Ten big digs

Near Mount Kilimanjaro, Olduvai Gorge cuts through ancient lake beds which preserve stone tools and hominid remains spanning hundreds of millennia of human ancestry and accomplishment: work there has continued for decades and is displayed in a visitor centre.

2. Atapuerca, Spain

Last spring the oldest European yet known was found in the Sima del Elefante cave in northern Spain. Homo antecessor, a relative of Homo erectus, has been dated to 1.2 million years ago, three times as old as Boxgrove Man, the oldest Briton.

The Atapuerca caves, filled in by natural erosion, were found when a British mining company cut a railway through a low limestone hill east of Burgos a century ago, but have been excavated only recently by Eudald Carbonell, with dozens of volunteers digging at the Dolina Grande site every summer. Nearby, the deep Sima de los Huesos has yielded remains of more than thirty individuals of Homo heidelbergensis, Boxgrove Man’s species, dating back half a million years, and all of the caves — visitable on tours from the local museum in Ibeas de Juarros — have shown how the ancient environment changed through time, with different species being hunted as the climate shifted from cold to warm and back again.

3. Monte Verde, southern Chile

For over a century the date of the first Americans has been disputed, with little evidence older than the Clovis big-game hunters who lived in the United States around 13,000 years ago. Everybody agrees that they came from eastern Siberia through Alaska, but whether they then moved down the centre of the continent, or took a coastal route along the Pacific shores of British Columbia and California until they were south of the great ice sheets remains a matter of debate, with the coastal option gaining ground in recent years; but the earliest generally accepted date for this has stuck in Clovis times through half a century of investigation.

Monte Verde, a stream-side camp of people who may have lived elsewhere, has now been dated to 14,500 years ago, and is so far south that the first entrants into the Americas must have come in through Alaska or down the coast many centuries earlier. Tom Dillehay found flimsy houses, tools of ground and chipped stone, and evidence of sophisticated use of natural resources, including medicinal herbs and seaweeds brought from the Pacific coast thirty miles away.

Although the site can be visited easily from the cruise-ship port of Puerto Montt, there are no surface remains to see (the finds are at a regional university): but despite its unspectacular nature, Dillehay’s dig at Monte Verde has pushed back the history of the New World by thousands of years.

4. The Rose Theatre, London

Until 1989 we had no idea what a Shakespearean theatre was like, although Laurence Olivier’s Henry V made a brave attempt at reconstructing the Globe Playhouse based on distant views in Elizabethan panoramas of London. The discovery of the Rose — built in 1587, remodeled in 1592 and destroyed in 1600 — gave us an almost complete set of foundations from which the exact size and shape of the ground plan could for the first time be seen. It also showed that the stage was not a large projecting rectangle, as had been thought —- and perpetuated in the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe —- but a shallow polygon. The Rose, and what little we now know of the original Globe nearby, give us a context to understand how Shakespeare’s plays were originally staged. The foundations are carefully preserved below a modern office block near Southwark Bridge, with a display explaining the work so far.

5. Troy, Turkey

The Trojan War, and Troy itself, were long believed to be the fruit of Homer’s imaginative genius, but Heinrich Schliemann, a nineteenth-century German businessman-turned-scholar, came to believe that Homer had recorded a version of real history — albeit a history already several centuries old — and decided he would go and find ancient Troy. Using clues from the Iliad and Odyssey, he fixed on an area near the mouth of the Dardanelles, where Frank Calvert, a local resident who shared Schliemann’s Homeric interests, steered him to the mound of Hisarlik. Between 1875 and his death in 1890, Schliemann dug a huge trench through Hisarlik, uncovering nine successive buried citadels: he believed Troy II to have been Homer’s city, although we now think that the later Troy VI and VIIa are more likely. He also found what he believed to be the tomb of Agamemnon, leader of Troy’s Greek besiegers, at Mycenae.

Recent work at Troy by Manfred Korfmann has shown that Hisarlik was not the whole city, but just its fortress: a lower town six times larger stretched to the south, and makes much better sense of Homer’s stirring narrative of Hector being chased by Achilles around the city walls. Visitors today can see the impressive walls of Troy VI, Schliemann’s great trench, cleaned out and signposted, and a giant wooden recreation of the Trojan Horse.

