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.

125 places · 53 localities · last reviewed 12 September 2026

France ParisParis has grown across two thousand years from a walled Gallo-Roman island to a capital of kings, revolutions and world's fairs, its ground layered with fortresses, convents, tollgates and battlefields, each stratum still traceable beneath the boulevards Haussmann drew over them. 30 digs
289 records

The tower built to be torn down after 20 years Pavillon Ferrié · 1651–1948 A defeated wall left its shape in this square Place de Clichy · 1785–2001 An island of courts, sieges and public spectacle Siege of Paris · 500–1972 Bullet scars mark the École Militaire from 1944 Les Invalides · 1751–2025 Wine-tax cheats and a phone-bomb on the same corner Rue Friant · 1721–1972 A police officer was shot dead beside Notre-Dame in 1944 Siege of Paris · 700–2019 An island fought over since the Vikings sailed up the Seine Siege of Paris · 250 BC–1995 A chapel built for a crown of thorns still stands Siege of Paris · 250 BC–2014 Vikings besieged this island fortress until paid to leave Siege of Paris · 250 BC–1995 Egyptian coffins rest beneath a fortress that became a palace Louvre Castle · 100 BC–1794 A fortress underlies the Louvre's glass pyramid Pyramide du Louvre · 500–1989 A teenager died feet from Citadium's door Citadium · 1783–1999 800 died at the last barricade of 1832 Le président du conseil ministre de la guerre cite à l'ordre de l'armée la Ville de Paris · 1358–1938 A pilot chose a dying man over his own escape Rue Gustave Courbet · 1730–1980 Ravel wrote Daphnis et Chloé near this Paris kiosk Le Kiosque de Paris · 1836–1944 A fireman died steps from the Arc de Triomphe Hôtel Landolfo-Carcano · 1785–2021 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 An anarchist's contempt for the bourgeois lit a bombing wave Place Vendôme · 1587–2014 Audit courts and vanished convents ring this Paris corner Les Feuillants Convent · 1200–2014 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 VersaillesVersailles 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 France Le Mesnil-AmelotLe Mesnil-Amelot, a village on the eastern edge of the Île-de-France plain, rests on clay, gypsum and limestone laid down by Eocene and Oligocene coastal seas. Marked in 1745 as a waypoint on the royal road to Reims, it later found itself beside a TGV station and airport terminal. 1 dig
3 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.