Ancient
In 1974 a plough near Cabras hit a stone face. Mont'e Prama gave up thousands of fragments of life-size warriors, the oldest stone statues in the western Mediterranean, smashed on purpose.
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Ancient
The Cyrus Cylinder, dug up in Babylon in 1879, is often called the first charter of human rights. It is a Babylonian royal proclamation of a kind kings had issued for two thousand years.
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Ancient
For a century the carved figures of Monte Albán were called dancers. Their closed eyes, open mouths and wounds show they are slain and mutilated captives.
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Ancient
Farmers digging a well in 1974 hit a clay head and found an emperor's buried army. Its 8,000 faces were built from about eight moulds and finished by hand.
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Ancient
Around 4000 BCE, Trypillia farmers in Ukraine built settlements of up to 15,000 people with no palace or king, then burned their own houses every few generations.
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Ancient
Peat-cutters found the Gundestrup cauldron in a Danish bog in 1891, dismantled and stacked. Its gods are Celtic, its silverwork Thracian, and its metal may be from Gaul.
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Ancient
The Guanches reached the Canary Islands from North Africa and then lost the use of boats, each island cut off from the next. They mummified their dead with dragon-tree resin.
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Ancient
Qaryat al-Faw, on the edge of Arabia's Empty Quarter, had a three-storey market, painted walls and inscriptions in several scripts, long before Islam. It was dug over forty years.
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Medieval
My Son is a valley of brick towers built to Shiva by the Cham kingdom of central Vietnam. In 2025 a trench there uncovered a processional brick road missed for a century.
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Modern
A diver off Japan's westernmost island found stone terraces 25 metres down in 1986. Most geologists think the sea and natural fractures made them, and no one has proved otherwise.
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Medieval
Each Chimú king built a walled mud-brick palace and was buried inside it, which is why Chan Chan holds ten. In 2026 archaeologists opened a burial platform the looters had missed.
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Ancient
A walker found an arm bone with a flint arrowhead in a German river. It led to Tollense, a battle around 1250 BCE involving thousands of fighters, some from far to the south.
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