Methodology

The four identification classes

Classes are assigned by hand and defended in each artifact. They describe the status of an identification, not how interesting a place is.

Accepted

A real site with mainstream scholarly and archaeological consensus.

Plausible

A real place proposed by mainstream scholarship, contested or unproven.

Speculative

An identification resting on a minority reading, a single proponent or later tradition.

Mythical

The poem places it outside the mappable world. No external tradition overrides that.

The 0–12 confidence rubric

Four criteria, three points each. The score is their sum and the band is derived from the score, so every badge on the site can be re-derived from the four numbers in the JSON.

0 = nothing · 1 = weak · 2 = partial · 3 = strong

Bands

Thresholds are fixed and published:

• High10–12 — all four criteria substantially satisfied.
• Medium6–9 — a real case with a real gap in it.
• Low3–5 — one criterion carries the claim.
• Minimal0–2 — the claim exists; the evidence effectively does not.

Rules the data must obey

• Coordinates hang off a hypothesis, never off a place. A place with competing identifications has competing coordinates, and the map draws all of them.
• A place marked unlocated may carry no coordinates at all. The schema forbids it, so nothing can quietly acquire a pin later.
• An identification outside the Mediterranean frame is listed as off-map, never clamped to the border — that would draw a location nobody proposed.
• An 'accepted' identification requires an archaeology or scholarship source. Tradition alone cannot promote a claim to accepted.
• Every hypothesis and every competing theory cites at least one source. A claim with no source does not enter the dataset.
• 'Mythical' is a statement about the poem's own geography, and no later tradition overrides it: Ogygia stays mythical however confidently a guidebook points at Gozo.

How sources are cited

Primary passages are cited by work, book and line, so any edition can be checked against them. Scholarship is cited by author, title and year. URLs appear only where a stable public one exists; a missing link means the citation was not verifiable online, not that it is weaker.

Limits, stated plainly

• The classes and the scores are one author's judgement, applied consistently and published in full so they can be argued with.
• Coverage is not exhaustive. The atlas holds the places and episodes with a locational question worth asking, not every toponym in the poems.
• The atlas takes no position on whether the Trojan War happened. Locating a city and dating an event are different questions, and only the first one is mapped here.
• Some coordinates are approximate to a village, a bay or an island rather than a site. Each hypothesis says which.