Dig Labs Project
Investigating historic and prehistoric mysteries together through crowdfunded research.
Latest from this source
Collaborative Research
The introduction of non-native species reveals the seafaring reach and agricultural strategies of the island's builders.
Collaborative Research
The Giza plateau has been the subject of archaeological investigation for over two centuries, yet the question of whether significant undiscovered architectural features remain within or beneath its monuments continues to generate scholarly debate. The known internal structures of the three major pyramids — discovered through centuries of physical exploration from al-Ma'mun's forced entry in the 9th century CE to Howard Vyse's dynamite-assisted excavations in the 1830s — represent only what has been physically accessed. The advent of non-invasive geophysical methods, particularly muon tomography, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), has opened the possibility of detecting features that eluded earlier explorers.
Collaborative Research
The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, constructed during the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2560 BCE), has been the subject of non-invasive investigation since the ScanPyramids project commenced in 2015. The deployment of cosmic-ray muon radiography — a technique exploiting the differential absorption of naturally occurring muons as they pass through stone — has yielded the most significant structural discovery inside the pyramid since the 19th century: a large internal void above the Grand Gallery. This void, first announced in 2017, was detected independently by three separate muon detection technologies, lending unusual robustness to the finding.
Collaborative Research
Solving the Indus Valley script would help us understand the social, political, and literary history of this massive civilization.
Collaborative Research
We are hunting for the missing key to Linear A. Is the problem a lack of text, or are we missing the cultural context of the people who built the Labyrinth?
Collaborative Research
Who created this object? What astronomical knowledge does it encode? How was it used, why was it altered, and what does its final burial reveal?
Collaborative Research
Was the Baghdad Battery a medical device, a religious artifact, or the first known battery? Could it be part of a larger, more complex system lost to history?
Collaborative Research
We are bringing together the research to determine if the pyramid's precision was a local achievement or a legacy of a forgotten past.
Collaborative Research
We are following the leads across the savannas and bringing together the research on the aquatic roots of early societies.
Collaborative Research
The complex relationship with Homo sapiens tells a story of adaptation, genetic replacement, and eventual extinction.
Collaborative Research
Our investigation re-examines the chemical composition of the image and the potential for a "shadow" created by ancient artistic or natural processes.
Collaborative Research
The Great Pyramid of Giza is aligned to the cardinal points — north, south, east, and west — with an error of approximately 3 arc-minutes (0.05 degrees) counterclockwise from true north. The pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure exhibit similar but slightly different alignment errors. This level of precision, achieved without magnetic compasses (which were unknown in the ancient world) and without the Pole Star Polaris (which did not occupy the celestial north pole in the third millennium BCE due to precession), represents a remarkable feat of astronomical observation and surveying.
Collaborative Research
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in a remarkably short duration of time, likely between 20 and 27 years. How was this accomplished?
Collaborative Research
We are following the leads into the bureaucratic machinery of the Old Kingdom and bringing together the research on this model of mass-scale labor management.
Collaborative Research
The placement of stone blocks in the Egyptian pyramids required not merely transporting them to the correct elevation but positioning them with a precision that remains impressive by modern standards. At the Great Pyramid of Giza, the core blocks — averaging 2.5 tonnes — were fitted into courses with sufficient accuracy to maintain a smooth, continuous slope over 146 metres of height. The casing stones achieved joints averaging 0.5 millimetres. The granite beams of the King's Chamber, weighing up to 80 tonnes, were raised to a height of approximately 43 metres and placed with a precision that has preserved the chamber's integrity for over 4,500 years.
Collaborative Research
The casing stones of the Great Pyramid of Giza were fitted with joints averaging approximately 0.5 millimetres in width — a tolerance thinner than a standard credit card (approximately 0.76 mm). This precision, first systematically measured by W.M. Flinders Petrie in 1881–1882, has been confirmed by subsequent surveys and represents one of the most frequently cited examples of ancient engineering achievement. The casing stones were quarried from fine-grained Tura limestone, transported across the Nile, and dressed on-site to achieve a degree of surface flatness and joint tightness that approaches the limits of what is achievable with hand tools.
Collaborative Research
How did people transport pyramid blocks, some weighing hundreds of tons, from quarry to construction sites?
Collaborative Research
By examining records and the "Ennius" attribution, we are piecing together the identities of the figures who guarded Rome’s most famous military dynasty.
For two thousand years, the final resting place of Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony has remained archaeology’s most tantalizing "missing person" case.
Collaborative Research
By examining environmental records of ancient inundations, we are following the leads to understand the roots of this enduring tradition.
Collaborative Research
Are the similarities between lithic tools on opposite sides of the Atlantic purely a coincidence?
Collaborative Research
A potential discovery at the Coto Correa archaeological site in Spain could rewrite the history of human cognition.
Collaborative Research
Skeptics debate whether the Dispilio 'Tablet' incisions are a true proto-writing system or merely "marking" symbols for property, ritual, or tallying.
