Research on land-use/cover change in East Africa commonly suffers from a time-frame bias, caused by limitations in remote sensing data. At the same time, maps of East Africa from the late 19^th and early to mid 20^th century containing vegetation and land-use data represent an underutilised source of historical knowledge, suffering as they do from a colonial stigmata. We explore the potentials of using these historical maps in understanding and visualising landscape transformations at different temporal and spatial scales. By systematically employing historical and contemporary maps and related sources such as land-use/cover and satellite image data we aim to contribute to current discussions on land use change and policy. Exploring ways to extract and classify land use data, correlating map descriptions with written, pictorial and photographic representations connected to these maps, the project is conducted along two main avenues, one raster based and the other topological. At present we focus on land cover changes present in maps from 1872 to the present on Kilimanjaro, Ngorongoro and Lake Manyara, Tanzania.