Every place with ground on record

98 localities, each assembled from the tiles dug inside it. A locality's page is the canonical record; the individual pieces of ground sit under it.

Austria

Innere Stadt
Innere 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

Bulgaria

Sofia
Beneath modern Sofia lies Serdica, the fortified Roman and medieval city besieged by Bulgarian forces in 809 and taken by the Ottomans in 1382. Its buried streets and a sunken church now sit beneath a shopping mall and the Serdika Metro Station, marking the old city's core. 1 dig
11 records

China

Beijing
Beijing gathers ground of very different kinds: a canal-side Ming treasury turned imperial birthday stage in Haidian, and Fengtai farmland without electricity until a 1978 order placed a radio university upon it. Between them lie centuries of scripture, siege, and signal. 2 digs
18 records Huairou
Huairou is a mountainous district north of Beijing, garrisoned from 1368 onward to guard the capital's northern approach. Its ridge carries the Mutianyu Great Wall, Ming stonework built atop Neoproterozoic bedrock, with signal towers, a horn tower and a gate-tower set to hold a mountain pass. 2 digs
5 records

Colombia

Medellin
El Poblado, in Medellín, is ground that carried no name of its own until 1929, when a survey drew the barrio Alejandría over former pastureland. The wider territory had been recorded since 1616 as the Spanish settlement San Lorenzo de Aburrá, and from 1675 as El Poblado, now Comuna 14. 0 digs
25 records

France

Bezannes
Bezannes, near Reims, is a place where champagne trade and the wider world have repeatedly met. It gave its name to the Charles Heidsieck house, founded here in 1851, and later to a TGV station opened in 2007 that put the commune on the national rail map. 1 dig
26 records Le Mesnil-Amelot
Le 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 dig
6 records Paris
Paris 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 digs
319 records Versailles
Versailles grew around a palace that housed the French court from 1682 until the Revolution of 1789, when the Tennis Court Oath was sworn on its grounds. The palace later endured a 1978 bomb that gutted its north wing. 1 dig
15 records

Ireland

Dublin
Dublin'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

Italy

Como
Como 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 Cremona
Cremona 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 Ferno
Ferno, 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 dig
3 records Florence
Florence gathers around Piazza della Signoria and its cathedral: seat of a medieval republic, site of a friar's execution, ground where Medici dukes raised bronze monuments, and a Duomo built directly over the city's first cathedral. Republic gave way to Medici rule, and each layer left its mark. 3 digs
23 records Monza
Monza 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 digs
81 records Padua
Padua's former ghetto neighbourhood, near the synagogue built in 1548 and the ancient university, holds a record of arrest and deportation. Sixteen stumbling stones set into its pavement mark families and students taken between December 1943 and May 1944. 1 dig
3 records Pisa
Pisa's Via Santa Maria runs near the Piazza del Duomo, where the cathedral was consecrated in 1118 on soft ground that later tipped its bell tower. Around it rose a memorial church after 1316 and, centuries on, a fountain of 1765. 1 dig
10 records Porto - Saragozza
Via 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 Rome
Rome'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 digs
62 records Santo Stefano
Santo Stefano gathers a long ground in Bologna: the site of two Christian executions in 305 AD, a buried temple to Isis, an early medieval cemetery, and, nearby, the palace prison where a defeated king died in 1272. Ownership and use shifted repeatedly across centuries of destruction and rebuilding. 1 dig
15 records Venezia-Murano-Burano
Venice was built as a city without roads, entered only by water until the nineteenth century, when a rail causeway and later a road bridge tied it to the mainland. The Ponte della Libertà, completed in 1933, remains its sole land approach, bombed during the Second World War for that very reason. 3 digs
44 records Verona
Verona's record here gathers around Piazza Bra: a small plaque to the city's sons who fell fighting in Libya in 1911, set near the spot where Garibaldi once vowed "Rome or death," alongside older markers of the square's long civic and military past. 1 dig
3 records

Netherlands

Gemeente Utrecht
Gemeente Utrecht gathers ground once governed on its own terms, among them Vleuten, a village that ran its own council for more than a century before being absorbed twice — first into Vleuten-De Meern in 1954, then into Utrecht itself in 2001. 1 dig
11 records

