The library of ground
Every place Strata has dug, assembled from its sources and filed by locality and era. A place is reviewed again whenever the ground beneath it is dug afresh.
230 places · 98 localities · last reviewed 21 September 2026
United States
MapletonMapleton, Utah, began as farmland settled around 1850 under the name Union Bench, an extension of Springville, before disputes over water rights led to its incorporation as a town in 1901. Its Roswell Darius Bird Sr. House, raised in 1892, later became the town's own museum of pioneer memory.
1 dig
13 records Portugal CascaisCascais grew from scattered Roman farm estates into a chartered fishing town in 1364, then into King Luís I's chosen summer court from the 1870s, and finally into a coast of forts, shipwrecks and exiled royalty, its ground still carrying Visigothic graves, quarried walls and a fort disarmed within a year of its rebuilding. 13 digs
151 records
98 records
58 records
4 records United States PlanoPlano's ground holds a family burial plot begun in 1847 by a War of 1812 veteran, still receiving burials today. Around it, the town changed shape entirely — a church, a highway, and later shopping and offices, rose and in some cases passed while the cemetery remained. 1 dig
10 records United States CelinaCelina grew up on Collin County prairie once broken by early farm families, whose burial grounds still mark the land. Bush Cemetery, laid out in 1862, and the George McGarrah Cemetery, set aside by a farming family in 1879, remain fixed points as the farms around them became ranches, subdivisions and roads. 2 digs
17 records
12 records United States ProvoProvo, Utah, grew up along the Provo River on ground taken from Timpanogos families in an 1850 siege, then built over with schools, churches and homes across a century of settlement. Its Brigham Young Academy became a library; its post office took a lawyer's name; its streets remember a botched execution. 10 digs
114 records
62 records United States Salt Lake CitySalt Lake City spans a valley once called Sivogah, trapped by ambush in 1824, settled by Mormon pioneers under Brigham Young, and reshaped since by mining fortunes, a stalled billionaire's development, farming villages absorbed into suburbs, and a temple that reordered a whole hillside in 2009. 14 digs
129 records
319 records
6 records United States PinedalePinedale, Wyoming, sits in Sublette County beside Fremont Lake, ground worked and watched for thousands of years before it held a federal biologist's memorial, a family's hidden graves, and the town's own cemetery, founded in 1904 and passed to public hands in 1973. 1 dig
7 records United States DraperDraper, Utah, in this record, is traced through two Longbranch Drive addresses on land pulled into suburban development at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley — ordinary house lots platted in 2000, built up in 2004, and oriented ever since toward the white spire of the Draper Utah Temple a mile and a half north. 2 digs
14 records United States SedaliaSedalia sits near ground more thoroughly recorded under the name Castle Pines Village, a private Colorado community platted from 1981 around a Nicklaus-designed course that hosted The International, a PGA Tour event built around high-altitude scoring, from 1986 to 2006. 1 dig
9 records United States Castle RockCastle Rock, United States, took shape around ground first recorded not in story but in survey: soil mapped in 1974, and a vanished hamlet called Douglas, absorbed once Castle Rock became county seat in 1871 and Tomah was platted nearby in 1909. 2 digs
13 records
3 records United States OremOrem grew up on the bench above Provo, a farming settlement that became a city in 1877 and later filled with Geneva Steel housing, a mall, and a transit hub. This record gathers one plot near the Carter–Terry–Call House, where a bishop's second chance and a century of change sit close together. 1 dig
13 records United States ClearfieldClearfield, Utah began in 1877 as a rail siding platted on farmland in Davis County, serving lines including the Ogden & Syracuse Railway. Recognised as a city that same year, it later grew in the shadow of Hill Air Force Base, whose Cold War-era buildings replaced the wheat fields and grain elevators of its founding. 1 dig
