AAI Receives NEH Digital Start-Up Grant

The AAI has received a Digital Humanities Level II Start-Up grant for development of the Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East (GANE). The award is one of 32 start-up awards announced this month by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. GANE will be an authoritative, free and open access compendium of over 8,000 places from the Ancient Near East. The project is based on software developed by the Pleiades project, an extant and successful model for open access publication of easy to reference, authoritative place and time information. Pleiades offers unique URLs to reference specific places, locations, and toponyms. The GANE project will build on these capabilities with the goal to enable future researchers to develop a geospatial index of archaeological sites and historical places spanning some twelve thousand years, from the Natufian period through the Iron Age (c. 12,500 – 600 BCE). The 18-month project will begin in September 2011.