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By kind
Every one of the 9,978 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.
Capitals, ports and metropolises that rose, fell and were found again.
Places that defy a simple label.
Stone circles, dolmens, menhirs and passage tombs raised without metal tools.
Sacred precincts, sanctuaries and the architecture of ritual.
Mounds made of layer upon layer of settlement.
The first farming settlements and the houses people lived in.
Platform and burial mounds of the Americas and beyond.
From Giza and Saqqara to Teotihuacan, Meroë and the contested mounds.
Mounds, henges, enclosures and effigies built from earth.
Settlements sealed under ash, sand or silt and excavated centuries later.
Harbours, towns and monuments now beneath the sea or a lake.
Paintings and engravings from the deepest human past.
Harbours, quays and anchorages that moved cargo before the coastline shifted.
Canals, qanats, stepwells and reservoirs of ancient engineers.
Burial monuments and the things sent with the dead.
Burial mounds raised over the dead.
Lines, figures and shapes drawn into the land at a scale meant for the sky.
Temples, tombs and churches carved directly from living rock.
Walls, citadels and hill forts.
Where people lived.
Images pecked, incised or ground into rock rather than painted onto it.
Caverns used as shelter, sanctuary or burial place — and often painted.
Hilltops ringed with ramparts and ditches, built for defence and display.
Cities of the dead.
Ground set apart for a god or a spirit — walled, or simply marked and understood.
Steppe burial mounds heaped over pit graves, from the Caucasus to the Altai.
Places whose nature or age is disputed.
Rings of standing stones.
Stone mounds raised around a burial chamber reached along a passage.
Portal tombs of upright stones and a capstone.
Ground set aside for the dead, used and reused over generations.
Places known from legend or remote sensing.
Shallow overhangs lived under for millennia, with the deposits to prove it.
Urban centres built inside walls, gates and towers.
Smaller communities defended by a wall, bank or palisade.
Channels and arcades that carried water to a city across whatever lay between.
Chambered tombs entered through a stone passage.
Buildings raised to house a god and the rites owed to it.
Basins, moles and warehouses built as a single piece of infrastructure.
Where the stone was cut, sometimes with a block still lying half-freed.
Popular claims rejected by scholarship.
Walls thrown across a valley to hold back a season's water.
Stepped temple towers of Mesopotamia, built in mudbrick and rebuilt in place.
Stacked masonry villages of the American Southwest, built room against room.
Raised artificial ground built to carry a temple, a house or a ceremony.
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.
Cities that lived by their harbour, and often died when it silted up.
Gently sloping tunnels that tap an aquifer and walk its water to the surface.
Carved refuges and hidden complexes beneath 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.
Open grave fields — scattered urns, cists and pits rather than a single monument.
Islands charted for centuries, searched for, and never found — cartographers' ghosts.
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.
Where the finds ended up, when the site itself is gone or off limits.
Settlements built out over water — on piles, on islands, on floating ground.
Rock and sediment shaped by geology alone, however much it looks like architecture.
Waystations, staging posts and caravanserais along ancient routes.
Places first described in a text, and only afterwards looked for on the ground.
160 finer labels carried alongside the primary kind · 962 rarer ones appear on the places themselves
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