Incredible photos reveal the world's earliest archaeological digs

Digging: an early history

The ancient world has always been a source of fascination, but much of what we know about the Romans, Greeks, Maya, Inca and other civilisations lay hidden beneath the ground for centuries. Those secrets stayed buried until a wave of archaeological discoveries in the 19th and early 20th centuries began to fill gaps in the written records, and, with these rare archive photos, you can watch history in the making.

Read on to see incredible black-and-white photos of early archaeological digs...

1853: Pompeii

This Roman town near modern-day Naples was one of the first sites to foster modern thinking on archaeology. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it buried the town under a thick blanket of volcanic ash, leaving it preserved for centuries. Around 1,500 years later, architect Domenico Fontana stumbled across the site, but excavations didn’t begin until 1748, prompting a flurry of interest across the Western world. Subsequent visitors included French photographer Firmin-Eugene Le Dien, who captured this early image in 1853.

1860s: Pompeii

After more than a century of excavation, pioneering Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli (pictured) became director of the dig site in 1860, and knowledge about Pompeii – and the wider study of the ancient world – improved no end. Instead of relying on contemporary accounts of the eruption such as those of Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who documented its chaotic aftermath as well as the death of his uncle, historians could now examine physical evidence to see what had transpired.

1870s: Pompeii

Fiorelli developed the then-revolutionary method of using plaster casts to fill gaps in the ash left by long-decayed organic matter. This produced heart-rending recreations of the bodies of victims, revealing lovers embracing each other as they perished, rich merchants fleeing laden with valuable jewels and whole families huddled together as the pyroclastic flow swept through town. Fiorelli even retrieved loaves of bread part-baked on that fateful morning (pictured here is the House of the Baker, circa 1875), only to be taken out of the ovens 1,800 years later.

1881: Pompeii

While earlier excavations had revealed some of Pompeii’s streets and villas along with landmarks like the forum and amphitheatre, Fiorelli instituted a more rigorous system of excavating, cataloguing and preserving the priceless artefacts buried beneath the ash. This systematic approach meant proper mapping of each sector and sifting through each layer of debris (pictured here in 1881) to date items more precisely.

1929: Herculaneum

Pompeii wasn’t the only site frozen in time under the ash, as the nearby town of Herculaneum was also buried by Vesuvius in AD 79. It was discovered in 1709 by a worker building a well whose drill hit fine Italian marble, but the treasures of better-known Pompeii stole the limelight. By the early 20th century, however, slum housing in Resina – the town that sat right over the ruins of Herculaneum – had been cleared, leading to another wave of discoveries through the 1920s and 1930s under archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri.

1860s: Angkor Wat

Cambodia’s most famous landmark, a few miles from Siem Reap, was once a thriving city home to roughly 750,000 people. This vast complex of more than 1,000 temples and pagodas was built in the 12th century, yet within a few hundred years, the sprawling city had been abandoned. Historians still aren’t entirely sure why, though one theory is that a period of drought and flooding wreaked havoc on its water management system. It was 'rediscovered' in 1860 by French explorer Henri Mouhot, overgrown amid the jungle yet still as impressive as ever.

1860s: Angkor Wat

They spent four centuries merging with nature, but, as the ruins of Angkor Wat were revealed again in the 1860s, their grand scale and intricate carvings meant they remained the most impressive examples of Khmer architecture anywhere on Earth. Among the highlights were the elaborate bas-reliefs (pictured) found in some of the temples, some still carrying traces of paint and depicting scenes from Hindu epics and texts. They highlighted the site’s complex religious heritage; it was first dedicated to Hindu god Vishnu and later to the Buddhist faith.

1870s: Troy

Immortalised in Homer’s epic poem the Iliad and recreated countless times since – not least in the 2004 film starring Brad Pitt – the story of Troy focuses on its siege by the Greek ‘king of kings’ Agamemnon as he tries to recapture Helen, 'the face that launched a thousand ships'. The tale has commanded attention for centuries, but it was only in 1870 that self-taught archaeologist and German businessman Heinrich Schliemann linked it to a site in what is now northwest Turkey, proving that the lost city was, in fact, a real place.

1870s: Troy

The mythical events depicted in the Iliad were but a fraction of the history of Troy. Set in a favourable spot overlooking the Dardanelles, excavations went on to reveal that the site had been settled from the earliest days of the Bronze Age (around 3000 BC), with layers from each of the city's iterations labelled from Troy I to Troy IX. Schliemann had a gift for exaggeration and also claimed to have uncovered Priam’s treasure – a cache of gold, silver and other precious items that almost certainly does not date from the time of the Trojan War.

