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Conference Paper: Catching up with the daughters of Atlas (2026)

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Last modified May 05, 2026 06:09 PM
The Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places at twenty. Pleiades managing editor Tom Elliott delivered the following paper in the Presidential Panel of the Association of Ancient Historians Annual Meeting 2026 in Iowa City, Iowa, on Thursday, 16 April 2026. The text has been lightly revised to incorporate text shown on slides, hyperlinks to web pages that were shown as screen captures to the audience, and hyperlinks and references that were provided to the audience in a handout. Some context-specific interactions with the audience have been omitted.

Prologue

It is an honor to join you all here today and to be among so many friends and fellow-laborers in the fields of ancient history. I'd like to begin by offering a reflection illustrating the importance and ephemerality of place in the study of humanity and its history. I want to start there, positioning myself — and all of you — in space and time and culture and politics and what it might all mean to a person, before turning to discussion of the Pleiades gazetteer, which tries to capture and communicate some of that sort of thing for a collection of more distant and older places.

I’ve come here from North Alabama, where I live on land my wife’s ancestors purchased in the early 20th century, lost in the Great Depression, and repurchased in the 1970s with loan guarantees from the [federal government]. Like all of Alabama, this is land that had been returned to U.S. jurisdiction after the defeat of the criminal, pro-slavery Confederacy in the late 19th century. It is land that was hunted, farmed, and loved by brown, white, and black people, both before and after the Civil War, including by the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Shawnee.

In 1816, under duress, the Cherokee Nation ceded the area now incorporated as Madison County, Alabama, to the United States. An original route of the Trail of Tears — a genocidal abomination committed by the US Government in the ensuing decades — passes within a mile of my house, now buried under highway asphalt and recently stripped of the signage that memorialized that history. We live close to the Flint River, a tributary of the Tennessee, which in turn flows into the Mississippi and eventually into what we still all call the Gulf of Mexico. I have no idea what name the Cherokee or their predecessors gave to the Flint, but I have seen and held the projectile points they made from the abundant local chert evoked by its modern English name. And so conscious of the valences of my home, I come now to Iowa City, which is situated on another tributary of the mighty Mississippi. We gather here on the ancestral lands of the Báxoǰe, Sauk, and Meskwaki nations. Dispossession of their land allowed for the growth of the University of Iowa, our host.

Let us now, equipped with scholarly skill and human empathy, honor those who preceded us by turning our attention to the effort of rediscovering and preserving the memory, names, and connections of other peoples and the places they inhabited.

A globe showing the majority of Africa, Asia, and Europe. A mass of yellow dots covers the Mediterranean region and the lower Nile valley, decreasing in number across the rest of the visible land masses.

Pleiades origins

By one reckoning, the Pleiades gazetteer is 20 years old, hence the subtitle of my talk. More about that in a moment, but, first, what is Pleiades?

Pleiades is a community-built gazetteer. It publishes authoritative geographic information about ancient places and spaces, enabling scholars, students and enthusiasts to use, create, and share that information freely under open license. At present, just over 42,000 ancient places and spaces are recorded. The number of places recorded – as well as the depth and completeness of the information about each of them – varies widely and is growing daily.

Where does the data in Pleiades come from? A little over 34,000 of the initial records in Pleiades — we call them "place resources" — were adapted and digitized from the Barrington Atlas. The Classical Atlas Project, which ran from the late 1980s through the year 2000, was intended to produce a book of maps: a comprehensive atlas of the Greek and Roman World. Thanks to the efforts of about 200 scholars and cartographers working under the direction of Richard Talbert, and thanks to the visionary generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Robert Strassler, and other sponsors, the project succeeded in its goal. The double-folio Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World — the first comprehensive Greek and Roman atlas to appear in print since the 19th century — was published by Princeton University Press in the year 2000, along with a two-volume, fourteen-hundred page Map-by-Map Directory that provided alternate names, broad temporal indicia, and bibliographic information for each feature, including thousands too poorly located to be mapped at all. Collected papers and reports of the Classical Atlas Project have been published in Talbert, Richard J. A. Challenges of Mapping the Classical World. Routledge, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429485688. 

With the encouragement of the sponsoring academic organization, the American Philological Association (now known as the Society for Classical Studies), we subsequently undertook to turn all of that information into an online database.

