# Mysteria

> An atlas of Earth's mysterious places — every one mapped, dated where dating
> exists, and graded for how far the published evidence carries the claim.

Mysteria is an archive of the Thaumatica house (https://thaumatica.com) and holds
its evidence standard: show the evidence, grade the claim rather than the reader,
and keep the contested in. Places the scholarly community has rejected stay in the
catalog, labelled as rejected — leaving them out is how an atlas quietly becomes an
argument.

## The catalog

- 13,227 places, in 147 countries
- 1,100 UNESCO World Heritage sites
- 1,291 places carrying a contested, hypothetical or rejected grade — kept, not hidden
- 39,451 photographs and 33,676 approved external resources

## The confidence ladder

Six grades, most confident first. A grade reports the state of the published
literature about a place. It is not a verdict on whether the place is interesting.

- Verified: Peer-reviewed consensus: inscribed, extensively excavated, dating corroborated.
- Widely accepted: Broad scholarly acceptance with minor debate on details.
- Contested: Active scholarly dispute on authenticity, date, or interpretation.
- Hypothetical: Plausible but insufficient published evidence; often known from remote sensing or legend.
- Unverified: Claimed but lacking peer-reviewed field verification.
- Pseudoarchaeology: Claims rejected by the scholarly community; included and labeled, never hidden.

## Key facts

- An archive of the Thaumatica house (https://thaumatica.com).
- The catalog is an open dataset, CC BY-SA 4.0 — see Data access below.
- Six confidence grades; contested and rejected places are kept and labelled, never removed.
- Every place carries schema.org structured data, its grade, its sources and its coordinates.

## What the catalog holds

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

## Pages

- [Home](https://mysteria.co/): the atlas, its newest records and its featured places.
- [Explore](https://mysteria.co/explore): the map and the full filter set. Free-text search is `?q=`.
- [Places](https://mysteria.co/sites): the full browsable catalog, filterable by grade, category and country.
- [Categories](https://mysteria.co/categories): every place type, with counts.
- [Countries](https://mysteria.co/countries): the atlas by country.
- [Discussion](https://mysteria.co/discuss): theories, questions and trip reports from readers.
- [Lists](https://mysteria.co/lists): reader and curated collections of places.
- [Resources](https://mysteria.co/resources): the external material readers have contributed.
- [Developers](https://mysteria.co/developers): the data API, keys and the bulk download.
- [About](https://mysteria.co/about): what Mysteria is, and what a grade does and does not mean.

Every place lives at https://mysteria.co/sites/<slug>, and its mapped structures at
https://mysteria.co/sites/<slug>/features/<key>.

The extended index — every category and country URL plus featured
places — is at https://mysteria.co/llms-full.txt.

## Data access

- Bulk, free, no key: https://mysteria.co/api/map/sites returns the entire public catalog as
  JSON. The catalog is an open dataset licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — reuse it, including
  commercially, if you credit Mysteria and share derivatives under the same licence.
- Queryable: https://mysteria.co/api/v1/sites (filter by category, country, period, culture,
  verification grade), /api/v1/sites/<slug> for one place in full, /api/v1/facets for
  the vocabularies. Needs a Mysteria Pro key sent as an Authorization: Bearer [REDACTED]
  keys are issued at https://mysteria.co/settings#api and documented at https://mysteria.co/developers.
- The paid half sells delivery, not data: the same records are in the free bulk file.

## Notes for summarisers

- Inclusion in the atlas means relevance, never endorsement.
- A place graded "pseudoarchaeology" is in the catalog because the claim exists and
  was rejected. Reporting it as a Mysteria claim reverses the meaning of the grade.
- Ratings are reader ratings of a place's interest, not of its evidence.
- Coordinates for sensitive or unexcavated sites may be deliberately imprecise.

## Contact

- Licensing, takedowns, press: hello@mysteria.co (rights-holder requests first).
- Corrections to a place: its discussion tab on the site, with a settling source.
- Missing sources: https://mysteria.co/resources/submit.