Maya cartographers Basilio Ah, Julio Sanchez and Andres Coh came from Toledo District, Belize to the University of California for two weeks to help complete the final stages of making the land use map and to work on other sheet maps for The Maya Atlas. The Maya cartographers received additional cartographic training from Dr. Cherie Semans, the Department of Geography's staff carographer, and training in computer cartography from Mr. Don Bain, head of the Department's Computer Facility.

Working closely with the UC Berkeley GeoMap team of Charles Tambiah, Jennie Freeman and Tim Norris, the Maya cartographers again went over the 1:25,000 village maps to crosscheck them for accuracy and completeness. These maps were then photographed using a Nikon N-90 with a special 60mm copy lens to produce fine-grain 35mm color transparencies. These transparencies (slides) were then placed into a Nikon LS-1000 Slide Scanner (2500 dpi) and the images imported into a Mac 8200 computer, with back-up images stored on high-capacity 100MB Zip disks. With the images of the maps made by the village researchers on the computer harddrive, each image could then be reduced by a uniform scale reduction and put together (much like pieces of a puzzle) to produce the land use map, the first of several maps being made for the Maya Atlas. The Maya cartographers assisted at every stage of the computer work and made decisions on many Atlas map questions and problems. The Maya cartographers gave four lectures to an advanced UC Berkeley conservation geography class on the Maya, land use, conservation, and the making of the Maya Atlas.

To create the land use map the UC Berkeley cartographers used all of the village maps (42 communities) to assemble by means of the GeoMap computer the composite land use areas. Where there were small overlaps from village to village, the Maya cartographers -- based on their on-the-ground familiarity with community lands -- directed the Berkeley computer cartographers where to make the minor adjustments. Overall, each village map fit closely with neighboring village maps.

The final, 20 x 30 inch high quality land use map and smaller copies were completed at the end of November and sent to TMCC in Belize and Indian Law Resource Center in Washington for inclusion in the Maya land rights case before Belize's Supreme Court.