Portugal

Aldoar
Aldoar, on the edge of Porto near the mouth of the Douro, holds ground where a bishop's Renaissance chapel was later swallowed by a fortress wall. Built in the 1520s and rebuilt into a bastion against Spain between 1646 and 1653, it marks a place shaped by faith and defence in turn. 1 dig
5 records Almada
Almada, on the south bank opposite Lisbon, holds ground shaped as much by natural forces as by people. At Charneca de Caparica, a fossil sea cliff and a planted pine forest sit side by side, both eventually fenced off by law to keep the land from disappearing further. 1 dig
4 records Cascais
Cascais 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 Grandola
Grândola, in the district that bears its name, is remembered above all for lending its name to a song. On 25 April 1974, 1 dig
4 records Lisbon
Lisbon carries its layers close together: a hilltop besieged in 1147, a royal square rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake, a secret police headquarters that fired its last shots in 1974, and industrial waterfront turned into a World's Fair in 1998. Moors, kings, dictators and engineers each left their mark on the same short walks. 9 digs
108 records Mafra
Mafra grew around a king's vow: John V promised in 1711 to build a convent if his wife bore an heir, and that promise became the vast Palace of Mafra, finished in 1755. The town's old stone pillory still stands nearby, marking older judicial ground. 1 dig
12 records Misericordia
Misericórdia 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 Oeiras
Oeiras, on the Tagus estuary west of Lisbon, grew from a fishing and defensive coastline into a municipality in 1759 under the Marquês de Pombal, and later into a dense Lisbon suburb, its ground marked by a fort, a railway, and a science institute built without a chain of command. 1 dig
12 records Parque das Nacoes
Parque das Nações occupies a stretch of Lisbon's Tagus riverfront that passed through shipbuilding, wartime seaplanes, transatlantic flying boats, and decades of slaughterhouses and refineries before the 1992-1998 clearance for Expo '98, which left behind the Vasco da Gama Tower and its sculpture Cursiva. 1 dig
7 records Peniche
Peniche, 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 Salvaterra de Magos
Salvaterra de Magos grew around a royal hunting lodge built in the 1500s, favored by the Portuguese crown into the 1700s, where a marriage contract had already been signed in 1383. Fires in 1817 and 1828, then an 1858 earthquake, brought the palace down, leaving only its chapel and falconry standing. 1 dig
9 records Santa Maria Maior
Santa 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 digs
23 records Sintra
Sintra, Portugal, gathers its history around a royal palace where kings were born, confined and died, and around the villages and burial grounds spread through its hills. Moorish, medieval and modern layers sit close together, held by the crown, by the Church, and later by exiles and dictators-in-waiting. 9 digs
64 records Sobral de Monte Agraco
Sobral de Monte Agraço is the hill town where André Masséna's invading French army was stopped in October 1810, held through a starving winter behind Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras, and turned back towards Spain in March 1811, never reaching Lisbon. 1 dig
5 records

Serbia

Opstina Nis-Medijana
Opstina Niš-Medijana holds ground fought over across centuries: besieged by crusader knights in 1096, taken by Bulgarian troops in 1915 as Serbia's wartime capital, and struck by NATO cluster bombs in 1999. Emperors, priests and armies all left their mark here. 1 dig
7 records

Spain

Madrid
Puerta 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 Murcia
Murcia 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 Ronda
Ronda's record centres on its bullring, built between 1780 and 1784 for the Real Maestranza de Caballería and designed by Martín de Aldehuela. Its stone stands collapsed on opening night, was repaired, reopened in 1785, and later served as a concentration camp during the Civil War in 1939. 0 digs
14 records Valencia
Valencia's ground carries Roman foundations, a royal conquest in 1238, and a papal request in 1246 that finally became a classroom seven centuries later. Kings, friars and floods have each left their mark, from the buried city of Valentia to the archive begun in 1419. 1 dig
14 records Vigo
Vigo'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

Switzerland

Bulle
Bulle, first named in the 9th century, grew around a fortress the bishops of Lausanne raised between 1291 and 1331. Built to a Savoy-style plan in a town that never belonged to Savoy, the castle passed to Fribourg's rule in 1536 when the bishop fled the invading Bernese army. 2 digs
22 records