10 records Spain MurciaMurcia grew around a Muslim citadel seized in 1243, when a treaty placed the city under Castilian protection and its ruling family was soon pushed out of its own fortress. That citadel became a church, a Templar hospital and now a museum, one thread in a town of bridges, floods and a flour mill turned landmark. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom North LeighNorth Leigh holds a Roman villa uncovered and stripped within a week in 1813, a Saxon burial ground, a vanished medieval village, and Eynsham Hall — a 1770s house rebuilt as an Edwardian mansion that sheltered wartime mothers and airmen before becoming a hotel. 5 digs
71 records
81 records
16 records United Kingdom OxfordOxford grew around Carfax crossroads, its fortunes bound to town and university alike. A tavern quarrel over wine there in 1355 became a massacre that shaped five centuries of governance, while sieges, executions and a killing rate that made it medieval England's murder capital marked the city's turbulent centuries. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom Stoke-on-TrentStoke-on-Trent grew around Hanley's streets, chapels and pottery works, from a Methodist congregation's expulsion in 1779 to the grand chapel they built twice and finally lost, and to the bottle ovens, halls and theatres that still mark its trade and worship. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom LondonLondon's ground holds a workhouse on Poland Street, a Roman bathhouse beneath Shadwell's docks, a Saxon knights' grant at Aldgate, and the Tower of London's siege, executions and plague burials — each site changed by outbreak, riot or rebuilding across nearly two thousand years. 5 digs
70 records United States WindsorWindsor, Connecticut, holds two brick houses raised a generation apart: one built by a brickmaker from clay dug across the road around 1825, the other by a tobacco farmer whose crop made him rich enough to outbuild the town's wood-framed houses, around 1860. 2 digs
20 records Spain VigoVigo's Praza da Independencia holds the memory of 1809, when fishermen, farmers, and townsfolk forced occupying French troops out of the city without any garrison of Spanish regulars to lead them, an episode still called the Reconquest of Vigo. 1 dig
3 records Portugal PenichePeniche, on the Portuguese coast, is defined by its fortress: raised from 1557 against pirate raids, it later held foreign internees and prisoners of war before becoming, from 1934 to 1974, one of the Estado Novo dictatorship's most feared political prisons. 1 dig
8 records Ireland DublinDublin's ground carries siege, rebellion and argument in close quarters: a corner near Dublin Castle that saw a collapsed 1649 siege and 1922 street fighting, and a spot on O'Connell Street where a column stood, fell to a bomb, and gave way to the Spire. 2 digs
24 records
23 records Italy Porto - SaragozzaVia Giacomo Venezian, in Bologna's Porto - Saragozza district, runs close to Piazza del Nettuno, where Palazzo Re Enzo held Enzo of Sardinia, son of Emperor Frederick II, prisoner from 1249 until his death in 1272 — twenty-three years within a building still standing. 1 dig
12 records Vatican City RomeBeneath the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica lies a second-century funeral monument amid a Roman necropolis of roughly a thousand graves. Tradition and a 1968 papal declaration name it Peter's tomb, though the excavation's own lead archaeologist doubted that identification throughout his life. 1 dig
12 records Italy ComoComo grew from Novum Comum, the Roman colony whose arena and baths once stood near what is now Viale Carlo Cattaneo, before medieval walls rose partly over those older foundations, carrying the ground through Romanesque building, Renaissance rebuilding and twentieth-century Modernism. 1 dig
4 records Spain MadridPuerta del Sol has long been the square where Madrid's public life gathered: a convent's steps for gossip, a lost fountain, the point from which every Spanish road is measured, a post office turned seat of government, and, on 13 September 1974, the site of a bombing that killed thirteen people. 1 dig
