about.txt

---
title: About this Project
author: Ben Hancock
lang: en-US
---


Overview & Motivation
=====================

The aim of this project is to allow archaeology enthusiasts, curious
travelers, and amateur historians the ability to search through the
[Pleiades] database using modern-day country names. For the
unfamiliar, Pleiades is a public repository or “gazetteer” of
geographic information about the ancient world. It's an amazing
project, and it offers very robust search already. But country-based
search is one missing feature, and is enabled in this project by
combining data from Pleiades with data from [Natural Earth].

This project was also a way for me to get familiar with new-to-me
technologies using real-world data, particularly the [Echo web framework]
for Golang, and the [PostGIS] extension to the PostgreSQL database. All of
which is to say, while I hope that the end product is useful to those
who may chance upon this humble project, this was also undertaken for
fun and learning.

One important note is that the Pleiades places returned when searching
by country name do not necessarily fall *exclusively* within that
country's borders; only a part of the place may overlap with that
country's territory. Features spanning a large geographic area, (e.g.
the [Ganges River]), will appear in searches for a variety of
countries.  In other words, places have a one-to-many relationship
with modern day countries. Please also note that results may not
always be correct; see the caveats mentioned below.

If you are viewing this document online, you can view a guide for
how the data for this project was prepared on the [guide page](/guide.html).
Or view the documentation in the code repository (see below).


License & Caveats
=================

I made efforts to check that my methods in combining the two data sets
produced expected results. That said, I cannot vouch for the accuracy
or completeness of the data -- including whether the listed places
actually fall within the named countries. When inspecting the data,
I found instances where places fell into no country at all (usually
when located next to a body of water) or into an unexpected country.
For more notes on this, see the guide.

This project is free software. For license information, see the public
repository where this project's code is hosted:

<https://github.com/benghancock/ancient-places>


Credits
=======

The places data for this project was sourced from [Pleiades]. Pleiades
is a joint project of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
at New York University and the Ancient World Mapping Center at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Using, sharing, and
remixing of the content is permitted under terms of the [CC BY-SA
3.0]. For more information, see its [credits page].

The geographic data for modern sovereign nations was sourced from
[Natural Earth].

The image on the home page is an outline map of Syria, and is
licensed under Creative Commons, with the following attribution:

[Syria_location_map.svg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Syria_location_map.svg):
[NordNordWest](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:NordNordWest)
[Syria_physical_map](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Syria_physical_map.svg):
[Urutseg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Urutseg) derivative work:
[NordNordWest](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:NordNordWest)
[CC BY-SA 3.0].

I chose Syria for the home page image because it is the home of the
ancient crossroads of [Palmyra], a place I find particularly fascinating.

Contact
=======

For questions or comments about this project, please write to:

mail [at] benghancock (dot) com

[Pleiades]: https://pleiades.stoa.org/
[credits page]: https://pleiades.stoa.org/credits
[Echo web framework]: https://echo.labstack.com
[PostGIS]: https://postgis.net/
[Natural Earth]: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/
[Ganges River]: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/59822
[Palmyra]: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/668331
[CC BY-SA 3.0]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)