20 Lost Cities Found By Reading The Land Instead Of Digging

In 1911, Hiram Bingham III, a Yale historian searching for the lost Incan city of Vilcabamba, hiked into the Andes to look for ruins. A local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, accompanied by a young boy named Pablito Alvarez, led him up a mountain ridge to Machu Picchu, an Inca royal estate built centuries earlier. The families who farmed its stone terraces were still living there. Bingham told the world he’d discovered it, and wrongly believed it was Vilcabamba.

Frank Calvert, an English antiquarian living in Turkey, owned part of a mound called Hisarlik near the Dardanelles. During the 1860s, he was intrigued by the way its height above the Karamenderes river plain coincided with Homer’s description of the setting of Troy in the Iliad. He trial-dug the site in 1865, but was short on money. So he brought in a rich German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann, who started to excavate the site in 1871 and uncovered a stack of ancient cities. Schliemann got all the fame, but Calvert was the man who had actually found the mound.

The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt was charting the ancient caravan routes between Cairo and Damascus in 1812 when he learned from some passing Bedouins of mysterious ruins near the tomb of Aaron, the biblical figure said to be Moses’s brother, in present-day Jordan. Posing as a pious sheikh, he hired a guide to lead him on a journey through the Siq, a kilometer-long crack between sheer rock walls. On August 22, he stepped out into the hidden valley of Petra and wrote an account of the Nabataean Kingdom’s famous caravan city carved from stone. The locals had been familiar with the site for centuries.

In September 1871, a German geologist named Carl Mauch climbed a series of granite hilltops in southern Africa, led by local Karanga Shona residents. He mapped the dry-stone walls of Great Zimbabwe, the capital of a medieval African kingdom, built straight onto the rock. He read the landscape correctly but got the builders wrong, proposing that the ruins had been built by the biblical Queen of Sheba, or by Phoenician traders. Decades later, archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s excavation of the site in 1929 showed the theory to be wrong: Great Zimbabwe was Shona-built, by Africans, all along.

In 1841 and 1842, guided by locals, John Lloyd Stephens, an American traveler, and Frederick Catherwood, a British architect, walked through the brush in Mexico’s Yucatán and found themselves in Chichen Itza, an ancient Maya city that had thrived hundreds of years before. The two men made maps showing how the massive stepped pyramid known as El Castillo stood next to the Sacred Cenote, a natural sinkhole carved out of limestone down to the water table. In a land without rivers, that sinkhole told them everything they needed to know about why the city was there.

In 1878, the Cretan merchant and amateur antiquarian Minos Kalokairinos dug trial trenches into Kephala Hill overlooking Crete’s Kairatos River valley and found storage jars and palace walls at Knossos, the ceremonial center of Minoan civilization associated in Greek mythology with King Minos. But he was driven away by political upheaval during Ottoman rule, and the British archaeologist Arthur Evans didn’t start serious excavation until 1900. Those famous restored palace walls of Knossos were erected by Evans long after the original stones had lain beneath the soil.

The two English antiquarians Robert Wood and James Dawkins examined the deserted Palmyra, a prosperous trading town located at the heart of a Syrian oasis, in 1751. Instead of wielding a pickaxe, they took up pencil and paper to draw careful plans of the Great Colonnade, the Temple of Bel, and the tomb-towers dotting the desert. In their 1753 book The Ruins of Palmyra, they provided Europe with the first scholarly reconstruction of the city, a century before archaeologists started digging.

In 1845, British diplomat Austen Henry Layard came across the Kuyunjik mound, situated on the east bank of the Tigris opposite present-day Mosul. Earlier, the French consul Paul-Émile Botta had been digging at Khorsabad, convinced he had found Nineveh. He had not. Layard, however, knew that Kuyunjik was an artificial tell, formed by layers of decayed mudbrick over centuries, and proceeded to excavate it from 1845 to 1851. His digs brought to light the palace of the Assyrian king Sennacherib and the library of King Ashurbanipal. The city was indeed Nineveh, capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

In 1848, gum-collectors in Guatemala’s Petén rainforest had noticed stone structures poking out above the treetops, where no such structures should have been. Local officials, including a man named Modesto Méndez and another named Ambrosio Tut, led an expedition that year, following these limestone roof-combs above the canopy back to their origins. They found the Maya city of Tikal, whose temples had soared 200-plus feet in the air centuries before its abandonment, and had since been overtaken by jungle. Their survey of its central pyramids was the first official mapping the city had ever received.

The locals of southern Iraq called it Tell el-Mukayyar, the Mound of Pitch, because of the black bitumen that stained the bricks of its upper reaches. When J.E. Taylor, the British vice-consul at Basra, excavated the stepped terraces of the mound in 1853, he discovered cuneiform cylinders that identified it as Ur, the Sumerian city associated with Abraham, the biblical patriarch. The name of the mound itself had already given the game away.

