Detailed Knowledge of Territory: Construction and Army

Abstract

The objective of this article is to emphasise the keys of territory construction phase which complements that of its exploration. Both of them give rise to the appearance of the first signs, a fact that constitutes a first step towards its graphic representation. From the very beginning of time, human being necessities has urged men to push forward and discover territories provoking alterations in the territory itself, and loading it with new contents (Fig. 1). To carry out this construction, they were helped by their technical and communicative capacities which, evolved with the passage of time, allowed them to face most of the activities they had decided to undertake. The paper addresses concepts and advances affecting directly to the territory and that deal with the information contained and its less natural characteristics. Terms such as: artificiality, complexity and others are used to try to understand the impulses that lead mankind to intervene their habitat and transform it. Some authors such as Soria, Menéndez de Luarca and Capel dealt with some of the keys to this construction process. Armies, always at the vanguard of technology, proactively become main actors in this phase of the detailed knowledge of the territory.