ABSTRACT
Two basic culture groups existed in pre-colonial Nicaragua. In the central highlands and Pacific coast regions, the native peoples were linguistically and culturally similar to the Aztec and the Maya. Most people of central and western Nicaragua spoke dialects of Pipil, a language closely related to Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec. Most of Nicaragua’s Caribbean lowlands area was inhabited by tribes that migrated north from what is now Colombia. The first map of the region was prepared by Christopher Columbus in 1502 and covered the Caribbean coast. The IAGS developed a series of map projections for each of the Central American countries during the late 1940s through the 1950s. Each of these coordinate systems was based on the Lambert Conformal Conic projection with two standard parallels, similar in treatment as the Coast & Geodetic Survey did for those applicable states in the United States.
