Amulets, charms and talismans worldwide — what they are made of, where on the body or the house they go, what their carriers say they stop, and when and where each one is documented. Every hemisphere, from the Neolithic to a sticker on a phone.
How lopsided this still is
Every record counts once per hemisphere it touches, so the four numbers add to more than the
record count. The northern and eastern bars are long because the written record this atlas reads from is
long there. That is a fact about the sources, not about where people carry charms.
What is in it
amulet
109
tradition
19
motif
26
material
29
practice
19
place
22
person
12
org
10
term
21
art
8
story
11
Time
Records with a date
241
Still carried
226
Earliest dated
10000 BCE
Reading an absence
An undated record is one nobody here could date from a source, not one with no history. Undated records are listed in /api/timeline.json.
The world
Countries named
118
Reading an absence
A blank country means no record here names it. Australia is blank on purpose and /story/what-this-atlas-does-not-print says why.
Claims
Claim rows
736
With somebody quoted
66
Rule
Every claim carries a claimant. A claim with no source does not get written.
Held back on purpose
Records with a restriction
45
Rule
Where a tradition limits what outsiders may be told, the record prints the restriction and stops.
field observations (no record carries the field tier yet)
photographs — the licence pipeline is built (tools/harvest_commons.py accepts only CC0, public domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA and FAL, and writes the licence and author beside each file), but the candidate filenames in the records are guesses and most do not exist on Commons. Attaching a search result automatically would be exactly the kind of guess this project refuses everywhere else, so the pictures wait for a curated pass
most of the southern hemisphere at the density the north has
prices with dates in most markets
languages other than English in the prose
What each provenance tier means
cited
Cited — a named source, linked
harvested
Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence
tradition
Tradition — general knowledge of the practice, hedged in the prose
inference
Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above
field
Field — someone stood there
This page is generated from coverage.json, which is built from
the records themselves. Nothing on it is typed by hand.