1. Where did all the content in Pleiades come from?

The initial set of information (places, names) in Pleiades came from the Classical Atlas Project. It was converted from the compilation materials that were used to assemble the Map-by-Map Directory to the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. We're grateful to the American Philological Association, which sponsored the Classical Atlas Project, for its collaboration in this regard.

Pleiades is designed to encourage users to improve, update and expand the content. We're currently working with the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) at Harvard to collate our content with their geodata sets, which are derived from a number of sources, including the Barrington Atlas map compilation materials. This will bring coordinates into Pleiades, along with links to DARMC. For its part, DARMC will get temporal information from us, and links back into Pleiades.

Meantime, individual Pleiades users have been adding new content too. For example, consider this detailed treatment of the ancient settlement now called Ain el-Gedida in Egypt, prepared by Nicola Aravecchia.