Out of the Ground: A Quiz on Famous Archaeological Discoveries

A shepherd chasing a lost goat, farmers digging a well, sponge divers… Many of history's most famous finds began by chance. How many do you know in ten questions?

10 questions · 3 min

Who discovered the Lascaux cave paintings in France in 1940?

How did China's Terracotta Army, made up of thousands of clay soldiers, come to light in 1974?

Thanks to whom were the first pieces of the Dead Sea (Qumran) Scrolls found in 1946-47?

What is the Antikythera mechanism, recovered from a shipwreck in Greece?

What made the Rosetta Stone so valuable for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs?

Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement over 9,000 years old with houses packed wall to wall, no streets between them and rooftops used as walkways, is in which Turkish province?

Which archaeologist found Tutankhamun's almost untouched tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922?

Who dug Hisarlık Hill near Çanakkale in the 1870s and presented it as Troy, but is also remembered for his crude methods?

The Roman town of Pompeii was buried under the ash of which volcano in AD 79?

Who first spotted the Uluburun wreck off Kaş, one of the oldest known shipwrecks in the world, in 1982?

Some of archaeology's greatest finds were made not by professors but by curious teenagers crawling into a cave, farmers digging a well or divers collecting sponges on the seabed. Others were the reward of years of stubborn digging.

Ten questions, four options each. Every answer is settled knowledge in museum and excavation records.