Archaeology
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50 free Archaeology trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Archaeology is the closest thing science has to solving a mystery. A change in the colour of the earth, a broken pot or a few seeds can reveal how people lived thousands of years before anyone wrote anything down, and now and then a dig turns up a tomb, a shipwreck or a whole buried town. This quiz covers the subject from both ends. There are the headline discoveries and the archaeologists who made them, from Egypt and Greece to Peru, China and Britain, along with the history of how digging grew from treasure hunting into a careful science. There are also the basics every Archaeology 101 class teaches: how excavation works, how finds are dated, and what the words used in the trench actually mean. It is written for students, history fans, quiz hosts and curious kids alike. The early questions are the famous stories most people have met, the later ones reward anyone who has spent time on a site, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which English king's skeleton was found beneath a council car park in Leicester, more than 500 years after his death?
Richard III
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.
Q 02What did farmers digging a well near the Chinese city of Xi'an stumble upon in March 1974?
Terracotta Army
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.
Q 03Which slab, found by French soldiers in Egypt in 1799, repeats one priestly decree in three different scripts?
Rosetta Stone
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.
Q 04Which 3.2-million-year-old skeleton, unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, was named after a Beatles song played in camp?
Lucy
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.
Q 05Which crime novelist spent months each year on digs in Iraq and Syria with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan?
Agatha Christie
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.
Q 06Which future US president cut a trench through a burial mound near his Virginia home and recorded its layers?
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Q 07At which Roman town did Giuseppe Fiorelli pour plaster into hollows left by bodies in the volcanic ash?
Pompeii
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.
Q 08Which British archaeologist peered by candlelight into Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 after years of fruitless digging?
Howard Carter
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.
Q 09What did Terry Herbert use in 2009 to find the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold in a ploughed field?
Metal detector
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.
Q 10Which fictional professor of archaeology first reached cinemas in 1981, racing the Nazis to the Ark of the Covenant?
Indiana Jones
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.
Q 11Which Inca citadel high in the Peruvian Andes did Hiram Bingham bring to international attention in 1911?
Machu Picchu
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.
Q 12Stonehenge's smaller bluestones were hauled about 150 miles to Salisbury Plain from the Preseli Hills in which country?
Wales
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.
Q 13Which ancient Jewish manuscripts were first found by Bedouin shepherds in jars inside caves near Qumran in the 1940s?
Q 21Which isotope did Willard Libby use to date once-living remains, work that earned the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?
Carbon-14
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.
Q 22Angkor Wat, the largest religious complex in the world, appears on the national flag of which Southeast Asian country?
Cambodia
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.
Q 23Which rock-cut city in Jordan did Swiss traveller Johann Burckhardt reveal to the Western world in 1812?
Petra
Dead Sea Scrolls
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.
Q 14Which Pacific outpost is dotted with nearly 1,000 moai, giant stone statues thought to represent deified ancestors?
Easter Island
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.
Q 15In Christian Thomsen's three-age system, which material names the period between the Stone Age and the Iron Age?
Bronze
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.
Q 16Which scientists, often confused with archaeologists, dig up dinosaurs and other fossils rather than human remains?
Paleontologists
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.
Q 17Which dating method counts and matches tree rings in old timber to date a building to the exact year?
Dendrochronology
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.
Q 18Which small hand tool, sold to diggers as the Marshalltown in America and the WHS in Britain, scrapes strata clean?
Trowel
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.
Q 19In what kind of wet ground did Denmark's Tollund Man lie so well preserved that finders suspected a recent murder?
Peat bog
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.
Q 20Which seafaring people set up a short-lived base at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland about a thousand years ago?
Vikings
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.
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.
Q 24Which giant ground drawings in southern Peru, among them a monkey and a hummingbird, are best seen from the air?
Nazca Lines
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.
Q 25Which mummy more than 5,000 years old, found by tourists in the Alps in 1991, had an arrowhead lodged in one shoulder?
Ötzi
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.
Q 26On which Mediterranean island did Arthur Evans begin uncovering Knossos, the palace linked to the myth of the Minotaur?
Crete
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.
Q 27The Elgin Marbles, bought for the British nation in 1816, came chiefly from which temple on the Acropolis of Athens?
Parthenon
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.
Q 28Which French cave of Stone Age paintings was discovered in 1940 when a teenager's dog investigated a hole in the ground?
Lascaux
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.
Q 29Which German businessman began digging at Hisarlik in Turkey in 1870, convinced that the mound hid Homer's Troy?
Heinrich Schliemann
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.
Q 30Which French scholar announced in 1822 that he could read Egyptian hieroglyphs, helped by his fluency in Coptic?
Jean-François Champollion
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.