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; every id is verified by
coordinate (the Pleiades representative point is within a few km of ours and the
place description matches the site), never guessed, and re-checked weekly by
scripts/check_gazetteer.py so a stray coordinate cannot quietly slip in.
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:
- Corrected five drifted coordinates — Zominthos (~7.5 km), Kythera (~8.4 km), Pylos (~9.4 km), and the Cyprus and Margiana island centroids — each realigned to the Pleiades point.
- 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.
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 exactly
this 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.