levantCarta/Sidon

LevantCarta Sidon is an online mapping platform built to document and analyze the urban evolution of Sidon across its entire recorded history, from 4500 BC to the present. The platform integrates five categories of primary source data: historical maps, streetscapes, aerial surveys, archaeological surveys, and architectural projects, each situated in both space and time within a GIS-based interface. This spatial and temporal anchoring of heterogeneous source types produces a structured and queryable urban record where cartographic, photographic, archaeological, and architectural evidence can be examined in relation to one another across distinct periods.

The platform's integration of these primary sources into a single georeferenced environment is what defines its methodological contribution. Rather than maintaining parallel archives by source type or period, LevantCarta Sidon positions each dataset within the same spatial framework, enabling users to trace patterns of urban change, identify the layering of successive built environments, and examine the relationship between physical form and historical process across more than six millennia of continuous occupation.

The result is a comprehensive urban archive for Sidon, the first and only platform of its kind for the city. It serves historians, archaeologists, urban planners, and researchers with a spatially and temporally rigorous basis for studying one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, while remaining accessible to broader audiences seeking to engage with Sidon's place in the long history of the eastern Mediterranean.