I start the clock that gets us to twenty years in 2006, when we received the first grant for Pleiades funding. In total, the Pleiades project has benefited from four grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as follows:

Reports and proposals related to these grants may be viewed on the Pleiades website at https://pleiades.stoa.org/docs/reports-proposals.

Why were we trying to convert the Barrington Atlas to a digital database, and why did the NEH invest so much money in that work? Here's the executive summary we provided for the first successful proposal, which attempted to articulate the overall idea and our rationale for the benefit of the NEH review panel and members of the National Humanities Council:

The creation of an interactive Internet-based spatial and historical reference tool for the cartography of the ancient world, which expands and updates the NEH-supported Classical Atlas Project.

  • Pleiades develops new mechanisms for the creation, maintenance and long-term functional preservation of humanities reference works.
  • It establishes an international community of scholars, students and enthusiasts who collaborate in updating the information assembled by the NEH-supported Classical Atlas Project.
  • They use a web-based, multi-lingual collaboration support system, built with open-source software and made freely available for reuse.
  • Pleiades enforces user roles that permit each user to contribute additions and improvements to any placename, geographic location, date, bibliographic reference or explanatory essay in the dataset, while facilitating rigorous review preparatory to publication in print and digital formats.

Lurking beneath this set of commitments, of course, lies a more complex history of concerns and motivations. Like any effort brought before a funding body, the idea of the Pleiades gazetteer had begun much earlier and was dependent on the intellectual effort of many.

There were so many ideas that started coming together for us in the 1990s. You’ll find many of them addressed in works listed under "Influences, Ideas, and History" below; I hope you'll forgive me for offering only an incomplete summary today. Among the formative influences on Pleiades, you’ll find historical gazetteer development. You’ll see we thought about the benefits and inadequacies of desktop and web-based geographic information systems, as well as the development of the so-called spatial web and, more parochially, the so-called "spatial turn" in the humanities. We worried about scholarship and publication outpacing our ability to keep geographic data up-to-date: the Map-by-Map Directory, and even the locations on the maps in the Atlas, were going to start going stale immediately.

Consequently, we were influenced heavily by the advent of Wikipedia and its technology-enabled participatory and iterative model of authorship and editing. I’ll share a comparative discovery here that I haven’t mentioned in print anywhere but probably should. On the back shelf in the Epigraphy Room in the library in Chapel Hill, there used to be a set of three-ring binders containing the mimeographed and handwritten database that T.R.S. Broughton kept for his magnum opus, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic. It’s clear from paging through it that he assembled and updated its contents collaboratively, sending out individual page changes to scholarly collaborators around the world by post and receiving back from them additions and corrections. It’s a spectacular example of pre-internet crowd-sourcing.

Once we'd committed to something digital and iterative, we also became concerned with maintaining and reinforcing the scholarly imperative of stable citation and extending it to digital data.

Pleiades benefited from more than NEH dollars. We owe existential debts to the late Ross Scaife and his Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities, to the Ancient World Mapping Center and the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, which has been the technical and editorial host of Pleiades since 2008.

What's in Pleiades? Updated Place Information Originating in the Barrington Atlas

A globe showing the majority of Africa, Asia, and Europe. A mass of grey dots covers the Mediterranean region and the lower Nile valley, decreasing in number across the Arabian peninsula and southwest Asia into the Indian subcontinent.

Here are the locations of the 34,084 Barrington Atlas places that were digitized and imported into Pleiades as its technical underpinnings took shape between 2006 and 2011.

A globe showing the majority of Africa, Asia, and Europe. A mass of grey dots covers the Mediterranean region and the lower Nile valley, decreasing in number across the Arabian peninsula and southwest Asia into the Indian subcontinent. The vast majority of the dots are colored bright yellow; only a few visible dots are gray.This second map highlights more than twenty-three thousand of the original 34,000 Barrington places that have been modified at least once since original accession. Many have been expanded and adjusted multiple times. A quick tour through a fraction of those updates will illustrate some of what we've been doing, and what we've learned about the needs of the scholarly community — and the public — along the way.

Let's start with Acholshausen. This is a Pleiades place resource that has seen almost no updates and therefore retains the hallmarks of its original import. The title comes directly from the Map-by-Map Directory. The original creators and contributors' names reflect the compilers of the original Barrington Atlas map. Additional personal names have been added with subsequent modifications, like the import of coordinates and bibliographic reference cleanup. You can see that the short, prose summary was programmatically generated on the basis of the atlas directory information.

