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By kind
Every one of the 4,496 places in the atlas carries one primary kind and any number of finer labels — the counts below include both. Start with a kind, then narrow by country, period or how firmly it is established.
Places that defy a simple label.
Capitals, ports and metropolises that rose, fell and were found again.
The first farming settlements and the houses people lived in.
Mounds made of layer upon layer of settlement.
Sacred precincts, sanctuaries and the architecture of ritual.
Platform and burial mounds of the Americas and beyond.
From Giza and Saqqara to Teotihuacan, Meroë and the contested mounds.
Stone circles, dolmens, menhirs and passage tombs raised without metal tools.
Settlements sealed under ash, sand or silt and excavated centuries later.
Mounds, henges, enclosures and effigies built from earth.
Paintings and engravings from the deepest human past.
Harbours, towns and monuments now beneath the sea or a lake.
Harbours, quays and anchorages that moved cargo before the coastline shifted.
Canals, qanats, stepwells and reservoirs of ancient engineers.
Lines, figures and shapes drawn into the land at a scale meant for the sky.
Burial monuments and the things sent with the dead.
Burial mounds raised over the dead.
Walls, citadels and hill forts.
Images pecked, incised or ground into rock rather than painted onto it.
Temples, tombs and churches carved directly from living rock.
Where people lived.
Places whose nature or age is disputed.
Places known from legend or remote sensing.
Steppe burial mounds heaped over pit graves, from the Caucasus to the Altai.
Hilltops ringed with ramparts and ditches, built for defence and display.
Ground set aside for the dead, used and reused over generations.
Stone mounds raised around a burial chamber reached along a passage.
Cities of the dead.
Caverns used as shelter, sanctuary or burial place — and often painted.
Portal tombs of upright stones and a capstone.
Smaller communities defended by a wall, bank or palisade.
Rings of standing stones.
Urban centres built inside walls, gates and towers.
Popular claims rejected by scholarship.
Ground set apart for a god or a spirit — walled, or simply marked and understood.
Chambered tombs entered through a stone passage.
Earth heaped over the dead: the most widespread monument humans ever built.
Proposed from texts, survey or satellite imagery, but not yet confirmed on the ground.
Walls thrown across a valley to hold back a season's water.
Raised artificial ground built to carry a temple, a house or a ceremony.
Cities that lived by their harbour, and often died when it silted up.
Stacked masonry villages of the American Southwest, built room against room.
Shallow overhangs lived under for millennia, with the deposits to prove it.
Buildings raised to house a god and the rites owed to it.
Stepped temple towers of Mesopotamia, built in mudbrick and rebuilt in place.
Channels and arcades that carried water to a city across whatever lay between.
Basins, moles and warehouses built as a single piece of infrastructure.
Gently sloping tunnels that tap an aquifer and walk its water to the surface.
Norse settlements, burials and landfalls of the 8th to 11th centuries.
Cities known from texts or rumour, since found again — or still being looked for.
Islands charted for centuries, searched for, and never found — cartographers' ghosts.
Open grave fields — scattered urns, cists and pits rather than a single monument.
Where the stone was cut, sometimes with a block still lying half-freed.
Artefacts and works whose making still argues with what we think the period could do.
A single house of a god, standing on its own rather than in a precinct.
Peoples known mainly from what they left behind, or from someone else's account of them.
Landforms the ancient world read as sacred, or that were long mistaken for built work.
Carved refuges and hidden complexes beneath the surface.
Settlements built out over water — on piles, on islands, on floating ground.
Where the finds ended up, when the site itself is gone or off limits.
Rock and sediment shaped by geology alone, however much it looks like architecture.
Places first described in a text, and only afterwards looked for on the ground.
Waystations, staging posts and caravanserais along ancient routes.
134 finer labels carried alongside the primary kind · 540 rarer ones appear on the places themselves
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