The aggregate alignment is geographic. The monument–settlement divergence is not.
Monument enrichment: 2.52× (Z = 6.74) · Settlement: anti-clustered (Z = −2.91) | Old World only; Egypt-dependent; temporal peak is the Memphis pyramid field
Explore the data ↓The overall site count is explained by habitable terrain. But within those corridors, only monumental architecture clusters on the line. Settlements — built by the same people, in the same places, during the same periods — do not.
An eighth database (Historic England) serves as a negative control — and returns exactly zero.
| Database | Sites | Monument Z | Settlement Z | Divergence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pleiades (pre-2000 BCE) | 34,470 | 8.55 | −1.43 | 9.65 |
| Megalithic Portal (non-European) | 61,913 | 11.03 | 4.29 | 6.74 |
| p3k14c (radiocarbon) | 36,693 | 8.09 | 1.91 | 6.18 |
| DARE (Roman atlas) | 29,760 | 0.50 | −5.65 | 6.15 |
| OSM (excluded after audit — Algerian bulk import bias) | — | — | — | — |
| Historic England (control) | 20,026 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 ✓ |
The analysed corpus is eight independently compiled databases totalling 228,937 site records. Per-database results vary: the monument–settlement divergence is present in some and absent or reversed in others. Figures previously given here — ~259,000 unique sites, 550,000 raw entries, a 180,000-site spatial-test subset, and a claim that the divergence appears in every intersecting database — were withdrawn on 2026-08-23; the first three could not be reconciled with the manuscript's own per-database counts.
The divergence is strongest between Egypt and Iran. In the New World, both types cluster equally — that's geographic coincidence.
Peru has 2,462 sites on the circle — but monuments and settlements cluster there at equal rates. The anomaly is specifically in the Egypt-to-Iran corridor, where only monumental architecture concentrates on the line.
Peak monument enrichment is 9.23× at a 7 km corridor half-width. Peak monument–settlement divergence is D = 2.18 at 18 km. Settlements never reach significance at any scale.
The single most important control. Pleiades Gazetteer, pre-2000 BCE sites only. Same geography, same rivers, same time period.
If the pattern were caused by geography — fertile rivers, trade routes, coastlines — settlements would cluster too. They don't. Only monumental architecture clusters on the line. Split-sample blinded validation confirms: mean Z = 9.45 across 100 random splits, minimum Z = 7.31.
The globe plots 1,688 sites drawn only from the eight databases in the analysed corpus — here, the Peru Ministry of Culture (1,655) and Pleiades (33). OpenStreetMap and Wikidata are excluded, OSM after an audit found bulk satellite imports inflating its counts. Until 2026-08-23 this page showed 3,489 sites in eight clusters, but 1,801 of those came from OSM, Wikidata and other sources outside the analysed corpus. Four clusters — Easter Island, Indus Valley, Southeast Asia and Amazon/Brazil — contained no sites from the eight databases at all, and have been removed rather than shown empty. What remains is what the analysed corpus actually supports.
Click a cluster to fly to it on the globe.
93% of the circumference has nothing near it. The honest reporting of misses is what makes the hits credible.
| Site | Distance | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Machu Picchu | 16 km | On the line |
| Preah Vihear | 31 km | On the line |
| Marajó Island | 42 km | On the line |
| Cusco | 49 km | On the line |
| Angkor Wat | 168 km | Near miss |
| Kuk Swamp | 164 km | Near miss |
| Rego Grande | 369 km | Miss |
| Baalbek | 421 km | Miss |
| Göbekli Tepe | 770 km | Miss |
| Stonehenge | 2,915 km | Miss |
| Teotihuacan | 4,559 km | Miss |
Define your own great circle pole and see how many sites it catches. This measures raw site proximity — the real test is whether monuments and settlements diverge, which requires the full statistical pipeline.
Monument-specific clustering in the Egypt-to-Iran corridor cannot be explained by geography, astronomy, geology, or database bias. The cause remains an open question.
We explicitly do not claim: (a) that a lost civilization coordinated site placement, (b) that ancient transoceanic contact occurred, or (c) that the circle has astronomical significance.