Secrets in the Dust

Hawaiian-born, Yale-educated Hiram Bingham was determined to make a name for himself as an explorer. At the beginning of the 20th Century, when the last empty spaces on the globe were fast disappearing, he decided to climb South America’s highest mountain and discover the legendary last refuge of the Incas after the Conquistadors’ invasion. In the end, the mountain he scaled turned out to be only the second-highest.

In one of the epic stories of archaeology, German multimillionaire Heinrich Schliemann set out to find the true location of Troy, site of the duel of Achilles and Hector in the Trojan War, the greatest legend of the ancient world. In decades of patient detective work, fortuitous encounters, endless energy, and obsessive ambition, he discovered a fabulous horde of jewellery - Priam's Treasure - at a multilayered site he was convinced was Troy. He was right about the location, but wrong about the treasure (by 2000 years and several levels of excavation). In his quest for "authenticity", Schliemann even married a young Greek woman, making her desperately unhappy until she resigned herself to her role as his muse and helper. Schliemann managed to hide some of his most valuable finds from the Turkish authorities.

From the 1860s to the 1880s two explorers - the German Teobert Maler and the American Edward Thompson - competed in a bitter rivalry to find and photograph lost Mayan cities, deep in the Mexican and Guatemalan jungles. Maler was the superior scientist and photographer, but Thompson had a flair for adventure and self-promotion - and a way of keeping his discoveries out of government hands. Between them, they rediscovered a wonderful lost civilisation, whose language and architecture still challenges today's hi-tech archaeologists. Teobert Maler died embittered and almost forgotten; but his photographs are still treasured as the first and best records of Mayan cities before they were overrun by tourists from the developed world.

Archaeology, as we understand it, didn't exist in 1758 when Johann Joachim Winckelmann made his way from the royal library in Dresden, Germany, to visit another private collection. He wanted to see the King of Naples's museum of statues, salvaged from crude digs at the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1700 years after their destruction in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79. The king's guards refused him entry. But Winckelmann persevered, sneaking into the museum and the excavation sites, until he published an illicit catalogue of the finds that took the civilized world by storm, sparking a new interest in, and understanding of, the classical world.

As Indian independence approached in the first half of the 20th century, British archaeologists John Hubert Marshall and Sir Mortimer Wheeler worked at breakneck speed to understand the great ancient civilisations of the subcontinent, which the British Empire had ruled for a mere 200 years. The British archaeologists and their Indian colleagues succeeded in identifying the Indus civilisation, a sophisticated culture up to 4000 years old whose towns and cities built of clay bricks extended over a vast area - apparently without the use of a written language. But as they worked on, in peace and then in war, the archaeologists found themselves faced with a familiar question. Was this advanced Indus civilisation peaceful, or was it forged and maintained through cruel wars?

Fifty years before the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, Frenchman Auguste Mariette and German Emil Brugsch worked together in Cairo and Luxor to identify and decipher the contents of the tombs where the Pharaohs were laid to rest. They discovered the names and dates of Egypt's earliest Pharaohs, the ones who created Egypt's Empire and civilisation; they started the collection that would become the legendary Egyptian Museum in Cairo; and most importantly they found the tomb - and the mummy - of the greatest Pharaoh of them all: Ramses II.

Alfred Merlin was digging for Roman remains in Tunisia in 1907 when sponge-divers identified mysterious remains - stone columns, just off-shore in the Mediterranean. Was this the legendary lost city of Atlantis? But when beautifully crafted Roman works of art were salvaged from the site, Merlin came to an even more intriguing conclusion: These were the remains of a Roman shipwreck. The Mediterranean, he knew, was the highway of the ancient world - water was the only efficient way to transport heavy goods quickly throughout the Empire. And when greedy traders overloaded their ships, the resulting disasters left behind a gift for archaeologists 2000 later.

Through its ability to make us dream and marvel at the achievements of the past, archaeology has evolved from an inconspicuous discipline based on ruins and fragments into one of the most attention-grabbing fields of scientific study today. Luckily for him, Eduard Seler had a weak constitution; in 1882 he met and married his doctor's daughter. Caecilie's energy and curiosity complemented Eduard's intellectual passion and capacity for hard, detailed work, and together they left Berlin for Mexico to decipher the codices of the Aztecs.

It was a chance find of a coin in a field that led Isodoro Falchi to identify the site Vetulonia the last township of the Etruscan federation. This loose grouping of hilltop cities inhabited Italy's beautiful Tuscany region for 1,000 years, until their disappearance around 500 BC. Because they decorated their tombs as facsimiles of their homes, we know exactly how they lived. From these, their unmistakable statues and other artifacts, we know that they used iron tools, built towns with stone temples, and lived in terraced houses with small interior pools. Theirs was a sensuous, prosperous lifestyle of banquets and pleasure, with equality between the sexes - and a healthy interest in sex itself

Alfred Rust was a humble electrician in 1920s Germany when he first discovered ice-age tools in a swamp near Hamburg. At that time no-one believed that ice-age man could have survived this far north. No scholar would take this amateur’s views seriously, so in 1930 he set off on a 3,000km bicycle ride to Syria, to learn about ice age civilizations. His studies there made his reputation, and back in Germany he could demonstrate how nomadic ice-age hunters lived from the meat and hides of great reindeer herds whose migration routes led between the glaciers.

In 1923 Ernst Herzfeld was the greatest living scholar of the Persian Empire, that ruled in the Middle East from 612BC until it was defeated by Alexander the Great in 330BC. That year Herzfeld set out on his last major expedition. It would last more than 10 years. It would make crucial discoveries about this misunderstood civilisation, and it would end in personal disaster. A German expedition in the 1920s was of necessity small-scale, operating with little or no money. The defeated power in WWI could no longer afford such "luxuries". But this was also an opportunity: the colonial powers - Britain and France - were not popular with the local governments in the region.

Angkor Wat is often hailed as one of the most extraordinary architectural creations ever built, with its intricate bas-reliefs, strange acoustics and magnificent soaring towers. Angkor Wat, originally named Vrah Vishnulok - the sacred abode of Lord Vishnu, is the largest temple in the world. It was built by King Suryavarman II in the 12th century. The Sanskrit Nagara (capital) was modified by the Cambodian tongue to Nokor and then to Angkor. The word Angkor is derived from the Sanskrit word 'nagara' meaning 'holy city'. Vatika is Sanskrit word for temple. "The city which is a temple," Angkor Wat is a majestic monument, the world's largest religious construction in stone, and an architectural masterpiece.