Licences and credits

The atlas is assembled from public records. Each is used under the licence its own project publishes, and each is linked from the pages that use it.

The records of the monuments are Wikidata's, under CC0 1.0. The map records merged into them are OpenStreetMap's, under the ODbL. The radiocarbon dates are the p3k14c database's, under CC0 1.0. The country table is Natural Earth's, in the public domain. Where a monument is on the World Heritage List, the listing is linked and never copied.

Every page that uses a record links back to the place it came from, and lists the sources it used underneath.

Every photograph is hot-linked from Wikimedia Commons. Nothing is copied into the atlas and re-served: the browser fetches the picture from Commons, where it lives, under the licence its photographer chose.

Only four licences are used: public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. A file under a non-commercial or no-derivatives term is not used, and neither is one whose licence cannot be read. A file that requires attribution is only used when the licence record carries an author to attribute.

Each photograph is credited where it appears — author, licence and the page on Commons — and again in the sources list of the site page it appears on. A photograph taken at the monument itself is marked as such, with how far the camera stood from it.

The encyclopaedic text a summary is written from is Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. A summary is written in the atlas's own words from that text; it is not a copy of it. The article is linked on every page that draws on it, together with the revision the text was read from, so the original and the attribution are always one click away.

The atlas's own words — this page, the methods, the labels on the globe — are the project's own work. Ask before reusing them at length.

The three-dimensional views are generated by the atlas's own code: parametric models of each type of monument, placed on the real terrain. They are interpretive, not survey data, and are labelled Interpretive 3D wherever they appear. They carry no third-party licence, because no third-party model is used.

The map under the globe and under the site maps is drawn from OpenFreeMap's vector tiles — OpenStreetMap's coastlines, roads, water and place names, under the ODbL — over NASA's Blue Marble imagery, which is in the public domain. The globe is drawn by the atlas's own code with the MapLibre GL library (BSD-3-Clause). No photographic tiles, no satellite imagery and no third-party map styling are used on the globe or on a site page.

Instrument Serif for the display face, Inter Tight for the interface and JetBrains Mono for figures. All three are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and are served from the atlas's own domain; no font is fetched from a third-party service.

Every photographer is credited on the picture they took, on the site page it appears on, and in the sources list of that page. The authors of the Wikipedia articles the atlas draws on are credited in the article's own revision history, which is linked from every page that uses the text.

The OpenStreetMap contributors are credited on the map itself, wherever it is drawn, because the map data under the globe and under the site maps is theirs. The map records that were merged into the catalogue are credited on the site pages that carry them.

The atlas is free to read and free to share. A photograph and a Wikipedia article keep their own licences: link to the file and to the article, and keep the credit. The atlas's own words and its 3D reconstructions are the project's own work, so ask first. Site records are built from records that are themselves open — the licences above say which is which.

If a licence has been read wrongly, if a credit is missing, or if a page states something its source does not support, tell us and it will be put right. Reports are read by a person.

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