No abstract

Sardis, in western Turkey, was a major city from about 800 BC to 600 AD. The site’s rich history is matched with an equally rich excavation history spanning sixty years. Sardis is an active excavation which has embraced born-digital recording practices, yet it remains saddled with a significant amount of legacy data. The nature of this data requires serious vetting to be intelligible to those without intimate knowledge of the project. At present, the most effective way of vetting this data is via focused publication pushes. Sardis has several recent data-heavy publications that present the site in traditional and new ways. These publications also provide significant challenges, such as the integration of legacy data with born-digital content. This contribution illustrates a hybrid model for archaeological publication, outlining the process for a print volume of nearly 8,000 coins, coupled with the full data set presented online, and a push to integrate this material with the American Numismatic Society’s Nomisma platform, creating the largest collection to date of linked open data on coins from a controlled archaeological excavation. Sardis produced the first coins in the ancient world and the project looks forward to enhancing opportunities for numismatic data discovery and reuse.

No abstract

Excavations over the course of the 2012 and 2013 seasons at Poggio Civitate (Murlo) have revealed the presence of domestic architecture in an area immediately to the southwest of the Piano del Tesoro plateau, the portion of Poggio Civitate that preserves evidence of monumental building from the Orientalizing and Archaic phases of the site’s occupation. At least two building phases have been discovered in the eastern extent of the hill’s Civitate A property zone and they reveal that a small rectilinear structure dating to the late seventh century BCE was superimposed on an earlier, curvilinear structure. These architectural discoveries indicate that the opulent Orientalizing structures on the Piano del Tesoro plateau were not only visible to people on nearby hilltops, but also to a community that stood to its immediate west. While additional excavation is needed to clarify a number of questions about Civitate A, it is striking that its inhabitants appear to have had access to at least a few items of notable quality and potential social value, many of which were also used by the social elite living on the plateau. In addition, the number of planed, cut and carved antler, horn and bone objects and fragments recovered within the interior area of Structure 1 raises the possibility that artisans employed in the service of Poggio Civitate’s ruling elite created similar artifacts for their own domestic arena. Future excavations both in Civitate A as well as on other hilltop settlements in the region of Murlo should provide even greater insight into these and many other questions concerning this remarkably well-preserved site and the activities of its ancient inhabitants.

No abstract