Route reconstruction of the German Expedition to East Africa in 1862/1862 led by Werner Munzinger: GIS files as supplement to the research paper

Abstract

This data set is the result of the route reconstruction of the German expedition to East Africa in 1861/1862. The expedition was led by Werner Munzinger, and the section covered here led from Mai Scheka in present-day Eritrea through Tigray in Ethiopia to Kassala in Sudan. The reconstruction was based on the maps and reports published by the expedition team:

Heuglin, T. v., Kinzelbach, T., Munzinger, W., and Steudner, H.: Die Deutsche Expedition in Ost-Afrika 1861 und 1862: Zusammenstellung der astronomischen, hypsometrischen und meteorologischen Beobachtungen, und der trigonometrischen und itinerarischen Aufnahmen, Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes' Geographischer Anstalt über wichtige neue Erforschungen auf dem Gesammtgebiete der Geographie; 13 = Ergänzungsband III, Perthes, Gotha, 46 pp., 1864.

We gathered all geospatial information from these sources to reconstruct the route on a modern map basis. All methodological details can be found in the accompanying research paper.

Here we publish three files in the shapefile format:

1. munzinger_pois_reconstructed.shp (point shapefile) These are the places of interest that we extracted from Munzinger's maps and travel reports and located on a modern basis. These are differentiated in -stop: locations where the group stayed over night -poi: places of interest the group used for orientation or provided information about -wp: waypoints that the group passed by -torrent: streams/valleys that the group hat to cross

2. munzinger_stations_reconstructed.shp (point shapefile) These are all of the geodetic measurement stations that the group set up. The attribute table contains: -station: the name of the station as on the maps -dir_text: the direction as given in the text, including cardinal direction -location: the place on which the measurement was focused -deviation: the magnetic deviation of the angular measurements as stated in the text -dir_dev360: The angular measurement converted to 360 degree space including the magnetic deviation --> these are the final values we used for the reconstruction

3. munzinger_route_reconstructed.shp (line shapefile) This is the final reconstructed route.

All files are in EPSG:32637 - WGS 84 / UTM zone 37N