This project is an interactive atlas built on top of open scholarly data about the ancient world. The underlying geographic and historical data is not ours — it comes from the public archaeological and digital-humanities commons listed below. We are grateful to these projects and reproduce their required attribution here.
The application code, the narrative/editorial content, and the interface are our own
(see LICENSE). The data carries the licenses of its respective sources.
| Source | What we use | License | Attribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pleiades | Ancient places, coordinates, names | CC-BY 3.0 ✅ | Ancient World Mapping Center & Institute for the Study of the Ancient World |
| AWMC geodata | Coastlines, features, roads | ODbL 1.0 ✅ — share-alike | AWMC; derived from the Barrington Atlas & OpenStreetMap |
| DARE | Roads, settlements, provinces, water | CC-BY-SA 3.0 ✅ — share-alike | Johan Åhlfeldt (Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire) |
| ORBIS v2 | Route network / travel model | MIT ✅ | Elijah Meeks & Walter Scheidel, Stanford University |
| Vici.org | Archaeological sites | CC-BY-SA 3.0 ✅ — share-alike | René Voorburg / Vici.org contributors |
| Cliopatria (Seshat) | World polity shapes over time | CC-BY 4.0 ✅ verified | Seshat Global History Databank (Nature Sci Data 2025) |
| Wikidata | Structured entity data | CC0 (public domain) | Wikidata contributors |
| Wikipedia | Entity descriptions / enrichment | text under CC-BY-SA 4.0 | Wikipedia contributors |
| Source | Layer | License | Attribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Itiner-e | Roman roads (detailed) | CC-BY-NC 4.0 |
Pau de Soto |
| OxREP | Mines, shipwrecks | OxREP terms (confirm) |
Oxford Roman Economy Project |
| DARMC / OxREP | Shipwrecks | CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 (DARMC/MAPS) ✅ verified — non-commercial | DARMC, Harvard / OxREP |
| Roman-Battles-Droid | Battles (classical) | no explicit license |
rharriso — attribution given; plan: re-source from Wikidata (CC0) |
| roman-amphitheaters | Amphitheaters | Unlicense (public domain) ✅ verified | Sebastian Heath et al. |
| Sciences-Po cross-verified database | Notable people | CC-BY-SA |
Sciences-Po |
| Pelagios / Peripleo / Recogito | Place gazetteer links | CC-BY (confirm) |
Pelagios Network |
| iDAI.gazetteer | Archaeological sites | DAI terms (confirm) |
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut |
✅ = license verified 2026-07-01 against the source (or the source's own attribution string).
Itiner-e (the detailed Roman roads layer) is CC-BY-NC 4.0 — non-commercial.
- ✅ Fine for this project's current use: a free, open-source, non-commercial atlas.
- ❌ It would block any commercial use of that specific layer. If this ever becomes a paid product, either drop the Itiner-e layer or obtain a commercial license from the author.
AWMC (ODbL), DARE (CC-BY-SA), and Vici (CC-BY-SA) are copyleft on the data:
- Any dataset we redistribute that is derived from them must be offered under compatible share-alike terms. We therefore keep our integrated data open.
- This does not restrict our application code or original narrative
content — those are separate works under our own
LICENSE.
The running app surfaces these credits in two visible places (a license requirement):
- The map attribution control (bottom of the map) names the tile and data sources, expanding as layers are toggled on.
- The landing-page footer credits the core sources and links back here.