Articles about places & monuments across every continent and era, oldest first.
A 2017 PNAS paper dated ten dams and the Tangshan Levee at Liangzhu to 5,200–4,800 years ago, older than the 300 ha walled city they protected.
· 3000 BCA storm around 1850 stripped a dune at the Bay of Skaill, Orkney, and bared a kitchen midden 15 or 16 feet high. Petrie, Childe and Bayliss followed.
· 2900 BCCaral, in Peru's Supe valley, raised pyramids by 2627 BC with no pottery or maize; its farmers grew cotton for fishing nets and traded it for fish.
· 2600 BCKhufu's pyramid lies within six arcminutes of true north. No Egyptian text says how; Glen Dash of AERA weighed four methods, from shadows to star transits.
· 2560 BCEgyptian crews fed by the state, not slaves, built the Giza pyramids. A town for the workers, their cemetery and gang names inside the pyramid show it.
· 2560 BCMineral grains in the Altar Stone match rock in northeast Scotland, 750 km away. The sarsens came from 25 km north, the bluestones from west Wales.
· 2500 BCAt Mohenjo-daro almost every house had a bathing area draining to covered street drains big enough for workmen to enter; only two brick toilets are known.
· 2500 BCA 2026 Ministry of Culture post calls Dholavira's ten-sign gypsum inscription the world's oldest-known signboard, at a city ASI excavated under R.S. Bisht.
· 2500 BCThe Indus cities of 2600–1900 BC left no identified palace or royal tomb. J. M. Kenoyer proposes rule by competing elites and calls 'Great Bath' a guess.
· 2500 BCS. R. Rao called the brick basin at Lothal the earliest dock in the world. Lawrence Leshnik measured its sill, channel and stones in 1968 and saw a tank.
· 2400 BCIn 1975 Sapienza excavators found Ebla's palace archive at Tell Mardikh, Syria. Scarpa counts over 15,000 pieces in one room, ASOR over 18,000 tablets.
· 2300 BCArkaim reserve records say dam work began in November 1986; a 1987 survey found a ringed Bronze Age settlement, and the reservoir was canceled in April 1991.
· 2000 BCA Soviet expedition found the Gonur oasis in Turkmenistan's Karakum desert in 1974. Its Bronze Age city traded with the Indus; its dates are disputed.
· 2000 BCSeiichi Izumi's University of Tokyo team dug up two crossed-hands clay reliefs at Kotosh, Peru, in 1960 and 1963; sources disagree on their age.
· 2000 BCArthur Evans dug at Knossos from 1900 to 1931 and rebuilt the palace in reinforced concrete, "a real godsend" to him, "controversial" to the Ashmolean.
· 1700 BCErlitou in Henan has palaces, a bronze foundry and grid roads from about 1900 to 1500 BC, and no writing to say whether its rulers were the Xia.
· 1700 BCA Bronze Age town on Thera with three-story houses and drains, emptied before the eruption buried it. Radiocarbon and Egyptian dates differ by a century.
· 1600 BCSchliemann began digging Grave Circle A at Mycenae on August 7, 1876, and wired the king in French. The "face of Agamemnon" line is not in his 1878 book.
· 1550 BCHunter-gatherers moved nearly 2 million cubic yards of earth at Poverty Point, Louisiana, 1700–1100 BC; Mound A took up to 15.5 million basket loads.
· 1500 BCLater building buried KV62 and its location was lost; floodwater never filled it, the Theban Mapping Project says. It may not first have been his tomb.
· 1323 BCA sponge diver reported "metal biscuits with ears" off Kas in 1982; the Institute of Nautical Archaeology excavated the wreck from 1984 to 1994.
· 1300 BCIn August 1985 Patrick Kirch's team found a waterlogged Lapita stilt-village at Talepakemalai on Eloaua Island, Mussau, with pottery and obsidian intact.
· 1300 BCPLOS ONE published a dwarfism claim from two Palau caves in March 2008, then a rebuttal from three universities five and a half months later.
· 1000 BCLapita voyagers from the Bismarck Archipelago were the first people on Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, about 1400 to 1000 BC. DNA points to East Asia.
· 1000 BC
