The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds.

DARMC allows innovative spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia in the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization. A work in progress with no claim to definitiveness, it has been built in less than three years by a dedicated team of Harvard undergraduates, graduate students, research scholars and one professor, with some valuable contributions from younger and more senior scholars at other institutions. For more details on who we are, please see the People page. In a first phase, DARMC offers a series of maps and geodatabases bearing on multiple aspects of Roman and medieval civilization in the broadest terms. We have drawn on the cartographic achievements of our predecessors, most notably from Richard J. A. Talbert’s magnificent Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000), the remarkable fruit of an international research effort. DARMC includes the majority of the cultural features of the Barrington Atlas at a higher level of geographic accuracy and detail. We build on that achievement and continue it in close collaboration with Pleiades, the online gazeteer and bibliography of classical sites. As such DARMC will allow spatial access of new clarity, functionality and ease to the rich textual data assembled in Pleiades. Conversely, the written materials synthesized in Pleiades can be envisaged in their full spatial and visual dimension in DARMC.