'Section Ro' of the Cyclopean Wall

 Oscar Broneer, in an article of 1966, reports a section of 'cyclopean wall' which he calls 'Ro'.  He says:

"Section Ro (Fig. 2, 4), on the property of Panagiota Roussi, ca. 120 m. to the west of St, is only 8.40 m. long, but this retains the interesting feature of a tower like projection, 2.80 m. wide and jutting out 0.63 m. from the face. This miniature tower, the stones of which project into the interior, is the first of several found in the wall. The setback on the north face of section St may have been made to serve the same purpose as these small towers. The few pottery sherds found in contact  with section Ro were undatable."[1]

In addition to this Broneer provides a drawing of this segment:[2]

Segment Ro, Broneer [1966] 350, Fig. 2, no. 4.

The drawing provides an orientation line from which we may deduce that the line of the wall is on an azimuth of ~102.25° (or ESE).  The question is 'where is Ro'?  In my opinion no one presently knows.  Broneer says it is 'on the property of Panagiota Roussi'.  In doing this he perpetuates a practice that cannot be sufficiently condemned - the naming of archaeological sites after the names of the people who own the property (looking at you, Emilia Kanta).  In the nearly 70 years since this segment was discovered 'Panagiota Roussi' has, presumably, been translated into a brighter and more glorious sphere and it's anyone's guess who owns the property now.  I suppose that this practice is thought of as a kind of 'site security' but it is really a practice of scholarly deviousness.  Obscuring the locations of sites in scholarly writings is not necessary for site security.  To see that just regard the work of Yannis Lolos, the eminent archaeologist of the Corinthia.  In his Land of Sikyon he not only gives exact lat/long pairs for every one of his many discoveries, he often gives the exact coordinates of each corner of the field in which the discovery was made.  Taking an example at random from Lolos [2011] we have HS-139, a set of ashlars for which all four coordinate pairs for the corners of the field in which it was discovered are given.[3]

As a result of the irresponsible practice of not giving adequate location information it now appears that no one knows where segment Ro actually is.[4]

Do we know anything at all about where Ro is?  Sort of.

We are told that Ro is about 120 m. to the west of segment St.  Where is St?  Well, St, according to Broneer [1966] is located next to the W side of the main road that travels to Kenchreai.[5]  If that's true then St would be about here: 37.913586 N, 23.003973 E.  Broneer goes on to say: "In the northeast corner, close to the modern road, some of the interior fill of small stones was exposed, ... " [6].  The northeast corner of the site could not be close to the modern road unless the bulk of St was on the western side of the road.  Fine.  Let's place it there momentarily and work forward to Segment Ro which, we'll remember, was 120 m. (about) to the W of St.  Where would that put Ro?  Let's look at the map:

In this photo we're looking roughly SW at the main road between Isthmia and Kenchreai.  North is to the lower right.  Segment St is  placed near the main road on the W side per Broneer.  A circle of 120 m radius is drawn centered on St.  Using that circle as a guide we see that segment Ro is somewhere on top of the ridge near where the Hexamilion wall begins its turn to the S.  Putting Ro here gets it in line for the next segment, Pe, which is some 600 m. further along.

An expert on the Hexamilion wall, Timothy Gregory, gives us a detailed look at the entire extent of that wall and, just where we're guessed a placement for Ro is the same place where the Hexamilion wall turns towards the S.  Gregory describes this area at the turning of the Hexamilion like this: "Just past 0+6,500 m. the Hexamilion reaches the end of the plateau and turns sharply to the south. At this point another tower (S-13) formed a lookout over the level ground to the east and north (Pl. 12:c). In this area, from 0+6,300 m. to beyond 0+6,500 m., the Hexamilion follows a line suggested by Oscar Broneer for a section of his Cyclopean wall across the Isthmus. According to Broneer, the wall ran along the north edge of the plateau, until the turning at Tower S-13, at which point the Cyclopean wall continued its course eastward on a nearly direct line to the Saronic Gulf. Section Ro of Broneer's wall seems to be located at the bottom of the hill on this line. The wall may be the one that Leake saw ..., as he speaks of two walls descending towards the sea, apparently from this point (S-13). ..."[7]  Emphasis is mine.

Gregory then discusses the possibility that the Hexamilion wall itself branched into two walls at this point (one going south and one east) and, if so, that " ... would explain the situation described by Leake in 1806. There can, however, be no question that in its original phase there was only one wall and that it turned southward at Tower S-13."[8]

If we follow Gregory and assume that Ro is on the foot of the ridge then that pushes St to the eastern side of the main highway.  Here I show a hypothetical position for Ro at the foot of the ridge.  The circle is 120 m in radius and is centered on our hypothetical Ro.  Do you see where it puts St?

Yes.   It puts St on the other or eastern side of the main road which contradicts Broneer.

So, if we follow Broneer, Ro is at the top of the ridge.  If we follow Gregory then Ro is at the foot of the ridge.  And this is what gives rise to my suspicion that the location of this little segment of wall is simply not now known to anyone.

Is there a potential solution that brings all these observations together?  Maybe.  It depends on whether we're willing to accept the old frontage road as the former main road that joins Kenchreae to Isthmia.  Here's what that would look like:

Broneer's diagram suggests that the orientation of the wall at Ro (wherever it is) is on an azimuth of 102.25 degrees.  I added 180 degrees to that and drew a reverse azimuth of 282.25 degrees from Sk (which position is known).  That is the green line on the map.

Now we can proceed if we are able to accept that the frontage road (brownish line labelled 'Old Main Road?') is the main road as it was in 1957 when these segments were discovered.  (The purple line is the modern road.) If so then we can place St roughly just to the west of the Old Road at the paddle labelled 'Hyp. St'.  The red circle there is 25 m in diameter which is the length for St given in Broneer.  On that green paddle I centered a circle of 120 m. radius (the yellow circle).  Where that circle intersects the green azimuth line on the W I placed the paddle for Ro.  It is labelled 'Hyp. Ro'.  That placement of Ro seems to agree with Gregory's idea that Ro might be at the bottom of the ridge.  And just at that point there begins a spur which rises to the top of Mytika ridge at the watchtower that Gregory has labelled 'S-13'.  At or near this hypothetical location for Ro the line of the wall would have to turn slightly to the W in order to mount this spur.

