Pondera Online: A Digital Database of Ancient Commercial Weights from the Aegean Zone

The study of commercial weights, which developed in the second half of the 19th century (Hultsch 1862; Pernice 1894), is most of the time not taken in account in economic archaeology, although recent research has shown that these instrumenta are fundamental to understanding the functioning of both Classical and Hellenistic economies. 20th century archaeological excavations have brought to light many weights, which have been more or less comprehensively published, but which have rarely been studied as a series—with some exceptions, such as the weights from the Athenian Agora (Lang 1964) or from Olympia (Hitzl 1996). Nowadays, more than 2,000 weights are registered in Greece and around 7,500 in Turkey, half of them from public and private collections, half of them from archaeological excavations; many weights remain unpublished. Dispersed objects, disparate information and imprecise data together constitute a major obstacle to a comprehensive approach. The creation of an open access database is intended to fill a gap in the collection, standardization, and processing of these archaeological data. The MySQL tool (http://sites.uclouvain.be/pondera) makes it possible to encode precise data in a dozen complex fields (denomination, place of origin, place of provenance, place of conservation, dating, archaeological description, inscriptions, metrological analysis, bibliography, and photography), to search for information in various ways, and finally to create distribution graphs and maps. Our paper aims to demonstrate how the building of such a formatted database is a necessary prerequisite to the global study of this material