Maps and Marginalia: Marking the Unknown

The Albuquerque Museum delves into its collection of maps from the early modern world (ca. 1500–1700) to uncover the stereotypes in the marginalia, or decorative illustrations on the map’s borders. More than purely geographical documents, the maps showcase myths of ‘primitive’ Indigenous lives, reinforce Eurocentric views of superiority that justified colonialism, and indicate how little Europeans knew about the world it was exploring with imagined landforms and communities.

Image: John Speed, The Western Hemisphere in 1626, ca. 1626 (reproduced 1970), lithograph on paper, gift of the Albuquerque Museum Foundation from the Lucia v.B. Batten Estate, PC2020.51.74