Geography

Geography

aegean.geo maps a corpus's find-sites to coordinates and exposes it as a geopandas GeoDataFrame, so you can do spatial analysis and plotting — where a word clusters, how far a script reaches, how a corpus is distributed across Crete and the Aegean.

It's an opt-in extra (pip install pyaegean[geo] — geopandas + shapely). import aegean stays instant and dependency-free; the geo functions raise a clear error if the extra isn't installed.

import aegean
from aegean import geo

corpus = aegean.load("lineara")

geo.to_geodataframe(corpus)                 # one row per inscription with a mapped site
geo.to_geodataframe(corpus, level="site")   # one row per site + its inscription count
geo.word_distribution(corpus, "KU-RO")      # the sites where KU-RO is attested, with counts

Each call returns a geopandas.GeoDataFrame in EPSG:4326 with a geometry column of points — ready for .plot(), spatial joins, or export. Inscriptions whose site isn't in the gazetteer are dropped (see coverage below).

The gazetteer

geo.site_coordinates() returns the bundled site→coordinate table — a dict[str, SiteCoord] keyed by the corpus's meta.site label. Coordinates are approximate (site-level, ~1 km), drawn from standard archaeological references — fine for mapping, not survey work.

geo.site_coordinates()["Haghia Triada"]
# SiteCoord(name='Haghia Triada', lat=35.06, lon=24.79, region='crete')

The gazetteer covers the find-sites in all four corpora — the Cretan and Aegean Linear A sites, plus Pylos (Linear B), Cyprus, and the Cypro-Minoan sites Enkomi and Ugarit.

Pleiades alignment

33 of the 56 find-sites are aligned to a Pleiades place id, for linked-open-data work. Every id is verified by coordinate — the Pleiades representative point is within a few km of ours and its description matches the site — so a match is confirmed, never guessed. It's on SiteCoord.pleiades (an int), with SiteCoord.pleiades_uri giving the full https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/<id> URI, and surfaces as a pleiades column in the GeoDataFrames from to_geodataframe / word_distribution. The remaining sites are mostly minor findspots, peak sanctuaries, and caves not yet in Pleiades — left null, and listed as upstream-contribution candidates in docs/pleiades-candidates.md.

geo.site_coordinates()["Haghia Triada"].pleiades_uri
# 'https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/589672'

Plotting

A GeoDataFrame plots in one line (with matplotlib installed):

gdf = geo.to_geodataframe(corpus, level="site")
gdf.plot()        # the find-sites as points; overlay on a basemap of your choice

Provenance

Coordinates are compiled from standard archaeological references (GORILA, Younger, public gazetteers) via the Linear A Research Workbench (Apache-2.0). See Data & Provenance and NOTICE.