The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land (DAAHL) is an international project that brings together experts in information technology including Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the archaeology of the Holy Land.
The Atlas includes territories modern Israel, Palestine, Jordan, southern Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai Peninsula.
This is the first on-line digital atlas of the region held sacred to the three faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Archaeological sites in Wadi Hasa, Jordan,plotted with DAAHL’s database and Google Earth.
Using the power of spatial information systems such as Google Maps and Google Earth, GIS, the tens of thousands of recorded archaeological sites for the region – from the remote prehistoric periods to the early 20th century – will be entered into a comprehensive database along with site maps, photographs and artifacts. The historical and archaeological content for this project will be developed by a team of over 30 international scholars working in the region, helping to provide the data used to create the Atlas. This website and its content will serve as the prototype “knowledge node” of a more comprehensive Digital Archaeological Atlas Network for the Mediterranean region.
New developments in telecommunications and information technology are revolutionizing the fields of archaeology, history, and the social sciences. The atlas represents a signature project of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) at the University of California, San Diego and the Geo-Archaeological Information Applications (GAIA) Lab at Arizona State University. The atlas project brings together many of these advances based on new discoveries and the latest content concerning one of the most politically complex but meaningful geographic regions in world heritage. The control of time and space allow archaeologists to uncover address the ‘big questions’ of human history and social evolution.
These include answering how and why the major technological revolutions of history occurred and influenced social and historical change in the Middle East. In broad strokes, the control of time and space are essential commodities in the construction of a heritage-based cyberinfrastructure, which come together for scholars and the general public in the DAAHL. New developments in GIS, high-precision radiometric dating methods, and archaeological fieldwork carried out in the Holy Land (Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, southern Syria and the Sinai Peninsula) have helped identify significant “Global Moments” of fundamental social change in this region. The atlas will harvest, analyze and disseminate settlement pattern and new archaeological data for each key period of culture change in the Holy Land, from the Lower Paleolithic over 2 million years ago to the early 20th century when the region came under British control.
This prototype web site is organized around two central themes, a series of case studies, historic maps, and database search functions. The “Empires” theme organizes information that illustrates the march of empires across the Middle East, from the development of the first Egyptian state in about 3000 BCE to the Ottoman Empire in 1918 CE. Here, the DAAHL concentrates on the impact of imperial “ordering templates” upon the lifeways of indigenous peoples in the region, as they are reflected and refracted by imperial and local traditions.
The DAAHL website incorporates an interactive Google Maps interface, which can be animated to show the spatial footprints of more than 20 empires. A drop-down list lets the user select any of the empires; a selection automatically loads text in the right side of the page that introduces the empire, and queries the DAAHL database to present the archaeological sites in the database that were contemporary with the chosen empire. (The user must be zoomed in about halfway to see the site points).
Each site point can be clicked to open a balloon with its name, and the name can be clicked to open a page in the atlas that contains three groups of information: 1) the listing from the DAAHL database, showing all the filled-in fields from the site table; 2) a listing of all the chapters or case studies in the DAAHL website that discuss the project; 3) a detailed, verbal description of the site, which can be richly embedded with pictures, tables, and static maps.
The Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land contains a lot of useful information for archaeologists, historians, pilgrims and all that is interested in the history of this region.
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Photo The Judean Desert. Maksym Strykhar/Religious Tourism