Browsing Ancient Lycia and Pisidia

Pleiades reached its first data milestone today. We've loaded up all point features from the Barrington Atlas Map 65: Lycia-Pisidia. Map 65 (dead center of the locator map) was compiled by C. Foss and S. Mitchell, and edited by R. Talbert (see credits). The Pleiades portal provides KML and GeoRSS views of all features and folderish collections of features. The latter are used within the site in conjunction with several OpenLayers-based maps.

Lycia was an early Greek colony in Asia Minor and, later, a Roman province. Pisidia is mountainous country, and its peoples mounted a long insurgency against Greeks and Romans. Archaeologists are active in this region: at Sagalassos and Choma (site currently down) in particular. The Choma network link from Pleiades is well worth a visit. The dig itself is found 1.5 kilometers NE of the 1:500,000 scale Pleiades placemark. Google has recent high-resolution imagery for the region, and you can easily see the site and excavation. The next development milestones for Pleiades focus on creating the scholarly workflow that will improve the locations, historical names, and bibliographic references of these features. Dare we call it "Scholarship 2.0"?

All contemporary features can be viewed using the Imperial Roman period network link.

Initial startup funding for Pleiades is generously provided by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities with a two-year grant (2006-2008) through its Preservation and Access Research and Development program. Hosting for Pleiades during this period is provided by the Stoa Consortium and the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky.