Data package for modeling the journey of Colonel William Leake in the southern Mani Peninsula, Greece, using least-cost analysis

Data used to model Colonel William Leake's journey in the southern Mani Peninsula, Greece, in the year 1805. Leake's journey is described in the book, 'Travels in the Morea: Volume I' (Leake 1830, pp. 233-321). The data may be used to calculate least-cost paths between the places where Leake stopped, taking into consideration the contemporary path network and calculating cost in time based on Tobler's hiking function and the Modified Tobler function. A paper interpreting these data, ‘Reconstructing Historical Journeys with Least-Cost Analysis: Colonel William Leake in the Mani Peninsula, Greece,’ is currently under review and will be linked here after acceptance.

Dr. Rebecca M. Seifried mapped the pre-modern paths as part of a PhD dissertation completed in 2016 through the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, entitled ‘Community Organization and Imperial Expansion in a Rural Landscape: The Mani Peninsula, Greece (AD 1000-1821)’ (https://indigo.uic.edu/handle/10027/21274). Fieldwork was conducted in 2014 and 2016 under the auspices of the 5th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities in Sparta and in collaboration with the Diros Project, an archaeological survey and excavation co-directed by Dr. Giorgos Papathanassopoulos and Dr. Anastasia Papathanasiou through the Ephorate of Palaeoanthropology & Speleology of Southern Greece. The remaining datasets were created in collaboration with Dr. Chelsea A.M. Gardner as part of the "CART-ography Project: Cataloguing Ancient Routes and Travels in the Mani Peninsula,” whose goal is to catalogue the historic accounts of travelers to Mani and to model their routes throughout the peninsula.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1346694), Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016 750843), the DigitalGlobe Foundation, the National Cadastre and Mapping Agency, SA (Ktimatologio), ArchaeoLandscapes Europe, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Society of Women Geographers, the Archaeological Institute of America, and Mount Allison University.