🏺The Greats

By 1922 Lord Carnarvon had decided to stop funding the search; Carter persuaded him to pay for one final season. Three days after work resumed that November, a step cut into the bedrock appeared beneath the remains of ancient workmen's huts. On 26 November, Carter opened a small hole into the antechamber, held up a candle, and — asked by Carnarvon whether he could see anything — gave the discipline its most famous reply: "Yes, wonderful things."

At Jericho between 1952 and 1958, Kenyon's trenches cut to bedrock and found a massive stone tower and town wall dating to around 8000 BCE — monumental architecture millennia before pottery, let alone the Bronze Age. The same stratigraphy showed almost nothing standing in the era of Joshua's supposed conquest, a result that dismayed some of the excavation's biblically motivated sponsors. She published the evidence anyway, in exhaustive detail, and the tower remains among the oldest monuments known.

In 1976 at Laetoli, visiting researchers larking about — throwing dried elephant dung at each other — tumbled into a gully and noticed ancient animal prints preserved in volcanic ash. Two years of careful work later, Paul Abell of Mary Leakey's team spotted a heel print that proved human-like: the Laetoli trackway, roughly 27 meters of footprints left by upright-walking hominins about 3.66 million years ago. Bipedalism, the prints showed, is a million years older than stone tools.

On 31 May 1873, Schliemann claimed he glimpsed gold in a trench wall, dismissed the workmen for an unscheduled rest, and cut the hoard free with his own knife while his wife Sophia carried it away in her shawl. He later admitted Sophia was in Athens that day — one of many embellishments — and he smuggled "Priam's Treasure" out of the Ottoman Empire. Lost from Berlin in 1945, the gold resurfaced in 1993 in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, where it remains, still disputed.

In June 1936, near the end of the fourteenth Anyang season, his team hit pit YH127: a single buried archive of more than 17,000 inscribed oracle-bone fragments, the records of Shang royal divination. Rather than dig it apart in place, they cut the entire pit out as a three-ton block and shipped it to the laboratory in Nanjing for micro-excavation. A year later Japan's invasion halted the dig; Li Ji spent the war moving the collections across China, and finished his career with them in Taiwan.

Studying the dated stelae of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, Proskouriakoff noticed that monuments clustered before each temple spanned roughly a human lifetime, opening with one distinctive date-glyph and adding another a couple of decades later. Her 1960 paper argued these were birth and accession records of successive rulers — overturning the reigning view, defended by Eric Thompson, that the texts were pure calendar-priest astronomy. She was right; the glyphs were history, and decipherment followed. Her ashes were buried at Piedras Negras in 1998.

In 1960, as a 27-year-old graduate student who learned to dive in a swimming pool weeks earlier, Bass directed the excavation of a Bronze Age shipwreck at Cape Gelidonya, Turkey — the first ancient wreck excavated in its entirety on the seabed by archaeologists. Mapping, grids and recording all happened at 27 meters' depth. His later Uluburun project (1984–94) logged over 22,000 dives and raised a 3,300-year-old royal cargo — Canaanite copper, Egyptian gold, Baltic amber — rewriting Bronze Age trade.