Humanities
Reconstructing the past from what people left behind rather than what they wrote down.
10 fields · 89 topics · 125 curated works
How the discipline turns dirt into argument.
Foundations & Overviews · Excavation Technique · Stratigraphy (Archaeological) · Survey & Prospection · Site Formation Processes
The methods that made archaeology quantitative.
Foundations & Overviews · Radiocarbon Dating · Dendrochronology · Thermoluminescence · Isotope Analysis
Human societies before writing, read from what they left behind — stone tools, settlements, megaliths and rock art.
Foundations & Overviews · Stone Tool Technology · Hunter-Gatherer Sites · Rock Art · Neolithic Settlements
Greece, Rome and their neighbours in the ground.
Foundations & Overviews · Greek Sites & Sanctuaries · Roman Urbanism · Pompeii & Herculaneum · Etruscan Archaeology
The regions where the discipline began — tombs, temples and cuneiform archives, and the excavation history that shaped it.
Foundations & Overviews · Egyptian Excavation History · Tombs & Mortuary Archaeology · Temple Complexes · Mesopotamian Sites
Vast and comparatively under-covered — the Indus Valley, Chinese and Japanese sites, Great Zimbabwe and the African Iron Age.
Foundations & Overviews · Chinese Archaeology · The Terracotta Army · Indus Valley Excavations · Southeast Asian Sites
The archaeology of two continents settled late.
Foundations & Overviews · Peopling of the Americas · Maya Sites · Aztec Archaeology · Andean Archaeology
Bodies, diet, disease and landscape — osteology, palaeopathology and isotope evidence for what people ate and where from.
Foundations & Overviews · Human Osteology · Palaeopathology · Diet Reconstruction · Zooarchaeology
Who owns the past, who may dig it up, and who decides where it is displayed — the field's most contested ground.
Foundations & Overviews · Cultural Heritage Management · Looting & Illicit Antiquities · Repatriation Debates · Site Conservation
Archaeology of the drowned and the recent — shipwrecks, harbours, factories and battlefields still within living memory.
Foundations & Overviews · Shipwreck Archaeology · Submerged Landscapes · Harbour Archaeology · Industrial Sites
No prior grounding assumed.
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan
John Lloyd Stephens · 1841
Documents dozens of ruined Maya cities as the work of the indigenous ancestors of living Central Americans, against a contemporary readership that…
+30 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
History of the Conquest of Mexico
William H. Prescott · 1843
Opens with a systematic account of Aztec civilisation drawn from Spanish chronicles and surviving monuments, establishing the framework through which…
+41 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley
Ephraim G. Squier & Edwin H. Davis · 1848
Surveys and maps hundreds of earthworks across the Ohio and Mississippi valleys as the first systematic record of a mound-building culture, before…
+51 more at this level
12 of 125 works
John Lloyd Stephens
Documents dozens of ruined Maya cities as the work of the indigenous ancestors of living Central Americans, against a contemporary readership that assumed only Old World migrants could have built them.
480 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Henri Mouhot
The published diary that brought Angkor to Western attention, describing the temple complex as the work of a vanished, sophisticated Khmer civilisation rather than a natural curiosity.
300 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026John Thomson
Uses newly practical photography, rather than the sketches of earlier travellers, to document Angkor's temples, arguing the camera can settle disputes about the ruins' scale and condition that verbal description could not.
George Smith
Announces the decipherment of a cuneiform tablet from Nineveh recounting a Babylonian flood story, arguing it is an independent source for the biblical flood narrative rather than derived from it.
Ephraim George Squier
Records and illustrates Inca and pre-Inca ruins across Peru and Bolivia, including the first detailed Western account of Tiwanaku, before systematic excavation began in the region.
600 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Amelia B. Edwards
Documents monuments already crumbling under tourist damage and looting, and makes the case that led directly to founding the Egypt Exploration Fund: that Egypt's ancient remains need organised, funded protection.
Auguste Mariette
Surveys Karnak, Luxor, Dendera and Edfu as a connected sequence of building campaigns, arguing that a temple's successive additions record the political history of the dynasty that built them.
W. M. Flinders Petrie
A first-person account of a decade of excavation that argues Egyptology's early treasure-hunting had destroyed more evidence than it recovered, and that only exact measurement and recording could recover what was left.
250 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Ernest Arthur Gardner
Traces Greek sculpture as a sequence of technical solutions to representing the human body, arguing stylistic development is best read through surviving originals rather than through later Roman copies.
Percy Gardner
Sets out the technical vocabulary and developmental stages of Greek sculpture and vase painting as a systematic discipline meant to train students to read style, not merely to admire finished works.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Waldstein & Leonard Shoobridge
Argues that Herculaneum's deep volcanic burial, unlike the shallower ash over Pompeii, preserved organic material and multi-storey buildings intact, and makes the case for a large-scale, modern re-excavation of the site.
Adolf Michaelis
Surveys a century of excavation from Pompeii to Olympia to Crete, arguing that classical archaeology only became a discipline once it moved from collecting statues to recording where and how they were found.