Still Standing: Why Buildings from Before AD 1100 Survive, in Wikidata

Which buildings last a thousand years, and why? I assemble every building and structure in Wikidata with a construction date before AD 1100 and coordinates: 6,837 items in 94 countries after removing objects, places and routes. From Wikidata's classes, conservation states, current uses and labels I classify each by original use, form, condition and use today, and compare them with 40,200 structures built between 1100 and 1599. Coverage is very uneven (Japan, Italy and the United Kingdom hold 46% of the records), so I report shares. 65% of the early survivors were built for worship and only 4% as houses or palaces. 58% still appear to serve their original purpose, 99% of them religious, while 30% of fortifications and 72% of houses and palaces are ruins or sites. Against the later set, the oldest survivors are more often sacred (73% against 59%) and, where a material is recorded, more often stone (75% against 62%). Ruins lie further from modern cities than buildings in use and are concentrated in the arid belt of North Africa and the Middle East. A hand check of 32 randomly drawn items against Wikipedia finds that 10 are mostly later buildings on an older foundation, and 20% of items with a dated style list only styles that began after 1100. The data suggest two routes to survival: continuous use, which often preserves a place by rebuilding it, and abandonment where nobody reuses the stone, which preserves original fabric as ruins. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/oldest-buildings/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/oldest-buildings. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/oldest-buildings/.