Map of ancient sites

A red sandstone canyon in La Rioja, its boulders pecked with petroglyphs and its rocks full of Triassic fossils.

Sandstone shelters painted over 17,000 years, from Gwion figures to the Wanjina that Traditional Owners still look after.

A 15-meter curl of ancient granite near Hyden, Katter Kich to the Ballardong Noongar, shaped in ways still debated.

A slope of bare granite blocks on the forested ridge where Austria, Germany and Czechia meet, read by geologists and by a local explorer.

An 800-meter line of stone blocks off North Bimini: natural beachrock to geologists, an ancient harbor to others.

Straight lines in a lidar scan of Brazilian forest, read by one group as streets of Ratanabá, in the homeland of the Apiaká people.

Hundreds of stone pillars rise from the sand west of Varna: an ancient sea floor to geologists, ruined temples to their first visitor.

Two ceremonial platforms on Rapa Nui's south coast, one backed by basalt slabs so finely fitted they are compared to Inca walls.

Round houses, a ring ditch, painted fish bowls and children buried in jars: a millet farmers' village on Xi'an's edge, 6,000 years old.

Hundreds of rooms cut into a granite cliff north of Beijing, with stone beds and stoves, and no record of who carved them.

A 17-meter stone Buddha and more than 100,000 smaller figures, cut into the cliffs of the Yi River for Northern Wei and Tang patrons.

Two Eastern Han tombs found under a Shandong village pond, carved with ram heads, kitchens, chariots and the moon rabbit.

Bronze faces with jutting eyes, a 2.6-meter figure and gold masks, broken and buried in Sichuan some 3,000 years ago.

Thousands of life-size clay soldiers, each with its own face, buried in battle order beside the sealed tomb of China's First Emperor.

The Qing emperors' Garden of Perfect Brightness, looted and burned in 1860, where marble ruins of European palaces still stand.

A collapsed cave on Dragon Bone Hill where Peking Man lived some 770,000 years ago, and whose fossils vanished in 1941.

Hundreds of stone balls, some over two meters wide, carved by Costa Rica's ancient chiefdoms and set in lines by their leaders' houses.

Lidar mapped more than 6,000 earthen platforms and long straight roads under the forest of Amazonian Ecuador, begun 2,500 years ago.

Where Sneferu's builders changed a pyramid's slope halfway up, then raised the Red Pyramid at one even angle.

Three Fourth Dynasty pyramids, the Great Sphinx and the town of the crews who built them, on a plateau at Cairo's edge.

The burial ground of ancient Memphis, where Djoser's Step Pyramid rises above 3,000 years of tombs, catacombs and bull burials.

A vast T-shaped pit south of Giza, paved with granite, where a king's pyramid was begun and abandoned some 4,500 years ago.

A 1.5-kilometer crater above San Salvador, on a volcano whose ash layers help date the valley's ancient villages.

A Maya farming village buried by ash around 600 CE, its kitchens, gardens and manioc fields left as the villagers fled.

Sword-carved stone slabs stand over medieval graves in Ethiopia's Soddo highlands, and their signs are still read in different ways.

An ordinary ladder in a Jura stream bed, slowly wrapped in the same limestone crust that builds the Baume waterfall.

Five marble seats of honor ring the orchestra of a small theater at the Amphiareion, a healing sanctuary north of Athens.

Rough limestone boulders over a stream near Epidaurus: a Mycenaean road bridge that people still cross, some 3,000 years on.

A bearded marble giant about 10.5 meters long, still lying in the Naxos quarry where Archaic sculptors left it.

Terraced ruins of the Argolid's great sanctuary of Hera, where a gold-and-ivory goddess by Polykleitos once sat enthroned.

A walled Bronze Age citadel above the Argive plain, still entered through a gate carved with two lions around 1250 BCE.

A limestone cave near Thessaloniki where villagers found one of Europe's most complete archaic human skulls in 1960.

A small Mycenaean bridge of unmortared boulders near Arkadiko, still carrying a track some 3,200 years after it was built.

Sloping limestone walls near Argos, dated to the 4th century BCE from the pottery and to about 2700 BCE from the stone itself.

The ruined temple below Mount Parnassus where the Pythia, Apollo's priestess, answered the questions of kings and cities.

A grey limestone temple of Apollo at 1,131 meters in the Arcadian mountains, home of the oldest known Corinthian capital.

A Bronze Age tomb at Mycenae whose corbelled stone dome stayed the largest in the world for more than a thousand years.