These constructions are hypothetical but, for now, I am using the corresponding positions for Ro and St in my Atlas:

Ro: C7760  37.913490° N, 23.003881° E

St:  C7759  37.913254° N, 23.005230° E

Footnotes

[1] Broneer [1966] 349-351.

[2] Broneer [1966] 350, Fig. 2, no. 4.

[3] Lolos [2011] 507, no. HS-139.

[4] And see this.

[5] Broneer [1966] 349.

[6] Ibid. 349.

[7] Gregory [1993] 49.

[8] Idem.

Bibliography

Broneer [1966] : Broneer, Oscar.  "The Cyclopean Wall on the Isthmus of Corinth and Its Bearing on Late Bronze Age Chronology",  Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (35:4), 346-362.  1966.  Online <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/147564">here</a>.

Gregory [1993] : Timothy, Gregory E., Isthmia V, The Hexamilion and the Fortress. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton, New Jersey, 1993.  ISBN: 0-87661-935-9.

Lolos [2011]: Lolos, Yannis, A., Land of Sikyon: Archaeology and History of a Greek City-State, Hesperia supplements, 39.   Princeton:  American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2011, ISBN 9780876615393.

How to create a gazetteer - what I've learned

I recently completed the seventh year of continual work on the Mycenaean Atlas Project. In that time a great deal has been done but that's not what I want to write about now. I want to write about what I've learned during this work - and one thing in particular. 

 When creating a gazetteer or Atlas of the world of antiquity you must tell the user a story about each site. 

A gazetteer is not simply a matching list of feature names with latitude/longitude pairs. No usable gazetteer of antiquity can be written in this fashion.  Why not?  Because there are too many sites whose positions we do not know for certain.   So when choosing a lat/lon pair it almost always is a judgment - an approximation or a guess.   The user has to be told what went into that judgment.  In that case, it is crucial to give the user some hints about how to proceed in the face of uncertainty. At the very least the user must be given in full the references that you used (and with internet links if possible). 

Full disclosure is important when articles and/or books are not available to the gazetteer creator. For example, the ancient city of Iton in Phthiotis poses a number of geographical puzzles concerning not only Iton but the nearby sites of Zerelia, Karatsadagli, and Marmara. These sites form a little conceptual cluster which may or may not have something to do with a temple (the Barrington Atlas shows Iton and Marmara as cult sites). The gazetteer writer has to sort the sites out, locate them, evaluate their significance, and in particular, discuss the problem of whether there was or was not a cult of Athena Itonia in that area (as Strabo claims).  In my Commentary on Pleiades I went all the way back to the original investigators but I wasn't really able to seal the deal - to remove the last bit of ambiguity. The reason? I have no access to Lalonde's Athena Itonia: Geography and Meaning of an Ancient Greek War Goddess from just three years ago. Brill wants $195.00 for it and Amazon wants $143.00. Impractical either way. This isn't really a complaint. For one reason or another, this happens a lot and to just about everybody. How did I handle this? This is the message I put at the end of my comments for Pleiades 540935 which deals with Marmara. 

"Most of these questions should now be resolved in Lalonde [2019].  Regrettably, Lalonde's book was not available to me at the time of writing." 

Pleiades Commentary on Marmara (Pl. no. 540935)

 Now that the user is warned he or she might be able to get their hands on a copy of Lalonde and figure out the ambiguous parts. 

- Room has to be given to scholarly disagreements.  In the case of Iton which I mentioned above both Stählin [1924] and Philippson [1950] think that there was a temple there.  Roller [2018] thinks not.  The user needs to be told.

 - There are puzzles of transliteration to work through. The user has to be told what these are if they are material. 

 - Bibliography, bibliography, bibliography.  The user needs to know what research the position is based on.  Gazetteers are not just a circular citation game where gA cites gB and gB cites gC and gC cites gA. The user needs to be grounded at least as well as the gazetteer maker himself or herself was grounded. 

 - Misleading descriptions by the primary investigators. Investigators routinely get directions wrong, distances wrong, etc. Investigators are human. We get it. But when these problems are identified then the resolution (if there is one) must be explained to the user.   Here's an example: of a site in Euboea Sackett says 

" ..., Kherronisi, is a rocky headland immediately south of the island church Ayios Nikolaos. It is about 25 m. above the sea ... "[1] 

But Kherronisi isn't south of the Ayios Nikolaos - it's to the NE.  And the elevation of Kherronisi is not 25 m. - it is no more than 15 m.  I nearly made a serious error here but I finally convinced myself, in the teeth of Sackett's description, that Topostext was right in their placement and so I followed Brady Kiesling's solution.[2]

Pleiades Commentary on Helleniki (Pl. 540809)

Status of the commentary on Pleiades:  As of 12/11/22 I have completed some 400+ corrections/annotations to the Pleiades dataset.  These corrections complete the repair of the  rounded coordinates for mainland Greece as far north as Thessaly, the Cyclades, Crete, the Dodecanese, and some of the islands of the Aegean NE.  I have made the data table of these corrections and supplemental notes available to Pleiades. Perhaps they'll be interested.

Because there are about 5000 potentially correctible sites I won't ever be able to finish this.  But already Pleiades, for the Greek worlds and as seen through my Digital Atlas, has a much bouncier and usable feel.  It starts to be what it should be - a product that pays attention to correctness and usefulness and, as a result, gives the user confidence in the result.  And using the Digital Atlas you can also easily compare  Pleiades' solutions with the solutions of the Vici, DARE, and Trismegistos data sets as well as to the Topostext gazetteer and to de Graauw's Harbors.  

The Digital Atlas is now a working prototype of a full-up gazetteer of Antiquity.

And, as always, this is a useful reminder.

Footnotes

[1] Sackett et al. [1966] 42, #11.  'Elliniko'.

[2] Topostext is here, Pleiades is here, and my own solution is here.

Bibliography

Sackett et al. [1966] : Sackett, L.H. with V. Sankey, R.J. Howell, T.W. Jacobsen and M.R. Popham, 'Prehistoric Euboea: Contributions toward a Survey', Annual of the British School at Athens (61) 33-112.  1966.  Online here.

