El registro del Mesón de Fierro en la cartografía de los siglos XVI a XIX

Abstract

Since the mid-16th Century and until today, the meteorites of Campo del Cielo (Chaco and Santiago del Estero) have been subject of study and numerous expeditions set out to find it, but not always successfully. They generated no more than two cartographic documents, one of them -corresponding to the expedition of Francisco de Ibarra in 1779- has been lost and the following, corresponding to the expedition of Miguel Rubin de Celis of the year 1783, is preserved in different copies. In all other maps, the location of the Mesón de Fierro and the itineraries of the expeditions have been reconstructed on tabulated data (distances traveled between points) or copied from the Rubin de Celis map. As curious facts, the location of the “Penol de hieiro” is included on a Dutch map from the year 1640, which is the oldest mention found by the author, and the anachronistic mention of a “Native iron” location on an English map of 1850.