Historians have long been fascinated by the creation of maps during the Age of Exploration. Of special interest are maps such as Waldseemüller and Ringmann's first map mentioning "America." The New York Times Science page looks at A Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox, a new book on the subject by John W. Hessler.

A 700-year-old map of the world, the Hereford Mappa Mundi, has been removed from display in Hereford Cathedral for evaluation of its condition. The 52 in. (132cm) circular map shows a medieval view of the world with Jerusalem at the center and Paradise "surrounded by a wall and a ring of fire, roughly where Japan would be." (photos)

Experts previously believed that only four copies of the 16th century Waldseemueller map still existed, but a fifth copy has been discovered between the pages of a 19th century book in Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University. (photo)

Harvard University has announced the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC), a website that "offers a series of maps and geodatabases bearing on multiple aspects of Roman and medieval civilization in the broadest terms."

In a discovery worthy of Dan Brown, experts believe they may have found Sir Walter Raleigh's "lost colony" of Roanoke inscribed on a 16th century map in invisible ink. (photos)

The Roman road network, renowned for its scope and efficiency, has now gotten even easier to travel thanks to an online application from Stanford University.  ORBIS is a geospatial network model that covers hundreds of land and sea routes in the Roman Empire circa 200 CE.

Theories about the fate of the "Lost Colony", a group of English colonists who founded a settlement in coastal North Carolina (USA), have ranged from disease to alien abduction. New evidence found on an English map may finally answer the question.

The U.S. Government is set to name a spot north of San Francisco, California after Sir Francis Drake, giving credance to that spot as the true location where Drake landed and claimed "Nova Albion" for Elizabeth I.

In 2010, a family discovered an antique gun buried in the sand on Dundee Beach in Australia's Northern Territory. The artifact, which resembles a 16th century swivel gun, has revived the theory that the continent was discovered by Portuguese seafarer Cristovao de Mendonca in 1521. (photo)

A collaborative project by Queen's University Belfast, King’s College London, and the Bodleian Libraries offers an innovative approach that explores the ‘linguistic geographies’ of the Gough Map, the earliest surviving geographically recognizable map of Great Britain.

Combining the Google Maps user interface with Wikipedia's knowledge data, this mashup site interactively displays the history of world military conflicts in a multidimensional format that allows one to see how the areas of conflict changed over time. Select your persona's lifetime on the timeline (or by hand-editing the URL), and see what wars were shaping the world during that time.

Google has produced an interactive website mapping warfare and battles throughout the world.

On March 30, 2011, the world's oldest printed star charts, created by German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, were auctioned by Sotheby's auction house in London. The woodcuts were first printed in 1515. (photo)

Ever wondered what Anglo-Saxon London would have looked like? Londonlist offers the opportunity to view closeups of how modern mapmakers would view medieval London.

An exhibition of maps from the Ottoman Empire will be on display at the Vatican this winter. The Ottoman Worldview from Piri Reis to Katip Çelebi', a traveling exhibit, was created in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the birth of Katip Çelebi'.

A team of Harvard undergraduates, graduate students, research scholars and one professor have created the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations, a mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds using the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) information system.

A group of experts from Berlin Technical University's Department for Geodesy and Geoinformation Science have cracked a 2nd  century map of Germany created by Ptolemy, re-dating many of the country's cities by 1,000 years.

Lecture given by Toby Lester -- a longtime editor and writer for The Atlantic, and the author of The Fourth Part of the World (2009) -- about the Waldseemüller world map of 1507.

A new website, PASE Domesday, allows users to search William the Conqueror's 1086 Domesday book by person and village. The results can be seen in tabular or map form.

We all know the schoolboy version of the naming of the American continents: merchant explorer Amerigo Vespucci supposedly named the New World after himself. But a little-known proofreader and scholar named Matthias Ringmann may actually be responsible.

The Library of Congress recently played host to "Re-Examining the Portolan Chart: History, Navigation and Science.", an academic conference dedicated to the history and origins of medieval coastal maps.

Most of us think of a map as a tool for getting from one place to another. But throughout history, mapmakers have had other priorities than providing a factual picture of the world.

In 1602, when he created the first Chinese map to name the Americas, Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit missionary living in Bejing. His map is currently on display at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. (photo)

The December 2009 issue of Smithsonian Magazine features an article on the Waldseemüller Map, an early 16th century chart which "changed the way people thought about the world."

Scholars are actively studying a mid-16th century map painted on amate paper made from tree bark which "tells sacred stories and speaks of pilgrimages, wars, medicine, plants, marriages, rituals and heroes of the Cuauhtinchan community," the Mexican people of modern Southwest U.S.

In a 2002 article for the website Strange Horizons, Michael Livingston looks at three modern myths about medieval maps, and discusses what medieval maps truly were.

Recent high-resolution geophysical surveys of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum in Norfolk, England, show that the town may have included agricultural areas, a discovery that contradicts earlier theories of the town's dense population. (graphic)

For years, experts have disputed the legitimacy of the Vinland Map, the famous 15th century map which depicted parts of North America many years before its discovery by Christopher Columbus. Now Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, has declared the map genuine.

Dante de Valencia,of the Shire of Trinovantia Nova, Kingdom of Ealdormere, has produced an interactive Map of the Known World.

The World Digital Library, Unesco's project to "promote curiosity and understanding across cultures," has launched its website with 1,200 documents ranging from a" 1,000-year-old Japanese novel to the earliest known map to mention America by name."