The Commentary on Pleiades

 The Mycenaean Atlas Project is more than just a Bronze Age gazetteer.  It is an accessible viewer for the entire ancient world - and at every period. It accomplishes this goal by integrating several very different data sets.  Here's an example:

The city of Aigion in Achaea as displayed in the Digital Atlas

One of those data sets is Pleiades.  But how do you handle or display a dataset with as many serious defects as Pleiades?  Its deficiencies are of three kinds.  Of Pleiades' approximately 39,000 records about 7,000 have no lat/lon coordinates at all.   As a result, these points cannot be displayed at all and  why they are in the dataset in the first place is a mystery.

Pleiades next problem is the 5,000 or so sites for which the lat/lon pairs are rounded to the nearest quarter degree.  This indefensible practice (and never corrected during the entire 20-year existence of this DB) puts these sites off by about 12 km. on average.  Even worse, it creates about 400 or so 'stacks' in each of which some 10 to 20 sites have exactly the same rounded coordinates and cannot be disambiguated.  (See the example of Boreion, below.)

The remainder 26,000 sites are simply inaccurate.  They are off by about 900 m. on average because this part of the DB was intended for the Barrington Atlas - a printed product in which accuracy, at the given scales, could never be better than a km. or so.  Accuracy is expensive and you never pay for more than you need.  This practice was fine for a printed product but a disaster when moved to the digital world in which representable locations are accurate to less than a meter.  The need to develop precise and accurate data for the digital world is far more urgent than it is for the world of the printed atlas.

When showing Pleiades data in a gazetteer viewer such as the Mycenaean Atlas Project the overwhelming temptation is to correct these numerous errors by adding additional information to the Pleiades data. Providing accurate lat/lon pairs is a chief priority.  The design problem is, somehow, to add that information in a way that new versions of the Pleiades database don't write over what people external to Pleiades, such as myself, have added.  How do we best add and store supplemental and updated information for Pleiades sites and how should this new data be displayed?

What is required is a Commentary on Pleiades.

      To support this Commentary I created a new DB table that would hold any additional information or corrected lat/lon pairs.  A table that is independent of the Pleiades database would not be overwritten by new versions of the Pleiades database.  It would exist alongside the Pleiades DB. And yet the new data in this table could still be connected to the old Pleiades database through the Pleiades id no.  That way if there was an entry in the new table for any specific Pleiades site record my browser would display THAT corrected/additional data instead of the incorrect Pleiades data.  This required that I accompany my new DB table with a new browser page in .html.  This will be the new Commentary on Pleiades page which stands between my viewer and Pleiades itself.  In addition to corrected information this new page maps the Pleiades places to their correct location on a new map instead of to the incorrect rounded quarter-degree locations where they are now displayed.

Design of old and new interaction with Pleiades.

The upper half of this diagram shows the current situation; the Mycenaean Atlas Project takes information from the unmodified local copy of the Pleiades database and displays it.  That display has a button that, when clicked, takes the user back to the original Pleiades page for more information.

The lower half of the diagram shows the new design.  In addition to the local copy of the Pleiades database as before (orange), there is a brand-new table that contains my own contributed material.  On the browser map, when the user clicks the Pleiades icon for more info they don't go to the Pleiades page as before but to the new Pleiades Commentary page that shows the corrected lat/lon pair along with more info and a browser map that shows the icon in its corrected position.  A link on that supplemental commentary page will send the user to the original Pleiades page (dashed line).

This whole process is transparent to the user who will only see the new commentary page when he or she clicks on a Pleiades place for which I have created commentary. 

The new Pleiades Commentary page will look like this (annotations in red):

The new Commentary on Pleiades page (here for Belminatis, Pleiades 570152).

Now I'd like to show a situation in which this commentary is invaluable.

Mt. Boreion in Arcadia is Pleiades 570158.  Pleiades gives its position rounded to the nearest quarter degree like this: 37.25, 22.25.  This is exactly the same position as seventeen other Pleiades sites.  I list them here:

Pleiades grouping 18 sites at the very same location: 37.25 N, 22.25 E.

This sort of practice is common in Pleiades and it must be corrected.  Even a casual user does not deserve to have all these sites shown in the identical location.

I corrected the rounded position of Boreion (37.25 N, 22.25 E) to  37.429300°,  22.342900°.  On the next map I compare my position, Topostext's position, and  Pleiades position:

Placement of Mount Boreion (Attica) in Pleiades, Topostext, and Mycenaean Atlas Project.

I have not adopted Topostext's position here but the rounded Pleiades position (at the bottom of the map) is 21 km. from my proposed location and almost 19 km. distant from Topostext's. 

My Commentary to Pleiades will change all this. If you search for 570158 or 'Boreion' and display it on the digital atlas you will be shown this next page (Be sure to select 'Pleiades' layer from the (not shown) map layer selector on the top right):

Mt. Boreion (Pleiades 570158) displayed in correct position.

The top link in the info box ("Pleiades (S) 570158") will not bring the user to the main Pleiades page for 'Boreion'.  Instead the new Pleiades Commentary screen will be displayed:

Commentary on Pleiades - supplemental information page

My goal for the future is to correct all the locations whose lat/lon coordinates have been rounded.  For the Peloponnese alone this amounts to about 160 such rounded markers.  Presently there are about 150 corrected Pleiades sites (primarily for the Peloponnese) and the work of adding corrections to Pleiades will be ongoing.

Pleiades' pages and how to fix them

 How Pleiades pages look:

If ever there was a mutual appreciation society that society is Pleiades.  Look at all the bloviating thank-yous and credits-given on the left side of this window.  No user cares about that and all this extraneous info should be relegated to a secondary page that users can look at if and when they want to.

The map is way too small.  I mean, the map is what it's about, right?  Unless naming the several  Pleiades honchos over and over is the actual purpose of Pleiades ... that couldn't be the real purpose could it?

