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Document Details :

Title: The identification of Xenophon's Kerasous
Subtitle: A New Solution to an Old Problem
Author(s): MANOLEDAKIS, Manolis
Journal: Ancient West & East
Volume: 21    Date: 2022   
Pages: 109-125
DOI: 10.2143/AWE.21.0.3291140

Abstract :
This article re-examines a very old issue in the study of the Black Sea history and topography: the placement of Kerasous, the city visited by Xenophon and mentioned by him as colony of Sinope. Two sites on the southern Black Sea coast have been proposed as having hosted this city, Giresun and Vakfıkebir. None of them has ever yielded any archaeological evidence to support such identification, though. Therefore, scholars have always been attempting to draw conclusions based solely on the words of Xenophon. The issue is here examined from a different viewpoint: a specific GIS technique called Cost Surface Analysis, which is widely used by spatial analysis in archaeology, is applied to our area of interest, and provides us with an impressive result.

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