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.

On Helladic.info: New Elevation Analysis and Gazetteer Report

I have always wanted this site to provide more than maps showing Mycenaean sites.  

Therefore I am happy to announce the release of new software for the site Helladic.info which provides more detailed reports and which I hope the community will find useful.

Additional text  has been placed on the 'Using the Atlas' page that explains what these reports do and how to access them.  

This blog entry is intended to familiarize users with these new pages and how they work.

The report page can be triggered both from the Controls Page Combo Map Box as well as the Combination Map itself. 

When, from the Controls page, you select some criterion such as the region name ‘Salamis’ you can then click on the new ‘Report’ button.

Choosing Reports from the original Controls page.  Select one, two or
three criteria (region, type, or ceramic horizon) and click on the new 'Report' button.

You can also reach the new reports pages from the Combination Map page by pressing the new report button.  The reporting criteria will be those that you selected when generating the map.

Main Report Page

The resulting REPORT page characterizes the sites which fit your criteria.

It provides a site breakdown by the number of times sites fitting your criteria are tagged with specific types. This gives you an idea of the dominant use of your chosen sites. There is also a site breakdown by regions. In this example using ‘Salamis’ all the sites are in that region and no other.

If you selected some criterion other than region you will get a table that lists all the regions containing sites that fit that criterion. For example if you chose the type ‘Fort’ the table would show all the regions that contain a site typed as ‘Fort’. Here those include ‘Boeotia’, ‘Thessaly’, ‘Corinthia’, ‘Locris Opuntia’, ‘Argolid’, and ‘Achaea’.

The basic REPORT page also has two buttons, ‘Elevation’ and ‘Gazetteer’ that, when clicked, will provide more detailed reports.

Close-up view of the detailed reports buttons.

The Gazetteer Report button provides a basic interative list of all the sites that fit your criterion. Clicking the Elevation report button provides further analysis of the elevations of the sites fitting your criterion.

ELEVATION REPORT

The elevation report provides several sections. The first is for basic statistical parameters.

Sample appearance of the parameters section of the Elevation Report.
In this case for Achaea.

 The parameters listed here are:

- Arithmetic mean of elevations of the sites that fit this criterion. This is the sum of the elevations divided by the number of sites.

- Median elevation. The median is another measure of central tendency. It is that actual elevation which falls halfway between the lowest and the highest elevations.

- Standard deviation

- Variance

- Skew The skew shows how much the bulk of the observations are displaced from the arithmetic mean. It is an indication of symmetry in the curve – or the lack of it. If the skew is positive then the bulk of the observations are displaced to the left of the mean; if negative then the bulk of the observations are displaced to the right of the mean. If the skew is 0.0 or close to it then the distribution is more or less symmetrical. Skew might be either positive or negative but in interpreting the meaning of any partiular skew I use the absolute value. So the skew parameter is interpreted as follows:

0.0: The distribution is symmetrical

0.0 to 0.5: The distribution is approximately symmetrical

0.5 to 1.0: The distribution is moderately skewed

> 1.0: The distribution is highly skewed

Kurtosis This is a parameter that indicates how much of the population is in the tails as opposed to the shoulders of the distribution. For more information about skew and kurtosis and how to interpret them see this.



The elevation report also provides two graphs. The first shows the frequency of various elevation ranges; that is, it maps the elevations into the frequency domain. The horizontal axis is elevations from 0 to highest elevation in the set. The vertical axis shows the frequency of sites whose elevations are in that range.

The second graph is a straight-forward plot of sites against their elevations in the order of increasing elevation. The horizontal axis consists of the site place keys in order of elevation from lowest to highest. The vertical axis is elevations.

Charts on the elevation report page.
Here for sites in Arcadia

Beneath the charts are two tables. The left-most table is a list of all the sites fitting these criteria which have elevations lower than the arithmetic mean. The right-most table is a list of all the sites fitting these criteria which have elevations greater than the arithmetic mean. The columns in both tables are sortable. The place key numbers in those tables, when clicked, will bring up a place key report for that site.

The next illustration shows the full elevation report page.

GAZETTEER

The Gazetteer report is a simple list of all the sites which meet the specified criteria. The criteria themselves are listed on the top of the page. A sortable and clickable list of all the relevant sites follows this. The list is sortable by clicking on the column heads.

Gazetteer Report Page

On the both the elevation and the gazetteer pages there are buttons for generating .kml and .csv files.  These will be implemented shortly.




