The Interactive Ancient Mediterranean (IAM) project is creating an on-line atlas of the ancient Mediterranean world designed to support high school, community college and introductory university teaching in classics, ancient history, archaeology and related fields.

Thanks to a grant from the UNC-CH Chancellor's Instructional Technology Awards program, IAM has its own dedicated staff, including a project manager, who operate under the supervision of Prof. Richard Talbert, the director of the APA's Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. A copy of the original IAM proposal is available online. Because of its separate staff and funding, IAM is able to build upon materials being developed by the atlas' research and editing teams without diverting resources from the atlas project itself and without compromising its publication timeline.

IAM has benefitted tremendously from the help and advice of a number of cooperating faculty and instructors, advisors, friends and philanthropists who donated slides, photographs and digital images with the understanding that these would be published on the web for others to use for non-profit, educational purposes without payment of a royalty. Their names are listed here.

IAM represents an exciting opportunity to enhance the teaching of the ancient world in a tangible manner, and to take the first steps toward developing the robust, scholarly, digital products that should follow the publication of the atlas in 1999.

The current edition of IAM--including hardware purchase, software development, and content creation--was funded by a $30,000 grant from the UNC-CH Chancellor's Instructional Technology Awards program. All funds from this source have now been spent, and IAM is currently unfunded. IAM's director and project manager are currently seeking new sources of funding.

If you are interested in supporting IAM in continuing its effort to bring the history, geography and cartography of the ancient Mediterranean world to the general public, whose history it is after all, please contact Prof. Richard J.A. Talbert (talbert@email.unc.edu) or Mr. Tom Elliott (awmc@unc.edu).

The Scout Report for Social Sciences, a publication of the Internet Scout Project, a project of the InterNIC, based at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The Scout Report.Volume 2, Number 4, November 3, 1998.