Stanford University
CESTA

This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
The Archaeology of Place in Ancient Cyprus
This project builds on the A. G. Leventis-funded Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus project. Whereas the latter is concerned with place-names and how their spelling and language change and evolve over time, the "The Archaeology of Place in Ancient Cyprus" is concerned with mapping sites whose contemporary names cannot be known, and whose spatial configuration is often uncertain; or at least only partially evident. We are creating a seed dataset which seeks to represent Cypriot archaeology of the prehistoric period, before any contemporary place-names are documented.  This involves a multistage process of critical quantification: starting with published material on prehistoric sites and features, we are examining how these can be defined in objective (and computable)  terms, and how different units of archaeology can be represented at different scales. This will lead to a broader examination the 'toponymic spaces' of prehistoric features: how do the areas they occupy on the Earth's surface relate to more recent place-name structures? And what strategies can we use to grow this dataset in the future, beyond the corpus of material currently available in print?
Former Research Assistants:
Nicole Follmann, Kevin Garcia

Spatial History