United Kingdom

Bicester
Bicester grew around a saint's relics and a Norman priory, on ground already old with Roman roads and early Christian burial. A highwayman's ambush in 1818 and a designer outlet opened in 1995 mark how the same streets kept changing hands and purpose. 1 dig
12 records City of London
The City of London holds Aldgate, breached by rebels in 1381 and 1471, and the Tower of London, raised by William the Conqueror in the early 1080s, where three queens were beheaded and a 1974 bomb killed a visitor. Sieges, executions and modern violence have all left their mark here. 2 digs
25 records City of Westminster
The City of Westminster's record here gathers around Monmouth House, near Broadwick Street, where a contaminated pump caused the 1854 cholera outbreak that killed 616 people and changed how disease itself was understood. 1 dig
4 records Lillingstone Dayrell with Luffield Abbey
Lillingstone Dayrell with Luffield Abbey carries a Benedictine priory cleared in the fifteenth century, a deserted village, an Iron Age hillfort, and a wartime airfield reborn as Silverstone Circuit, birthplace of the World Championship of Drivers. 1 dig
12 records London
London'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 North Leigh
North 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 Oxford
Oxford 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 Portsmouth
Portsmouth's dockyard ground has carried the weight of empire and its punishments: a parish recorded from 979, the Mary Rose lost offshore in 1545, and, on a single quarterdeck at № 10 Storehouse, an admiral shot in 1757 for failing to do his utmost. 1 dig
12 records Silverstone
Silverstone, Northamptonshire, has held an Iron Age hillfort, a medieval moated farm and a Roman cremation cemetery, before a wartime bomber airfield gave way in 1948 to the racing circuit that has staged the British Grand Prix, and its share of triumph and death, ever since. 3 digs
43 records Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-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 Tower Hamlets
Tower Hamlets holds a Roman bath house buried beneath Wapping's streets and the Norman keep William the Conqueror began at the Tower of London in the early 1080s. Between them lie centuries of upheaval: murder on Ratcliff Highway, executions at Tower Green, and a 1974 bomb in the White Tower's mortar room. 2 digs
27 records Woodstock
Woodstock, Oxfordshire, grew around a royal hunting seat where Henry II kept Fair Rosamund and Elizabeth I was later held under guard. That old manor gave way to Blenheim Palace, built in the early 1700s and, in 1874, the birthplace of Winston Churchill. 1 dig
13 records