In 1920, R.D. Banerji, an Indian archaeologist working for the Archaeological Survey of India, went to look at a mound that might be an ancient Buddhist stupa. Below it, he found flint scrapers and brickwork that appeared much older. Over the next two years, he excavated the area and discovered seals dating from the Bronze Age in Mohenjo-daro, a planned city with a grid of streets and underground drainage constructed by the Indus Valley Civilization. He brought his finds to his superior, John Marshall, who then announced the discovery to the world, showing that the Indus Valley Civilization was as ancient as the cultures of Sumer and Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

Local historians knew Roman walls stood near modern Caistor St Edmund in England’s Norfolk countryside, but nobody could see the town’s plan belowground. In a drought in July 1928, crops growing on top of buried stone walls ripened and turned yellow early, while those on top of buried ditches remained green. Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots photographed the pattern from the air, and the whole street grid of Venta Icenorum came into view in one fell swoop: forum, temples, bathhouse, and all. Venta Icenorum was a Roman town that had sprung up following the failed revolt of Boudica, the British queen who rose up against Roman rule.

In 1863, Sir Alexander Cunningham, founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, studied a series of mounds on Pakistan’s Haro River, identifying them using the travel accounts of Xuanzang, a 7th-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim. Cunningham did not find one city but three at Taxila, built in succession: the mounds of Bhir, Sirkap, and Sirsukh, where Greek, Persian, and Indian Buddhist influences met.

Ani, which was the capital of the medieval Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia, sits on a triangular plateau bounded by deep ravines formed by the Akhurian and Tsar rivers. The ravines helped preserve the street layout even after the city was razed following the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century and emptied by an earthquake in 1319. From 1892 to 1910, Russian-Armenian archaeologist Nikoghayos Marr documented the fortifications of the plateau and excavated royal palaces and churches, giving rise to Ani’s moniker as the City of 1,001 Churches.

The ruined mudbrick city of Samarra, built in 836 CE as the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital along the Tigris River, appeared as just a confusing jumble of low, eroded mounds. In 1919, Lt. Col. G.A. Beazeley, a Royal Engineers officer who served as an RAF surveyor, flew over the site and conducted systematic photographic surveys. From several thousand feet up, he saw low shadows that showed a 20-mile-long plan of avenues, geometrically arranged palaces, gardens, and ancient racecourses.

In the Hampshire countryside of England, there is a village named Silchester, which used to be called Calleva Atrebatum, a Roman town that was abandoned around the time of the early Anglo-Saxon conquest and never re-established. While standing walls surrounded the village pasture, no one could see what was behind the walls. It wasn’t until the 1920s that O.G.S. Crawford, an aerial photography pioneer for the British Ordnance Survey, took photographs from above, revealing cropmarks outlining the entire street grid below.

From 1925 to 1932, Father Antoine Poidebard, a French Jesuit priest, flew a biplane at dawn and dusk over the desert frontier of the old Roman Empire in what is now Syria and Jordan. In the low light of these times, long shadows revealed buried forts, watchtowers and caravan stations. Poidebard mapped hundreds of these sites and published his findings in 1934, convinced that they formed a single unbroken wall of defense. Satellite research in later years showed that, rather than a single wall, these were spaced out to serve trade, caravan protection, and water control.

On July 28, 1834, a French architect named Charles Texier mapped the steep mountain ridges and terraced fortification walls near what is now called Boğazkale, Turkey. He was very precise about the measurements, but thought the site must be Greek or Median, which was off by centuries. The place was in fact Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire. Nobody would discover this until 1906, when a German academic called Hugo Winckler unearthed thousands of cuneiform tablets from the ruins.

In August 1933, Bedouin tribesmen digging a grave on a mound called Tell Hariri, in eastern Syria, turned up a headless stone statue. French archaeologist André Parrot, with the Louvre Museum, was sent to investigate. He recognized the mound as an ancient city site and began formal excavation that December. He found Mari, a Bronze Age Mesopotamian trade city on the Euphrates destroyed by Hammurabi of Babylon. The dig eventually uncovered a 300-room palace and over 20,000 clay tablets.

An Etruscan seaport on the Adriatic, Spina was built on wooden pilings across the lagoons of the Po Delta, with its canals doubling as its streets until silt filled them and eventually covered the city. A drainage operation in 1922 in one of the lagoons turned up the city’s cemetery, but no one had any idea where the rest of the city might be. In 1956, after another drainage operation in a neighboring lagoon, archaeologists Nereo Alfieri and Valerio Cimani took to the air and flew over the drying mud. Darker marks on the soil revealed the entire canal network, the waterways, and the pilings beneath them.

This content was created with the help of AI.