A stepped stone mountain of 2,672 carved panels and 504 Buddhas, raised in Java around 800 CE and read in more ways than one.

A foot-shaped hollow, four to five meters long, on a Lombok river cliff, said to be the mark a vanished king promised to leave.

A great stone mound on a Meath hilltop whose carved inner chamber catches the rising sun around the spring and autumn equinoxes.

A stone seat in the kerb of Cairn T at Loughcrew, named for the hag said to have dropped the hills' cairns from her apron.

Many-sided limestone blocks, fitted so closely no paper slips between them, wrap the hilltop citadel of Alatri.

Thousands of Etruscan tombs line streets cut in the tufa, many carved inside like the houses of the living.

A tomb barely a meter across, hidden in an Umbrian beech wood and still closed by a stone door that turns on its pivots.

Two hundred doorways in a Saitama hillside: Kofun-era tombs, a wartime tunnel factory and a moss that glows in the dark.

A caravan capital carved into red sandstone, where the Nabataeans cut tombs, temples and water channels from the living rock.

Arrow-shaped stone traps along the Ustyurt cliffs, and five giant figures scraped into a desert valley in the winter of 2016–2017.

Two Neolithic temples on Gozo, begun around 3600 BCE with blocks so huge that islanders credited them to a giantess.

A Neolithic temple on a ridge above Malta's south coast, its outer wall built of slabs up to 5.2 meters tall.

A Neolithic cemetery cut three levels deep into Maltese limestone, its rooms carved to look like the temples above.

Three Neolithic temples above Malta's south coast, one of them facing the equinox sunrise through its doorway.

Four Neolithic temples in a Maltese town, carved with spirals, goats and pigs, around the lower half of a giant skirted figure.

An oval Maya pyramid at Uxmal that grew around five temples, and the dwarf who, the story says, raised it in one night.

A granite turtle beside the Terelj road, shaped by weathering and tied by Mongolian guides to a defeated khan's hidden treasure.

Permian tree trunks, carried by a river flood and turned to quartz, lie in the stony ground west of Khorixas.

Spirals, faces and monkeys pecked into some 2,000 basalt boulders on the slopes of Maderas volcano in Lake Nicaragua.

A steep volcanic cone above the Peruvian rainforest, read by some as a pyramid and honored nearby as a sacred mountain.

Warriors, orcas and long lines cleared on the hills around Palpa, some of them centuries older than the Nasca Lines.

A cliff near Cajamarca cut with 337 small window-shaped tombs, made by the Cajamarca people and still keeping its dates to itself.

Copper Age tombs of stone and earth above the Alvor estuary, where an Algarve community buried its dead for over a thousand years.

About 95 granite menhirs on an Alentejo hillside, raised and reshaped by Neolithic communities from roughly 7,000 years ago.

Granite boulders on a Sintra hilltop, listed as a dolmen in 1910, where no burial has yet been found and every reading is still open.

Two great Alentejo dolmens: one once thought Portugal's largest, the other later ringed by Copper Age beehive tombs.

Seven granite slabs, some leaning inward, still hold up a single capstone about 4 meters across on a plateau in the Alto Alentejo.

A five-sided stone chamber near Tomar, where Neolithic pots held the first direct traces of milk and dairy found in Iberia.

Horses, aurochs and ibex engraved on riverside schist, saved from a dam's reservoir in the 1990s, their age still debated.

Thirty-four granite menhirs in a horseshoe open to the east, on a low rise northwest of Évora, set upright again by volunteers in 1995.

Granite stones set in a square around a phallic menhir, moved from the Alqueva reservoir and rebuilt below Monsaraz in 2004.

Some forty granite stones in a double oval on an east-facing hill near Évora, a few carved with round-eyed faces.

A broken menhir near Monsaraz carved with a rayed sun, a crook and wavy lines, its lost base once reused in a press.

A 5.6-meter granite pillar with a carved phallic tip on the plain below Monsaraz, found fallen in 1969 and raised again.

A lone egg-shaped granite menhir with a carved crook, standing where the midsummer sun rises seen from the Almendres Cromlech.

A mushroom-shaped granite rock in the Alentejo, its cap heaped with pebbles thrown by women asking when they will marry.

A spoon-shaped pool cut into rock beside the Strei, still fed by the warm springs that Roman Dacia bathed in.

A Greek-planned Dacian stronghold on a steep hilltop, ringed by watchtowers and served by a vaulted cistern built the Roman way.