7 records Portugal MisericordiaMisericórdia is a Lisbon parish shaped twice by disaster — the 1755 earthquake and the 1988 Chiado fire — where a poet's uncertain grave, a ruined convent, and rebuilt shopping streets sit together around Praça Luís de Camões and Largo do Chiado. 2 digs
26 records
3 records Austria Innere StadtInnere Stadt is Vienna's old core, ground first held by the Roman camp of Vindobona and since layered with medieval churches, Habsburg burial, sieges, a Baroque palais, a synagogue and a wartime Gestapo headquarters — each holding its place beneath the streets. 1 dig
18 records Italy CremonaCremona rests on Pliocene clay within the Cenozoic fill of the Padana basin, a colony fought over in 200 BC and besieged in AD 69, later marked by a Romanesque baptistery, the towering Torrazzo, a rebuilt opera house and a small square that was once a plague cemetery. 1 dig
24 records
13 records Portugal CascaisCascais grew from scattered Roman farm estates into a chartered fishing town in 1364, then into King Luís I's chosen summer court from the 1870s, and finally into a coast of forts, shipwrecks and exiled royalty, its ground still carrying Visigothic graves, quarried walls and a fort disarmed within a year of its rebuilding. 13 digs
151 records
The name that stayed small while the coast grew up around it
Alcabideche · 1873–2020
The walls that named this town
Colégio Marista de Carcavelos · 1400–2013
A fishing village becomes a king's chosen court
Chalet Monte Real · 1520–2018
United States
LehiLehi, Utah, grew from farmed ground once worked by families like the Evanses and Harwoods into a town marked by a 1849 killing at nearby Battle Creek Canyon, a defensive wall raised at American Fork, and, much later, subdivisions and a school called Skyridge rising on land that had stood empty.
10 digs98 records
A falcon named Flash and ten years of state titles
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1848–2016
A hamlet named for a president, then erased
Kern Avenue · 1878–2024
A school with no past to tell
Highland · 1972–now
The house that has no story to tell
Highland · 1972–2024
A bond built the school, the town supplies the names
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1849–now
United States
HighlandHighland, Utah, incorporated in 1870, grew from Lake Bonneville's old lake bed and later farmland into subdivisions like Dry Creek Highlands and Blessing Rock at Beacon Hill, platted through the 2000s and 2010s. Its ground holds ordinary residential turnover alongside Lone Peak High School and the nearby resting place of inventor Bill Gore.
7 digs58 records
A DuPont chemist who bet his own basement over his boss
Highland · 1849–now
A knight for a mascot, a title for real
Lone Peak High School · 1849–2025
Some ground has only ever been ground
5942 West Southern Cross Court · 2004–2021
A lakebed lot in Highland became a subdivision house
Highland · 2005–2019
A lake bottom platted, sold, and refinanced
West Broadleaf Hollow Circle · 2014–2020
United States
SteinauerSteinauer grew from German-immigrant farm families who opened Rinne Cemetery in 1868 and Salems Cemetery in 1869, then raised Salem United Church of Christ in 1879. The settlement later endured a shooting on its road and the 1918 influenza pandemic.
1 dig4 records United States PlanoPlano's ground holds a family burial plot begun in 1847 by a War of 1812 veteran, still receiving burials today. Around it, the town changed shape entirely — a church, a highway, and later shopping and offices, rose and in some cases passed while the cemetery remained. 1 dig
10 records United States CelinaCelina grew up on Collin County prairie once broken by early farm families, whose burial grounds still mark the land. Bush Cemetery, laid out in 1862, and the George McGarrah Cemetery, set aside by a farming family in 1879, remain fixed points as the farms around them became ranches, subdivisions and roads. 2 digs
17 records
A cemetery outlasted the family farm around it
Singletree Court · 1848–2019
Where the first settlers of this prairie still lie
McKinney · 1862–now
United States
American ForkAmerican Fork, Utah, incorporated as a city in 1850, holds a record that runs from an early pioneer burial ground through a farmstead preserved from 1883 to the rock-walled cemetery, built in 1937, where physicist Harvey Fletcher and congresswoman Reva Beck Bosone were laid to rest.
