Lost colonies, cities and civilizations
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Lost Colonies, Cities and Civilizations — Daily trivia Wednesday, October 21, 2026: questions and answers
All 10 questions with answers and explanations. Play this daily
Q 01What word was carved on a post at the vanished Roanoke colony?
- ACROATOAN
- BCHESAPEAKE
- CMANTEO
- DRALEIGH
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CROATOAN
Governor John White returned in 1590 to find the settlers gone, no distress cross, and CROATOAN carved on a post, the name of a nearby island and tribe; a storm stopped him sailing there to look.
Q 02Which Mississippian city was once the largest north of Mexico?
- AMesa Verde
- BCahokia
- CSerpent Mound
- DPoverty Point
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Cahokia
Cahokia, across the Mississippi from modern St. Louis, held perhaps 15,000 people around 1100, with a central mound whose base outspans the Great Pyramid's; by 1350 it was empty.
Q 03Phoenix, Arizona was named for rising on whose ruins?
- AHohokam
- BAnasazi
- CMogollon
- DSinagua
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Hohokam
Hohokam. The Hohokam dug hundreds of miles of irrigation canals along the Salt River, then vanished as a culture around 1450. When settlers re-cut those canals in 1868, Darrell Duppa proposed a name for a city reborn from the ruins.
Q 04Which Greek city sank in a single night in 373 BC?
- AMycenae
- BOlynthus
- CHelike
- DAmphipolis
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Helike
Helike. An earthquake and tsunami on a winter night in 373 BC swallowed the Achaean city so completely that Pausanias later saw only ruins under water; its remains were found in 2001, buried inland beneath an old lagoon.
Q 05The last written record of Norse Greenland, from 1408, describes what?
- AA bishop's visit
- BA plague burial
- CA whale hunt
- DA wedding
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A wedding
Norse settlers farmed Greenland for 400 years; the last news out was a wedding at Hvalsey church in 1408, reported by guests who later sailed home to Iceland. By the 1450s the settlements were empty.
Q 06Digs at Akrotiri, the town Thera's eruption buried, found no what?
- APottery
- BWall paintings
- CHuman remains
- DUpper storeys
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Human remains
Earthquakes evidently warned the townspeople, who left with their valuables before the eruption; unlike Pompeii, the digs found no human remains in houses or streets, though the ash preserved frescoes, pottery and three-storey homes.
Q 07Mesa Verde's famous cliff dwellings were occupied for roughly how long?
- AAbout a millennium
- BAbout three centuries
- CAbout five centuries
- DAbout a century
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About a century
Ancestral Puebloans farmed the mesa tops for 600 years but only moved into the alcoves around 1190, building Cliff Palace and its neighbours; by 1300, after about a century, they had all gone south.
Q 08Which enigmatic invaders named in Egyptian texts are linked to the Late Bronze Age collapse?
- AThe Huns
- BThe Sea Peoples
- CThe Vandals
- DThe Goths
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The Sea Peoples
Nobody knows who the Sea Peoples actually were; the main evidence is Ramesses III's victory reliefs at Medinet Habu, and many historians now see them as a symptom of the Bronze Age collapse rather than its cause.
Q 09After the Mycenaean collapse, how long did Greece go without writing?
- AAbout a millennium
- BAbout four decades
- CAbout a century
- DAbout four centuries
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About four centuries
About four centuries. Linear B vanished with the palaces it served around 1200 BC, and mainland Greece produced no writing again until the Phoenician-derived alphabet appeared about 800 BC, so the Trojan War stories survived only by word of mouth.
Q 10Which Saharan civilization withered as its tunnels drained ancient fossil groundwater?
- AGaetuli
- BGaramantes
- CNasamones
- DBlemmyes
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Garamantes
Garamantes. In Libya's Fezzan the Garamantes dug hundreds of foggara tunnels into aquifers last filled in a wetter age; as the water table sank out of reach, their oasis farms failed and the towns slowly emptied after about AD 400.
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