Demo Version Digital Excavation History of Ancient Olympia Online

The sanctuary of Olympia is central to the understanding of the panhellenic sanctuaries of Greece. In 1875, the German excavations began a comprehensive uncovering of the sanctuary. In six campaigns between 1875 and 1881, large parts of the sanctuary were uncovered. Already during the excavations reports were published. From 1890 individual plans, find categories and buildings were presented in monographs. However, the find contexts and features of the excavations were not published in the same form at that time.

Foundation of the project "Olympia - Excavation History(s) Digital" is the systematic indexing and digitization of the archival records of Olympia's excavations. This has been systematically advanced by the Athens department in recent years. Together with the Head Office in Berlin, a start has been made on transcribing these archival records, which are written in Kurrent, and preparing them for import into iDAI.field. The plans and sketches, handwritten diaries and reports are the basis for reconstructing these old excavations.

iDAI.field proves to be a flexible tool not only for documenting a new excavation, but also an old excavation that has been documented in an analogous way.  The version now released in the web version of iDAI.field is the demo version: https://field.idai.world/project/olympia-context-online.

In the coming months, the data will be further processed and its quality improved. The goal is to present a more comprehensive version for the 150th anniversary of the start of the German excavations in Olympia in 2025.