1 dig12 records United States ProvoProvo, Utah, grew up along the Provo River on ground taken from Timpanogos families in an 1850 siege, then built over with schools, churches and homes across a century of settlement. Its Brigham Young Academy became a library; its post office took a lawyer's name; its streets remember a botched execution. 10 digs
114 records
A siege that ended in beheadings on the Provo River
Provo · 1849–now
The two-day fight that ended in beheadings
Provo · 1849–now
A Provo lawyer argued 59 cases before he lost his life
Provo · 1849–2002
The condemned man who chose the bullet over the rope
2230 North · 1849–now
Italy
RomeRome's ground holds an amphitheatre, a bathing complex turned piazza, a chasm in the Forum, and the spot where Julius Caesar fell. Emperors, senators and Gothic besiegers each left their mark, and what they built or broke still shapes the streets walked today.
5 digs62 records United States Salt Lake CitySalt Lake City spans a valley once called Sivogah, trapped by ambush in 1824, settled by Mormon pioneers under Brigham Young, and reshaped since by mining fortunes, a stalled billionaire's development, farming villages absorbed into suburbs, and a temple that reordered a whole hillside in 2009. 14 digs
129 records
A village that outlived its own name
West Valley City · 1849–2022
The village that became a shopping center
West Valley City · 1000 BC–2022
A pioneer teacher's name on a schoolhouse a filmmaker saved
Draper · 1849–2025
The brothers who came home to South Jordan
11351 South 1385 West · 1859–2023
France
ParisParis gathers a walled Roman island, a royal fortress rebuilt into a museum palace, boulevards laid out under Napoleon III, and streets marked by revolution, occupation and liberation. Kings, engineers, resistants and anarchists have each left their trace on its ground, layer over layer.
30 digs319 records
Wine-tax cheats and a phone-bomb on the same corner
Rue Friant · 1721–1972
A chapel built for a crown of thorns still stands
Siege of Paris · 250 BC–2014
Egyptian coffins rest beneath a fortress that became a palace
Louvre Castle · 100 BC–1794
A teenager died on this corner in 2013
Citadium · 1783–1999
Ravel composed Daphnis et Chloé near this corner
Le Kiosque de Paris · 1836–1944
A crossroads named after wartime allies
Charles de Gaulle · 1667–2024
An orientalist theatre for four thousand vanished within a decade
Keolis · 1779–1951
Cinema was born in a café cellar near the opera
Café de la Paix · 1600–2025
Poincaré unveiled a playwright's monument here
Hôtel Marcel Dassault · 1768–2002
A hotel rises on ground once walled for a royal arsenal
SO/ Paris Hôtel · 1254–2022
Chaillot hill has been rebuilt for two centuries
Carlingue · 1794–1980
A hotel corner where cinema itself began
InterContinental Paris le Grand · 1600–2025
A processional line binds this ground to the Louvre
Axe historique · 1682–2015
France
Le Mesnil-AmelotLe Mesnil-Amelot, a village in Seine-et-Marne on the eastern edge of the Île-de-France plain, rests on Eocene and Oligocene clay, gypsum and limestone laid down by shifting coastal seas. Once a waypoint on the royal road to Reims, it now stands beside Charles de Gaulle Airport's TGV station.
1 dig6 records United States PinedalePinedale, Wyoming, sits in Sublette County beside Fremont Lake, ground worked and watched for thousands of years before it held a federal biologist's memorial, a family's hidden graves, and the town's own cemetery, founded in 1904 and passed to public hands in 1973. 1 dig
7 records United States DraperDraper, Utah, in this record, is traced through two Longbranch Drive addresses on land pulled into suburban development at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley — ordinary house lots platted in 2000, built up in 2004, and oriented ever since toward the white spire of the Draper Utah Temple a mile and a half north. 2 digs
14 records United States SedaliaSedalia sits near ground more thoroughly recorded under the name Castle Pines Village, a private Colorado community platted from 1981 around a Nicklaus-designed course that hosted The International, a PGA Tour event built around high-altitude scoring, from 1986 to 2006. 1 dig
9 records United States Castle RockCastle Rock, United States, took shape around ground first recorded not in story but in survey: soil mapped in 1974, and a vanished hamlet called Douglas, absorbed once Castle Rock became county seat in 1871 and Tomah was platted nearby in 1909. 2 digs
13 records
The town that vanished under the county's own word for it
Hickory Oaks Street · 1871–1986
The survey that mapped you instead of a story about you
Green Fern Point · 1902–1986
United States
HerrimanHerriman, once open field on the edge of the Salt Lake Valley, took shape as suburban subdivisions like Rosecrest Place replaced pasture from the mid-2000s onward, with new houses on streets such as Larawood Lane arriving alongside institutions, including a school that changed its plans before it ever opened.
