50 Fun Facts About Archaeology

Which English king's skeleton was found beneath a council car park in Leicester, more than 500 years after his death?

Richard III was killed at Bosworth in 1485 and hastily buried in a friary church. The bones turned up on the first day of the dig, and DNA from descendants of his sister confirmed whose they were.

What did farmers digging a well near the Chinese city of Xi'an stumble upon in March 1974?

The Terracotta Army stands guard beside the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor. More than 8,000 life-size clay soldiers fill three pits, and the emperor's own tomb remains unopened.

Which slab, found by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799, repeats one priestly decree in three different scripts?

The Rosetta Stone gave scholars a Greek text they could read beside two Egyptian scripts they could not. It was surrendered to British troops in 1801 and shipped to London.

Which 3.2-million-year-old skeleton, unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, was named after a Beatles song played in camp?

Lucy walked upright on two legs yet had a small, ape-like skull, evidence that walking came before big brains. The song was played loudly and repeatedly in camp on the evening after the find.

Which crime novelist spent months each year on digs in Iraq and Syria with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan?

Agatha Christie met Mallowan while visiting an excavation in Iraq and married him in 1930. She made herself useful by photographing, cleaning and recording finds, and loved restoring ceramics.

Which future US president cut a trench through a burial mound near his Virginia home and recorded its layers?

Thomas Jefferson wanted to test rival stories about who was buried in the mound. His trench let him see the layers of earth and bones inside, an approach far ahead of the treasure hunting of his day.

At which Roman town did Giuseppe Fiorelli pour plaster into hollows left by bodies in the volcanic ash?

Pompeii was buried when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, and the bodies decayed inside the hardened ash. Fiorelli's casts caught the victims' final poses at the moment they died.

Which British archaeologist peered by candlelight into Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 after years of fruitless digging?

Howard Carter had been granted just one more season of funding by a patron tired of finding little. Early in that season a worker uncovered a step cut in the rock, the top of a buried stairway.

What did Terry Herbert use in 2009 to find the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold in a ploughed field?

A metal detector swept over recently ploughed farmland led Herbert to the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found. Nearly every piece is martial, including 86 sword pommels.

Which fictional professor of archaeology first reached cinemas in 1981, racing the Nazis to the Ark of the Covenant?

Indiana Jones was pitched by George Lucas to Steven Spielberg as an idea better than James Bond. Harrison Ford has played the professor in all five films.

Which Inca citadel high in the Peruvian Andes did Hiram Bingham bring to international attention in 1911?

Machu Picchu is believed to have been a royal estate for the emperor Pachacuti. Bingham was hunting for the last Inca capital when a farmer and innkeeper, Melchor Arteaga, led him up to the ruins.

Stonehenge's smaller bluestones were hauled about 150 miles to Salisbury Plain from the Preseli Hills in which country?

Wales supplied the bluestones, while the giant sarsens came from only about 15 miles away. Bone chemistry suggests some people buried at Stonehenge had themselves lived near the bluestone source.

Which ancient Jewish manuscripts were first found by Bedouin shepherds in jars inside caves near Qumran in the 1940s?

The Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of books of the Hebrew Bible. Before the find, the earliest Hebrew copies known were about a thousand years younger.

Which Pacific outpost is dotted with nearly 1,000 moai, giant stone statues thought to represent deified ancestors?

Easter Island lies at the southeastern tip of the Polynesian Triangle and has belonged to Chile since 1888. By 1838 almost every statue away from the quarry had been toppled.

In Christian Thomsen's three-age system, which material names the period between the Stone Age and the Iron Age?

Bronze takes the middle slot because Thomsen, sorting a Copenhagen museum collection, saw that tools were made of stone, then bronze, then iron. Some systems add a Copper Age just before it.

Which scientists, often confused with archaeologists, dig up dinosaurs and other fossils rather than human remains?

Paleontologists study fossils, the remains of ancient life. Archaeologists study what people made and left behind, so dinosaurs, which died out long before humans existed, fall outside their job.

Which dating method counts and matches tree rings in old timber to date a building to the exact year?

Dendrochronology works because tree rings form in a yearly pattern that changes with the seasons, so matching sequences gives exact dates. Astronomer A. E. Douglass built the method while searching wood for traces of sunspot cycles.