Collaborative Research
Is this patch of water truly a supernatural graveyard, or is it a victim of its own notoriety?
Collaborative Research
We’re going inside the stones to see if the blueprint for the world’s greatest monument was hidden in plain sight all along.
Is Waššukanni hidden beneath the tell-mounds of northeastern Syria, or was it erased so thoroughly by its successors that only dust remains?
Collaborative Research
Yet, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to conclude that it was, unless to demonstrate to the future an advanced mathematical knowledge.
Collaborative Research
We are following the leads of the Scottish sky-watchers and picking up the trails of evidence for prehistoric astronomy.
Collaborative Research
The Fourth Dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom (c. 2613–2494 BCE) produced the most massive and precisely constructed stone monuments in human history. Within approximately 120 years, three generations of pharaohs — Sneferu, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure — erected the Giza pyramid complex and the Dahshur monuments, consuming an estimated 25 million tonnes of stone. Yet by the Fifth Dynasty, pyramid construction had already diminished dramatically in scale, and by the end of the Sixth Dynasty, it had effectively ceased. No subsequent Egyptian civilization — not the Middle Kingdom, not the New Kingdom at the height of its imperial power — attempted to replicate the Giza achievement. Understanding why requires integrating evidence from political economy, environmental history, administrative records, and architectural analysis.
Collaborative Research
Plato described a civilization that vanished due to the wrath of the gods, an account that inspired thousands of years of exploration for a real-world location.
Collaborative Research
We are re-examining the earliest phases of urban life to see if the blueprint for modern society was written in the dust of a forgotten palace.
Collaborative Research
Were cobbles used intentionally to break mastodon bones at Cerutti Mastodon? If so, were hominins inhabiting the New World much earlier than previously thought?
Collaborative Research
The standard Egyptological position is that the Egyptian pyramids were royal tombs — monumental burial structures designed to protect the pharaoh's body and facilitate the transition to the afterlife. This interpretation is supported by substantial evidence: burial chambers, stone sarcophagi, canopic equipment, funerary texts (in later pyramids), associated mortuary temples, and the broader context of Egyptian funerary culture. Yet the tomb hypothesis has attracted persistent skepticism, fuelled by the notable absence of pharaonic mummies from the Giza pyramids, the empty sarcophagi, and the sheer scale of the structures relative to the modest spatial requirements of a burial.
Collaborative Research
We are following the leads on the first metalworkers to understand our technological origins and to bring together research on prehistoric high-heat chemistry.
Collaborative Research
While many elements will never be understood, it's possible to reconstruct some of the knowledge and thought behind Paleolithic cave art.
Collaborative Research
The discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows proved that Norse longships reached North America nearly 500 years before Columbus. A permanent colony or a seasonal shipyard?
Collaborative Research
The anatomy of a primate from the family Theranthropithecidae suggests bipedalism similar to that of humans. How far did things go?
Collaborative Research
We analyze the historical records and environmental conditions of the period to find the specific trigger for this mass event.
Collaborative Research
While the Terracotta Army is found, his actual burial chamber remains unopened and allegedly protected by rivers of mercury.
Collaborative Research
Directions to the Qumran Copper Scroll utilize obscure landmarks and vanished local names, making the treasure nearly impossible to track.
Collaborative Research
Our investigation utilizes AI and statistical linguistics to search for hidden structures and grammatical patterns within the text.
Collaborative Research
Our research examines the site's astronomical precision and its relationship to other medicine wheels across North America.
Collaborative Research
The base platform of the Great Pyramid of Giza is level to within approximately 2.1 centimetres (5/8 of an inch) across its entire 230-metre perimeter — a relative precision of approximately 0.009 per cent. This achievement, on a foundation that covers an area of approximately 5.3 hectares (13 acres), is remarkable by any standard: maintaining such flatness over such an area required either an extraordinary levelling instrument or an extraordinary levelling method applied with extraordinary patience. The builders had neither modern laser levels nor precision spirit levels; they accomplished this feat with water, string, and careful observation.
Collaborative Research
Its design suggests it was a multipurpose implement for butchery and woodworking, and possibly a ritual or aesthetic object, but the debate rages on.
Collaborative Research
The prevailing view leans toward symbolism over ventilation or astronomy, but the true purpose of the air shafts in the Great Pyramid of Giza remains uncertain.
Collaborative Research
We analyze genetic and archaeological evidence for the integration of the "Lost Colony" into local populations and examine records of the Little Ice Age.
Collaborative Research
Archaic humans, including Neanderthals and other pre-sapiens species, possessed skills far more specialized than traditional "caveman" stereotypes suggest.
Collaborative Research
Theories range from measuring devices and knitting tools to religious artifacts or status symbols, as no contemporary Roman texts mention them.
Collaborative Research
The presence of human populations on remote islands suggests that early cultures possessed maritime capabilities long before the dawn of recorded history.