The Barrington Atlas map coordinates shown here on the map and listed under the subheading "locations" were digitized by a project run at Harvard by Michael McCormick. It was called the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization. This project digitized coordinates for settlements and a few other types of point features from the Barrington Atlas, and then adjusted some of them to match more closely with labeled features in Google Earth. DARMC shared their data with Pleiades in 2010, and this enabled us to add coordinates quickly to almost 6,000 of the 34,000 place resources we had created from the atlas. For the rest — the rivers, the regions, the peoples, and more — we used the coordinates of the corresponding Barrington Atlas grid squares to get things started.

Some of these gridsquares still exist in Pleiades. Here is the place resource for the ancient Tziorikellos river, which was identified in a publication of the 1930s with a "Sulucak Deresi" in modern European Turkey. Pleiades contributors are actively working to replace the remaining gridsquares, and even the DARMC locations (which have their own limitations) with even more accurate and more precise coordinates.

The place resource for Nineveh illustrates the cumulative results of such work over time. Just like Acholshausen, the Pleiades place resource for Nineveh began as a dot on a Barrington Atlas map and a corresponding entry in the Map-by-Map Directory. It now boasts an extended prose summary, taking in the great city's history before the timeframe of the Barrington Atlas. The DARMC location has been retired, and is replaced by two representative point locations drawn from other geographic reference works, as well as a polygon outlining the extent of the modern archaeological area associated with the site of Nineveh today. The orange circle marks a calculated representative point: the centroid of those three locations. Before we dig into the names listing below and the profusion of green, bow-tie symbols on the map at right, I want to draw your attention to the information immediately below the prose summary.

A screen capture of a portion of the place resource page for Nineveh, centered on the section titled "Canonical URI for this page:". The value shown immediately under that heading is "https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/874621".Behold, the canonical uniform resource identifier. Think of these — every Pleiades place page has one — as the driver's license or passport number for the corresponding place. I think that the assignment of these unique, stable identifiers may end up being the most important thing Pleiades has done. Thanks to the efforts of our friends on the Pelagios team — formerly a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that worked to realize and demonstrate the value of embedding such references in other datasets — Pleiades canonical URIs are widely used to identify and disambiguate geographic places in an ever-growing number of scholarly datasets for ancient studies.

One current manifestation of this digital cross-citation practice is the Pleiades Linked Data sidebar. The code feeding this little widget is currently sifting through data published by other projects, looking for the Pleiades identifier for the current page. In this case, it's found the canonical URI for Pleiades' Nineveh in the MANTO database of Greek myth, the Nomisma numismatic database, ToposText, and Wikidata. It creates a link to the entries in each of those databases on their own websites, and decorates it with a yellow star if the bibliographic references in Pleiades include citations of the external database as well. So, here, we're looking at reciprocal links for Nineveh between Pleiades and these other four websites.

We rolled out the Linked Data sidebar just over a year ago. As of yesterday, over twenty-two thousand unique Pleiades place resources display the sidebar. Taken together, these sidebars report almost 38,000 inbound links from 20 external datasets and websites.  Almost 17,000 of these links are reciprocated by Pleiades references. I am currently in discussion with about 10 other projects in order to bring their data, which already contains Pleiades links, into the sidebar as well.

Now, back to locations. On the page and map for Nineveh, we saw how Pleiades lets us depart from the conventional GIS constraint of associating one place with one and only one geometric feature. This gives Pleiades flexibility to address the realities of our understanding of ancient places and their locations. For unlocated features, we can omit the location entirely.

For an attested ancient feature with multiple possible or suggested modern identifications, we can include some or all of the possibilities, marking them with qualifications like "less certain" or, as here in the case of the dread Mons Graupius, "uncertain."

In combination, another Pleiades feature and another transcendence of the constraints on the Barrington Atlas, make even more interesting things possible.

Behold, our beloved Athens. At the scales possible in dynamic web mapping — and given the scale of our scholarly knowledge of this ancient place — is a simple dot all we can or want to do? If we can record connections between a place and its subordinate or neighboring places, we can create maps like this. Each green bowtie symbol here marks the representative location of another place resource that we have connected to this one in the database, characterizing that connection as "located at", "located in", or "located near".

