This is a small visual experiment: human events laid over much older land. The first layer is a selective historical battle catalogue spanning 1468 BCE–2003 CE. A separate modern layer covers 1989–2025. Neither can answer for all recorded history.
The Historical Conflict Event Dataset (HCED), Miller & Bakar (2023), supplies geocoded battle records. Surviving accounts heavily favor some regions, periods and types of warfare. A battle count is not a measure of conflict intensity, casualties, peacefulness or comprehensive historical coverage. Location and date uncertainty remain, especially for ancient events. Missing coordinates are excluded.
HCED dataset & documentation · CC0 1.0
The historical and modern datasets are kept separate because their units, inclusion rules and reporting differ. Their counts are not comparable.
UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset v26.1 records organized violence between states, non-state actors, and one-sided attacks on civilians. These are coded events, not the number of wars, a peace index, or all forms of harm.
For the modern layer, only location precision 1–2 is used: identified places or locations within an approximately 25 km area. Less precise region, administrative-area, country and estimated-location codes are excluded. A point is still approximate. Events near craton boundaries may be assigned differently with better locations or a different geological map.
One record is counted once for every craton polygon that covers its supplied point. Overlapping mapped cratons, if any, can share a count. Events outside all mapped cratons are excluded from the colors. UCDP’s recording thresholds and both sources’ unequal reporting leave substantial omissions.
Zero is a measured zero in this filtered dataset, not evidence of no conflict. Gray land lies outside the mapped cratons and has no craton score. Years outside the selected source’s coverage are unmeasured, not zero. Gaps inside its time window are also likely.
Counts use a log(1 + count) viridis color scale. Area-normalized counts divide events by craton surface area, not population or time; they are spatial densities, not personal risk. Area uses spherical surface area on a 6,371.0088 km radius Earth. For UCDP, year selection uses the supplied event year. For HCED, a record is counted if its supplied date or date interval overlaps the selected window. Each record counts once, even if an interval spans several years. Two HCED records with unknown years and one with missing coordinates are omitted. Three repeated source IDs are retained as separate catalogue rows. Negative years mean BCE.
UCDP data & documentation · CC BY 4.0
Archean basement polygons from Hasterok et al. (2022), New maps of global geological provinces and tectonic plates. These outlines represent areas with basement older than 2.5 billion years, including reworked areas in the source. Their geological interpretations are not exact borders. Only 55 provinces classified as “craton” in the source are shown, including eight flagged as reworked. Shields and other mapped Archean areas are omitted. Craton polygons are lightly simplified for this display; event assignment uses the original outlines.
Geological map source · GPL-3.0 license
Land context: Natural Earth, public domain. Display: D3 and its license.
Data provenance & processing details · Source code & geological source data