Which small hand tool, sold to diggers as the Marshalltown in America and the WHS in Britain, scrapes strata clean?

A trowel designed for pointing brickwork is the excavator's favourite tool. Its edge scratches each surface clean so the differences between one stratum and the next show up.

In what kind of wet ground did Denmark's Tollund Man lie so well preserved that finders suspected a recent murder?

A peat bog is acidic, cold and short of oxygen, which tans skin like leather while dissolving bone. Tollund Man died in the Iron Age, and the stubble on his chin was still intact in 1950.

Which seafaring people set up a short-lived base at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland about a thousand years ago?

Vikings sailing west from Greenland used the site as a base camp centuries before Columbus. Excavations in the 1960s gave the first firm evidence behind the Norse sagas of a land called Vinland.

Which isotope did Willard Libby use to date once-living remains, work that earned the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

Carbon-14 is absorbed by every living thing and decays steadily after death, halving about every 5,730 years. So little is left after roughly 50,000 years that older samples cannot be measured.

Angkor Wat, the largest religious complex in the world, appears on the national flag of which Southeast Asian country?

Cambodia's great temple was built in the 1100s for the Hindu god Vishnu and later adapted for Buddhist worship. It stayed in continuous religious use, which helped it survive so well.

Which rock-cut city in Jordan did Swiss traveller Johann Burckhardt reveal to the Western world in 1812?

Petra grew rich as a trading hub of the Nabataeans on the incense routes. It is nicknamed the Rose City for the colour of the sandstone from which it is carved.

Which giant ground drawings in southern Peru, among them a monkey and a hummingbird, are best seen from the air?

The Nazca Lines were made by removing reddish-brown surface pebbles to expose the paler ground beneath. A dry, windless climate has preserved them for around 2,000 years.

Which mummy more than 5,000 years old, found by tourists in the Alps in 1991, had an arrowhead lodged in one shoulder?

Ötzi also carried a copper axe and bore 61 tattoos made with soot. The arrowhead in his left shoulder convinced researchers that he had been killed by another person.

On which Mediterranean island did Arthur Evans begin uncovering Knossos, the palace linked to the myth of the Minotaur?

Crete was the heart of what Evans called the Minoan civilisation, which he set apart from Mycenaean Greece. He rebuilt parts of the palace in reinforced concrete, with colour and his own interpretation.

The Elgin Marbles, bought for the British nation in 1816, came chiefly from which temple on the Acropolis of Athens?

The Parthenon lost about half of its surviving sculptures to the Earl of Elgin's agents between 1801 and 1812. Their presence in London has been an international controversy ever since.

Which French cave of Stone Age paintings was discovered in 1940 when a teenager's dog investigated a hole in the ground?

Lascaux drew 1,200 visitors a day, whose breath and body heat had visibly damaged the paintings by 1955. The cave has been closed to the public since 1963, and tourists see replicas instead.

Which German businessman began digging at Hisarlik in Turkey in 1870, convinced that the mound hid Homer's Troy?

Heinrich Schliemann found gold he named Priam's Treasure, but it lay in a city far older than Homer's. Later archaeologists condemned his digging for destroying the main layers of the real Troy.

Which French scholar announced in 1822 that he could read Egyptian hieroglyphs, helped by his fluency in Coptic?

Jean-François Champollion believed Coptic was the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language and learned to speak it from a priest in Paris. On making his breakthrough he is said to have collapsed from excitement.

Which English earl bankrolled the search for Tutankhamun's tomb, then died of an infected mosquito bite months later?

Lord Carnarvon's death in Cairo in April 1923 set newspapers talking of a mummy's curse. His country house, Highclere Castle, later became the filming location for Downton Abbey.

Which British fossil hunter found the Laetoli footprints, left in Tanzanian volcanic ash 3.7 million years ago?

Mary Leakey and her team uncovered the trail in the 1970s, at the time the oldest known evidence of upright walking. She had earlier found the Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge.

Which airborne scanning technique, flown over Guatemalan jungle in 2018, revealed over 60,000 hidden Maya structures?

Lidar fires laser pulses that map the ground beneath a forest canopy, showing walls and roads invisible to anyone on foot. The survey showed the Maya world was much larger than previously thought.

Which law, first proposed by Nicolas Steno in 1669, says that deeper undisturbed layers are older than those above?

