Such surveys rely on natural features, including streams or landforms as well as other individual and often ephemeral objects, such as rocks and trees. Most of the world's land areas have been subdivided unsystematically, and this method-or lack of method-partly explains the complicated pattern of property and civil boundaries in many older regions of the earth. By contrast, subdivision on another piece of land, even for the same uses and even when lines have been drawn straight, appears haphazard, its boundaries and markers apparently fixed arbitrarily, creating a patchwork of properties. The subdivision on one piece of land looks highly patterned and systematic, rectangular in shape and oriented in cardinal directions, with roads and boundaries spaced at specific intervals. Two seemingly similar pieces of land appear quite different because of the way they have been laid out. Once laid down the boundaries of land division become part of an inheritance to be accepted or modified by later generations.Īir travelers see the effects of cadastral surveying instantly when they look out the window. And of all these human designs, one of the most widespread, if not the most important, is the subdivision of land for purposes of settlement and taxation-the cadastral survey. Patterns resulting from humankind's activities, although individually not of the great scale of natural features, in aggregate give to certain areas their most distinctive character. Inscribed upon that grand design, the surface of the earth, are the marks of human occupancy.
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