Ancient Places in Pleiades

Places are geographical and historical contexts for Names and Locations. Places may have within their core some features of the physical world – a sea, a bay, a river, a mountain range, a pass, a road, a settlement or an ethnic region – but their primary quality is that, in the words of Yi-fu Tuan [1], they are constructed by human experience. Places may be no larger than a family dwelling or as big as an empire, be temporally enduring or fleeting. They may expand, constract and evolve over time. A place may be unnamed, unlocated, falsely attested or even mythical. Pleiades began with the cataloged places of the Barrington Atlas, minting a unique place for each record in the map-by-map directories of the Atlas and creating names and locations in the context of that place. Recent additions include places appearing on Barrington Atlas map sheets that did not appear individually in the directories and entirely new places added by the Pleiades user community. For more details about the way that Pleiades models information, please see the technical introduction to places.

Starting points

• Internum Mare (the Mediterranean Sea) is perhaps the central place of the Greek and Roman worlds. Connections can be followed from there to many other places.
  
• Aphrodisias contains the largest number of locations and names, and links to evidence for them from the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias project.
  
• The faceted place index provides a number of entry points into the set of all places.
• The faceted name index does likewise for names.
• Getting Started explains how to begin contributing to Pleiades.
  

The Catalog

The catalog of Pleiades objects can be searched via simple or advanced forms and is also written every morning to files that can be opened in a spreadsheet program.

Downloads

CSV, KML and RDF datasets can be downloaded from Pleiades or from CKAN.

References