With respect to the map panel (which is way too tiny to be useful) we're zoomed in so far that context is lost. What can P. do about restoring that context?   Even for a specialist it's easy to forget exactly where we are.  And don't get me started about the annoying zoom-in-from-outer-space (ZIFOS, tm) which is cool and kicky the first time you see it but is actually a time-waster and the fiftieth time makes me -like Oedipus - want to scratch out my eyeballs

How Pleiades pages should look:

In the revised version we've done away with the annoying zoom-in-from-outer-space and settled on a nice large map.   Context which is lost by being zoomed-in is restored with the new spotter map which you see on the upper right.  The spotter map is zoomed out (level 4,5?) so that you can tell at a glance where you are in the world.

All the ridiculous back-scratching, log-rolling, and mutual thank-yous are moved off to one of the tabs on the top.  Users can click on that tab if they want to see whose bright idea this site was but - spoiler alert - they won't.  I left the bibliography off of this new map but there is room for one or a button that will pop the bibliography up on a new window.  New windows for subsidiary purposes are easy to write and not enough advantage is taken of this idea.

And, in fact, now that I look at it, we should lose the right-hand side margin which is crapped up with stuff that could easily be buttons.  How about this:

The new and improved, user-forward, Pleiades page!

Lean and mean.  No wasted space.  User's needs are foremost.  The search field has been moved to where it belongs and is enlarged so as to be actually visible.  Do you see the new Credits button?  No?  Good.

Instead we have something actually useful which is a new bibliography button.  When you click on it you get a simple bibliography page (not shown).  Now if  Pleiades would just fix all the broken bibliography links and then link to something actually useful instead of a Zotero page.

Next, On to Peripleo!  If it ever works.

The Pheneos Plain and the location of Lykouria

The town of Lykouria was only ever notable for the fact that Pausanias once passed through it and there are few or no other mentions of it in antiquity.   Its isolation explains this.  It is set in northern Arcadia, surrounded by mountains, and sitting on the edge of a remarkable karst landscape (the plain of Pheneus) to which there is no easy entrance or exit.  Let's go to the map.

The area of the Pheneos Basin in N. Arcadia.

The Pheneos Basin in more detail.  Lykouria was located somewhere on the southwest edge of the valley, and just to the north of the jagged white line in the lower left that indicates a road.

The Pheneos Basin from the SE and looking NW.  Lykouria was located somewhere by the center left corner of the superimposed line map.

Here's what we know about Lykouria.  In Paus. viii.19.4 we read "One of the roads west out of Pheneos I have still to deal with, the one on the left, which leads to Kleitor, past Herakles Labour, the channel he made for the river Aroanios.  Beyond that point, the road goes down to a place called Lykouria, which is the territorial boundary of Pheneos and Kleitor."[1]

Let's look at each of the bolded names in turn:

Pheneos (ID: F7322): An ancient town of Arcadia situated in the NW corner of the Pheneos Plain.

The hill on which Pheneos was built is in the center of this image.  
Here S is to the lower left.

Kleitor is Pausanias' destination.  What geographical relationship does it have to Pheneos?

This map shows the route Pausanias takes.  He starts at Feneos and travels more or less along the blue line and reaches ancient Kleitor.  The distance is about 26 km; a day's trip perhaps.  The town of Lykouria is somewhere near the end of that first leg just before it bends to the SW and descends into a valley.  Can we be more precise?

In the very next paragraph (viii.20.1) Pausanias says this: "Six miles or so from Lykouria you arrive at the SPRINGS OF THE LADON.  I had heard that the water of the Phenean lake which drops into the pot-holes in the mountains comes up again here to form the springs of the Ladon."[2]

The Ladon is a major tributary of the Alpheios which it joins (at  37.593682° N,  21.820481° E) from the N and just above the complex at ancient Olympia.  The primary source of this river is a spring at F7315.  Here is a user-submitted photo of the Spring.

Springs of the Ladon where they emerge from underground at F7315.
Original  work of Chris Karagounis.  All rights reserved to the creator.

The Pheneos Plain forms a basin at an average elevation of about 750 m. sloping down to about 710 m. at its S end.  Any water that enters the plain (which it does from the N) exits from the south by the way of sinkholes or katavothrai.  The water that leaves the Pheneos Plain reemerges at this spring and from here it becomes one of the major contributors to the Ladon river.  This spring at F7315 has an elevation of 475 m.  The distance to the katavothrai is just about 9 km. or 5.66 miles.  In that distance the waters to the spring fall about 235 m. or 771 ft.  This is about the height of a 72-story building.

So  Pausanias says that the Spring and the town of Lykouria are about 50 stades distant from each other.  All we have to do is work backward from the Spring about 50 stadia and we should be in the region of Lykouria.  So how long is a stadion?  A stadion was a rough and ready estimation of length and it varied from about 157 m/stadion to 209 m/stadion.   I gathered various stadion equivalents from sources around the internet and put them into this table:

These values of m/stadion have a standard deviation of 14.175 m.

I could think of no better solution than to take the average of 185.4 m/stadion.  This would suggest that the distance Pausanias traveled was about 5 and 3/4 miles (9.27 km.)    To confirm that that makes sense let's look at the next photo.

Pausanias's plausible route in green (R to L)

Here we see the territory stretching from the Springs of the Ladon to the edge of the Pheneos Plain.  On this map I traced a plausible route for Pausanias in green.  This route goes to the edge of the plain and it is just a hair over 5.5 miles (8.87 km.).  So this suggests that Lykouria is north of where the green path reaches the plain and south of Louzion (F7321).  Levi suggests that 'Pausanias took roughly the track from LOUZION.' [3]

The ancient town/village of Lykouria may safely be placed somewhere on the SW edge of the Pheneos Plain where it meets the hills and between 37.865 N to 37.879 N longitude which is a distance of 0.94 miles or (1.52 km.)  The total area to search would be about 1 square km. (100 ha.) or 0.39 sq. miles.  It looks like this:

Here I removed the vector-map overlay so you can see what the country looks like.  The orange polygon encloses the 1 sq. km. search area.  The two horizontal lines are the bounds in longitude which I referred to above.

This work was undertaken to improve the guesses of Pleiades and Topostext.  Topostext has the location of Lykouria at the Ladon Springs.  This cannot be because Pausanias has already told us that the Springs and Lykouria are 50 stadia distant from one another.  Pleiades, with their usual carelessness, has placed Lykouria on the other (west) side of Mt. Dourdoubana/Pentelia at 37.90495, 22.230895.  I'm not even going to bother to plot that.

