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 achaeological site provides one of the most complete records of daily life from the ancient world. Beginning in the 1926 season, under the direction of E.E. Peterson, the excavators began to record buildings and finds according to five occupation phases, A (300 CE-450 CE) - E (earliest, 199 BCE - 50 BCE).
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.