De L’Amerique (Peuples De Virginie) (America [People of Virginia])

Alain Manesson Mallet was a French cartographer with a background in mathematics and engineering. He worked as a military theoretician and is credited with popularizing the idea of constructing three-dimensional maps and military plans. “De L’Amerique: Peuples de Virginie” (“Of America: People of Virginia”) is a page from the fifth volume of Mallet’s encyclopedic book “Description de l'univers” (“Description of the Universe”), which was originally published in Paris in 1683. The volumes include maps of regions around the world alongside illustrated landscapes and scenes. This page was part of a larger section about Virginia and the Americas more broadly. It depicts two Indigenous people, one male and one female, in a natural setting. Mallet’s ethnographic representation of Indigenous people exemplifies a larger practice that was part of European peoples’ process of colonizing the American continents.