1900: Knossos

The Palace of Knossos in northern Crete – a landmark find in the history of the ancient Minoans, the first great civilisation of ancient Greece – is often said to have been discovered in 1900 by British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. This photo shows parts of the palace, which was founded as far back as 2000 BC, shortly after those excavations. Yet it was local Cretan businessman Minos Kalokairinos who unearthed the first signs of this Bronze Age edifice in 1878, on his search for the labyrinth that once held the mythical minotaur.

1900: Knossos

The role of Kalokairinos is now better acknowledged in history books – and commemorated by a bust at the entrance to the site – but the discovery of the grand palace of King Minos still remains inextricably linked with Evans, then the curator of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. In the late-19th century Crete was under Ottoman Turkish rule, and any uncovered artefacts could quickly have been claimed by Ottoman authorities. Evans agreed to wait until the Ottomans left in 1898, after which proper excavations began.

1920s: Knossos

Evans (pictured here later in life) still enjoys a fairly positive reputation in Greece – in sharp contrast to British ambassador Lord Elgin, who removed stretches of the Parthenon friezes and took them back to display in the British Museum – but his legacy is still controversial. In the 1920s, he 'restored' much of the site using concrete in an effort to stop it from collapsing. His work divided opinion, and one visitor in the 1930s suggested that "the first impression on the mind of a visitor is that Knossian architecture consists of garages and public lavatories."

1849: Giza

It’s often claimed that Napoleon Bonaparte’s soldiers used the famous Sphinx, pictured here still submerged in sand in 1849, for target practice, shooting the nose off the part-human, part-lion creature. But artworks made before the Frenchman arrived in Egypt in 1798 suggest that the Sphinx’s nose had already been lost to time, or, if some theories are to be believed, to a visiting sufi who objected to people worshipping the Sphinx and wanted to prove it was no more than a statue.

1850s: Giza

Unlike many of the sites on this list, the Pyramids of Giza were never buried and forgotten beneath the sand, instead standing tall on the banks of the Nile for more than 4,500 years. But that doesn’t mean they escaped the 19th century’s flurry of archaeological intrigue. Would-be Egyptologists came to explore, including British MP Howard Vyse who discovered ancient graffiti etched into the stone of the Great Pyramid in 1837, linking it to the pharaoh Khufu. Unfortunately, he only found it by smashing his way in with dynamite and causing irreparable damage. This photo was taken by Francis Frith in the 1850s.

1850s: Giza

A huge expedition of surveyors, artists and archaeologists led by German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius arrived in Egypt in the 1840s, and left an extraordinary legacy of paintings, casts of inscriptions and scholarly research that was published as a huge 12-volume series, Monuments of Egypt and Ethiopia, between 1849 and 1859. Pictured here is a sketch from that series. Western scholars kept coming back as the century wore on, including Sir William Flinders Petrie, whose survey of the pyramids in the 1880s produced such accurate measurements that they were still in use a century later.

c.1900: Giza

English travel entrepreneur Thomas Cook – founder of the modern package holiday – spotted the chance to cash in on the excitement around archaeology and began running guided trips to Egypt and Palestine in 1869. These Victorian visitors were not by any means the first to marvel at the wonders of the ancient world – some tourists even clambered up the hefty stones of the pyramids or delved into the gloomy depths inside – but they helped kickstart a travel trend that continues to this day.

1850s: Valley of the Kings

The earliest pharaohs built towering pyramids as their personal burial chambers, but around the 16th century BC the rulers of the New Kingdom began to favour underground tombs as their entryways to the afterlife. The tombs in the Valley of the Kings, part of the ancient city of Thebes, were no secret even in antiquity, and most of them were stripped of their riches by thieves even before the age of pharaohs ended. This photo shows the valley in the 1850s, before it had yielded its most important discoveries.

1922: Tutankhamun

By the early 20th century many observers thought that the Valley of the Kings had been exhausted of its treasures, but Egyptologist Howard Carter (pictured, right) had other ideas. With the help of English aristocrat George Herbert (left), the fifth Earl of Carnarvon whose home at Highclere Castle is now better known as the real-life Downton Abbey, he began to explore. Their initial efforts were halted by the outbreak of the First World War, but they soon returned – and their discoveries would change the study of ancient Egypt forever.

1922: Tutankhamun

After five fruitless years, Carnarvon was ready to give up until Carter, believing he'd found the still-undiscovered tomb of Tutankhamun, convinced him to try one last season. On 4 November 1922, Carter arrived to find that local workers had unearthed a sunken staircase leading to a door with its royal seal still intact. Carter later wrote in his journal: "It was a thrilling moment for an excavator...to suddenly find himself, after so many years of toilsome work, on the verge of what looked like a magnificent discovery – an untouched tomb."

