News and discoveries

An intact shaft grave found in 2015 near the Palace of Nestor held over 1,400 objects, including four gold signet rings and the Pylos Combat Agate, illuminating Minoan influence on the emerging Mycenaean elite.

Recognizing carved T-shaped pillars in 1994, Schmidt began excavations that revealed monumental Neolithic enclosures predating agriculture, upending assumptions that complex ritual architecture followed farming.

On 8 November 1977 Andronikos found unlooted vaulted tombs beneath the Great Tumulus at Vergina, one holding cremated remains in a gold larnax widely identified as Philip II, father of Alexander the Great.

While digging a well in 1974, farmers near the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang struck life-sized pottery figures, leading to the excavation of thousands of terracotta warriors guarding China's first emperor.

In 1947 a young Bedouin shepherd found jars of ancient scrolls in a cave at Qumran; the eventual corpus of some 900 manuscripts is the oldest surviving body of Hebrew biblical and sectarian texts.

In 1940 four teenagers following a dog into a hillside opening found the Lascaux cave and its galleries of Ice Age horses, aurochs and deer, among the greatest surviving Palaeolithic art.

On the first day of digging in 1939 Blegen struck clay tablets, ultimately around a thousand Linear B documents, the first found on the Greek mainland and later central to Ventris's 1952 decipherment.

In 1939 Basil Brown revealed the imprint of a 27-metre ship and an undisturbed burial chamber with a helmet, gold and garnet regalia, transforming knowledge of early Anglo-Saxon England.

In November 1922 Carter found the near-intact tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, whose thousands of grave goods and golden mask became the most famous archaeological find of the 20th century.

Sponge divers who found a Roman-era wreck off Antikythera raised in 1901 a corroded bronze geared device, later shown to be an astronomical calculator, the earliest known analogue 'computer'.

From 1900 Evans uncovered the vast palace at Knossos with its frescoes, storerooms and Linear A/B archives, defining and naming the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete.

Schliemann uncovered five shaft graves inside the citadel's Grave Circle A, yielding gold funerary masks (including the so-called Mask of Agamemnon), weapons and jewelry that first revealed the wealth of Mycenaean royal burials.

Schliemann's excavations from 1871 at the mound of Hisarlik, on Frank Calvert's earlier identification, exposed successive fortified cities and the gold 'Priam's Treasure', bringing Homeric Troy into archaeology.

In July 1799 soldiers of Napoleon's expedition uncovered a stela carrying the same decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek; it became the key to deciphering hieroglyphs.

Formal digging under Alcubierre began at Pompeii in 1748, gradually revealing streets, houses, frescoes and casts of victims that made the buried city the defining window onto Roman daily life.

On 14 January 1506 workmen in de Fredis's vineyard found the marble Laocoön group; Pope Julius II sent Sangallo and Michelangelo, and it became a touchstone of Renaissance art.

On 5 July 2009 a metal-detectorist found the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever recovered, nearly 4,600 martial items whose fine goldwork illuminates the kingdom of Mercia.

On the citadel's west slope Taylour uncovered a complex of shrines with wall paintings of armed goddesses, clay idols and offering tables, the clearest surviving evidence of Mycenaean cult practice.

In 1959 Mary Leakey found the robust hominin cranium OH 5 ('Zinjanthropus', now Paranthropus boisei) at Olduvai, anchoring East Africa as a center of human evolution.

Found in 1951 and excavated 1952–1954, this second grave circle predates Grave Circle A and documents the rise of the early Mycenaean warrior elite.

Local farmers digging for fertilizer in 1945 found a sealed jar of thirteen Coptic codices, including Gnostic texts such as the Gospel of Thomas, reshaping the study of early Christianity.

In 1911 Bingham, guided by local farmers, brought the Inca royal estate of Machu Picchu to international attention and led its early clearing and documentation.

From 1886 Tsountas systematically excavated the palace megaron, five tholos tombs and over one hundred chamber tombs, laying the empirical foundation for the study of Mycenaean civilization.

In 1879 Sautuola, guided by his daughter's glance at the ceiling, recognized the polychrome bison of Altamira as Palaeolithic art, a claim rejected for decades before it transformed understanding of Ice Age humanity.

In 1738 Bourbon-sponsored tunneling reached the theatre of Herculaneum, opening the first scientific-era recovery of a city entombed by the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius.

From the 1480s artists lowered themselves into the buried painted rooms of Nero's palace; the fantastical wall decoration they copied, named 'grottesche', gave European art the term and style 'grotesque'.

A ground-based remote-sensing survey (2003 onward) mapped hundreds of buried structures of the settlement outside the citadel, followed by excavation of the Lower Town and its outer fortification.

First dug in 1950–51 and re-excavated from 2000 by Kim Shelton, this house-and-workshop preserved a ceramic production complex with thousands of vessels destroyed in an LH IIIA2 earthquake.

Wace's British School campaigns established a three-phase chronology of the nine tholos tombs and argued for indigenous mainland ('Helladic') development rather than Minoan imposition.

From about 1550 the antiquarian Ligorio excavated Hadrian's Villa, produced its first systematic description and named its buildings, while supplying statuary for the nearby Villa d'Este.

Appointed 'prefect of marbles' by Leo X in 1515, Raphael surveyed the ancient city to reconstruct its plan and, in his c.1519 Letter to Leo X, appealed for the preservation of its monuments.

Completed about 1446, Biondo's 'Roma Instaurata' was the first systematic, documented guide to the ruins of ancient Rome, effectively launching the antiquarian archaeology of the Renaissance.