Traditional Navajo Maps and Wayfinding

All theories of the "peopling" of the Western Hemisphere acknowledge the abundant evidence, from remotest pre-Columbian times to the present, that American Indians have traveled long distances for direct subsistence, trade, and other purposes. 1 Yet most Indian societies have not produced "maps" in the familiar sense of "a representation, usually on a plane surface, of a region of the earth or heavens." 2 Outside the influence of European colonizers, and with the pre-Columbian exception of urbanized Mesoamerican groups, these groups have relied mainly on speech and memory to transmit and store important information, including knowledge about the earth's surface and wayfinding on it. 3 Scholars working within Eurocentric traditions of keeping written records have documented some of these spoken and memorized portrayals of the earth's surface.