The Map-by-Map Directory to Accompany the Barrington Atlas

This 1,500-page work provides a compiler’s introduction for each map that appears in the Barrington Atlas, together with a list of additional data for each labeled feature and a full bibliography.

In lockstep with the maps, directory listings provide historical names for features. Project compilers and editors exercised great care to admit only those names attested in ancient sources or – absent any such – those later names that might be reasonably inferred backward in time. Thus, latinate forms assumed for Greek sites by modern scholars, and used in print, have been rigorously excluded. Where a cultural feature is attested by archaeology but no ancient name can be associated with it, modern names have been introduced, using distinctive type. A series of editorial conventions for historical names, employed on the maps and in the directory, facilitates the marking of variants, reconstruction, interpolation and other editorial observations. The temporal aspect is treated as well. The 1,500-year span of the atlas is subdivided into 5 broad periods. The currency of names, and the relevance or habitation of built features, are communicated with letter codes for each period, postfixed with a question mark as necessary to indicate hesitancy on the part of the compiler. For all features, an attempt is made (via the “Modern Name / Location” column) to communicate the modern position of a feature via an associated modern placename or short description. Finally, a select number of bibliographic citations are provided in order to direct users of the atlas, as efficiently as possible, to a comprehensive or representative work that, in turn, facilitates discovery of all relevant scholarly publications. In the absence of any such modern work, primary source citations were substituted. Rarely, a compiler’s name is introduced to indicate an original conclusion or discovery whose separate publication was anticipated, but not yet scheduled.

For examples, see: BAtlasEntityExamples