From Villages to Empires: Archaeological Settlements of the South Levant from the Chalcolithic to the Byzantine Period

The present dataset contains point geometries of archaeological sites (5,542) in the South Levant. Data were collected from different sources: published archaeological surveys, online databases, excavation reports, and stored in a geospatial database in an open format – geopackage (.gpkg). It comprises information about periods of occupation (site-phase), location, estimated size, typology, and bibliographical information. The dataset is stored on GitHub and Zenodo under an open-access license. For the South Levant, it represents – to our knowledge – the first dataset combining location accuracy, estimated size, and an analysis-ready structure. It can support a wide range of analyses, from simple point pattern to long-term settlement history reconstruction, to multi-proxy studies if combined with other archaeological and paleoenvironmental data.