1 dig3 records United States OremOrem grew up on the bench above Provo, a farming settlement that became a city in 1877 and later filled with Geneva Steel housing, a mall, and a transit hub. This record gathers one plot near the Carter–Terry–Call House, where a bishop's second chance and a century of change sit close together. 1 dig
13 records United States ClearfieldClearfield, Utah began in 1877 as a rail siding platted on farmland in Davis County, serving lines including the Ogden & Syracuse Railway. Recognised as a city that same year, it later grew in the shadow of Hill Air Force Base, whose Cold War-era buildings replaced the wheat fields and grain elevators of its founding. 1 dig
10 records Spain MurciaMurcia grew around a Muslim citadel seized in 1243, when a treaty placed the city under Castilian protection and its ruling family was soon pushed out of its own fortress. That citadel became a church, a Templar hospital and now a museum, one thread in a town of bridges, floods and a flour mill turned landmark. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom North LeighNorth Leigh holds a Roman villa uncovered and stripped within a week in 1813, a Saxon burial ground, a vanished medieval village, and Eynsham Hall — a 1770s house rebuilt as an Edwardian mansion that sheltered wartime mothers and airmen before becoming a hotel. 5 digs
71 records
The mansion built to replace itself
Eynsham Hall, Terrace Walls To Rear · 800 BC–1981
A mosaic survived fifteen centuries, then a week
Eynsham Hall, Terrace Walls To Rear · 800 BC–1981
Italy
MonzaMonza grew from Pliocene clay into a Lombard royal seat, a Habsburg villa town, and a name known worldwide for speed. Queen Theodelinda died here in 627; King Umberto I was shot dead here in 1900; and its medieval Arengario, Visconti castle ruins and racetrack still mark the ground.
8 digs81 records
The king who did not see it coming
church of San Biagio · 100 BC–1965
The Chimera guards a square that has always argued
Arengario (Monza) · 1200–1961
Schumacher won at Monza before a fading seabed
2000 Italian Grand Prix · 1922–2023
A king was shot dead beside his own park
Royal Villa of Monza · 1750–1986
United States
NaugatuckNaugatuck, Connecticut, grew up in a low valley cut into 500-million-year-old Waterbury Gneiss beside the Naugatuck River, where Charles Goodyear's rubber industry crowded mills and worker housing onto the only flat ground — ground the river reclaimed on August 19, 1955, when it rose 27 feet and killed eight people in town.
