Review: National atlas of Senegal

Summary

Yveline Poncet reviews the Atlas national du Sénégal, coordinated by Régine Van Chi-Bonnardel in the Dossiers Pédagogiques collection for teachers and students. She praises its achievement in assembling, coordinating and mapping difficult-to-obtain information, its generally clear thematic maps, and the explanatory notices combining photographs, supplementary maps, statistical diagrams and bibliographies. She criticizes some graphic choices, inconvenient scale presentation, limited coverage of agriculture, livestock and fishing, outdated statistics, and the absence of cross-map syntheses of land use and environmental vulnerability. She notes that rural themes recur in regional plates, that further plates are announced, and that the unfinished atlas would benefit from regular updates. Returning to a controversy over an accompanying notice, she examines plate 18 on Senegambian protohistoric sites: its mapping reveals distributions and contacts, but blank areas require clarification as either actual absences or gaps in survey coverage. Poncet uses the review to question the balance between maps and extensive texts and between research and teaching. She argues that maps embody interpretation and classification, and that an atlas's intended audience should guide its selection and presentation of knowledge.