1922: Tutankhamun

Carter had to wait for his benefactor, Carnarvon, before venturing further – but the pair would soon reveal the most significant find in ancient Egyptian history. The chambers were piled high with the wheels of a golden chariot, a gilded throne, delicate alabaster vases, statues carved from solid ebony and more, in Carter's words, "wonderful things". It would take nearly a decade to catalogue the more than 5,000 artefacts.

1924: Tutankhamun

The finds were so delicate that some took days or even weeks to remove from the tomb – but nothing was as painstaking as preserving the pharaoh’s sarcophagus, set at the heart of an ornately decorated burial chamber. In February 1924, Carter finally lifted the weighty lid in front of an eager audience of VIPs – only to find it held a series of smaller coffins, eventually leading to a cask made of 110kg (243lbs) of solid gold, along with the golden funerary mask that is now synonymous with the wonders of ancient Egypt.

1874: Petra

Jordan’s most famous landmark was never lost to the locals; built as the capital of the Nabataean people in the 3rd century BC, it has long been a fixture of the area. But it was unknown to westerners until 27-year-old Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt stumbled across it on 22 August 1812 during a journey originally intended to locate the source of the Niger River. This photo of the magnificent Treasury building was taken in 1874.

1874: Petra

With a sprawling array of rock-cut ruins quite unlike those found in Italy, Greece or Egypt, Petra captured the late-19th-century imagination, and many researchers visited and documented the site. Archaeological investigations really got underway at the turn of the century, and the earliest scientific expedition published its findings in 1907. It was slow going, and even now only about 15% of the city has been uncovered.

1911: Machu Picchu

When the ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu was built in the 15th century, its occupants could not have known that in little more than a century the vast complex of temples and palaces would lie abandoned in the jungle. At least until Peruvian farmer Agustin Lizarraga organised a trip through the Urubamba Valley in 1902 in search of new, fertile farmlands. He was so amazed by the discovery that he even inscribed his name and the date (just visible on the left of this 1911 photo) into the Temple of the Three Windows.

1912: Machu Picchu

Despite Lizarraga’s landmark find, there’s another name more often associated with the 'discovery' of the ancient citadel. Hiram Bingham, a professor at Yale University, is sometimes said to have inspired the character of Indiana Jones – a reputation at least partly taken from his work excavating Machu Picchu. In 1911 he was trekking through the jungle in search of two other Inca cities when local people led him to an altogether more exciting spot. Here he's pictured in his camp at the site the following year.

1912: Machu Picchu

With the world’s eyes focused on the extraordinary 'lost city' – an entire issue of National Geographic magazine was dedicated to the site in 1913 – Bingham began the long process of exploring the citadel. These efforts revealed a sprawling network of architecturally advanced buildings, with stones cut precisely enough to fit together and withstand earthquakes, along with houses, terraces cultivated to grow crops and a series of cave-cemeteries set across the slopes.

1912: Machu Picchu

Within a year of his 'discovery', Bingham was leading a team of archaeologists on a return expedition sponsored by Yale and the National Geographic Society. While this expedition was crucial in excavating the site and cataloguing its most important artefacts, the group also transported thousands of valuable objects – including human remains – for further study at Yale. They weren’t all returned until 2012.

1939: Sutton Hoo

As Europe readied itself for war in the summer of 1939, there was another storm brewing beneath the unsuspecting English countryside. Amateur archaeologist Basil Brown was sifting through the soil when he came across a find that would transform our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons. Deep beneath the surface was an 89-foot (27m) burial ship that the British Museum calls the most impressive medieval grave in Europe, and which has since been immortalised in the 2021 film The Dig, starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan.

1939: Sutton Hoo

The treasure trove had lain untouched beneath the Suffolk soil since the 7th century, and was so extensive it had to be adjudicated by the local coroner’s court (pictured). While the body had long since decayed, it was clear this was the grave of an important person – probably a king or noble – laid to rest surrounded by gold, silver and bronze, along with a double-edged sword that suggests he may have been left-handed.

1939: Sutton Hoo

This was not only a rich find in the literal sense – it also revolutionised our view of the Anglo-Saxons, showcasing the wealth and worldliness of early East Anglia. An exquisitely crafted helmet is the best-known artefact uncovered, but there were also jewelled belts, Byzantine silverware from modern-day Istanbul, silver spoons inscribed with Greek letters, gold coins from France and garnets from Sri Lanka.

Read on to see our ranking of the world's most exciting archaeological discoveries