them according to their magnitude.
    The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
    ... They were keen observers....
    The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy comparable to that of the early white men."
    See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
    American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
    In our book, we take these observations one level further
    and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving and pictographic rock art in Native America,
    together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
    placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
    in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
    That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
    whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens, "immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
    cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
    These landmarks were placed systematically in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
    and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."


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