Discover: Worldwide Archaeological Site Search

Discover is the global site-search module inside PinPoint Treasure. It answers a narrow question well: for any point on Earth, what documented historical, archaeological, and heritage sites are already recorded nearby, and who recorded them?

The module queries six public registers in parallel and merges the results into one map layer. UNESCO World Heritage supplies inscribed properties and their buffer zones. Wikidata supplies structured records with coordinates, dates, and cross-references. OpenStreetMap supplies the historic=* tag family — ruins, archaeological sites, wrecks, mines, and memorials mapped by local surveyors.

World Historical Gazetteer and Pleiades add the deep-time layer: place names attested in classical and medieval sources, linked to modern coordinates with an explicit confidence note. GeoNames fills the gap for populated places and physical features whose historic names have drifted.

Deduplication matters more than coverage. The same ruin can appear in four registers with four slightly different coordinates and three name spellings. Discover clusters records within a tolerance radius, keeps the highest-precision coordinate, and preserves every source citation rather than collapsing them, so the operator can see whether a site rests on one register or four.

What Discover does not do is invent sites. A blank area on the map means no register has published a record there — not that nothing is present. That distinction is the point: the module is a documentation baseline you build a search on top of, and it makes prior recording visible before any terrain analysis is run.

The practical workflow is to open Discover over a target area, read what is already documented and legally protected, and only then move to LiDAR terrain analysis. Sites in these registers are frequently protected by national heritage law; knowing they exist is as much a legal safeguard as a research shortcut.