There is a modern town of Lykouria in this area which is 3.8 km. from the Ladon Springs.  It has nothing to do with the town/village of ancient Lykouria.  Frazer, when he comments on viii.19.4, says

"The modern village of Lykouria can hardly occupy the site of the ancient place of that name.  For Pausanias's description of the route to it implies that it was situated in the plain of Pheneus, lower down than the city of Pheneus, and that it was on or near the canal.  Moreover, he says (20. 1) that Lycuria was 50 Greek furlongs (5 1/2 miles) from the springs of the Ladon; whereas the modern Lykouria is only 2 1/2 miles (less than 20 furlongs) from the springs."[4]

As it was so close to the head of the valley leading to the Ladon Spring I wonder whether the business model of Lykouria wasn't primarily to provide guides down the risky descent to the Springs and then on to Kleitor.

In another post, I would like to write more about the karst landscape (or polje) of Pheneos but this is enough for today.

Notes

[1] Translation in Levi [1971] 418.

[2] Idem.

[3] Levi [1971] 418, fn. 141.

[4] Frazer [1898] 262.

Bibliography

Frazer [1898] : Frazer, J.G. Pausanias's Description of Greece; Translated with a Commentary by J.G. Frazer. Vol. IV, Commentary on Books VI-VIII., London, MacMillan and Co. Limited. 1898.

Levi [1971] :  Levi, Peter.  Pausanias; Guide to Greece; Vol. 2 Southern Greece.  Translated with an Introduction by Peter Levi.  Penguin Books, 1971.  ISBN: 978-0-14-044226-7.

The concept of citation-readiness and Mycenaean Atlas Project

 A URL  is a 'universal resource locator': it refers to a web site, e.g. pleiades.stoa.org.  A URI is a 'universal resource identifier': it refers to a specific item sheltered under the URL.  So, in the pleiades scheme, 579885 is a URI that refers to Athens.  And the link (URL + URI): pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885 is the pointer to 'Athens' in their database and which will be returned by Pleiades.   This is a very friendly form and easy for the user to remember.

The actual address of the Pleiades Athens page would not be friendly at all.  It's more likely to look something like this:

{a} https://www.pleiades.org/stoa/locator-page-constructor?place=579885

My example here is made-up but Pleiades' genuine locator is going to be very much like it and an awful lot for the user to remember.  Much easier to allow the user to write:

{b}  pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885

Now, to be clear, form {b} is for the user's convenience.  The server running at pleiades cannot use this string directly.  It has to convert this string into form {a} before the server can task the right resource.  A rewrite rule is what allows the server to do this.  The result is convenience for the user but correctness for the server.  Win-win.

Well, what one group can do another can also.  I created some rewrite rules for helladic.info so that, if you know the location key for a BA site you can just use that without  remembering the long pathname to the actual program.  So from now on you will be able to type and/or embed a simplified form.  E.g., such as here for the stadium at Argos:

{b}  www.helladic.info/C4480               

instead of the real full path:

{a}  https://www.helladic.info/MAPC/pkey_report_wparam.php?place=C4880

The rewrite rule itself is just this:

RewriteRule  ^(C[0-9]+)$  /MAPC/pkey_report_wparam.php?place=$1  [L,R]

... and the result looks like this:

In one of his foggier statements about Pleiades URLs (he clearly doesn't understand the technology), Tom Elliott has this to say about enhancing citation practice.

“On the world-wide-web, the identifiers necessary for citation should be front-and- center: they are the strings of characters that you put into the location bar of your browser in order to retrieve a web page.  They are the essential magic in a hyperlink.  Their technical name is “Uniform Resource Identifier,” a phrase usually abbreviated with  the acronym URI.  URIs (or yoo-ahr-ees, as they’re sometimes pronounced) are cool.  They’re cool because, if you construct them sensibly and connect them to interesting information and take care of them so they don’t rot into uselessness, they make citation happen.  In throwing off the normalizing tyranny of a single map view to embrace the radical equality of all places, Pleiades was born citation-ready.  Because Sean Gillies and others present at the creation payed attention to emerging best practice and cared about scholarly communication, Pleiades was born citation-ready.”[1]

(I removed Elliott's footnotes 17 and 18).

Elliott suggests that this practice makes pleiades 'citation-ready'.  'Citation-ready' in this sense requires, however, no special 'magic' (the word is Elliott's and it's one which he should avoid) because every server supports rewrite rules that will convert some simple address that you type into the URL box (here pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885) into the more complex 'actual' address where that resource resides.  As usual Elliott is erecting a cathedral on a postage stamp - overselling a normal web function.  If all it takes is a rewrite rule to make pleiades 'citation-ready' then helladic.info is now also 'citation-ready' ...

or something.

But is a simple rewrite-rule enough to create citation-readiness?  I'm not convinced.  We all could benefit from a discussion which tries to clear up the idea of scholarly citation in the context of on-line resources.  Maybe next time.

Notes

1. Elliott [2018] 45-6.
2. A guide to rewrite rules is here and a handy cheat sheet for regular expressions (RAs) is here.

Biblio

Elliott [2018]:  Elliott, Tom, 'The Pleiadic Gaze: Looking at Archaeology from the Perspective of a Digital Gazetteer',  Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World; Classical Archaeology in the Digital Age – The AIAC Presidential Panel 12.1 (51), 43-51.  Kristian Göransson ed., 2018.  Online here.

It seems to me that this paper was actually written at least a decade ago but I can find no earlier reference to it.  Is it just me?  Does anyone else know better?

A Draft of a talk to the Ancient MakerSpaces Conference in January 2022

 

I am very happy to have been invited to give a talk in January to the Ancient MakerSpaces conference in San Francisco. This is a workshop session of the AIA-SCS (American Institute of Archaeology and the Society for Classical Studies) and it provides a forum for individuals or groups who have been pioneering digital applications in several fields of the humanities.[1]

My talk, devoted to the Mycenaean Atlas Project, is only ten minutes and so affords just about enough time to state the goals of the M.A.P. , show some representative slides, and talk about lessons learned. And yet I took this opportunity to write a longer report about the M.A.P. which explains some of my positions in more detail. Those who would like to learn more about this project than is available in a 10-minute talk can refer to this short paper.

