The World's Most Mysterious Archaeological Discoveries

Sometimes one discovery is enough to rewrite an entire chapter of human history. A wooden structure survives for nearly half a million years. A city appears beneath a forest. A burned library can be read without opening a scroll. A royal tomb is identified after centuries of uncertainty.

The World's Most Mysterious Archaeological Discoveries investigates thirty finds including Kalambo Falls, Göbekli Tepe, Denisova Cave, the Upano Valley, Valeriana, Pompeii, the Herculaneum scrolls, Thonis-Heracleion, the Antikythera Mechanism, the Indus script, Sanxingdui, Ötzi, Sacsayhuamán, Nan Madol, Rapa Nui and Great Zimbabwe.

Along the way, Alden M. Corvale shows how LiDAR, ancient DNA, artificial intelligence, remote sensing and virtual unwrapping are changing what archaeologists can see. The result is a book about genuine mysteries without manufactured miracles: what the evidence establishes, where interpretation begins and which questions remain open.