Building an Integrated Database of North-Eastern African Archaeological and Heritage Sites for Mapping Complex Social Landscapes

Abstract

This dataset contains archaeological and heritage sites of the Marmarica region (NE-Libya/NW-Egypt), ranging from the Late Bronze to the Roman times. It has been developed in the framework of the PERAIA project, which aims to analyse the long-term history and interaction patterns along the harsh environments of north-eastern Africa. The records contain accurate geographic location of sites, including place names, typology, chronology, and metadata of documented remains, along with information regarding the environmental and ecological context. Additionally, the dataset accounts for the specificities of the region’s varying environmental conditions and their potential impact on archaeological heritage. All this information associated with each archaeological site was collected from published field data surveys, maps, archaeological reports, and it was subsequently cross-checked with historical aerial photographs and satellite imagery to detect, and to register known and unknown sites within the study area. Regarding the potential reuse of all this data, the dataset is deposited on the project website and linked to Zenodo.

Keywords

• mapping
• cartographic analysis
• gis
• endangered heritage
• marmarica
• open data