Pleiades alignment — coverage and upstream candidates¶
The find-site gazetteer (src/aegean/data/bundled/geo/site_coordinates.json)
aligns each site to a Pleiades place id for
linked-open-data work. 78 of 94 entries are aligned. The weekly
scripts/check_gazetteer.py check measures coordinate agreement; it cannot establish
archaeological identity. A point and its identifier can agree while referring to
the wrong site. Title, period, description, and archaeological references require
separate examination.
Current coverage¶
The 94-entry gazetteer covers nine regions: Crete (40), the Levant (14), Sicily (13), mainland Greece (7), the Aegean (5), Cyrenaica (5), the Pontic region (5), Anatolia (4), and the contested remote entry Margiana (1). Sixteen entries remain unaligned and are listed below.
Earlier trust pass (2026-06-29)¶
At that stage the gazetteer contained 56 sites. All were checked against their Pleiades representative points:
- Realigned five coordinates — Zominthos (~7.5 km), Kythera (~8.4 km), Pylos (~9.4 km), and the Cyprus and Margiana island centroids. The Pylos change was subsequently found to match the wrong archaeological site; see below.
- Aligned seven more sites (33 → 40), each coordinate-verified:
| Site | Pleiades | Identification |
|---|---|---|
| Ugarit (Ras Shamra) | 668295 | the Ugarit tell; Pleiades carries the Greek harbour name "Leukos Limen" |
| Sitia | 590045 | ancient Setaea / Eteia at modern Sitia |
| Skoteino cave | 14671932 | the Skotino sacred cave (coordinate corrected ~8 km) |
| Fourni | 589657 | the Archanes (Acharna) cemetery — a parent-place link |
| Troullos | 589657 | the easternmost sector of Archanes — same parent place |
| Pyrgos | 589949 | Myrtos-Pyrgos (the Linear A "PYR" find-spot; a 39 km mislocation corrected) |
| Poros Herakleion | 589802 | Poros-Katsambas, the harbour of Knossos — a parent-place link |
An earlier pass (2026-06-11) aligned Iouktas, Arkhalokhori, Syme, Psychro, Apodoulou, Kardamoutsa, and Tel Haror.
Palace of Nestor correction (0.61.0)¶
The Linear B find-site Pylos denotes the Palace of Nestor at Epano Englianos.
Release 0.60.0 linked it to 570640,
Classical Pylos/Koryphasion, about 8.9 km away. Release 0.61.0 uses
156116232, Nestor's Palace,
at 37.027138° N, 21.694962° E. That record describes the Mycenaean palace and
cites Blegen's excavation publications and the Pylos Regional Archaeological
Project. The offline regression pins both the place identity and its coordinates.
This correction does not independently revalidate the other 93 entries.
Candidates to contribute upstream¶
These sites returned no matching Pleiades place: minor findspots, peak sanctuaries, and caves that legitimately are not yet in Pleiades. They are good candidates to contribute upstream (a Pleiades place submission), which both fills our nulls and improves the shared gazetteer:
- Crete: Vrysinas, Kophinas, Larani, Kannia (the Minoan villa, distinct from nearby Gortyn), Nerokurou (also spelled Nerokourou), Platanos, Traostalos, Trypiti, Armenoi, Papourou (Papoura), Prassa, Selakanos (Selakano), Skhinia (Schinias), Kalo Chorafi.
- Mainland: Haghios Stehanos (Hagios Stefanos, Laconia) — a dedicated Pleiades entry could not be confirmed (the only homonym is a Cypriot place ~930 km away), so it is left null pending a manual lookup rather than a guessed id.
Crete is a region placeholder, not a place, and is intentionally left null.
ToposText cross-ids are a possible future addition, but ToposText has no clean id API, so they are out of scope here.
Method¶
For each linked site, fetch its Pleiades /places/<id>/json, read the reprPoint,
and accept the link only when the point is within a few km of ours and the
title/description matches the site; scripts/check_gazetteer.py automates the
coordinate-distance check (fail > 6 km) on a weekly schedule. For an unaligned site, search Pleiades
(/search_rss?portal_type=Place) and apply the same verification before adding an id.