This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Archaeology recovers and interprets the human past from its excavated material remains, structures, artifacts and burials, rather than relying on written record alone. Its method is systematic excavation and stratigraphic analysis, reading a site's physical context, which layer an object sits in and what lies above and below it, to date and interpret the object independently of any later written account. The field is classified among the social sciences, and its establishment as a rigorous stratigraphic discipline is generally dated to 1890, when Flinders Petrie applied systematic layer by layer excavation at Tell el-Hesi, treating each stratum as datable evidence in its own right rather than an obstacle to whatever lay beneath it.
For an atlas of religion and belief, archaeology supplies the one kind of evidence a text can never supply on its own, physical confirmation. A temple's foundation, a votive offering left at a shrine, the grave goods buried with a body, are all material facts a written account can describe but cannot itself prove, and archaeology is the discipline able to independently verify, date or contradict a tradition's own account of a sacred site, an offering practice or a burial rite. Its regional branches are what recover the physical evidence behind many of the ancient sacred sites and ritual objects this atlas records.
That independence is why it matters here. A scripture or a chronicle can assert that a rite was practiced at a given place and time, and only excavation can confirm, from what the ground itself preserved, whether the physical record agrees with the written one.