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If you'd like to have a copy of the Mycenaean Atlas database then e-mail me and tell me about your project.  And remember that useful .kml and/or .csv files can be generated directly from all the windows (except the new reports pages) of the website helladic.info   Try it out! 

The Lambaina Quarry (C131) found again.

In Messenia, near a town called Lambaina, there is a site that was identified by the MME researchers as a quarry/cem/habitation.  First let's look at it in the context of Messenia:

Lambaina sits on the W side of the Pamisos valley just before the Ithome foothills.  

And here's a close-up of the Lambaina area:

In this map N is to the top.  The main N-S highway runs through the center of the picture past a woodworking yard and former quarry.

The first description of this site known to me appeared in an article by McDonald and Simpson in 1964 where we read this:

“77B. Tourkokivouro (Lambaina)

On the E side of the Messini-Meligala highway and near the fork to Lambaina village (which is above and W of the highway) is a tile factory belonging to Ioannis Michalopoulos.  Immediately E of the factory is a great clay quarry which has cut into and perhaps largely destroyed a prehistoric cemetery.  The owner states that he retrieved from here and conveyed to the museum in Kalamata the two Mycenaean vases (a pilgrim flask and the bowl of a kylix) which are labeled as originating in Lambaina.”  [1]

In a follow-up article from 1969 McDonald and Simpson wrote this:

“77B. Tourkokivouro (Lambaina)

…

The ephorate investigated the site reported by us … Three pits were dug to rock on the E side of the clay pit and factory.  Pottery was more or less stratified in the sequence EH-LH-G.  The only structure encountered was an empty slab grave, probably EH.  The pottery was taken to the Kalamata Museum.  Mr. Papathanasopoulos suggests that this is a habitation site, rather than (as we thought) a cemetery.”  [2]

Finally, what does Simpson say in his gazetteer?

“F120  Lambaina: Tourkokivouro

(MME No. 122)

EH II   LH III(A2-B) G

...

About a kilometre east-southeast of Lambaina, on the east side of the Messini-Valyra road, stratified EH, Mycenaean, and Geometric layers were found on the east edge of a clay quarry. …”  [3]

Well, since the tile factory has disappeared the site is now effectively lost.  Can we find it?  What do we have to go on?  

a. near the fork to Lambaina village.
b. E side of the main N-S highway in this area
c. about 1 km. E-SE of Lambaina
d. Tile factory

Let's take another look at the general area:

The fork to Lambaina village is at 37.142447°, 21.969534°. 

Lambaina village itself is at 37.147274°, 21.967193°. 

One km. to S of Lambaina brings us to 37.138490°, 21.969614° which, as will appear, is an overestimate.

The tile factory.  Fortunately Google Street View exists for this part of Messenia so we are able to cruise up and down the main highway looking for it.  It doesn’t take long to establish that there is no longer a tile factory in this area.  What I discovered is a wood-working shop/factory with the name of ξυλεια Οικονομου or ‘Economy Wood Products’.

  This must have been the tile factory back in the 1960’s and has since been converted to wood products, or so I hoped.  On that basis I put the marker on the ground in back of this shop.  I plotted a point (C131) at 37.143516°  N, 21.97205° E.  

Now a correspondent of mine has visited this place and suggested a correction.  This is what he says:

~~~

“I have managed to pass the Lambaina quarry (or wood yard) several times and finally found the yard open with the owner in attendance. I asked him about the excavations and what he knew of it all.  He said he was rather younger when all this was going on and his father (not there) was the one who might remember more detail.  However he walked with me to the back of the yard where the quarry was originally located.  He confirmed that ceramics were made there before the yard became a saw mill.   It seems the ceramics were mostly tiles rather than pots or other utensils. That obviously made a quick survey rather difficult as the remains of the tile production had been dumped in the quarry when the yard was cleared for lumber storage.   In fact I picked up some of the more "interesting" ceramic pieces and wondered how anyone could tell by sight alone if they were ancient or modern.   The owner said there had been some excavations in the 80's but that they had not found too much and decided it was more likely a habitation of some sort - maybe even an ancient ceramic production centre using the same clay source.   His impression was that the excavators did not think it was a cemetery - certainly not one of any size.   However he was only a young interested person at the time and may have not understood all/any details.  He did say they became interested in something further to the east in another field (maybe the tumulus reported) but he didn't know anything about it.   I noticed a number of low mounds/small hillocks in the area to the east of the old quarry but did not investigate further at this time. 

   The upshot of all this is that your original presumptions are mostly correct (it was that yard and it had had a change of use from ceramics to wood).   However you might like to adjust the position of the site to something about 50m west of the current location (which is definitely outside the original quarry area).   My GoogleEarth  co-ordinates for the quarry area are:  37° 8.605'N ,  21° 58.284'E.

   The quarry was mostly worked on the southern side into the low hill. Indeed there is a semicircular area a little further to the west that one might suppose was formed by excavation. Unfortunately after the official excavation the site was filled and the debris from the old ceramic shops was dumped in the area with little regard for ‘contamination’.”