6. Palenque, Mexico

The Maya city of Palenque was buried in the rainforest of Chiapas when “stone houses”, possibly Roman, were reported to King Charles III of Spain in 1784. Charles, who as king of Naples had taken an active interest in the excavations at Pompeii, authorized several official expeditions, although their reports remained trapped in civil service files. It was only in 1822 that Antonio del Rio’s account and its illustrations were published, for some reason in English and in London, the first time a Maya city had been brought to public attention. A popular book by John Lloyd Stephens in 1841, illustrated by the English architect Frederick Catherwood, and the scientific studies of Alfred Maudslay in the 1880s put Palenque firmly on the map, to be joined by dozens of other Maya cites dating to the Classic period of AD300-900.

Even so, Palenque was only opened up in the 1950s, when the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz found a tomb deep below the Temple of the Inscriptions. Inside a carved sarcophagus lay the jade-bedecked skeleton of a ruler who we now know to have been Janaab Pakal, who ruled Palenque from AD615 to 683 and lived to the age of 80.Decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing has enabled Pakal’s ancestry to be traced, and the Tomb of the Red Queen, found in 1994 in the adjacent Temple XIII, may be that of his wife, Lady Tz’akabu, who died in AD672. The skeleton was found with a jade mosaic death mask made from more than 100 pieces. The most recent discoveries have revealed stunning carvings and inscriptions dedicated by one of his grandsons in Temple XIX. At the same time, mapping of smaller ruins beneath the jungle growth has shown that Palenque was a city with a population in the thousands, abandoned around AD800, but now one of Mexico’s greatest tourist attractions, with a splendid new museum.

7. Qin Shi Huang Di’s tomb, China

In 1974 a Chinese peasant digging a well near the central city of Xi’an came upon a life-sized pottery head, and below it, the elaborately-decorated body of a warrior in armour made from overlapping scales. It was the first of more than six thousand statues, standing in long columns in a series of trenches into which the burned roof of massive logs had collapsed.

This spirit army had been placed to defend the tomb of Qin Shi Huang Di, First Emperor of China, who had died in 210BC after unifying the Middle Kingdom in a ruthless reign of some 35 years. The tomb itself, still unexcavated, lies to the west beneath an artificial hill of rammed earth, and was said by Chinese historians to be filled with treasure: but the treasures so far unearthed are impressive enough. Apart from the eastern spirit army, now known to be even larger than first estimated and to include painted figures representing senior ranks as well as ordinary soldiers, there have been amazing discoveries on other sides of the vast walled tomb enclosure. On the south, a huge pit contained stone replicas of the scale armour (the originals were probably of leather, or with metal plating), joined with copper wire and weighing 40 pounds (18 kilograms) — made for show, not for combat. Another pit nearby held life-sized pottery statues of acrobats, probably court entertainers, clad only in short kilts and with realistic anatomy — another first in Chinese art. Yet a third new discovery, closer to the burial mound itself, was an artificial landscape with a river populated with life-sized bronze birds, including geese, swans and cranes; all are known from later scroll paintings, but these may be the oldest naturalistic sculptures. Some of these new finds were included in the First Emperor exhibition at the British Museum last year, which is now touring in the USA.

8. Tutankhamun’s tomb, Thebes, Egypt

The tomb of Tutankhamun, extensively and exclusively reported in The Times when it was discovered in 1922 and for a decade of careful exploration thereafter, remains one of the most potent images in archaeology. The story of how Howard Carter and his backer, the Earl of Carnaervon, spent years patiently digging in the Valley of the Kings near Thebes, and how with his last throw of the dice Carter found the almost-intact burial of this then little-known pharaoh, is an epic that matches Heinrich Schliemann’s hunt for Troy in its tale of perseverance rewarded, and one which has ensured Tutankhamun instant name-recgonition ever since.

What has to some extent been overshadowed by the romance is the hard-headed importance of the find itself: until 1922, no Egyptian ruler’s tomb had been found undisturbed (and the minor robbery that occurred not long after Tutankhamun’s burial did not cause much damage). Mummies were known, but they had been secreted in secondary hidey-holes by priests after actual or threatened robbery. Tombs were known, dozens of them, but all had been entered and looted, leaving little sense of what had once been there and even less of the elaborate context of ritual that had accompanied the pharaoh’s demise and interment. Tutankhamun’s tomb showed, in massive detail, how Egyptian royalty went on the mysterious voyage into the afterlife. Apart from the golden coffins, shrines and thrones, the ritual couches with dramatic animals flanking each side, the chariots and models of boats, and the statues of the young king, there were more mundane grave goods: boxes of food, of linen underwear, writing equipment, tools and even a first aid kit, which shed an entirely new light on funerary practice. Carter’s famous words on first seeing into the tomb, “wonderful things” and “everywhere the glint of gold” have skewed our appreciation of what was in Tutankhamun’s tomb: no less than a time capsule of ancient Egyptian life, from the commonest to the rarest things their craftsmen made.

