UC San Diego

The DAAHL project is an international effort that brings together experts in information technology including Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the archaeology of the Holy Land (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, southern Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, and the Sinai Peninsula) to create the first online digital atlas of the region held sacred to the three great monotheistic faiths - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (fig. 1). Using the power of spatial information systems such as GIS, the tens of thousands of recorded archaeological sites for the region - from the remote prehistoric periods to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century - have been entered into a comprehensive database along with site maps, photographs, and artifacts. The historical and archaeological content for the project have been provided by a team of over 30 international scholars working in the region helping to provide the metadata that were used to populate it. The DAAHL database represents the first fully-developed data node of the Mediterranean Archaeological Network (MedArchNet), a project that envisions a series of archaeological atlases for the Mediterranean basin that share a common metadata structure (Savage and Levy i.p.).