Phoenician colonization
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I was reading Phoenician colonization from its origin to the 7th century BC (Manzano-Agugliaro et al. 2025) and thought it was an interesting dataset, but alas: it is split in four tables, behind a javascript redirect (wtf Taylor & Francis?) and with DMS coordinates (including typos and special characters)… So not easily reusable.
Let’s go build an accessible dataset.
Config
library(readr) library(purrr) library(dplyr) library(stringr) library(ggplot2) library(forcats) library(janitor) library(sf) library(rnaturalearth) library(glue) library(parzer) library(leaflet) sf_use_s2(FALSE) knitr::knit_hooks$set(crop = knitr::hook_pdfcrop)
Data
We need to manually download the CSVs (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4) because there is an antiscraping mechanism… Then a little cleaning and coordinates parsing with the very nice {parzer} package let us build a spatial object with {sf}.
sources = list(
c_10_bce = "data_raw/T0001-10.1080_17445647.2025.2528876.csv",
c_09_bce = "data_raw/T0002-10.1080_17445647.2025.2528876.csv",
c_08_bce = "data_raw/T0003-10.1080_17445647.2025.2528876.csv",
c_07_bce = "data_raw/T0004-10.1080_17445647.2025.2528876.csv"
)
phoenician <- sources |>
imap(\(f, c) { read_csv(f) |>
mutate(century_start_bce = parse_number(c))}) |>
list_rbind() |>
clean_names() |>
mutate(lon = parse_lon(str_replace(longitude_e, "−", "-")),
lat = parse_lat(str_replace(latitude_n, ",", "."))) |>
st_as_sf(coords = c("lon", "lat"), crs = "EPSG:4326")
Maps
The resulting layer, mapped on a Natural Earth background, seems good.
world <- ne_countries() |>
st_intersection(phoenician |>
st_bbox() |>
st_as_sfc() |>
st_buffer(4, joinStyle = "MITRE", mitreLimit = 10))
phoenician |>
ggplot() +
geom_sf(data = world) +
geom_sf(aes(color = fct_rev(as_factor(century_start_bce)))) +
theme_void() +
labs(title = "Phoenician colonies",
subtitle = "10th c. BCE - 7th c. BCE",
color = "from\n(century BCE)",
caption = glue("data doi:10.1080/17445647.2025.2528876
https://r.iresmi.net/ {Sys.Date()}")) +
theme_minimal() +
theme(plot.caption = element_text(size = 6),
plot.background = element_rect(fill = "white"))
You want more interactivity?
Using {leaflet}…
phoenician |>
leaflet() |>
addTiles(attribution = r"(
<a href="https://r.iresmi.net/">r.iresmi.net</a>.
data: Manzano-Agugliaro et al. 2025. doi:10.1080/17445647.2025.2528876;
map: <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright/">OpenStreetMap</a>)") |>
addCircleMarkers(popup = ~ glue("<b>{settlement}</b><br /><br />
from {century_start_bce}th c. BCE \\
{if_else(!is.na(centuries_of_subsequent_permanence),
paste0('<br />to ', centuries_of_subsequent_permanence), '')}"),
clusterOptions = markerClusterOptions())
Export
We can build a clean Geopackage (and a CSV just in case):
phoenician |>
st_write(
"data/phoenician_settlements.gpkg",
layer = "phoenician_settlements",
layer_options = c(
"IDENTIFIER=Phoenician colonization from its origin to the 7th century BC",
glue("DESCRIPTION=Data from:
Manzano-Agugliaro, F., Marín-Buzón, C., Carpintero-Lozano, S., & López-Castro, J. L. (2025). \\
Phoenician colonization from its origin to the 7th century BC. Journal of Maps, 21(1). \\
https://doi.org/10.1080/17445647.2025.2528876
Available on https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17141060
Extracted on {Sys.Date()} – https://r.iresmi.net/posts/2025/phoenician")),
delete_layer = TRUE,
quiet = TRUE)
phoenician |>
select(-c(latitude_n, longitude_e)) |>
bind_cols(st_coordinates(phoenician)) |>
rename(lon_wgs84 = X,
lat_wgs84 = Y) |>
st_drop_geometry() |>
write_csv("data/phoenician_settlements.csv")
And lastly we store them in a public repository; they are now available on Zenodo and therefore even have a doi:10.5281/zenodo.17141060
References
Manzano-Agugliaro, Francisco, Carmen Marín-Buzón, Susana Carpintero-Lozano, and José Luis López-Castro. 2025. “Phoenician Colonization from Its Origin to the 7th Century BC.” Journal of Maps 21 (1): 2528876. https://doi.org/10.1080/17445647.2025.2528876.
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