Superposition lets an excavator read a trench like a timeline, with the oldest deposits at the bottom. Human sites complicate it, because people dig pits and ditches down into older ground.

What do archaeologists call an ancient dump of domestic waste, such as the shell heaps studied on Danish coasts?

A midden can hold animal bones, shells, broken pots and even human excrement, so it records what a community ate and threw away. Some lie right outside individual houses.

On a dig, what term covers a non-portable trace of human activity, such as a hearth or a wall?

A feature cannot be separated from its location without changing its form, so it must be recorded where it lies. Artifacts, by contrast, are portable and can be carried back to a lab.

Which Latin phrase, used by doctors for a cancer that has not spread, describes a find still lying where it was left?

In situ finds keep their spatial and stratigraphic relationships, the information that shows how an object was used and when. Once lifted, that position can never be observed again.

Which period of prehistory, named by John Lubbock in 1865, began when farming replaced hunting and gathering?

Neolithic communities settled down, domesticated animals and began farming about 12,000 years ago in West Asia. Lubbock coined the name as a refinement of the three-age system.

Which Suffolk burial ground yielded an Anglo-Saxon ship in 1939, complete with a masked helmet and gold fittings?

Sutton Hoo was first dug by Basil Brown, a self-taught archaeologist working for the landowner Edith Pretty. Scholars think the grave most likely belonged to Rædwald, king of the East Angles.

Which hilltop site in Turkey holds carved T-shaped pillars raised by hunter-gatherers more than 11,000 years ago?

Göbekli Tepe's pillars are among the world's oldest known megaliths, many carved with reliefs of wild animals. Klaus Schmidt, who began digging in 1995, saw it as a gathering place for great feasts.

Which geared device, hauled from a Greek shipwreck by sponge divers in 1901, could predict eclipses decades ahead?

The Antikythera mechanism is the oldest known analogue computer, built before the ship went down around 60 BC. It also tracked the four-year cycle of the ancient Olympic Games.

Which supposed missing link from a Sussex gravel bed was exposed in 1953 as a human skull joined to an orangutan jaw?

Piltdown Man was broadly accepted for decades, helped by teeth filed down to look human. A 2016 scientific review pinned the hoax on its finder, the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson.

Which British archaeologist, once assisted at Carchemish by T. E. Lawrence, later excavated the Royal Cemetery at Ur?

Leonard Woolley led the dig at Ur from 1922 to 1934 and found royal tombs where attendants had been sacrificed to accompany their rulers. One trench paid off only because he decided to dig deeper.

Which script on clay tablets from Knossos and Pylos did architect Michael Ventris decipher in 1952 as early Greek?

Linear B turned out to record Mycenaean Greek, centuries older than the Greek alphabet. Ventris announced his findings in a BBC radio talk and died in a car crash only four years later.

Which British archaeologist and BBC quiz panellist devised a way of digging in grid squares divided by earth walls?

Mortimer Wheeler worked out the grid with his wife Tessa at the Roman town of Verulamium in the 1930s. The standing walls, called balks, keep a record of the layers in view as each square goes down.

Which Egyptologist invented seriation, shuffling a cardboard strip per grave until pottery styles fell into order?

Flinders Petrie has been called the father of Egyptian archaeology. He donated his head to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, where it is still stored, though not displayed.

Which diagram, developed in Winchester in 1973, charts the order in which a site's deposits and surfaces were formed?

The Harris matrix, named after Edward Harris, reduces a whole dig to boxes linked in order of formation. It taught excavators to remove deposits in the reverse order to that in which they were created.

Which Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall preserved thin wooden letters in ink, among them an invitation to a birthday party?

Vindolanda's tablets survived deep in waterlogged ground without oxygen. The invitation, sent by a commander's wife named Claudia Severa, is among the earliest known writing in Latin by a woman.

Which 9,000-year-old town in Turkey had no streets, with homes entered by ladder from the rooftops?

Çatalhöyük's houses were clustered in a honeycomb-like maze, so the rooftops were effectively its streets. People lived on the mound for well over a thousand years, from around 7500 BC.

Which mound city across the Mississippi from St. Louis was the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico?

Cahokia's biggest earthwork, Monks Mound, rises about 100 feet and covers 14 acres. At its peak around AD 1100 the city held some 120 earthworks, and it had emptied out by about 1400.