The evidence layer

Archaeological sites

The excavated places of the ancient world — who dug them and when, what came out of the ground, which museums hold it now, and what is still argued about.

26 sites · 111 recorded excavations · 54 unresolved questions

This layer answers a narrow question: how do we know? Every site page here is an account of evidence recovery — the excavation history with the excavators named, the structures that survive, the objects that came out and where they went, and the arguments that are still open.

It is deliberately not a second cities layer. A site page does not describe a settlement’s political history or its economy; those live on the cities pages, and a slug used there cannot be used here. Four of these sites sit inside cities the platform already covers — the Acropolis and the Agora inside Athens, the Forum and the Palatine inside Rome — and each of those pages carries a line at the top pointing at its city.

It is also not a buildings layer. Individual buildings have their own pages under Monuments, and Architecture explains what a temple, a stoa or a barrel vault is as a form; a site page names its structures and links out to both.

What the excavators got wrong

A recurring subject. The colossal statue in the Roman Forum was called Commodus for four centuries. Woolley published a silt layer at Ur as the flood of Genesis. Evans rebuilt Knossos in reinforced concrete and fixed a set of hypotheses in permanent material. Balanos repaired the Parthenon with iron clamps that rusted and split the marble, and the current restoration exists to undo him. These are not anecdotes about incompetence; they are how the discipline learned what it now does.

Where the finds went

Almost nothing on these sites is still on them. The finds are in 19 institutions, and where an object has a full provenance record it has its own entry among the 22 catalogued objects. Where a holding is contested, the museum page says so and this platform does not adjudicate it.

Coordinates and dates

26 of these sites carry a coordinate pair. Each one names the feature it points at — a gate, a tomb, a hypostyle hall — and is given to three decimal places, roughly a hundred metres, because a site is not a point and its extent is usually the thing under discussion.

Dates are stored as signed years, negative for BCE, with no year zero, and each one carries the precision it actually has: whether it is fixed by a document, estimated to the nearest half-century, given by tradition, or disputed. The eruption that buried Herculaneum and the shaft graves at Mycenae are both dates, and they are not the same kind of thing.

The Aegean and the Greek world

Citadel and palace · Greece
Mycenae
The citadel that gave a civilization its name, and the excavation that put a Bronze Age gold mask three centuries out of reach of the war it was named for.
Citadel and palace · Greece
Knossos
The largest Bronze Age building in the Aegean, and the most heavily reconstructed site in Greece — where the difficulty is separating what was excavated from what was rebuilt in concrete on top of it.
Settlement · Greece
Akrotiri, Thera
A Bronze Age town buried standing by a volcanic eruption, with its frescoes intact, its pots in place and — unlike Pompeii — nobody in it.
Citadel and palace · Greece
Pylos, the Palace of Nestor
The palace whose archive burned, and so survived: eleven hundred clay tablets baked by the fire that destroyed the building, recording a Bronze Age Greek state in its last year.
Sanctuary · Greece
The Acropolis of Athens
A fortified rock that became a sanctuary, a church, a mosque, a powder magazine and a national symbol — and whose excavation produced a sealed deposit of the sculpture the Persians smashed.
Civic centre · Greece
The Athenian Agora
Where Athenian democracy was physically operated — and where the machines it used to do it were dug up: the allotment frames, the water clocks, the jurors' tickets and thousands of ostraka.
Sanctuary · Greece
Delos
A small waterless island that held the birthplace of Apollo, the treasury of an Athenian alliance, and later one of the largest slave markets in the Mediterranean.
Sanctuary · Greece
Eleusis
The sanctuary where Greeks were initiated for a thousand years under an oath of silence that held — and where the archaeology tells us the hall, the crowd and the calendar, but not the rite.
Sanctuary · Greece
Epidaurus, the Sanctuary of Asklepios
A healing sanctuary that inscribed its own miracle stories on stone and published its building accounts beside them — the theatre is famous, the paperwork is more interesting.
Necropolis and royal tombs · Greece
Vergina, the royal tombs of Aigai
An unlooted Macedonian royal tomb opened in 1977, with a gold chest, a painted façade and a body — and a forty-year argument about whether the body is Philip II.

