Detourmap
Places worth the detour, by era
5,549 of the 39,832 places on Detourmap carry a founding date. Split by era, they read as five different maps — the prehistoric one is stone, the industrial one is iron.
- Prehistoric Older than writing — before about 1200 BC 164 places
- The ancient world From about 1200 BC to the fall of Rome in the west 388 places
- Medieval The thousand years from 500 to 1500 458 places
- Early modern From 1500 to the eve of the industrial age 293 places
- The industrial age From 1800 to 1950 — mines, works, forts and the towns they left 1,127 places
Questions about this page
How many places carry a date?
5,549 of the 39,832 on the atlas. A waterfall or a cave rarely has a founding year, so these lists lean heavily towards the archaeological half of the map. Everything without a date is still on the map and on its country page.
Where does the date come from?
Wikidata: inception, date of founding, or the start of the period the site belongs to, whichever it records. Dates for ancient sites are approximations and are shown as the century where that is the honest reading.
Where does this information come from?
Every place is drawn from Wikidata (CC0), with photographs from Wikimedia Commons and a link to its English Wikipedia article. Selection is deterministic: a place is here because Wikidata files it under one of the classes this atlas carries and it has coordinates, a photo and an article. Nothing is written or chosen by an AI, and the ranking is simply how many Wikipedia language editions cover a place.