Beneath your feet · Archaeological Romania
Choose a Romanian town or village to find archaeological discoveries recorded within 1, 5 and 10 km of its reference point. Explore their periods and open the evidence in Romania’s National Archaeological Record.
Find your town or villageExample: Iași · 5 km
26 sites, with recorded periods reaching back to the Neolithic.
21,510 sites with known positions from 29,007 RAN records consulted. RAN · 07.09.2026
The past nearby
The circle is centred on the locality’s reference point in GeoNames. Distances run in a straight line to the site points on the RAN map.
Type at least two letters. Accents are optional.
Earliest recognised period in the records
Periods are assigned from the terms used in the RAN entry. The original dating appears in each entry below; a site can contain several periods.
Across Romania
We compared site points with the 1 km population grid from the 2021 census. Each inhabited cell contributes its population.
≈86%
of the population in the 2021 census grid was within 5 km of a RAN site with published coordinates.
21,510 sites with known positions from 29,007 RAN records consulted.
Beyond the dots on the map
Examples from Romania’s archaeological heritage. The photographs show the places and objects described in their captions; they stay the same when you choose another place.
The large circular sanctuary at Sarmizegetusa Regia, photographed in 2017.
© Hoheblau · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0. Resized and converted to WebP.
Columns and walls at Histria, Constanța County, photographed in 2014.
© Caliman Emanuel Catalin · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0 RO. Resized and converted to WebP.
The Thinker and the Sitting Woman of Cernavodă, Hamangia culture. Photograph taken in 2023.
© Chainwit. · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0. Resized and converted to WebP.
Cucuteni pottery on display in Piatra Neamț, photographed in 2009.
© CristianChirita · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 3.0. Resized and converted to WebP.
Sources and limits
RAN is maintained by Romania’s National Heritage Institute. It covers recorded discoveries: a denser map can also reflect more research, infrastructure works or better documentation. Places without dots may have a past that remains unknown.
The official map distinguishes sites with coordinates from those placed conventionally at their locality. Distance circles and the national calculation use only the first category. A locality reference point provides an orientation; an address at the edge of town may have different surroundings.
The “oldest period” is the earliest recognised label in the matching records. Mesolithic, Eneolithic and Migration-period labels remain separate. Dates expressed only as centuries or ambiguous terms remain visible as text and are not automatically assigned a period. A record may document a settlement, cemetery or isolated find; these do not establish continuous habitation.
The calculation approximates residents’ distance using the centre of each 1 × 1 km census cell. A person could live up to about 707 m from that centre. The displayed range shows sensitivity to location within the cell; uncertainty in RAN coordinates and unrecorded discoveries add further limitations.
21,510 sites with known positions from 29,007 RAN records consulted. Records were accessed on 7 September 2026; the map layer is dated 11 August 2026. 20,797 records have at least one period recognised by this page’s classification. Search uses 18,236 GeoNames entries, including city sections.
Site names and original dating are reproduced in the record’s Romanian.