The Mycenaean Atlas Project

A Table of Contents for the Greek Bronze Age

'He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,

And Priam's neighbors.'

Robinson

The Mycenaean Atlas Project is a relational data base that is devoted to accurate locations for find sites of the Bronze Age in Greece. Currently it consists of 4400+ sites, 6400+ features, and nearly 4000 three-dimensional landscape models. More than six years of daily effort has gone into this project. Early on the decision was taken to make the database free and public and, to that end, the online site Helladic.info was created. This effort was undertaken because, to my knowledge, there was no previous effort to digitally map the entirety of the Mycenaean world.

There are now a number of digital products that try to map the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome in whole or in part.   Some of them are:

• The excellent Aristeia Project which covers the Geometric and the Archaic for Greece.  It is  conducted under the leadership of Dr. Mazarakis-Ainian; it has some problems of accuracy but on the whole is an excellent effort.  It would be even better if it were to show signs of continuing curatorship.  No project, and definitely not my own, is error-free and so the commitment to upkeep and correction is vital. 

• There is the Ancient Ports - Ports Antiques site which is designed and implemented by Arthur de Graauw who is an engineer specializing in harbor construction.  It is relentlessly accurate and Mr. de Graauw allows the download of his entire DB in the form of a flat-file or spreadsheet. This enables the user to convert it into a relational DB or read it into a GIS for further analysis.

• There is the ArchaeoCosmos initiative of the Capodistria University of Athens.  This seems to be an umbrella site for housing disparate and non-integrated projects related to the geography of ancient Greece but this site appears to be still in its beginning stages. I wasn't able to reach anything useful through their online interface.

• There is the specialized site called Topostext under the leadership of my friend Brady Kiesling.  Topostext successfully marries the landscape of Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Greece with thousands of site names mentioned in the ancient literature; invaluable for any readers of those texts.

• The Barrington Atlas is the basis for the Pleiades project which covers the Archaic through Roman periods.  I have some questions about their attempt to repurpose the Barrington Atlas data.

• A very useful survey of digital projects relating to the Northern Aegean (and Greece generally) can be found in the paper by Despoina Tsiafaki and Natasa Michailidou, 'Ways to Cope with the Scientific ARENA: Taking the Results of Archaeological Research a Step Further', which came out of the Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT) no. 23, 2018.  The paper is online here.  This paper reflects the approach of the ARENA digital project which is dedicated to making information available about a large number of find-spots in Macedonia and Thrace (8th to 1st centuries BC).  Their site is here.

• The Luwian Studies site, directed by Dr. Eberhard Zangger, is an excellent and highly accurate, source of information about western Anatolia and I have leaned on it heavily as it covers an area with which I have little familiarity.

• The Innovative Geophysical Approaches for the Study of Early Agricultural Villages of Neolithic Thessaly site proved invaluable for locating certain sites in that region even though it formally confines itself to the Neolithic.

• The site Digitizing Early Farming Cultures is another that covers the Neolithic but can provide valuable information about certain site locations.

• The Digital Crete project seems, regrettably, defunct. When it was online it provided very good information about sites on Crete. I hope that the FORTH Institute for Mediterranean Studies will resurrect it.

• The Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire seems comprehensive and well-intentioned but rather pedestrian as it tells the user little of what he or she would like to know.

• The finest site I know of that marries specific kinds of information (Levantine ceramics) with an atlas is the Levantine Ceramics Project whose home page is here. The history of the development of this project is here. This site is proof that a committee can, on occasion, design something splendid. It provides multiple entry points to its data and a nearly faultless search system. Let me give an example: I started by searching for 'Mycenaean' and then learned that that was a synonym for 'Philistine Monochrome'. I clicked on that name and got a page describing Philistine Monochrome ware and its dates. On that page was a list of sites where such ware was found. I then clicked 'View on Map' and was taken to a leaflet map plate on which the area where such ware is found was outlined. The map page also listed the find sites for this ware. When the 'vessels of this ware were found' check box was checked a list of a dozen or so places was displayed. Then I clicked on one of those (K.6.162a) a close-up map of the site was displayed with further buttons to look at individual items.  Here is what that page looks like:

In the center, and surrounding the site is a spiral of paddle images.  Each one is clickable and supplies more information about the items found there.  This web site is a perfect marriage of function and information with an atlas.

• The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land, or DAAHL, is the interface to a DB that records on the order of 100,000 find sites in the Levant and Egypt.  I do not see an institutional sponsor; I believe that it is solely the work of the consortium of scholars who are listed under 'Contributors'.  It is a very valuable repository of information about the Levant but it gives distinct signs of being unloved.  Broken links and links that go nowhere, software errors, confused usability issues - all these make the experience more frustrating than it needs to be.  I hope that this resource can find the curatorship that it deserves.  This site has the potential to be as good as the Levantine Ceramics Project but right now - it isn't.

There are also many partial gazetteers of the ancient world in articles and books. A good example of this is Goodison and Guarita which covers the Mesara in Crete.  Such sources can be found in the database bibliography and scattered throughout the site itself.  The M.A.P. coverage of some forty of the most prominent can be examined directly from the Control Page of the M.A.P. itself.

What is required to identify a site?

Computer people like to think in -tuples - the smallest set of things required to accomplish a task.  Doubles, triples, and so forth.  In this case the question is what is the smallest number of elements required to uniquely identify a site?  I maintain that this is a quadruple because site identification requires four things. 

• The first is a unique identifier that must be more than just a simple number.  It  must be unambiguous, applied to only one site, and the same denomination rule must apply to all sites.  It cannot be sub-classed; its role is not to explain but to identify.  

• The second item is a latitude/longitude pair.  It doesn't matter what system.   UTM/WGS84/GGRS87 and even What 3 Words are all interconvertible without loss of accuracy. 

• The third item is a rating that expresses the degree of confidence in your location.  Many sites in this field are not precisely locatable and that raises the problem of reliability.  A subjective measure of accuracy goes some way to increasing confidence in placement. 

• The fourth and last item is actually the most important.  That is a bibliography of the site by which one may demonstrate that everyone is talking about the same thing.  This reduces, although it does not eliminate, the problem of thinking that two distinct sites are one, or of promoting one site into two based only on significantly different descriptions.  Without a bibliography these are errors that are all too easy to commit.

