Six archaeological discoveries to rival Tutankhamun’s tomb

From the Terracotta army to the Flores ‘Hobbit’, these are the discoveries that experts argue are more significant than the unearthing of Tutankhamun’s resting place

By Jo Marchant

Ancient chariots from the Yinxu site in China

Imaginechina Limited/Alamy

Archaeologists have made many stunning discoveries down the years. These have changed our thinking on how our species became the only humans on the planet, how civilisations arose across the world and how international trade first began.

As the world marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most famous archaeological finds of all time – the unearthing of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt – New Scientist asked archaeologists who work at sites scattered across the world, from Greece to Indonesia, to nominate the discoveries they think are even more significant.

Mycenae Grave Circle

In the late 19th century, archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated a circle of six royal graves at the citadel of Mycenae in southern Greece. He found a hoard of golden treasures from the 16th century BC, including the “Mask of Agamemnon”, which Schliemann believed was worn by Mycenae’s mythological ruler, who fought in the Trojan war. That is unlikely, but the find “revolutionised our comprehension of the Mediterranean”, says Jack Davis at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, revealing the previously unknown Aegean civilisations that preceded historical Greece.

The Mask of Agamemnon, one of the most famous discoveries at Mycenae

World History Archive/Alamy

Terracotta Army and the ancient site of Yinxu

In 1974, workers digging near the city of Xi’an, China, uncovered a life-size clay soldier poised for battle. Archaeologists soon found an entire terracotta army, guarding the tomb of the 3rd-century-BC emperor Qin Shi Huang. Rowan Flad at Harvard University highlights the site along with Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang dynasty (see picture at the top of the page). This city, which dates to the late 2nd millennium BC and so is much older than the Terracotta army, revealed a golden age of early Chinese culture, including palaces, a flood-control system and inscribed oracle bones – the earliest evidence of the Chinese written language. Both “were true discoveries of things and stories that had been long forgotten”, says Flad.

The Terracotta army began to re-emerge from the ground in the 1970s

Melvyn Longhurst China/Alamy

Hand axes of Hoxne

In 1797, antiquary John Frere wrote to colleagues describing sharpened flints uncovered by brickworkers in Hoxne, England. The stones lay 4 metres deep, alongside the bones of enormous, unknown animals and beneath layers apparently once at the bottom of the sea. Frere suggested they belonged “to a very remote period… even beyond that of the present world”. His discovery of what we now know are Palaeolithic hand axes “revealed for the first time the long-term, deep-time human past”, says Mike Parker Pearson at University College London, “challenging the biblical notion that the world was created in 4004 BC.”

Stone Age hand-axes were discovered in Hoxne, England, in the late 18th century

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Uluburun

This Bronze Age shipwreck, found off the coast of Turkey in 1982, stands as “one of the great underwater discoveries”, says Brendan Foley at Lund University in Sweden. Once described as “Wall Street in a ship“, it transformed historians’ understanding of the era by revealing an astonishing web of trade contacts. The wreck’s vast cargo represented at least 11 different cultures and included weapons, jewellery, ostrich eggs, resin, spices and copper ingots from as far afield as Egypt, Cyprus and Asia.

A replica of the Uluburun ship wreck, a boat lost in the Mediterranean during a Bronze Age storm

WaterFrame/Alamy

The Flores ‘Hobbit’

The shock discovery of diminutive humans who once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores was the “JFK moment” of modern archaeology, says Adam Brumm at Griffith University in Australia, in the sense that scientists in the field still remember where they were when they heard the news. The tiny bones, discovered in a cave in 2003, showed that individuals (subsequently dubbed Homo floresiensis) grew to just over 1 metre tall and lived alongside giant lizards. For Brumm, “it was an electrifying and totally unexpected find”.

Homo floresiensis, an ancient human species that surprised everyone

Cicero Moraes et al. (CC BY 4.0)