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The concept of metacartography was introduced by William Bunge in his book “Theoretical Geography” (1962). For him it was an activity of setting the “boundaries” of cartography by exploring traverses from the map to the premap (i.e. “…other devices, such as photographs, pictures, graphs, language …”), and of most interest to him and fellow researchers at the time, from the map to mathematics. These traverses were performed, for example, along lines of scale, generalisation distortion, abstraction and “psychological accuracy” (premaps), alternatively topology, dimensionality, and distance (mathematics). The traverse activity quite simply started with an example that was definitely map-like, then progressively presenting other examples that had less and less of the map in them, noting when the change to premap or mathematical example occurred (e.g. for the scale traverse: Map of a city; Map of a campus in the city; Representation of a university building on the campus (premap); Representation of a nail in the building (premap)). This metacartography activity and its results were then to provide context for Bunge’s manifesto for a mathematically-led geography, a foundation of the “quantitative revolution” in the discipline that has led to the Cartographic and GI Science of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]