2 digs16 records United Kingdom OxfordOxford grew around Carfax crossroads, its fortunes bound to town and university alike. A tavern quarrel over wine there in 1355 became a massacre that shaped five centuries of governance, while sieges, executions and a killing rate that made it medieval England's murder capital marked the city's turbulent centuries. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom Stoke-on-TrentStoke-on-Trent grew around Hanley's streets, chapels and pottery works, from a Methodist congregation's expulsion in 1779 to the grand chapel they built twice and finally lost, and to the bottle ovens, halls and theatres that still mark its trade and worship. 1 dig
14 records United Kingdom LondonLondon's ground holds a workhouse on Poland Street, a Roman bathhouse beneath Shadwell's docks, a Saxon knights' grant at Aldgate, and the Tower of London's siege, executions and plague burials — each site changed by outbreak, riot or rebuilding across nearly two thousand years. 5 digs
70 records United States WindsorWindsor, Connecticut, holds two brick houses raised a generation apart: one built by a brickmaker from clay dug across the road around 1825, the other by a tobacco farmer whose crop made him rich enough to outbuild the town's wood-framed houses, around 1860. 2 digs
20 records Spain VigoVigo's Praza da Independencia holds the memory of 1809, when fishermen, farmers, and townsfolk forced occupying French troops out of the city without any garrison of Spanish regulars to lead them, an episode still called the Reconquest of Vigo. 1 dig
3 records Portugal PenichePeniche, on the Portuguese coast, is defined by its fortress: raised from 1557 against pirate raids, it later held foreign internees and prisoners of war before becoming, from 1934 to 1974, one of the Estado Novo dictatorship's most feared political prisons. 1 dig
8 records Ireland DublinDublin's ground carries siege, rebellion and argument in close quarters: a corner near Dublin Castle that saw a collapsed 1649 siege and 1922 street fighting, and a spot on O'Connell Street where a column stood, fell to a bomb, and gave way to the Spire. 2 digs
24 records
The pillar Dublin argued about for 157 years
Spire of Dublin · 377 BC–2003
A siege collapsed and a civil war opened near this corner
Castleview · 600–2016
Portugal
Santa Maria MaiorSanta Maria Maior, a parish in central Lisbon, holds ground once ruled by kings and monks alike. The Ribeira Palace stood here for around 250 years before the 1755 earthquake destroyed it, and Carmo Convent, founded in 1389, still stands roofless from that same morning.
2 digs23 records Italy Porto - SaragozzaVia Giacomo Venezian, in Bologna's Porto - Saragozza district, runs close to Piazza del Nettuno, where Palazzo Re Enzo held Enzo of Sardinia, son of Emperor Frederick II, prisoner from 1249 until his death in 1272 — twenty-three years within a building still standing. 1 dig
12 records Vatican City RomeBeneath the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica lies a second-century funeral monument amid a Roman necropolis of roughly a thousand graves. Tradition and a 1968 papal declaration name it Peter's tomb, though the excavation's own lead archaeologist doubted that identification throughout his life. 1 dig
12 records Italy ComoComo grew from Novum Comum, the Roman colony whose arena and baths once stood near what is now Viale Carlo Cattaneo, before medieval walls rose partly over those older foundations, carrying the ground through Romanesque building, Renaissance rebuilding and twentieth-century Modernism. 1 dig
4 records Spain MadridPuerta del Sol has long been the square where Madrid's public life gathered: a convent's steps for gossip, a lost fountain, the point from which every Spanish road is measured, a post office turned seat of government, and, on 13 September 1974, the site of a bombing that killed thirteen people. 1 dig
7 records Portugal MisericordiaMisericórdia is a Lisbon parish shaped twice by disaster — the 1755 earthquake and the 1988 Chiado fire — where a poet's uncertain grave, a ruined convent, and rebuilt shopping streets sit together around Praça Luís de Camões and Largo do Chiado. 2 digs
26 records
Fire took the Chiado twice, and the poets stayed
Largo do Chiado · 1147–1988
A nation buried the wrong bones and called it certain
Palacete Loures · 1147–1988
Italy
FernoFerno, a comune in the province of Varese, Lombardy, rests on Pliocene clay laid down beneath ancient seas over Cenozoic bedrock. Once a quiet stretch of the Lombard plain, it became linked to Malpensa Airport when a nearby railway station opened in 1999, later renamed in 2016.
1 dig3 records Austria Innere StadtInnere Stadt is Vienna's old core, ground first held by the Roman camp of Vindobona and since layered with medieval churches, Habsburg burial, sieges, a Baroque palais, a synagogue and a wartime Gestapo headquarters — each holding its place beneath the streets. 1 dig
18 records Italy CremonaCremona rests on Pliocene clay within the Cenozoic fill of the Padana basin, a colony fought over in 200 BC and besieged in AD 69, later marked by a Romanesque baptistery, the towering Torrazzo, a rebuilt opera house and a small square that was once a plague cemetery. 1 dig
24 records
A record of ground, not a magazine.
Nothing here was commissioned. Each place is assembled from its own sources, published at the resolution of the ground rather than the point, and reviewed again when the record changes. No page reports a person.