★ Explore the diverse positioning of humanity in the world through 111 maps, showcasing the geography from a multicultural perspective.
★ The combination of science and art, each map is accompanied by scientific explanations, transforming complex geographical knowledge into easily understandable stories.
★ Spanning time and space, from prehistory to modern times, covering five continents, presenting readers with a journey of human diversity across time and space.

An alternative atlas of maps from prehistory to the present day. A unique piece of work that introduces us to a different form of geography, another way of inscribing humans in the world.
Matteo Meschiari has put together an atlas that is unique. Not the maps we are used to seeing or the “normal” in-plane transposition of some particular portion of the terrestrial sphere. In these illustrations it is indeed the very idea of cartography that is questioned. Homo sapiens has always represented its territory with degrees of importance and in forms that vary according to cultural context. Different peoples in different periods “mapped” their place in the world on different material substrata, adding their own mythological, religious and symbolic imaginary. The 111 examples collected in the book, chosen from among the most significant ethnological research has to offer, allow Meschiari to show the vast spectrum of human diversity before, during and after modernity. Specially redrawn, each map is described and explained scientifically on the opposite page. The result is 111 stories and 111 alternative “worlds” from prehistory to the present day, embracing all five continents. prehistory to the present day, embracing all five continents.

This is a unique book, a thought-provoking journey through time, space and human plurality.

Matteo Meschiari, a writer and anthropologist, teaches Geography at the University of Palermo. His research interests include landscape in literature, housing models from the Paleolithic to the Anthropocene, prehistoric and tribal art, and perceived and inhabited space in the West and in indigenous cultures. An exponent of narrative anthropology, he has written and edited nonfiction works, novels, poetry and children’s books. Among his recent publications, "Antropocene fantastico. Scrivere un altro mondo" (Fantastic Anthropocene. Writing another world, 2020), "Geografie del collasso. L’Antropocene in 9 parole chiave" (Geographies of Collapse. The Anthropocene in nine words, 2021), "Landness. Una storia geoanarchica" (Landness. A history of geographical anarchy, 2022), "Kosmos" (2023) and "La fabbrica dei mondi. Geografie immaginate e Territà" (The World Factory. Imagined geographies and Territà [the genetic and cultural process of co-evolution between Homo sapiens and the earth], 2024).

Gustav Holm was a Danish explorer and naval officer. From 1883 to 1885 he led the Umiak Expedition to the then unknown Ammassalik coast of Eastern Greenland, where he became the first white man to come into contact with the local Tunumiit communities. Among them he met Kunit, a hunter, who in February and March 1885 carved him two tactile maps using wood swept in by the tide. The geographical area reproduced in the three-dimensional maps is a stretch of the coast around 66°N 36°W. The map on the left measures 14 x 5 cm and represents the fjords and relief of the area’s peninsulas, the one on the right measures 22 x 2,5 cm and represents the islands in front of them.
Ethnographic studies have always remarked upon the Inuit’s great sense of orientation and sensibility towards the landscape but Kunit, a skilled craftsman with outstanding geographical instinct, was even capable of describing places he had visited as many as twenty years earlier with the utmost precision. Holm carried out his exploring expedition rowing umiak, open seal- and walrus skin boats, once very common across the Arctic. It is not clear whether he actually used Kunit’s wooden maps but when he returned from his voyage, he did deposit them at the National Museum in Copenhagen. There they remained for decades until they were transferred permanently to the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk. The two maps represent a double anomaly. Traditionally, the Inuit did not use maps and wooden representations are a rarity among the ones gathered by Arctic explorers among the indigenous populations. Yet however culturally hybrid they may be, Ammassalik wooden maps are nonetheless an ingenious cartographic invention which transform two-dimensional representations into tools that can be read with the fingertips without even looking. From a cognitive point of view, they act as an effective synaesthetic bridge between body and landscape, between self-perception and representation of the world.