Collaborative Research
Discoveries of "fire-making kits" in the Paleolithic show that early humans used friction and percussion tools to generate sparks at will.
Collaborative Research
The Phaistos Disk is a fired clay disk, approximately 15 centimetres in diameter, discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier at the Minoan palace of Phaistos in southern Crete. Both faces of the disk bear spiralling sequences of symbols — 241 individual impressions comprising 45 distinct sign types — produced not by incision but by pressing individual stamps or punches into the wet clay before firing. The disk is typically dated to the Middle or Late Minoan period (ca. 1700 BCE), though its precise dating remains contested because neither thermoluminescence dating nor other direct dating methods have been applied. The disk is unique: no other artefact bearing identical symbols has been found, and the script does not correspond to any of the known Minoan writing systems (Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A, or Linear B).
Collaborative Research
Speech patterns, social status, diet, anxiety management, and other traits are largely taught and reinforced by the mother.
Collaborative Research
By analyzing the landscape where the Onon and Kherlen rivers form, we are hunting for the site which was allegedly altered to hide the Mongol Emperor forever.
Collaborative Research
Beyond serving as an elite center, the investment required suggests a complex social mechanism involving trade control, ritual authority, or political theater.
Collaborative Research
How did the Paleolithic human diet differ from region to region and from seasonal availability?
Collaborative Research
The emergence of human language remains one of the most consequential and least understood transitions in evolutionary history. Unlike other biological traits, language leaves no direct fossil record; its reconstruction depends on convergent evidence from comparative primatology, neuroscience, archaeology, and genetics. The transition from the gestural and vocal communication systems of the great ape lineage to the recursive, symbolic grammars of modern humans almost certainly occurred in stages, each building upon neurological, social, and anatomical preconditions established by the last.
Collaborative Research
The transition from small, egalitarian bands to larger, cooperative societies required a fundamental shift in human social norms and psychology.
Collaborative Research
The capacity for mathematical reasoning and musical production appears to be a deeply embedded feature of human cognition, with archaeological evidence for both extending well into the Upper Palaeolithic and possibly earlier. Notched bones interpreted as tally systems date to at least 42,000 years BP, while functional bone flutes from the Swabian Jura in southwestern Germany are dated to approximately 35,000–43,000 years BP. These artefacts predate agriculture, urbanisation, and all other features of settled civilisation by tens of thousands of years, suggesting that the neural substrates for quantitative and tonal reasoning were in place long before any practical application in economic or administrative contexts.
Collaborative Research
Was Alexander the Great swallowed by the rising tides of the Mediterranean, or perhaps hidden by a populace protecting their god-king from religious fervor?
Collaborative Research
We are following the trail of human expansion and picking up the evidence of the first global explorers.
Collaborative Research
The Etruscan language, spoken in central Italy from at least the eighth century BCE until its gradual absorption by Latin during the first century BCE, occupies a singular position in the linguistic history of the Mediterranean. Despite a corpus of approximately 13,000 inscriptions — including the longest known Etruscan text, the Liber Linteus preserved as mummy wrappings in Zagreb — and a well-understood alphabet derived from a Greek model, the Etruscan language does not belong to the Indo-European family that encompasses virtually all other historically attested languages of Italy and most of Europe.
Collaborative Research
Stonehenge stands as England's most iconic prehistoric enigma, a circle of massive sarsen stones and smaller bluestones that has puzzled observers for millennia
Collaborative Research
Was it their mastery of the horse and chariot, or a revolutionary social structure that allowed them to absorb their neighbors so effectively?
Collaborative Research
Little is known of the people who carved the huge containers and the jars themselves give little clue as to their origins or purpose.
Collaborative Research
We investigate the stratigraphic layers and archaeological artifacts associated with the site to refine its timeline.
Collaborative Research
Why did ancient peoples risk life and limb to drag massive stones across great distances?
Collaborative Research
Numerous attempts to find treasure and artifacts on the island have often ended in death and destitution, and yet, treasure hunters will not give up hope.
Collaborative Research
By analyzing the quarrying methods and celestial alignments of these sites, we are following the leads into our prehistoric past.
Collaborative Research
What can a footprint tell us about a species that vanished 1.5 million years ago?
Collaborative Research
Experimental archaeology proves Easter Island's moai were 'walked' to coastal platforms, confirming Rapa Nui oral traditions about their ancestral monuments.
Collaborative Research
Hair color serves as a biological fingerprint for the complex mixing of lineages over millennia.
Collaborative Research
The search for the final resting places of the Old Kingdom's greatest pharaohs has led some researchers to investigate the Pyramid of Amenemhat I at Lisht.
Collaborative Research
This investigation follows the trail of royal cemeteries of Abydos and satellite imagery, probing the floodplains for mud-brick foundations of a lost city.
Collaborative Research
Somewhere beneath the silt layers of Iraq lies the world’s first imperial capital: Agade.
The Observatory Guides
- Coverage