Every history happens somewhere. Most of what we read about Haiti gives us the events and leaves out the ground they happened on. The Geoindex puts that ground back. Every battle, every uprising, every treaty and every act of marronage in the archive gets pinned to the place where it happened.

Right now the map holds 64 verified locations drawn from 678 entries in the Istwanou timeline, running from 1492 to the 1990s. Each glowing point is a place where history was made, and each one links back to the entries behind it.

I built this to show patterns that are hard to see on the page. A plantation someone ran from in 1770 can be the same ground where a corvée crew was forced to work in 1918. Put them on one map and that continuity jumps out at you.

The sidebar on the left is where you drive the map. It has three parts.

Period filters narrow the map to one era. Click “Colonial” for the sites before 1791. Click “Revolution” to light up the battlefields of 1791 to 1804. Click “Occupation” to follow the Americans from 1915 to 1934. You can turn on more than one: pick “Revolution” and “Kingdom of the North” together and you get the whole arc from Bois Caïman to the death of Christophe. Click a filter again to turn it off.

Event type filters let you read the map by theme. “Battle” traces the military geography of the revolution. “Religious / Vodou” shows the spiritual landscape, from Bois Caïman to the Desounen of the Duvalier years. “Marronnage” follows the routes people took into the mountains. “Commerce” shows where the money moved, in the colony and after. These combine too: pick “Massacre” and “Occupation” together and you have a map of state violence under the American occupation.

The search box finds places by name, old names included. Type “Cap” and you get Cap-Haïtien along with its colonial name, Cap Français. Type “Tortue” to find the island where the Brethren of the Coast built their buccaneer republic.

The location list under the filters ranks every place on screen by how many entries mention it. Port-au-Prince leads with 276, and that makes sense: the capital has been at the center of almost every political crisis since it was founded. Click a place in the list and the map flies to it and opens its details.

The glowing dots are sized by how often a place shows up. The bigger the dot, the more entries mention it. Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien dominate because Haitian history has always been a conversation between those two cities.

The dot colors follow the main type of event at each place, with the key in the bottom right corner of the map. Red is violence: battles, massacres, executions, uprisings. Blue is politics and diplomacy. Gold is commerce. Purple marks sacred ground.

Click any dot to open its full record: the coordinates, the periods it spans, every event type tagged to it, and the entries that mention it with their dates.

Zoom and pan with the zoom buttons in the top left, your scroll wheel, or a pinch on your phone. The map stays anchored on Haiti, so you can travel the whole country from the Nord-Ouest down to the southern peninsula without losing your place.

The shaded layer under the dots is the real terrain of Haiti, built from elevation data: the mountains, the valleys and the coastline that shaped everything on this map. You can see the Massif de la Hotte and the Massif de la Selle rising in the south, and the Artibonite valley cutting through the middle of the country. That valley is Haiti’s breadbasket and the scene of endless fights over land and labor. This is the “crumpled sheet of foolscap” someone once described to Napoleon, the ground that sheltered marron communities for generations and stood in the way of every army that came to occupy it.

The Geoindex keeps growing. Every time I add new entries to the Istwanou timeline, their places land on this same map. The goal is one map that carries the whole arc of Haitian history, from the colony through the occupation and beyond, all in one view.