Notice one thing here.  The concept of a name, a string of characters or digits, uniquely designating the site is missing.  The Greek name-space is sparse and the result is a great deal of repetition.  The concept of the 'name' of a site is not essential to identifying it.  The question here is 'what can we dispense with in uniquely identifying a site?'  The name-string is one of those things that we can dispense with.

Accuracy

Why is accuracy important?  There are two reasons.

The first is that accuracy makes it possible to ask and answer important questions. My very strong feeling is that, in the field, and no matter what you find, whether it’s a worn, barely recognizable sherd or a palace complex, Datum One is where the object was found, exactly.    Why is accuracy of location so important when generations of archaeologists have supposed it to be unimportant?  Accuracy of location is important because only that can relate your specific find to everything else.  For example,

• how far is it on the average from a BA habitation to a water source?  
• What’s the standard deviation of that distance?  
• What’s the average elevation of a BA settlement, tholos, chamber tomb?  
• Is the average habitation above or below the average BA cemetery?  
• What’s the average distance from a habitation to its associated cemetery (when such an association can be determined)?  
• How many BA habitations do we know that were within 100 m of the ocean?  500 m?  1000 m?  
• Did the Mycenaeans live in the mountains?
• In the LH IIIC settlements were often moved to higher elevations for safety. This is probably true. Can we prove it?
• What proportion of BA habitations were obviously maritime in orientation or were not so oriented?  
• How many habitations with a LH IIIB2 or LH IIIC burn layer are there and how are they distributed, exactly?   

How about some accurate and useful maps of all those variables?

Second, accuracy is crucial because on that rests the potential to perform an almost unending array of analyses using already available databases.  Without accuracy of place there is no accurate elevation data, no accurate slope or site aspect analysis, no usable 3D modelling, no intervisibility analysis, no accurate positioning in relationship to water sources or geological setting.  There are a number of databases about Greece which are online which could be fruitfully integrated to a Bronze Age database such as the M.A.P. but which rely on accurate locations in order to be useful.   Garbage-in, garbage-out is the inflexible rule. 

A good example of this (nearly mis-fired) promise is given in an article by Wong  [2020] which demonstrates the types of analysis possible - in this case for the island of Naxos.  Naxos was explored very early in the twentieth century by, among others, Stephanos.  He discovered a number of cemeteries whose locations were not always adequately recorded.  Despite the best efforts of later researchers, notably Doumas and Renfrew, there is still a great deal of imprecision concerning the exact locations of some of these sites.   Consequent to the surveys of the Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project (SNAP) Wong wrote a series of invaluable articles describing the various types of analysis that were available along with very suggestive results.  Unfortunately many of Wong's sites were incorrectly placed (this was not his fault) and so his analysis was somewhat weakened.  Nonetheless I strongly recommend these articles for their valuable array of analytical techniques.

The great advantage of the digital approach is that errors (inevitable) can be corrected rapidly and cheaply.  The cost gradient for digital work is so low and the work  time so rapid that it seems obvious that the day of the printed book or article (along with their infuriating pay-walls) is finished.  Already researchers have more rapid access to a far greater array of material online than they would have even in all of our research libraries with, perhaps, the exception of the very greatest.

As fine as the prospect of powerful analysis may be the plain fact is that BA and other historical studies are imperceptibly moving from the data-gathering phase into the data input phase.  This will last for another half century at least.   I emphasize that this is my personal opinion only.

Goals

In light of this the Mycenaean Atlas Project is dedicated to carrying out a Baby Step. 

• The goal of the MAP is simply to specify, as accurately as possible, the location of as many Bronze Age sites as are discoverable.  The emphasis is on the culture of the Mycenaeans but the actual extent of the Atlas is further than that.
• To provide additional material to illustrate why each of the sites was included.  To that end nearly all sites have additional information that tries to say what they were or how they were used as well as the period of time in which they were built or used. 
• To provide analysis tools that allows further investigation of the sites in context.
• To make all of this information available to whoever might wish to use it or refer to it.  To that end the MAP takes the form of a relational database of BA sites.  It has online presence because it was wrapped in PHP software.  From a usability point of view this makes it exactly the same as the vast majority of sites on the internet. 

Downloadable

The entire DB is now available to anyone who wants it either in .sql form or through the online interface.  Its URL is www.helladic.info or www.mycenaeanatlas.com

Given that this goal of inclusive and accurate placement can be achieved it is crucial to try to show what kinds of analysis can be carried out on such a database. 

First what is the granularity at which these sites can be examined?  Sites may be analyzed and examined singly or in groups.  Single sites are identified by their place key which takes the form Cnnn or Cnnnn.  Typing the  place key into the search box (on any page) will take you to the Place Key Report page for that site.

ANALYSIS OF SINGLE SITES

<More about single site analysis: Types of analysis available are intervisibility, site aspect, nearest neighbors, and three-dimensional models>

• Intervisibility shows what sites are visible from your chosen single site within circle of 13 km in diameter. It returns a map with your central site in blue and intervisible sites in green.
• Site Aspect allows the examination of the slope and aspect of the ground around any site. It computes the slope at 150 and 300 m. from the site in the four cardinal directions. Based on these eight measurements it identifies the aspect of the site (which way it faces).
• Nearest Neighbors is a multi-way display of the distance and bearing from any site to its neighbors within a 1.5 km radius. This returns a map with the nearest neighbors in a circle of 3 km. radius. It provides graphs of distance and direction
• Three-dimensional models are available for about three-quarters of the sites. I was assisted in this by Xavier Fischer of elevationapi.com. He created the models which are hosted on sketchfab.com. And although this is a different site the model experience is seamless to the user.

ANALYSIS OF GROUPS

The Mycenaean Atlas Project controls page allows the user to define groups of sites in order to analyze them as a group.   The simplest means of defining a group  is by region; you may, for example,  be interested in all the sites on Aegina or in Messenia.  You may do that from the Control Page either by pull-down menus or by using the thumbnail maps at the bottom of the page.  When you click on the thumbnail it expands into a page-size map from which you can choose your region of interest.

