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

What this means

Filled, a ring, or faint. A filled mark is certainly within its recorded dates in the chosen year. A ring is possibly — some reading of its dates includes the year and another does not: a date known only to the century, or a start with no recorded end. A faint hollow mark has no recorded date at all: it is drawn in every year, in a neutral colour, because it says where a place is and nothing about when. About four places in ten have no recorded date — Mecca, Hebron, Bodh Gaya and the Temple Mount among them. A photograph standing on a possible mark is ringed apart and dimmed.

Archaeological sites are squares. They are on the map because Wikidata records them as the site of a culture — an ancient city, a ceremonial centre — not because anything records worship there, and the card says “Archaeological site”, never “sacred place”.

A mark is a place. What is documented to have happened there, and when, is a separate assertion — so a pin on a temple is not evidence of worship in the year on the slider. Several traditions can and do share one site.

Documented events are diamonds. A council, a conclave, a disputation or an apparition, drawn for the century of the chosen year, since most lasted days or months. Its point is the one Wikidata records for it or, for those kinds only, the place it records as its venue — dashed, and captioned “located by its recorded venue”. A war, a schism or a persecution is never given a venue’s point. Events recorded at exactly the same point — thirty papal conclaves in the Vatican — are one mark with a number.

No layer of adherents. Where people practised a tradition, and how many, needs a dataset with its own methodology. Modern borders, a ruler’s affiliation and a count of points cannot produce one, and this atlas will not draw one.

One clock on the slider. Only historical dates meet the year. When a source was written, or when something happens inside a story, is another clock and is never matched against it.

A blank area means no evidence in this collection. It does not mean the absence of belief.

What each collection is missing · How geography is handled

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.