The idea of place - where something is, relative or by reference to other things - seems to be rather primitive, and any thing seems to be either at some place, or to be - when a universal or a relation - at various things. Also, there may be different things that only differ in place (two atoms of Helium, perhaps) and there certainly are different things one can only tell apart by their different places.

There are various ways to reckon with places, and normally this is done by coordinates: tuples of things that uniquely identify - in some systematic way - a thing or place (where there may be but is no thing, for example).