Building Digital Gordion

Ever since the Penn Museum began excavations there in 1950, Gordion has remained a key site for the archaeology of first millennium BCE Anatolia. The significance of the site derives from the intrinsic historical importance of the place—a longstanding center of power and population—and from the extremely long–running excavations that have revealed the physical dimensions of that history in remarkable detail. The resultant archaeological dataset is correspondingly of great size and complexity, and therein lies its value. These same attributes, however, when combined with the dataset’s relative inaccessibility to researchers, have proved to be a serious obstacle to the completion of post-excavation analyses and final publications. In this article, we show how the Penn Museum and the Gordion Archaeological Project are utilizing modern digital technologies to develop Digital Gordion, a new means of dealing with the complexity of the Gordion dataset. The issues we face are not confined to Gordion but are generic to many of the world’s largest and longest running archaeological projects.