The same mechanism works to suggest the region in which other places are said to lie, as here for Attica. Note not only the map, but the corresponding list of connections, which provides links for the user to transit to each connected resource. Each relies on structured data in the database that can be exported and reused for analytic work.

We can encode and visualize diplomatic, tributary, administrative, and extractive networks, such as the Delian league.

We can also represent physical and topographic relationships through connections. You see here the example of the Great Wall of Gorgon, clearly represented by its constituent forts.

Under the auspices of the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), Anne Chen and colleagues have been using Pleiades to develop an urban gazetteer of Dura-Europos for integration with linked collections data at Yale, Wikidata, and elsewhere. In so doing, they've pioneered the use of Pleiades connections to represent archaeological phasing within the gazetteer; so, for example, it is now possible to click through links or maps in Pleiades to view the phasing of the synagogue at Dura.

One of the painful decisions the Atlas Project leadership had to make was the representation of Greek script in Latin characters. Although support for polytonic Greek script had been added to the Unicode standard in 1993, adoption and support in software came much later. This was particularly true of the software used for the Barrington Atlas maps such that the entire map compilation process was complete before Greek characters could have been properly added to the maps.

The modern web is not so constrained. And so Pleiades is able to represent names in any combination of language that has been properly registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and any writing system that has been fully added to Unicode. See, for example, the multiple names in multiple languages and scripts recorded in the place resource for the Krishna river in modern India (English, Telugu, and ancient Greek). Of course, some language and script combinations are less amenable to the Unicode approach, or are less well studied and implemented, and for these Pleiades retains the ability to record in romanization only.

New Place Resources Wholly Created in Pleiades

A globe showing the majority of Africa, Asia, and Europe. A large number of purple dots covers the Mediterranean region and the lower Nile valley, thinning out a bit across the rest of the visible land masses but covering a much larger area in Asia and Africa than the earlier map showing the Barrington Atlas coverage.The growth of Pleiades comprises not only updates to the data inherited from the Barrington, but also entirely new place entries. The current count is approaching 8,000 new place resources with associated names, locations, and references.

Once initially published, these new place resources are available for the same sort of incremental updates as the older materials.

Some of these are features too small to have been included in the Barrington Atlas given its scale. For example, here we have an attested urban sanctuary at Athens. By virtue of its connection to the place resource for Athens itself, this place contributes to the map full of green bowties – the footprint of Athens as so far recorded in Pleiades – that we looked at earlier.

Here’s another example, this time from Pompeii.

But we also have added new place resources that — like this Mongolian site — fall outside the boundaries of the Barrington Atlas. In this case, the expansion is both spatial and cultural.

What is the value of moving beyond the Barrington in this way? I think the value is self-evident for the Barrington-provenanced places and their new subordinate places, whether you look at data formats, search, more languages and scripts, more precise coordinates, or interconnection. Cultural, temporal, and spatial extension, I would argue, make just as much sense. Connection and comparison don’t stop at the Barrington borders. Here we’re following scholarly imperatives and real, beneficial shifts in our discipline and institutions: changes we’re right to celebrate, even as so much else looks increasingly dire. And we’re building on the synoptic approach taken by the atlas, even though it was forced to limit it by virtue of its remit and, practically, by what could reasonably get done in a limited period of time and in a cohesive manner given a prior century of neglect.

I’d like to pause for a moment to give credit for all this to our volunteer editors, reviewers, and contributors. You can find all 270 or so of them listed on our "Credits" page, with links to the resources they have added and updated. Our bylines contain the names of many more who are not registered themselves, but who have emailed in suggestions, offered corrections via social media, or have worked on teams with our registered contributors. Pleiades doesn’t exist without these people.

Here’s one more example of an entirely new entry. This time, back inside the Barrington envelope. I’ve added it because it illustrates a pattern Pleiades has established and that I’d like to emphasize – and recruit you all to help with – in the final minutes of my talk today. The katoikia of the Krollenians is newly attested in a freshly published Trajanic inscription from Turkey.

