The Michigan excavations between 1924-1935 explored and documented hundreds of houses at Karanis, all situated around the outskirts of an area that had been mined for fertilizer. As they worked, the Michigan archaeologists mapped each structure and recorded all finds found in each building. The archaeological site provides one of the most complete records of daily life from the ancient world.
The Karanis Housing Project, a research group at Oberlin College, has been digitizing the legacy artifact records from the excavation and creating a digital map of the site in a Geographic Information System (GIS). The GIS map allows users to visualize the entirety of the site and browse the artifacts discovered in each excavation unit or search for specific artifacts or classes of finds.
The Karanis Housing Project has been supported by Oberlin College, The Ohio Five's Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Oberlin-Kalamazoo-University of Michigan Faculty Research Grant (2012-2016), the Thomas F. Cooper '78 Endowed Classics Faculty Support Fund, and the Jody L. Maxmin '71 Classics Department Faculty Support Fund at Oberlin College.