SIHRHIS: a geodatabase of Hellenistic and Roman housing in Central-Western Sicily

Abstract The domestic architecture of Hellenistic and early Roman Sicily is documented by more than a century of excavations, but differences in terminology, graphic conventions and recording detail hinder comparison across sites and phases. This paper presents SIHRHIS (Sicilian Hellenistic and Roman Housing Information System), a relational geodatabase designed to integrate this heterogeneous evidence and support regional comparison.Built on PostgreSQL/PostGIS, managed through Directus and queried and visualised in QGIS, SIHRHIS links houses, rooms, structures, surfaces, activities and assemblages to building phases and bibliographic sources. Documented features and functional interpretations are recorded separately. Controlled vocabularies standardise the description of rooms, structures, surfaces, activities and chronology throughout the database.Spatial data combine the vectorisation of georeferenced legacy plans with new GNSS and drone photogrammetric surveys at selected sites. Attributes adapted from the Simple Vectorisation Protocol record the status of mapped features and associated uncertainties. SQL views and filtered QGIS layers generate thematic plans for individual houses and documented phases, showing room classes and functions, flooring types, activities and construction phases where the relevant data are available.The database currently documents 140 houses across eleven urban centres. The paper presents the data model and spatial workflow, showing how phase-specific mapping connects architectural evidence with functional interpretation while retaining links to the underlying sources. By making these relationships and their uncertainties explicit, SIHRHIS provides a framework for investigating domestic space and its transformation through time across a heterogeneous archaeological record. Paper submitted to the CAA2026 Proceedings (PCI Archaeology)