Journal
Dispatches from the ancient world: research, mysteries and the tools to test them.
Catalhoyuk: Nine Thousand Years Ago, a Town With No Streets
At Catalhoyuk people lived in a honeycomb of mudbrick houses entered through the roofs, with their dead buried under the beds. ...
Mount Nemrut: A King's Ego at 2,100 Metres
Antiochus I of Commagene crowned a mountain with his own tomb, colossal statues of himself among the gods, and one of the oldes...
Great Zimbabwe: The City They Said Africans Could Not Have Built
A medieval African capital of mortarless granite walls, hub of a gold trade reaching China, and the site of one of archaeology'...
Lalibela: Eleven Churches, Carved Straight Down
Around 1200 AD, Ethiopian masons cut eleven churches straight down into volcanic rock, joined by trenches and tunnels, to build...
Ellora: The Temple Carved Downward
The Kailasa temple at Ellora is the largest monolithic structure on Earth, carved top-down out of a basalt hillside. Corrected ...
Sigiriya: The Palace on Top of a Volcano's Throat
A parricide king built his palace on top of a 180-metre granite inselberg in the Sri Lankan jungle, with fountains that still w...
Callanish: The Stones That Watch the Moon
On the Isle of Lewis, a cross of avenues meets a circle of three-billion-year-old gneiss, and every 18.6 years the full moon wa...
Ring of Brodgar: The Perfect Circle of Orkney
On a thin neck of land between two Orkney lochs, Neolithic builders laid out a true circle 104 metres across and cut its ditch ...
Skara Brae: The Village Under the Sand
A storm in 1850 stripped the dunes from an Orkney bay and uncovered a five-thousand-year-old village with its stone furniture s...
Carnac: Three Thousand Stones in Rows
Around Carnac in Brittany stand about three thousand menhirs in kilometre-long rows, raised before the pyramids. Nobody knows w...
Tiwanaku: The City at the Top of the World
At 3,850 metres on the Bolivian altiplano, Tiwanaku fed tens of thousands with raised fields and cut andesite with a precision ...
Sacsayhuaman: Stones Fitted Like Soft Clay
Above Cusco, the Inca fitted hundred-tonne boulders together without mortar so tightly a knife blade fails between them. How th...