Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East

FAIN: HD-51425-11

Alexandria Archive Institute, Inc. (San Francisco, CA 94127-2036)
Eric C. Kansa (Project Director: March 2011 to August 2013)

The creation of the Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East, a geospatial index of archaeological sites and ancient historical places in the Near East, through the use of the Pleiades project software.

This grant will support the creation of the Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East. The project’s goal is to develop an authoritative, open access geospatial index of archaeological sites and historical places in the Near East, spanning some twelve thousand years (c. 12,500-600 BCE). The project is based on software developed by the Pleiades project (http://pleiades.stoa.org/), an extant and successful model for open access Web-based gazetteers. By developing a gazetteer of Ancient Near East places, researchers will be able to link events, persons, and archaeological evidence through shared notions of place and time. Thus, this project will help scholars to bring together disparate lines of historical and archaeological evidence. In doing so, this project represents critically needed infrastructure to catalyze research in the Ancient Near East and serves as an exemplar for open, collaborative scholarship.

Associated Products

The Red Sea is Arabian, Erythraean... Place Name Clustering in Pleiades and TAVO (Blog Post)
Title: The Red Sea is Arabian, Erythraean... Place Name Clustering in Pleiades and TAVO
Author: Francis Deblauwe
Abstract: Place names can have many variants due to not only chronological (e.g., Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul) or cultural/linguistic reasons (e.g., Genève, Genf, Ginevra and Geneva) but also due to differences in the exact place or area covered. The confusing connections between place names ultimately reflect the extent/lack of accurate knowledge of the textual sources as well as the changing economic and political lenses through which places were viewed. This blog post explores these issues using an example from the Red Sea.
Date: 09/12/2012
Primary URL: http://ux.opencontext.org/blog/2012/09/12/the-red-sea-is-arabian-erythraean/
Primary URL Description: Heritage Bytes blog post
Blog Title: Heritage Bytes
Website: http://ux.opencontext.org/blog/

Topics in Cyberinfrastructure, Digital Humanities, and Near Eastern Archaeology (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Topics in Cyberinfrastructure, Digital Humanities, and Near Eastern Archaeology
Abstract: Eric Kansa (AAI) presented on the Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East in his introductory lecture to the 2011 workshop "Communicating Digital Landscapes in Archaeology.” Charles E. Jones (NYU / ISAW) presented a paper in the same workshop on Pleiades' functionality with an emphasis on recent achievements and on-going challenges.
Author: Eric Kansa
Author: Charles E. Jones
Date: 11/17/2011
Location: American Schools of Oriental Research annual conference, San Francisco, CA
Primary URL: http://www.asor.org/am/documents/academic_program_11.8.11.pdf
Primary URL Description: ASOR 2011 program, Page 3

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