9. The Pyramid Builders’ city, Giza, Egypt

We think of ancient Egypt as the archaeology of death, with Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes and the Great Pyramids of Giza, just outside Cairo and more than a millennium older, as prime sites. But the houses of the dead had to be built, or carved out, by the living, and they had to live somewhere — preferably nearby. The tomb-cutters’ village of Deir el-Medina, near Tutankhamun’s tomb, has long been known and explored, but only recently has Mark Lehner begun to uncover the pyramid-builders’ town at Giza.

The three great pyramids, dating to around 2500BC, are surrounded by dozens of smaller ones, and the workforce was clearly a large one: but their mud-brick houses had melted into the desert sands. Lehner deduced that a structure known as the Wall of the Crow was the southern boundary of the sacred tomb zone, and that the builders’ houses and other facilities such as bakeries, breweries and craftsmen’s shops might lie just beyond it. Every trench he dug revealed the walls of workshops and supply facilities, and on one enclosure Lehner found four barrack blocks with sleeping platforms, which he believes were for accommodating the pyramid builders when they came to do their weeks of service for the pharaoh. Grain stores yielded sealings with the names of Khafre (Chephren) and Menkaure, builders of the second and third great pyramids, and animal bones showed that the diet included prime beef as well as pork, mutton and goat. The workers in the barracks seem to have been given cheap goat meat, while the higher officials in their houses ate beef. Seventeen acres have been investigated so far, but Mark Lehner believes that there is much more to find, as well as an area of unknown size now buried beneath the nearby suburbs of Cairo.

Ancient Egypt is famously a civilisation of many tombs and few towns — the early capital at Hierakonpolis in the far south and Akhenaton’s new seat at Tell el-Amarna midway between Thebes and Memphis are among the few known and studied — and thus the pyramid-builders’ community at Giza is opening an important new chapter in Egyptology.

10. Mohenjodaro, Pakistan

At almost the same moment that Tutakhamun’s tomb hit the headlines, a hitherto unknown civilization was announced by Sir John Marshall, head of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Nobody had noticed the great mud-brick mounds at Harappa, a hundred miles southwest of Lahore, or Mohenjodaro, north of Karachi on the banks of the Indus River, until the systematic mapping of the Raj’s archaeologists. Each of these cities, for they were no less, consisted of a massive citadel and a sprawling lower town: the population of Mohenjodaro has been estimated at 40,000. They were also earlier than anything known in British India at the time, with Mesopotamian imports showing that they dated to the third and second millennia BC, not much later than the Pyramids of Giza.

The Indian archaeologist R.D.Banerji began work at Mohenjodaro - the name means place of the dead - in the winter of 1921-22, and within a short while it became clear that the lower town consisted of a grid-planned community laid out in regular blocks, like Manhattan, as Sir John Marshall reported in the Illustrated London News. The houses were made of fired brick and were equipped with bathrooms and lavatories that drained into sewers beneath the brick-paved streets. There were wells, granaries and circular milling platforms: barley and wheat were the main cereals, and cattle, pigs and buffalo the main domestic animals, including the ancestors of the humped zebu cattle common in India today. Stone weights followed both a binary and a decimal system, and together with established measures of length related to the foot and the cubit (about 18 inches) showed that the Indus civilization had standardized systems across a wide area of what are today Pakistan and northwestern India.

The citadel of Mohenjodaro had large platforms interpreted by Sir Mortimer Wheeler - who dug there as the last British director of the ASI in the 1940s — as a state granary, and also a large ritual bath. More recent excavations by Italian archaeologists have shown that the city was built on huge brick platforms as a planned community, not one that had grown gradually, but what authority had commanded these impressive resources is still not known. The Indus script is known only from small seal-stones, with no long texts that might be deciphered, and there are no royal palaces, tombs or statues reflecting the lifestyles of the Indus rulers.

Although the Indus culture lasted for centuries, and dozens of large sites are now known and remain the subject of continuing investigation, Mohenjodaro is still one of the ancient world’s most mysterious cities.