From the way I understand it, when a new Age was opened, the maintainers were the first through. After the invention of deretheni, the first maintainer into an Age wore the heavy environmental armor that provided protection from everything up to and including falling into an open lava pool. Once that maintainer linked back and reported that it was safe, the next step was a cooperative effort between several guilds. A team made up of maintainers, surveyors, cartographers, healers, and probably a few guilds that aren't as prominent in the texts would link to the Age and study it. The maintainers would look for inconsistencies with how the book had been written and any unexpected dangers. The surveyors would establish the zero meridian and study the terrain for a report to their masters, the cartographers would begin mapping the Age, and the healers would begin studying the air, plants, animals and other factors searching for signs of unknown diseases and other potential medical hazards. There were probably botanists, zoologists, and other specialists as well, although I have no proof of that. In any case, there was at least some overlap of tasks between guilds -- both the maintainers and the healers would have been interested in dangerous animals or plants. The maintainers and the surveyors would have both been interested in hazardous rock formations or water conditions.
In the book of Atrus, the surveyors did all of the work on the Journey to the Surface by themselves, and the only other guild along for the ride was the Caterers, in form of cooks and food handlers. The miners didn't show up until the end, when they brought up the great tunneling machines to dig the Shaft. Still, that's the book, and the facts in the books have to be taken with a grain of salt. David Wingrove did most of the writing, and he got a lot of things wrong.
Why do we call them maintainer's marks? The reason for that is pretty simple. The symbol on top of them is the logo of the maintainers, and we know that they were the ones who set them in place because of the stash in Gahreesen. That was one of the reasons why Tweek mentioning they are the transmitters for the coordinate system caught me by surprise. Why would the maintainers set up the coordinate system instead of the surveyors? The other reason is because in the two maps we have -- the pod Age and Teledahn -- the latitude and longitude lines do not correspond to the physical locations of the mark in Teledahn or the probable locations in the pod Age. In Teledahn, the only sign of radial coordinate lines are in the lower right corner of the map, nowhere near the mark. The island the mark is on is a little to the left of the center.
_________________ * b'tagamem mot seKem ril ge'Dan Kenen reKElen faex b'sEnem ge'Dan -- lårE leDA Until next time! -- Larry LeDeay 3 # 11308 The Lost Library of D'ni
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