Life cycle of a colony

The pieces of information that I can find from extracts of the land register confused me at first. I tried to reconstruct a precise map of the settlement from the salvaged land register data, in addition to property deeds and transaction records. 

However, I could reconstruct different maps of the main settlement, and these maps did not agree at all. Similar incompatibilities can be found between various deeds outlining property limits and layout. It seemed there were several different buildings all sharing the same space.

The solution to this mystery turns out to be the difference in dates. The buildings are on the same plot of land, but one is newer and built on top of the ruins of the other, older building. 

Some time after the devastation of the old settlement in YC71, a new wave of colonists arrived and built their city on top of the ruins, only to have their new settlement destroyed fifty years later in YC121. However, this was just the latest reconstruction: there must have been many cycles of destruction and rebuilding. 

At this point, I do not yet have enough pieces of the puzzle to find out how many cycles there were exactly, and how many layers of buried settlements there are stacked on top of each other, but I think there are at the very least five or six. This has been going on for many centuries! On the rare oldest records that survived, dates appear to be missing, or written in some different calendar, or became unreadable, but I will cross-check names of the property owners with the Book of Records which has dates of birth and death.

One cannot but admire the tenaciousness of our colonists.