~~~

What's interesting about this narrative is a) no one seems to have visited it since the 1980's, b) When the changeover to wood products was carried out the debris from tile making seems to have been dumped into the quarry, c) the owner's son seems to have heard that the consensus of the archaeologists was that it was a habitation or, perhaps, a place of tile or vase manufacture and d) the archaeologists were later interested in a mound found further E (Tourkokivouro, C132). [4]

My correspondent also sends along some pictures that he took there and which I reproduce here:

First a Google map that shows how photos 1 and 3 were taken:

The next photo, Photo 1, is facing Mount Ithome and shows the clay pit/quarry to the left:

Some of the debris and plant-life found in the quarry.

Photo 2 is a close-up shot of the overgrown quarry.

Next, photo 3 is a shot of one of the piles of rock debris that lie around the site.   Here we're facing W (towards Ithome, visible)  and the back of the workshop:

And, finally, we have a spectacular panorama of the entire quarry and back of the lot:

In this last picture we're facing N.  The red lines indicate the angular scope of the panorama.  Certain things visible in the pano such as the telephone pole and the pine trees are indicated on the diagram.

So that's it then, quarry found again thanks to a valuable correspondent!

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In my last post I discussed the issue of Google starting to charge for its maps and how that affects Helladica.info.

In response to Google's change I have redelivered the Place Key report and the Feature Key report pages - re-written to use maps from Open Street Maps and ESRI.  This conversion work will be ongoing.

If you like these posts then please follow me on Twitter or Google Plus (Robert Consoli).

You can e-mail me (and I hope you will) at  bobconsoli   at   gmail.com

And please remember - Friends don't let friends use Facebook.

If you'd like to have a copy of the Mycenaean Atlas database then e-mail me and tell me about your project.  And remember that useful .kml and/or .csv files can be generated directly from all the windows of the website helladic.info   Try it out!

Notes

1. Messenia II:  "77B Tourkokivouro (Lambaina)", 235.

2. Messenia III:  "77B. Tourkokivouro", 157.

3. Simpson [1981]: "F 120 Lambaina Quarry", 129.

 4. Tourkokivouro described in Simpson [1981]  129, 'F 120 Lambaina Quarry'.

Biblio

Messenia II:   McDonald, William A. and Richard Hope Simpson, 'Further Exploration in Southwestern Peloponnese: 1962-1963'.  American Journal of Archaeology. (68:3). (Jul., 1964), pp. 229-245.

Messenia III:   McDonald, William A. and Richard Hope Simpson, Further Explorations in Southwestern Peloponnese: 1964-1968.  American Journal of Archaeology. (73:2).

 (Apr., 1969), pp. 123-177.

Simpson and Dickinson [1979]:   Simpson, Richard Hope and O.T.P.K. Dickinson, A Gazetteer of Aegean Civilization in the Bronze Age, Vol. I: The Mainland and the 

Islands, Paul Åströms Förlag, Goteborg. 1979.,  "D 122 Lambaina: Tourkokivouro", 159.

Simpson [1981]:   Simpson, Richard Hope, Mycenaean Greece. Park Ridge, New Jersey: Noyes Press, 1981.

Introduction to the Mycenaean Atlas Project, Part II

Part I of the Introduction to the Mycenaean Atlas Project may be found here.

f. PERIODS: Under this heading I include basic information about the periods of occupation of each site. I include here the sources which identified these periods along with, usually, a brief quotation from the source which justifies my including the specific period in the specific site article.


g. GENERAL: In many cases I include a brief statement that specifies why I have placed the specific site marker where I have. Ordinarily, when the site is marked ‘N’ or ‘unknown’ I include here a remark about the special difficulties encountered in finding the correct location. This is in the hope that others may start where I have left off and, perhaps, have a better start locating the desired place.


h. BIBLIO: This lists the sources that I found of especial value in identifying this specific site location.

