[First posted in AWOL 17 April 2014, updated 5 July 2019]
Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire
Johan Åhlfeldt, Lund, Sweden.
A first version of a tiled base map of the Roman Empire was created in
2012 by the author, in collaboration with the Pelagios project. A
second version was created afterwards and became part of an online
historical geographic information system (GIS) called the Digital Atlas
of the Roman Empire (DARE) hosted by the Department of Archaeology and
Classical History, Lund University, Sweden and available at
http://dare.ht.lu.se. The map was inspired by the Barrington Atlas of
the Greek and Roman World (Talbert, 2000) and was built upon
digitization efforts carried out by the Pleiades and DARMC projects even
though it became necessary to return to the original map for additional
data in order to produce a functional digital map. DARE aims at a much
higher level of accuracy and the integration of digital resources such
as satellite imagery, national topographic maps, source texts, other
source material and scholarly literature. Since 2012 we have worked to
improve the map regarding both its appearance, quality of location, meta
data describing properties of the ancient place and links to related
digital resources. The most prominent change is however the addition of
9111 places (and buildings) with a different provenance than the
Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. The Barrington Atlas was
limited to the physical size of the printed atlas, limitations that do
not apply the same way to a digital map. Most places that have been
added appear in national heritage databases which increasingly have
become available online the last years, for instance, the UK based
heritage databases Pastscape, Canmore and Coflein covering England,
Scotland and Wales respectively. Another important change in the new
version of the map is the rendering of natural and semi natural areas
(forest, grassland etc.) and bathymetry. In comparison with the map
created for the Pleiades project, the map created at Lund University
contains an additional zoom level, i. e. zoom level 11. The Digital
Atlas and its place database is an active project which is updated at
least once a month. In 2015, 822 places were added.
The map itself is also used by Pelagios, Pleiades and other projects
to provide a more suitable historical context for their mapping
applications. Its gazetteer is implemented in the Pelagios project. The
base map is Open Data and can be used by anyone under a Creative Commons
BY-SA licence. The projection of the map is Spherical Mercator
(EPSG:3857) compatible with most Web mapping software and easy to
implement. The maximum zoom level 11 corresponds to a scale at 1:250
000.
In DARE, ancient sites are organized as places and buildings
(subsites), each with a distinct place type and location. The buildings
are not rendered on the base map because of their close proximity to the
places they belong to, but are instead available as thematic overlays
(e.g. amphitheaters, theaters, temples etc. respectively). Meta data
about places and buildings are available next to the map.
Stefano Giglio • Principii e caratteri della cognitio criminale romana 
Posts
Stumble It!
