Forgotten Waters: Watershed Politics in the Xuani community Santa María Ixcatlán — Case Study

In the past, the expressions “unknown land” or “unknown sea” — more frequently written in their Latin forms terra incognita and mare incognito — were used to designate areas on maps that had not yet been explored. They were, as the Latin terms suggest, “under the radar.” Some examples from Western-tradition geography include the polar caps, which were described as terra incognita from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and the complete lack of awareness of the second-largest landmass on the planet, which was so “under the radar” that it wasn’t even outlined as “unknown land” — it was completely absent from all forms of documentation. The oldest surviving terrestrial globe, the Erdapfel, was completed in 1492, just as  Christopher Columbus was learning through his accidental encounters of the enormous oversight. He would return to Europe to correct the oversight with accounts of his voyage in 1493.