How Mythic Grounds researches, writes, sources, and verifies every entry — and how we handle the messy boundary between mythology, archaeology, and living traditions.
Last updated: May 2026
Every entry is split into three clearly labeled sections so that mythology is never presented as history, and history is never dressed up as mythology:
Mythology (Belief)
What people believed, told, sang, or enacted at this place. Written in the framing of the tradition — these are stories and meanings, not historical claims.
Geography (Place)
The physical site — coordinates, elevation, climate, what you see when you stand there. Verifiable on a map.
History (Archaeology)
What is documented in the archaeological and historical record — dates, builders, sieges, excavations, scholarly consensus. Sourced to peer-reviewed and primary works.
Every entry cites at least one source from a tiered system. Sources are listed at the bottom of each entry page and aggregated on the Sources & Bibliography page.
Tier 1 — Primary
Original ethnographies, tribal publications, first-person chronicles, archaeological reports, historical documents.
Tier 2 — Peer-Reviewed
Academic books and journal articles from university presses and discipline-specific journals.
Tier 3 — Institutional
UNESCO records, national heritage agencies, museum documentation, government surveys.
We do not cite blog posts, alternative-history channels, or social media as sources of fact. When we mention a popular myth or modern belief, we label it as such.
Mythic Grounds is a small project. We use large language models (primarily Claude) as a research and drafting assistant. We are direct about this because pretending otherwise would be dishonest — and because how we use AI matters more than whether we use it.
What AI does
What AI never does
In short: AI helps us write faster and check ourselves. It does not replace sources, scholars, or the people whose traditions we cover.
Mythology has a long history of being misused — by colonial writers, by pseudo-archaeology, by tourism marketing. We try hard not to add to that:
We make mistakes. When we're wrong, we want to know, and we want to fix it publicly.
Members of communities represented on this site take precedence: if you tell us we're framing something wrong about your tradition, that is not a debate — we listen and revise.
Many sites in this directory are sacred to living communities. Where appropriate, individual entries carry a sensitivity banner with context-specific guidance — for example, sites where photography is restricted, where ceremonies are closed to outsiders, or where access is regulated by tribal or religious authorities. The cultural authority over a site always belongs to the community attached to it, not to us.
Most of what is written online about sacred sites is either dry tourism copy or speculative myth-making. We are trying to make a third thing: a directory you can trust, where the line between what people believed and what archaeologists have found is always visible, and where the people whose traditions are represented can hold us accountable.