What Pleiades Does: La Alcudia

The Barrington Atlas (map 27, compiled by P.O. Spann in 1996) gives us the following cartographic representation of "La Alcudia", placing a map/quarry symbol inside a circle to indicate a cluster of such features and annotating it with abbreviations for gold and lead:

The associated Map-by-Map Directory entry constrains the feature to the periods of the Roman Republic and Early Empire; provides us with a short, descriptive location "Valle de Alcudia, S and E Puertollano"; and cites pages 190 and 202 in:

Domergue, Claude. Les mines de la Péninsule Ibérique dans l'antiquité romaine. Collection de l'Ecole française de Rome 127. Rome: École française de Rome, 1990. https://www.persee.fr/doc/efr_0000-0000_1990_ths_127_1.

The Map-by-Map Directory information was extracted from the original Microsoft Word file, restructured, and ingested into Pleiades by myself and Sean Gillies in 2010. In 2011, Sean imported a point-coordinate location that had been digitized from the Barrington Atlas map by the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) project at Harvard University, resulting in a basic Pleiades place record. You can see what the information in that record looked like in the earliest capture by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20201202072305/https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/265792.

In 2016, another Pleiades contributor, María Jesús Redondo, submitted to the editors a new Name resource for "Río Alcudia" (nomenclature attested as early as the medieval period). The Editors did not immediately publish this addition because we were contending with a trifecta of interrelated challenges: increased traffic (especially search bots) and submissions; slow and error-prone system performance; and a burgeoning backlog of complex submissions. Editorial responsiveness and effectiveness were hamstrung. When we did examine María's contribution,  it was clear that although "La Alcudia" must have something to do with the river, the river itself had not been labeled or annotated in the Barrington Atlas, implying that Spann had found no ancient name nor archaeological record sufficiently relevant. Consequently, we needed (at a minimum) to add a new place for the river, move the name, and explain the relationship between the two features. At this point, María did not have time to investigate the literature on ancient Roman mining associated with "La Alcudia", and so, sadly, her submission languished on the backlog.

That old backlog -- which had expanded to some thousands of entries until the National Endowment for the Humanities rescued us with a grant for improvements and upgrades -- is largely gone now, but for a few complex cases. Since emerging from the upgrade process in 2019, we have been maintaining a practical rhythm of reviewing hundreds of submissions promptly each month, while reducing the number of outstanding old questions.

Jeffrey Becker, one of our Associate Editors and himself a prolific, on-going contributor to the gazetteer, recently took up the matter of "La Alcudia" and "Río Alcudia". I have just published his updates to the original record for "La Alcudia" (a portion of the river's valley/watershed that was a hotbed of Roman-era resource extraction) and a new record for the river itself (including María's original Name resource).

Do you know more about either of these places or about others you think are missing from, or inadequately described, in Pleiades? We'd appreciate your help.