✦

Ancient Mystery

Archaeological sites whose construction, purpose, or builders remain debated.

Results · 43 mysteries

of 282

Cayo District, Belize
✦
Actun Tunichil Muknal
Fourteen sets of human remains lie in the upper chamber where they were left more than a thousand years ago, some of them children. Pots sit among them with holes punched through the base so nobody could use them again. Cameras have been banned since 2012, when a visitor dropped one onto a skull.
Skåne County, Sweden
✦
Ale's Stones
Fifty-nine boulders stand in the outline of a ship on a ridge above the Baltic, the largest weighing about five metric tons, hauled up a slope to a spot with no shelter and no water. Radiocarbon evidence places the monument broadly in the later Iron Age, around 500 to 1000 CE. An amateur astronomer has spent decades arguing it is thousands of years older and is a solar calendar, and no working archaeologist accepts it.
New Hampshire, United States
✦
America's Stonehenge
A hillside maze of stone chambers, walls, and a grooved "sacrificial table" in New Hampshire has been called both a 4,000-year-old ceremonial site and a 19th-century farmer's root cellars. A century of argument has not settled it.
Attica, Greece
✦
Antikythera Mechanism
Sponge divers raised this corroded bronze device from a shipwreck off Antikythera in 1901. X-ray scans in 2005 showed it was a geared calculator that predicted eclipses, tracked the moon and a cycle of athletic games, and, by its own inscriptions, displayed the five planets then known. Who built it, where, and when are still argued over, and no known device matches its complexity for at least a millennium afterward.
Puno, Peru
✦
Aramu Muru / Gate of the Gods
A seven-meter doorway carved into a sandstone cliff above Lake Titicaca is where legend says a fleeing Inca priest pressed a golden solar disk into the rock and vanished through a portal that opened in front of him, and visitors still press their foreheads into the niche to feel what he might have felt.
Vayots Dzor Province, Armenia
✦
Areni-1 Cave
This cave produced the oldest leather shoe on Earth and the oldest known winery. The part nobody repeats is what stood beside the wine vat: storage jars with the heads of adolescents inside them, and one skull that still held brain tissue.
Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia
✦
Arkaim
Found by accident in 1987 during a dam survey, this circular Bronze Age fortress in the Ural steppe was built with gates and doorways researchers say align to eighteen solar and lunar events, a claim, if accurate, of more precise astronomical design than Stonehenge.
Central Sulawesi, Indonesia
✦
Bada Valley Megaliths
Scattered across a remote Sulawesi highland valley, more than 400 carved stone figures, some over four meters tall, were made by a culture that left no name, no writing, and no agreed-upon date behind.
Zenica-Doboj Canton, Bosnia and Herzegovina
✦
Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun and Ravne Tunnels
Semir Osmanagić announced in 2005 that the hill above Visoko is a pyramid tens of thousands of years old, and started digging the following April. In December 2006, the European Association of Archaeologists published an open letter calling the project a cruel hoax with no place in genuine science. The digging did not stop, the tunnels are ticketed, and the town gets the visitors.

Results · 43 mysteries

Actun Tunichil Muknal

Ale's Stones

America's Stonehenge

Antikythera Mechanism

Aramu Muru / Gate of the Gods

Areni-1 Cave

Arkaim

Bada Valley Megaliths

Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun and Ravne Tunnels