Tracking the Ten Thousand

Title

Tracking the Ten Thousand: Exploring Xenophon's Anabasis with GIS and geospatial annotation

Project Staff

• Cian Colgan, Furman University, Classics & Earth and Environmental Sciences (Principal Investigator)
• Chiara Palladino, Durham University, Classics (Supervision)
• Suresh Muthukrishnan, Furman University, Earth and Environmental Sciences (Supervision)

Available

• Data repository: https://github.com/CianColgan/Tracking-the-Ten-Thousand
• Proof of concept: https://ciancolgan.com/ten/thousand.html

Description

This project uses GIS technologies and text annotation to investigate the spatial narrative of Xenophon's Anabasis. Text annotation with georeferencing is used to model the spatial dimension of the text, while GIS is adopted to reconstruct the itinerary described by Xenophon, and investigate whether new insights can be gained by explicitly modeling the relationship between the text and the material conditions of the surrounding environment. The three key techniques adopted are Radial Distance Buffering, Viewshed Analysis with 3D Modeling, and Least-cost analysis with cost-surface rasters (CSR).

Bibliography

• Colgan, C. (2026, June 5). Tracking the Ten Thousand: Using GIS to Conceptualize Spatial Narrative in Xenophon's Anabasis. Zenodo. DH Benelux 2026 Conference, Maastricht, Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20549629
• Palladino, C. & C. Colgan (2025). From the Pillars of Heracles to Ecbatana. In R. LaMonica, C., & Foka, A. (Eds.). Evolving Perspectives on Digital Classics (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003584155