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Ancient Places in Pleiades

Creators: Sean Gillies
Contributors: Tom Elliott
Copyright © The Contributors. Sharing and remixing permitted under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (cc-by).
Last modified Jul 11, 2024 04:40 PM — History
Pleiades is a gazetteer of ancient places. At present, it has extensive coverage for the Greek and Roman world, and is expanding temporally, spatially, and culturally.

Key Concepts

Information about ancient places in Pleiades is organized differently from both traditional gazetteers and standard GIS datasets. In our view, neither an alphabetical list of placenames nor a set of thematic layers is sufficiently flexible and rigorous to represent a complex, partial, and changing understanding of ancient geography. Instead, Pleiades content is organized into four types of "information resource": places, locations, names, and connections. Although some other projects have adopted this pattern since we introduced it, it remains uncommon; consequently, all but the most casual user will want to familiarize themselves with the distinctions between, and relationships among, these resources by reading the Conceptual Overview document in our Help section.

Find and Use Content

All published information resources in Pleiades are free and open to the public. No login is required. The following starting points will help you find the content you seek:

Home

The Pleiades home page at https://pleiades.stoa.org/home provides a quick overview of the project, a map and list of recently added and modified place resources, and other information suitable both for people new to the project and long-time users.

Search

There are three different search interfaces for finding Pleiades place resources. By browsing to Documentation > Need Help? > Using Pleiades Data > How to Search for Things in Pleiades, you'll find illustrated, step-by-step instructions.

Download

Regular exports of Pleiades content can be downloaded en masse in a number of formats.

API

Interact programmatically with published content via our Application Programming Interface.