Sacred places

Every collection · 400 CE

A pin is a place,never a people. Sites, not believers

Collection

Layers

Shapes

A circle: a sacred placeA temple, church, mosque, synagogue, shrine or holy city, at its recorded location.
A square: an archaeological siteRecorded as the site of a culture — the Maya, the Hittites — not as a place of worship.
A diamond: a documented eventA council, a conclave, an apparition, in the chosen year’s century. Part of Plus.
A dashed diamondLocated by its recorded venue: the event records no point of its own, so it stands on the place it names.
A wider, fainter markA location recorded only roughly, to a tenth of a degree or coarser: a district, not a doorway.
A numberSeveral places close together. Select it to zoom in.

Date evidence

Filled: certainly in this yearEvery reading of its recorded dates includes the year.
A ring: possibly in this yearSome reading does: a rough date, or no recorded end.
Faint and hollow: no recorded dateDrawn the same in every year: where the place is, never a claim about this one. A place with only an end on record (“until 1941”) is drawn so before that end. Turn it off under Layers.
“Attested from”The date of the first written record of the place, not of its founding.
“Within <a period>”A range read from the place’s recorded time period, not its own date: possible at most, never certain.
The bars over the yearsHow many of the collection’s sites the map draws at each century — certain below, possible above. Heights are on a log scale, so ten sites and four thousand both show. Select a bar to go there.

What a mark means

Site A location recorded for a place. Not by itself evidence that anything happened there. 3,777
Documented activity Something a source records happening here, at a date. The only role that claims an event. Where a council or an apparition records only its venue, the mark stands on the venue and says so.

5 more kinds of mark none in this import yet

Find or inscription Where an object or a text was found. Not where it was made, and not where it was used. None yet
Community A recorded community. Not a count of people, and not a share of a population. None yet
Route A documented route. Not a surveyed line — its course is as approximate as its sources, which are usually itineraries rather than maps. None yet
Political context A state or region, for context only. Never a religious distribution. None yet
Reviewed estimate An extent an editor argued for, with citations and a date. None published yet. None yet

Basemap © CARTO · © OpenStreetMap contributors. Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, each credited in its card and on its place’s page — with where it came from, when it is a Wikipedia article’s picture rather than the place’s own.