You can also choose groups of sites by Ceramic Horizon (Period) or by type or by some combination of the three criteria (Region,  Period, Type).

Once selected you can choose to get a map of these sites or a series of detailed reports.

There are five different reports available for each group search:

• Aspect and Slope -This page provides an analysis of all the slopes and aspects of the sites in your group
• Gazetteer - Simple but useful.  An alphabetical list of the sites in your group complete with  links to the sites.
• Elevation - This provides charts and analyses of the elevations of the sites in your chosen group.
• Chronology - This is a chart which shows all the ceramic horizons attested for your site groups
• Bibliography - This consists of a bibliography of all the works used in investigating the sites in your chosen group.

Lessons Learned

• There are many databases online that cover important topics such as hydrography and geology.  These can be integrated into a product like the Mycenaean Atlas Project in the same way that the API for elevations was integrated (elevationapi.com).  It is good to plan for this from the beginning.

• It might be time to redevelop this product to use  a robust GIS such as ArcGIS or QGIS.  The M.A.P. was developed using a rudimentary GIS which consisted of Google Earth  Professional along with database support in the form of MySQL.

The Greek toponymical name space is relatively sparse.  The ancient Greeks were the sort of  people who took along a whole 'culture package' when they migrated to new areas.  This resulted in their naming new features with old names that had been applied to similar things. 

Counter to this re-use of names each site has a long history of renaming, duplications, abandonments, and resettlements consequent to dialectical development, conquest, reconquest, population movement, and changes of language.  Much archaeology in this world was done a long time ago and as a result obsolete names are often embedded in the archaeological literature.  This constitutes a problem of its own.

And yet it is this that gives BA toponymy its subtlety and charm.

• As more databases  with differing time  periods are integrated the problem of mutations of names becomes more acute.  It is not be enough any more to content ourselves with a simple name or ID mapping to a lat/lon pair.  We need a more dynamic toponymical model that is suitable for historians as well as geographers.  This should be a model that links 'places' diachronically and not just in space.  It might be better to think of replacing Greek toponymical names with an accompanying story of name change (if I could think of a way to represent this).  This in turn starts with a completely redesigned database required to support such a presentation style.

For the Future

• The future will undoubtedly see the further integration of databases that are now separate.  In order to facilitate this task the international community should define a standard relational database format to which individual contributors can adhere.

• Compendia of site and  place locations will be of little use unless each of the sites is curated.  Databases that match site name with a lat/lon  pair will never be of much use.

... and a warning:

Thanks go to:

The primary contributor to the Mycenaean Atlas Project besides myself is Dr. Sarah Murray of the University of Toronto in Canada.    Several years ago I read her article (Murray [2014]) and learned that she had gathered a database of some 4000 LB and early IA sites.  She generously agreed to share this data with me.  From that data I culled about 2900 sites and from these was able to enrich those I already had as well as add about 1600 more that I did not yet have.

I have very generous friends and collaborators in Greece who have been kind enough to send me pictures and current observations  of several sites.  Among these I must mention 'Pete'  for working with me enthusiastically and selflessly for the last five years.  He has been instrumental in correcting errors and enhancing my understanding of a number of places in Messenia.  This product would be much poorer without his involvement.  Also Dr. Hajo Becker from Germany who has contributed photographs and whose numerous trips to Greece as well as thoughtful observations have helped me to precisely place several sites.

Dr. Michael Boyd (Oxford) kindly shared photographs and information about Kopanaki in Messenia.

Dr. Alex Knodell (Carleton College) worked with me on finding specific locations for many sites in Sterea Ellada.  I thank him warmly for affording me this opportunity.

Dr. Raphael Orgeolet (Aix-Marseille University) generously contributed location corrections for Kouophovouno (C988).

Dr. Dimitri Nakassis (University of Colorado at Boulder) contributed corrections for C6679, Chosti on Naxos.

Mr. Brady Kiessling of Topostext.org who encouraged me and who has provided invaluable information.

Many scholars have been kind enough to provide copies of their papers.  Among these is Dr. Rainer Felsch who  kindly provided his paper, ‘'Das Kastro Souvalas bei Kalapodi'’, which allowed me to correct the position of C6887 (when I had no other means of doing so).

I would be very remiss in not thanking Dr. Daniel Libatique and the professionals of the Ancient MakerSpaces organization who afforded me the opportunity to describe this project.

And, of course, special thanks to Michael P. Speidel, Professor Emeritus, University of Hawaii at Manoa who, all those years ago, set my feet on 'the right path.'

Any  errors that remain in these pages are mine. Any opinions that I state here or in the M.A.P. are also mine and mine alone and cannot be attributed to any of the people that I have named.

Footnotes

[1] The SCS website is here. The AIA website is here. The Ancient MakerSpaces page for the 2022 session in San Francisco is here.

Bibliography

Felsch, Rainer [2018]:  Felsch, Rainer , 'Das Kastro Souvalas bei Kalapodi' in Papakonstantinou et al. [2018] 73-82.  Online here.

Goodison and Guarita [2005]:  Goodison, Lucy and Carlos Guarita. ‘A New Catalogue of the Mesara-Type Tombs’,  Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici [47], pp. 171-212, 2005.  Online here.

Murray [2014]:  Murray, Sarah, "Qualitative Data, Hypothesis Testing and Archaeological Narratives: Was there ever a Greek Dark Age?" in C. Papadopoulos, E. Paliou, A. Chrysanthi, E. Kotoula, and A. Sarris (eds.) Archaeological Research in the Digital Age: Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. Greek Chapter (CAA-GR), Rethymno, Crete, 6-8 March 2014. (IMS-FORTH): 64–69. Online here.

Papakonstantinou et al. [2018]:  Papakonstantinou, Maria-Foteni and Charalampos Kritzas, Ioannes P. Touratsoglou (editors). Πύρρα Melétes gia tin archaiología stin Kentrikí Elláda pros timín tis Fanourías Dakorónia. Athens, SEMA Ekdotike.

Wong [2020]:    Wong, Todd.  'GIS Summary of SNAP 2019 (Part 3): Analyzing Extracted Results', esri Canada, Centres of Excellence.  Published in 2020 in the  'McMaster Blog'.  This article (part 3) is online here. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 4 is here.