Pleiades gazetteer datasets

Please report problems and make feature requests via the main Pleiades Gazetteer Issue Tracker.

Content is governed by the copyrights of the individual contributors responsible for its creation. Some rights are reserved. All content is distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution license (cc-by).

In order to facilitate reproducibility and to comply with license terms, we encourage use and citation of numbered releases for scholarly work that will be published in static form.

Please share notices of data reuse with the Pleiades community via email to pleiades.admin@nyu.edu. These reports help us to justify continued funding and operation of the gazetteer and to prioritize updates and improvements.

Version 4.1 - 28 May 2025

41,480 place resources

Since release 4.0.1 of pleiades.datasets on 6 February 2025, the Pleiades gazetteer published 287 new and 2,757 updated place resources, reflecting the work of Jeffrey Becker, Sarah Bond, Catherine Bouras, Anne Chen, Birgit Christiansen, Matthew Clark, Stefano Costa, Anthony Durham, Tom Elliott, Margherita Fantoli, E.W.B. Fentress, Güner Girgin, Maxime Guénette, Greta Hawes, Brady Kiesling, Chris de Lisle, Sean Manning, Gabriel McKee, John Muccigrosso, Jamie Novotny, Gethin Rees, Rosemary Selth, R. Scott Smith, Nicolas Souchon, Néhémie Strupler, Richard Talbert, Clifflena Tiah, and Scott Vanderbilt. As a result, this release provides documentation for 41,480 place resources.

Highlights

• Updated gazetteer data in this release: see "Contents" below.
• Updated data/gis/README.md for new places_accuracy.csv file, which provides more horizontal accuracy data for use in GIS software.
• Updated information about Pleiades Sidebar (q.v.)

Overview

This is a package of data derived from the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places. It is used for archival and redistribution purposes and is likely to be less up-to-date than the live data at https://pleiades.stoa.org.

Pleiades is a community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places. It publishes authoritative information about ancient places and spaces, providing unique services for finding, displaying, and reusing that information under open license. It publishes not just for individual human users, but also for search engines and for the widening array of computational research and visualization tools that support humanities teaching and research.

Pleiades is a continuously published scholarly reference work for the 21st century. We embrace the new paradigm of citizen humanities, encouraging contributions from any knowledgeable person and doing so in a context of pervasive peer review. Pleiades welcomes your contribution, no matter how small, and we have a number of useful tasks suitable for volunteers of every interest.

Access and Archiving

The latest versions of this package can be had by fork or download from the main branch at https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades-datasets. Numbered releases are created periodically at GitHub. These are archived at:

• zenodo.org using the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1193921
• archive.nyu.edu using the Handle 2451/34305
• archive.org using the URI https://archive.org/details/pleiades.datasets-{version_number}

Credits

Pleiades is brought to you by:

• Our volunteer content contributors (see data/rdf/authors.ttl for complete list and associated identifiers or data).
• Pleiades received significant, periodic support from the National Endowment for the Humanities between 2006 and 2019. Grant numbers: HK-230973-15, PA-51873-06, PX-50003-08, and PW-50557-10. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
• Web hosting and additional support has been provided since 2008 by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
• Additional support and in-kind collaboration has been provided since 2000 by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Development hosting and other project incubation support was provided between 2000 and 2008 by Ross Scaife and the Stoa Consortium.