Archaeologists, geographers, historians and others are exploring ways that landscape shapes and perpetuates essential structures and values of a society. My research on the historian Herodotus has led me to realize both the need for a better understanding of landscapes of ancient Greece, and the difficulties this research involves. The greatest challenge is the need to integrate very different types of evidence.
Excavation can provide a glimpse of spatial organization in fine detail.
Figurative arts may illustrate the iconography of landscape. Our disciplinary divisions normally separate these various artifacts of a single culture, but landscape provides a unifying theme to research drawing on all of them. We need a comparable development in method enabling us to assess the full range of sources. In the research strategy described here, I propose to address this problem in part through innovative applications of information technology. My experience working on the Perseus project has convinced me that humanists can readily use material outside their normal area of specialization if it is integrated into a single information system.