A forested Dacian stronghold above the Sebeș Valley, where a square stone tower-house once guarded the road into the mountains.

The Nera cuts 22 km through Banat limestone, past a lake born of a collapsed cave, travertine falls and tunnels still waiting for a date.

Earth banks, Greek-style stone walls and two great tower-houses on the hill that guarded the road to the Dacian capital.

Terraces, water pipes and a ring of limestone pillars on a sunny Dacian hillside across the valley from Sarmizegetusa Regia.

A cliff-ringed Dacian stronghold where an iron disc with an aurochs and a feline was found, read as shield, icon or emblem.

The last capital of free Dacia, high in the Orăștie Mountains, where rings of andesite pillars still invite many readings.

Eight grassy hills at the edge of a Făgăraș village, credited to giants, Dacians and landslides, and never excavated.

A hot spring in a Transylvanian hill where Roman governors bathed and left gold for the Nymphs.

A Dacian hilltop stronghold above a Transylvanian village, where fifteen bronze coin dies point to a mint.

Knobbly sandstone concretions from a 12-million-year-old delta, known locally as the old women, on a forested crest in Buzău.

Ten meter-wide stone balls from a Siberian coal mine, read as concretions by a museum geologist and still waiting for a lab study.

Wells still giving water after 3,000 years, ringed by carved camels, cavalry and inscriptions from South Arabian to early Arabic.

Life-size camels carved into sandstone near Sakaka, first read as Nabataean work, now dated by its team to the Neolithic.

A sandstone outcrop near Tayma split by a gap as straight as a ruler, one face carved with a horse and its handler.

A prehistoric passage grave drowned by a reservoir in 1963, its rings of granite slabs surfacing only when drought lowers the Tagus.

An Iron Age temple in northwest Syria where meter-long carved footprints stride from the porch toward the god's inner hall.

Courses of huge stone blocks on a base cut from the bedrock: the rampart of the Phoenician island city of Arwad.

Three sandstone blocks on a cliff above the Mekong valley, shaped by rain into a family of whales from a 75-million-year-old desert.

A three-story Roman arena for some 30,000 spectators, still towering over the Tunisian town that grew up around it.

A Phrygian tomb once guarded by lions, warriors and a Gorgon, now split apart on the floor of the Göynüş Valley.

Eight levels of stables, kitchens and chapels cut 85 meters into Cappadocia's soft rock, where villagers hid from raiders.

Stairs, house walls and quays slip into clear water along Kekova island, the remains of a Lycian and Byzantine harbor town.

A rock citadel above the dammed Tigris, with an Assyrian king carved in its cliff and royal tombs whose owners are still debated.

Rings of carved T-shaped pillars raised by hunter-gatherers more than 11,000 years ago on a hill near Şanlıurfa.

A rock-cut room of phallic pillars facing a carved head, at the heart of a Stone Age village east of Şanlıurfa.

A boat-shaped mound 29 km south of Mount Ararat: Noah's Ark to some, a fold in the rock to others, drilled for the first time in 2026.

Tombs raised high on stone pillars, a shaft covered in Lycian script, and a city that ancient writers say burned itself twice.

A 36-meter stone passage under a great earth mound leads to the domed chamber of a 4th-century BCE Bosporan ruler near Kerch.

A 4,000-year-old stone tomb in Al Ain whose doorways carry oryx, big cats, a donkey rider and an embracing pair.

A cliff village of about 1200 CE in a sandstone alcove on Utah's Comb Ridge, which Hopi people call a footprint of their ancestors.

Earthen bears and birds on bluffs above the Mississippi, raised by American Indian communities, most between about 650 and 1200 CE.

Sandstone villages built into canyon alcoves by Ancestral Pueblo farmers in the 1200s, still visited by their descendants.

Bison hunts, Plains horsemen and deep-cut handprints on a sandstone cliff in Wyoming's Red Desert, still read in more than one way.

A steep, ribbed cone at Damt in Yemen around a deep shaft of warm, sulfurous water, raised by hot springs, a volcano or both.

Life-size wild cattle, archers and crowded boats, carved into limestone boulders above the Caspian over some 14,000 years.

A long sandstone frieze by the San Juan River where bighorn sheep, flute players and horsemen record two thousand years of visitors.

A church carved into a sandstone cliff in Argeș, with two altars and some of the oldest frescoes in Wallachia.

Two granite tombs joined behind one monumental façade in a wooded ravine of Bulgaria's Sakar hills, a place of dragon stories.