CONCORDANCES

This document provides concordances between my pk numbers and the various numbering systems adopted by those gazetteers upon which I relied most heavily.

In this version I include concordances for the following:

1.   French [1967],     French, D.H.   Index of prehistoric sites in central Macedonia and catalogue of sherd material in the University of Thessaloniki, Athens, 1967.

This was done in part as I encountered references to French in Simpson [1981].

2.   Heath [nd],     Heath, Sebastian.  PRAP Site Gazetteer

This is the website of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project. The concordance contains those sites with periods given as ‘EH’, ‘MH’, or ‘LH’.

   

3.   Jameson et al. [1994],     Jameson, Michael H, Curtis N. Runnels, Tjeerd H. van Andel, A Greek Countryside; The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.  1994.  978-0804716086

In the concordance are sites which Jameson et al. identified as ‘EH’, ‘MH’, or ‘LH’.

4.   McDonald and Rapp [1972],     McDonald, William A. and George R. Rapp, Jr., The Minnesota Messenia Expedition: Reconstructing a Bronze Age Regional Environment, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.  USA. 1972.

The concordance contains all the sites in Register A beginning on p. 266.

5.   Pelon [1976],     Pelon, Olivier.  Tholoi, tumuli et cercles funéraires; Recherches sur les monuments funéraires de plan circulaire dan l'Égée de l'Âge du Bronze (IIIe at IIe millénaires av. J.-C).  Bibliothèques de l'École française d'Athènes et de Rome - Série Athènes, 229. 1976.   

6.   Simpson [1981],     Simpson, Richard Hope. Mycenaean Greece. Park Ridge, New Jersey: Noyes Press, 1981. 

7.   Simpson [2014],     Simpson, Richard Hope. Mycenaean Messenia and the Kingdom of Pylos. Philadelphia:Instap Academic Press, 2014.  978-1-931534-75-8.

8.   Simpson and Dickinson [1979],     Simpson, Richard Hope and O.T.P.K. Dickinson,  A Gazetteer of Aegean Civilization in the Bronze Age, Vol. I: The Mainland and the Islands, Paul Astroms Forlag, Goteborg. 1979.

    The material in this gazetteer is substantially repeated, often word for word, in Simpson [1981].  As a result only a few citations from this work are currently in the database.  Adding the entire work is planned for the future.

RELEASABLE FORMATS

This current document is meant purely to furnish an on-line resource of the contents of the locational database.  It is probably best used with a search facility.  

 A version of this document in .pdf format is available to be sent to any requester.

The specific aim of this database effort is to supply the interested user with a dynamic and interactive environment for exploring the Mycenaean world.  So, for those interested, there are available .kml files of the DB.  A basic .kml already exists of all the Mycenaean find spots.  It merely needs to be imported into Google Earth.  A tutorial describing how a Google Earth import is done is here.

 The entire database can be furnished as a .sql file to whoever may be interested, professional or amateur, simply by sending an e-mail here: 

bobconsoli@gmail.com

As a .sql it can be imported to any environment hosting a SQL server such as MySQL.  MySQL is a free, industry-standard implementation of a SQL server and is used very widely, for example, in internet applications. 

The Mycenaean Atlas Project itself has, at present, no internet component.

FUTURE PLANS FOR THE DATABASE

At this time the database is weakest with respect to Crete, Cyprus, and Italy.  Those places will be filled out in more detail in the future.  New releases of the database will be announced here:

mycenaeanatlasproject.blogspot.com

I welcome better locational information from those who have actually been to any of these sites.  I know that there are many individuals who can assist me in driving accuracy parameters to 0 and any contribution will be credited to the sender.

This project is entirely my own and any errors in it are mine. 

Blog posts on topics relating to the Mycenaean Atlas Project and other writings about Mycenology may be found at my two blogs:

mycenaeanatlasproject.blogspot.com

and

squinchpix.blogspot.com

Part I of this introduction may be found here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Papadopoulos [1979]: Papadopoulos, Thanasis J., Mycenaean Achaea; Part 1: Text.  Paul Aströms Förlag, Göteborg, Sweden. 1979. Vol 1.  ISBN: 91-85058-83-1

Tsakirakis [2000]: Tsakirakis, Vangelis G. "Using a Relational Database Management System for the Recording of Ancient Settlements and Sites in the Vrachneika Territory in Western Greece\", Online Proceedings of the group: Computer Applications & Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, 2000. http://proceedings.caaconference.org/year/2000/');