Cartography of Sertão of Brazil: some issues on an ongoing image along XIXth and XXth centuries

Abstract

Until the XIXth century, enormous parts of Brazilian territory remained unknown, as one can observe on map collections. The northeastern part, mainly the semi-arid Sertão, is one of the most significant absences from Brazilian cartography so then. A part of the country which constantly suffers from irregular rainy seasons, tending frequently to long-term periods of drought. The integration of Sertão to all country was formulated as one of the factors to reduce the problems concerned to the droughts. For that, it was demanded more efforts to build a sharp knowledge on the region, which was represented as Sertão as a whole. So, this paper aims to analyze how the cartographic documents were important to delineate the image of Sertão, even since the lack of accuracy of the maps in the beginnings of the XIXth century to the precision and concise ones of the XXth. Methodologically, this paper is based on new or few-used primary fonts, articulated to comprehend the historiographical construction of Brazilian Northeast region as well as the very notion of region as an ongoing image