The Roman world

Civic centre · Italy
The Roman Forum
A drained marsh that became the political centre of an empire, then a cow pasture, then the site where stratigraphic archaeology was invented in Rome.
Residence · Italy
The Palatine Hill
Iron Age huts, the house Augustus lived in, and four centuries of imperial palace stacked on the same forty acres — the hill that gave every later European language its word for palace.
Settlement · Italy
Herculaneum
Buried deeper than Pompeii and by hotter material, which carbonised its wood, its food and its library — and preserved, in a row of boat sheds, the people who did not get away.
Residence · Italy
Hadrian's Villa
A hundred and twenty hectares of imperial retreat that functioned as a laboratory for what concrete could be made to do — and whose famous room names were assigned in the sixteenth century from a late and unreliable text.
Settlement · Syria
Dura-Europos
A garrison town on the Euphrates that was besieged, abandoned and never reoccupied — leaving a synagogue covered in paintings, the oldest known church, a Roman shield, and the bodies of men who died in a mine under the wall.

Egypt

Necropolis and royal tombs · Egypt
Giza
Three pyramids, a sphinx, and — excavated in the last forty years — the bakeries, barracks and cemetery of the people who built them, who were not slaves.
Necropolis and royal tombs · Egypt
Saqqara
The burial ground of Memphis for three thousand years — where stone architecture begins with Djoser's step pyramid, where the oldest religious texts were found carved on chamber walls, and where the Apis bulls were buried in granite.
Sanctuary · Egypt
Karnak
Two thousand years of temple building on one site, with each king's work partly demolished to fill the next king's pylon — which is why a heretic's dismantled temple could be reassembled from inside a wall.
Necropolis and royal tombs · Egypt
The Valley of the Kings
Hidden royal tombs that were robbed anyway — and whose robberies were investigated, prosecuted and written up by the Egyptian state on papyri that still survive.
Settlement · Egypt
Amarna
A capital city built on empty desert, occupied for about fifteen years and abandoned — which makes it the only Egyptian city that can be excavated as a single moment rather than as a thousand years of rebuilding.
Settlement · Egypt
Deir el-Medina
The walled village of the men who cut the royal tombs — and the only community in the ancient world whose absentee records, pay disputes, love letters, lawsuits and strike survive in quantity.

Mesopotamia and Iran

Citadel and palace · Iran
Pasargadae
Cyrus's capital, left unfinished at his death — a scatter of pavilions in a watered garden, and a tomb that Alexander found robbed and ordered repaired.
Necropolis and royal tombs · Iran
Naqsh-e Rustam
Four Achaemenid kings cut into a cliff, of whom only one can be named from his own inscription — with seven Sasanian reliefs carved beneath them eight centuries later, claiming the inheritance.
Rock monument and inscription · Iran
Behistun
A cliff carving a hundred metres above a road, in three languages, that unlocked cuneiform for the modern world — and that is also the winner's account of a disputed succession.
Citadel and palace · Iraq
Ur
Woolley's Royal Cemetery: sixteen tombs where a ruler was buried with dozens of attendants who went into the pit with them — and a century-long argument about how they died.
Citadel and palace · Iraq
Nineveh
Sennacherib's capital, and the find-place of the largest surviving library of the ancient Near East — including the tablet that told a Victorian bank-note engraver there had been a flood story before Genesis.

How to read the evidence labels

Evidence level: Documented: Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
Evidence level: Probable: Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
Evidence level: Disputed: Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
Evidence level: Literary: Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
Evidence level: Mythological: Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
Evidence level: Unknown: The available evidence is insufficient to decide.

These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.