United States

Albuquerque
Albuquerque's ground carries layers from a 1716 Spanish land grant to a modern grid of named streets. Elena Gallegos, a soldier's widow permitted to hold property in her own right, once held land stretching from the Rio Grande to the Sandia Mountains, later divided by inheritance, courts, railroads and the city itself. 1 dig
8 records American Fork
American 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 dig
12 records Bellevue
Bellevue, Idaho grew from a mile-wide plateau that yielded more than $60 million in silver, lead, and gold between 1881 and 1893. Platted in 1880 and later reorganized under Blaine County, it served as a county seat, survived fire and explosion, and endured a violent later century. 1 dig
9 records Boston
Boston's ground near Congress Street carries the weight of a single violent night: on March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired on a crowd, killing five men, including Crispus Attucks. That corner, once colonial Quaker Lane, later burned in the Great Fire of 1872 before rebuilding into the Financial District known today. 1 dig
11 records Bristol
Bristol, Connecticut began as New Cambridge, a winter chapel granted in 1742 to farm families scattered over Fall Mountain and Chippens Hill so they might avoid exposed travel to church in Farmington. Incorporated as Bristol in 1785, it grew into a clockmaking city, becoming a city in 1911 and home to ESPN since 1979. 1 dig
12 records Castle Rock
Castle 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 Celina
Celina 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 Charleston
Charleston's Court House Square holds ground that carries centuries in layers: pirates condemned nearby in 1718, a colonial statehouse burned in 1788, and James Hoban's courthouse raised over its ruins between 1790 and 1792, a design he then carried to Washington to build the President's House. 1 dig
14 records Clearfield
Clearfield, 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 Dallas
Dallas here is anchored by North Houston Street, where American Airlines Center opened in 2001 on ground once occupied by an old power plant. Dallas voters raised $420 million in hotel and rental car taxes to keep the Mavericks and Stars from leaving Reunion Arena, and the arena now anchors Victory Park. 1 dig
14 records Draper
Draper, 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 Elk Ridge
Elk Ridge, Utah, incorporated as its own city in 1971, holds ground whose written record begins recently: a lot platted from Lee and Haskell Properties' land in January 2021, taken up by Kyle and Kristen Haskell, and marked in 2023 by a fatal garage explosion before a house rose there by 2025. 1 dig
11 records Galveston
Galveston sits on a barrier island that passed from Mexican to Texan hands, grew into a Gulf Coast port town of churches, mansions and a public library, and was struck on the night of September 8, 1900 by the deadliest natural disaster in American history. 1 dig
15 records Heber City
Heber City, Utah, became the seat of Wasatch County in 1859 and grew under settlers like Abram Hatch, bishop and territorial legislator, buried in the cemetery he helped lay out. War refugees, a young lumber-yard worker, and graves displaced by a rising reservoir all found their way into its record. 1 dig
11 records Herriman
Herriman, 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 dig
3 records Highland
Highland, 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 digs
58 records Lehi
Lehi, 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 digs
98 records Lindon
Lindon, Utah, took shape as a recognized place around 1850, on ground worked by Wadley Farms from 1869 and near an 1877 soft-rock farmhouse raised by an English convert and his wife. One recorded lot, platted in 1992, traces a single ownership chain to a 2021 house. 1 dig
12 records Logan
Logan, Utah, organized as a city in 1859, grew from a Mormon settlement into a valley seat marked by a college founded by Brigham Young, a mob lynching, and the quiet record of immigrant lives built into its houses and churches. 1 dig
13 records Louisville
Louisville grew from Virginia's western outpost before Kentucky was a state into a city of department stores, theatres, a soaring insurance tower, and a cathedral raised by enslaved labour. On June 1, 2020, that ground bore witness again, when David McAtee was shot dead steps from the Cathedral of the Assumption. 1 dig
15 records Mapleton
Mapleton, 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 Miami
This record gathers the Collins Avenue beachfront in Miami Beach, built up from bay and barrier island from the 1870s onward, where a 1957 MiMo tower hosted the Beatles in 1964 and was, decades later after a fire, deliberately reduced to rubble in 2022. 3 digs
23 records Mount Pleasant
Mount Pleasant, Utah, began as a fortified settlement in 1849 and was founded as a city in 1852. Its founder was killed in the Black Hawk War, a conflict that burned the original site and, seven years on, ended with a treaty signed in a bishop's front room on Main Street. 1 dig
14 records Naugatuck
Naugatuck, 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 digs
16 records Ogden
Ogden, Utah, a city organized in 1844, holds ground marked most sharply by a single night in 1974, when a robbery at a hi-fi shop on Washington Boulevard turned into torture and murder near the United States Post Office and Courthouse and the Helms Apartments, built 1916–1919. 3 digs
38 records Orem
Orem 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 Park City
Park City, Utah, incorporated in 1869, grew up around silver mines that demanded constant pumping to stay dry. Railroads built in the 1880s hauled coal to keep those mines running until Union Pacific abandoned the line in 1989; three years later it reopened as a 28-mile recreational trail. 2 digs
28 records Philadelphia
Philadelphia's Independence Hall, built as the Pennsylvania State House and completed in 1753, held the vote for independence on July 4, 1776, and the signing of the parchment a month later. The same room later drafted the Constitution, in 1787. 1 dig
15 records Pinedale
Pinedale, 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 Plano
Plano'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 Pleasant Grove
Pleasant Grove began on ground marked by an 1849 militia killing in Battle Creek Canyon, a pioneer dugout, and a forgotten burial plot, before rising as a Mormon farming settlement of stone houses, a tithing office, and a lone surviving blacksmith shop by the mid-twentieth century. 1 dig
15 records Pomfret
Pomfret, Connecticut, grew up along the spine now known as Pomfret Street, ground that carries a colonial-era tragedy alongside the ordinary passage of schools and churches through the town's centre. 1 dig
8 records Preston City
Preston City grew as the hub of a Connecticut town whose land came by deed from Uncas's son. It held a Congregational church from 1698 and a Baptist church from 1812, then a psychiatric hospital that opened for 95 years and closed for none, sold by the state for a dollar. 1 dig
8 records Provo
Provo, 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 Rocky Hill
Rocky Hill grew around ground first claimed in 1638, when John Robbins took land that his family would hold for nearly three centuries. His grandson raised a brick house and tavern there around 1767, and the town's story since has passed through pewtersmiths, ministers and ballplayers. 1 dig
10 records Salt Lake City
Salt 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 San Jose
San Jose gathers together ground that ranges from a 7,982-acre Mexican land grant to a Franciscan friar's borrowed name to the bureaucratic churn of transit fare estimates repeated four times over five years. Each piece shows a different kind of change, held in the same town. 3 digs
13 records Sedalia
Sedalia 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 Simsbury
Simsbury grew along Hopmeadow Street from a 1711 farmhouse into a town of schools, a bank and a memorial hall. David Phelps raised that farmhouse; his son Elisha died in 1776 supplying Revolutionary War troops. Later generations, including the Beldens, built on what he left behind. 1 dig
12 records Steinauer
Steinauer 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 dig
4 records Windsor
Windsor, 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

Vatican City

Rome
Beneath 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