Articles about places & monuments across every continent and era, oldest first.
Dredging for the 'Upolu–Savai'i car ferry exposed Samoa's only known Lapita pottery. Fiona Petchey dated it to 930–800 BC; 'Upolu has sunk since.
· 930 BCAntiquity's 2019 report says a major conflagration destroyed Must Farm's Bronze Age stilt houses, whose contents sank into a Cambridgeshire river channel.
· 850 BCTwenty shell trumpets came from Chavín's Caracolas Gallery in 2001. In 2025 PNAS reported vilca and tobacco alkaloids on six artifacts from Gallery 3.
· 800 BCLapita settlers landed at Nukuleka, Tonga, about 2,800 years ago. Descendants stayed in Tonga and Samoa until about AD 1025, then settled East Polynesia.
· 500 BCA Berlin museum record says Giuseppe Ferlini opened a Meroë pyramid in 1834 and took gold jewelry, once thought forged, made for Queen Amanishakheto.
· 300 BCPtolemy I commissioned the Pharos in 299 BC and it was finished in 279. Strabo and Pliny describe its white marble, its architect Sostratus and its fires.
· 280 BCFound on a royal hunt in 1961 and dug by a French mission until 1978, Ai Khanoum in north Afghanistan held a Greek theater, gymnasium and Delphic maxims.
· 250 BCOstraca beside Old Nisa's Square House named a Parthian fortress Mithradatkert, where about fifty ivory rhyta and a disputed Round Hall survive.
· 200 BCBirks dug 2,700 square meters of Fiji's Sigatoka dunes in 1965–66 and found three buried soils. Level 2, the Navatu layer, dates 1,700 to 1,300 cal BP.
· 200 BCMarshall's 1918 Guide to Taxila describes three cities in one valley, Bhir Mound, Sirkap and Sirsukh, each dated by walls, coin finds and dig layers.
· 170 BCPolybius heard Scipio quote Homer as Carthage fell in 146 BC. R. T. Ridley traced the salted-earth story to a 1930 sentence in the Cambridge Ancient History.
· 146 BCA 2022 PNAS study ties Pacific atoll settlement to sea-level fall after a highstand. Digs date Ebon occupation to two millennia and Utrōk to the first centuries AD.
· AD 1Wheeler dug Arikamedu, near Pondicherry, in 1945, found Italian Arretine ware and dated it AD 20-50; later digs argued it began near the 2nd century BC.
· AD 50Vesuvius carbonized a Roman villa's library in AD 79. Scans and machine learning now read the scrolls unopened: a first word in 2023, a whole roll by 2026.
· AD 79Johann Ludwig Burckhardt entered the valley of Petra on August 22, 1812, after telling his guide he had vowed to sacrifice a goat at the tomb of Aaron.
· AD 100Two walled-up rooms at Begram, 1937 and 1939, held Roman glass, Indian ivory and Han lacquer. Half went to Paris; 20 ivories returned to Kabul in 2012.
· AD 100Teotihuacan covered eight square miles and held 100,000 people or more by AD 400, yet no portrait or tomb of a king has been found. Its rulers are unknown.
· AD 200Squier and Davis counted 24 mounds at Mound City in 1848. Camp Sherman covered them in 1917; Newark's Octagon left its golf lease on January 1, 2025.
· AD 200Earthwork terraces cover an estimated 20 percent of Babeldaob, Palau, built about 500 BC to AD 650 and left by about AD 1000 for coastal villages of stone.
· AD 200Wall paintings found in a trench in March 1920 led to the Yale-Académie digs at Dura-Europos; its synagogue went to Damascus, its baptistery to Yale.
· AD 245Police recovered looted gold at Sipán in February 1987. Walter Alva's team then recorded an intact Moche royal tomb at Huaca Rajada on July 20, 1987.
· AD 250Palmyra taxed the caravans carrying Gulf and Indian goods across the desert to Rome. That wealth let Odaenathus and Zenobia rule the Roman East until AD 272.
· AD 270Aksum, in northern Ethiopia, struck gold, silver and bronze coins from the third century AD and raised granite grave markers more than 23 meters tall.
· AD 350The East India Company ordered Ajanta's paintings copied in 1844. Gill's canvases burned at the Crystal Palace in 1866; Griffiths recopied them, 1873-1885.
· AD 470
