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. 40 of 56 sites 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.

Trust pass (2026-06-29)

A full validation of all 56 sites 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), Nerokourou, Platanos, Traostalos, Trypiti, Armenoi, Papoura, Prassa, Selakano, Schinias, Kalo Chorafi.
• Mainland: 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 (unspecified)" 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.