Keeping up with new publications — in this case the most recent volume of Gephyra — enables Pleiades to update existing place resources and to add new ones as scholarship rolls on. If you were to read our first NEH proposal from back in 2005, you’d see this particular use case fits squarely in the summary we looked at earlier, where we argued for “new mechanisms for the creation, maintenance and long-term functional preservation of humanities reference works.” Keeping up with new work in our field is in no way a new mechanism, but having an online, continuously updated, and freely and globally available place for anyone with the skill and bona fides to report and share that bibliography — and to combine it with spatial coordinates, toponyms, and connective information — is very much a feature of the 21st century.

Pleiades Futures: What's Needed Now

This is, I think, the first area where Pleiades needs help and needs changes to keep going into its next 20 years. Bibliographic updates need to become more regular and more comprehensive. We need volunteers to monitor journals and add to relevant existing or new resources, to review and clean up new entries, and to help get new contributors up-to-speed working with bibliography in Pleiades and our project Zotero library.

We also have issues of governance, policy, documentation, and training to address. Chief among these is figuring out how to make me redundant. I’ve been benevolent Pleiades dictator for a long time now. I’m not prepared anytime soon to quit working on Pleiades, but the community and the work deserve a deliberate and effective transition to a more communal and stable form of governance and management.

We need an AI policy that our community members, both contributors and users, support and trust. We need documentation updates and expansion of the training opportunities we can provide. We need more people able to serve as regional, temporal, or topical reviewers and editors, including those with skills in toponyms and the texts, languages, and scripts of their witnesses. We need more outreach and social media engagement. Some of this work can be done by volunteers, but some of this will need money that we don’t currently have.

We also need more hands and minds working on technical tooling and operations management. We need to be able to plan and build for next-generation technical capabilities, alignment with other gazetteers and reference resources, and the accession of other datasets that are reaching end-of-life and that have approached Pleiades for long-term curation of their data.

So, that’s thirty minutes of catching up with Pleiades. If any of what you’ve seen interests you further – or worries you – please seek me out. I love to talk, and to listen.

Bibliography of Influences, Ideas and History

  • Elliott, Tom, and Sean Gillies. “Digital Geography and Classics.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 003, no. 1 (2009). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000031/000031.html.

  • Elliott, Tom, and Sean Gillies. “Geography: Shared Effort across Projects and Disciplines.” Digital Humanities 2010: Re-use of Open Source and Open Access Publications in Ancient Studies panel, University of Maryland, College Park, June 25, 2009. http://vimeo.com/12063424.

  • Elliott, Tom. “The Pleiadic Gaze: Looking at Archaeology from the Perspective of a Digital Gazetteer.” Classical Archaeology in the Digital Age – The AIAC Presidential Panel, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11588/PROPYLAEUM.708.C10612.

  • Gillies, Sean. “What’s an Un-GIS?” A gazetteer of past places. Pleiades: A Gazetteer of Past Places, February 11, 2013 (authored 2010). https://pleiades.stoa.org/docs/papers-and-presentations/whats-an-un-gis.

  • Guldi, Jo. “What Is the Spatial Turn?” Spatial Humanities: A Project of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, 2011. https://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/.

  • Kansa, Eric, Tom Elliott, Sebastian Heath, and Sean Gillies. “Atom Feeds and Incremental Semantic Annotation of Archaeological Collections.” Paper presented at Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archeology - CAA 2010. CAA2010: Fusion of Cultures: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Granada, Spain, April 2010, 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20120310092740/http://alexandriaarchive.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/CAA_2010_kansa_et_al_draft.pdf.

  • Knowles, Anne. Past Time, Past Place : GIS for History. ESRI Press, 2002.

  • Knowles, Anne Kelly, and Amy Hillier, eds. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. ESRI Press, 2008.

  • Simon, Rainer, Leif Isaksen, Elton Barker, and Pau de Soto Cañamares. “The Pleiades Gazetteer and the Pelagios Project.” In Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers by Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth Mostern, and Humphrey Southall, eds. Indiana University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2005zq7.

  • Southall, Humphrey, Ruth Mostern, and Merrick Lex Berman. “On Historical Gazetteers.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 5, no. 2 (2011): 127–45. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2011.0028.

  • Talbert, Richard J. A., and Tom Elliott. “Mapping the Ancient World: GIS for History.” Pages 145-162 in Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, by Anne Kelly Knowles. ESRI Press, 2002. Reprinted as Chapter 13 in Challenges of mapping the Classical World by Richard J.A. Talbert. Routledge, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429485688.

  • Tuan, Yi-fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 1977.