De Re Metallica

A tool for visualizing ancient mines and quarries

DRM is a simple visualization of every mine or quarry available on Pleiades—an online gazetteer of ancient places—categorized by metal or stone. It was made using Python and is limited entirely by the comprehensiveness of Pleiades itself. The code and an HTML version of the map can be found on Github. Feedback is welcome!

This is currently an exploratory tool: it makes no claims to comprehensive or exhaustive information on the topic, in part because it is limited by the mines and sources of minerals presented by Pleiades. The word "gazetteer" is critical, then. Users confuse this with comprehensive data at their own peril. By way of explaining color coding, I've tried to make it as intuitive as possible—red for iron, grey for silver, green for copper, and so forth.

An interactive visualization map can be found here, representing the latest version hosted on Github.

A word on dates

As far as dates go, future iterations may allow users to filter by date. The current one does not. Dates are shown when the user clicks on a particular site, bringing up a label that contains basic information. These are direct transcriptions from Pleiades. I was not able to find a full list of date codes used by Pleiades (some of them are cryptic). But codes such as "C" and "A" are clear enough (i.e., "classical" and "archaic").

A count of the mines and quarries reveals the following breakdown (though this may have changed).

"archaic" = A: 223
"classical" = C: 497
"hellenistic" = H: 1316
"roman" = R: 7126
"late-antique" = L: 2888

Pleiades occasionally combines these codes to show overlap among periods (thus AC or RL).