This page groups sacred sites by the year their sacred standing is first dated to. Wikipedia notes that the relics of the apostle James "discovered c. 830" are what made Santiago de Compostela a pilgrimage destination. Browsing by start year lets a visitor compare how old one site's sacred status is against another's.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingMonuments and places of apparent ritual use from before writing, whose religious meaning must be inferred from the structures themselves, from what was deposited in them and from their alignments. Nothing here is the sacred site of a named religion: the grouping is defined by the absence of a text, not by a shared belief. 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredUnrelated societies across tens of thousands of years and several regions - Ice Age cave painters in France, the builders of Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, the Maltese temple builders, and the megalith builders of Brittany, Britain, Ireland and Orkney. They are grouped by the state of the evidence about them, not by any shared culture, descent or religion. 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThese are the monuments most heavily claimed by others: ley lines, lost civilisations, ancient astronauts, and modern ceremonies presented as the builders' own. Rigorous work on alignments exists and is cited on the entries; it is not the same thing as the claims made in its name. Where a monument is used by a modern movement, the atlas records that use as modern. 2 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryContested. Whether a prehistoric structure can be identified as religious at all is disputed. The "temple" reading of Gobekli Tepe has been challenged on the ground that the same buildings are equally readable as houses, and the line archaeologists draw between ritual and domestic space may not have existed for the people who built them. 3 Learn More
Prehistoric Sacred Sites
This group gathers prehistoric sacred sites, monuments and places of apparent ritual significance from before written history, whose religious meaning must be inferred from the structures themselves and their alignments rather than from any surviving text. They range from megalithic circles and standing stones to painted caves and ancient sanctuaries.
The browser will find such monuments from across the ancient world. Because their builders left no scripture, the atlas is careful to distinguish what is known of these sites archaeologically from the many later and modern interpretations projected onto them.
31st century BCE
Filter Results1 entry
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland
3. So Fair a House: Gobekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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