Anunnaki·Archives

Some questions you can only ask standing there.

A travelling archive of ancient places, the sky above them, and the things we still cannot account for.

Places
17 sites · 6 written
Threads
3 traced
Latest research
9 logged
Library
10 texts

What this is

Anunnaki Archives follows what is being dug up, scanned and argued about in archaeology right now, and keeps a permanent file on each place it concerns.

Egypt reopened the excavation at Hawara in May 2026. A dating paper on Gunung Padang was retracted in 2024. Muon scans keep finding rooms inside the Great Pyramid. These things happen constantly, they get reported once, and then they scatter across a hundred sites and videos that never follow up.

This is the place where it is collected, checked against its own sources, and kept up to date. No decision about the answer before looking at the evidence, and no pretending a question is closed when it is not.

How this archive works

Four kinds of page, each doing a different job.

Places

One site at a time. What physically stands there, what the sky does above it, and the questions still open. Every page says at the top whether I have been there or am working from published reports.

Threads

Stories that turn up in more than one culture. Each one states which kind of link is plausible: shared ancestry, contact, independent invention, or unresolved.

Discoveries

Recent research, checked against its own sources. Each carries a plain label saying whether it is peer reviewed, disputed, or an unreviewed preprint.

Library

The primary texts themselves, free to read in full, with the age of every translation stated so you know how current it is.

Every page carries its sources and a review date. Where something is speculation rather than evidence, it sits in a marked box and says so. If you find an error, tell me and it gets corrected with a note saying what changed.

Latest research

What has actually been published or excavated recently, and what it changes.

Every entry links to its source. Where a claim is contested or unreviewed, it says so on the line rather than in a footnote.

7 May 2026

Egypt reopens the dig at Hawara

The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities confirmed new fieldwork beside the pyramid of Amenemhat III, in the area where classical writers placed a labyrinth they considered greater than the pyramids. Radar surveys in 2008 found room-shaped anomalies at eight to twelve metres depth across hectares.

Why it matters: this is the first serious attempt in over a century to test whether those anomalies are architecture. Groundwater is destroying the site while the argument continues.

Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities · full dossier

Excavating now

9 June 2026

Stonehenge's Altar Stone was hauled 700 kilometres

New analysis indicates the six-tonne Altar Stone was deliberately transported from Scotland to Salisbury Plain, a far greater distance than the Welsh bluestones and over terrain that makes the feat considerably harder to explain.

Why it matters: it is direct evidence that Neolithic people moved megalithic stone across most of an island, on purpose, for reasons we do not understand. The same question sits under Sacsayhuamán and Baalbek.

Reported via ScienceDaily, archaeology section

Peer reviewed

20 May 2026

Humans were living in West African rainforest 150,000 years ago

For decades the assumption was that early humans avoided dense rainforest as near-impossible terrain. Evidence from West Africa pushes occupation of that environment back dramatically.

Why it matters: rainforest destroys organic material and hides everything under canopy. If people were living there that early, a large part of the human record is somewhere we have barely looked.

Reported via ScienceDaily, archaeology section

Peer reviewed

10 August 2026

Koskarlı Cave pushes northern Anatolia's record back to 12,900 BC

Bone and charcoal from a cave near Trabzon date an intact hunter-gatherer occupation layer to between roughly 12,916 and 12,070 BC, with hearths, flint and obsidian tools including forms matching styles from Anatolia and the Caucasus.

Why it matters: this is the same window and the same region as Göbekli Tepe, and it fills a gap in who was living there before the enclosures went up.

Cambridge University Press · see also Göbekli Tepe dossier

Peer reviewed

2026

LiDAR estimates tens of thousands of earthworks in southwest Amazonia

A survey published in Nature uses airborne laser scanning to estimate the scale of pre-Columbian earthwork construction under Amazon canopy. Separately, LiDAR in the Chocó region of eastern Panama revealed traces of human modification beneath dense forest.

Why it matters: the Amazon was described for most of the twentieth century as pristine wilderness. It now looks like heavily engineered landscape, and almost none of it has been excavated.

Nature

Peer reviewed

18 June 2026

Plague was killing people 5,500 years ago

Ancient DNA from hunter-gatherer cemeteries in Siberia shows plague circulating long before cities, farming, or the rat-borne conditions usually blamed for historic outbreaks.

Why it matters: it removes a comfortable assumption about cause and effect, and shows how much sequencing is still rewriting the basics.

Reported via ScienceDaily, archaeology section

Peer reviewed

Jan 2026

A preprint claims the Great Pyramid is 23,000 years old

Engineer Alberto Donini proposed dating by comparing weathering on stone exposed since construction against stone exposed only since the casing was stripped in the fourteenth century. The model centres on roughly 22,900 BCE.

Where it wrings: unreviewed, its twelve measurements disagree with each other by tens of thousands of years before being averaged, and it has to explain away Merer's logbook, a dated administrative record of the pyramid's Fourth Dynasty construction.

Preprint on Zenodo · Giza dossier

Unreviewed

2023 to 2024

Did Homo naledi bury its dead?

Lee Berger's team argues a small brained hominin deliberately buried its dead in South Africa over 240,000 years ago, alongside wall engravings. The paper went through eLife's peer review and the reviewers themselves are publicly split.

Where it wrings: this is a dispute inside mainstream science, not mainstream against fringe. One reviewer publicly disputed the team's claim of reviewer consensus.

eLife

Contested

March 2024

Gunung Padang paper retracted

The 2023 claim of a 27,000 year old buried pyramid in West Java was withdrawn by Archaeological Prospection after specialists raised concerns that the radiocarbon dates could not be tied to human occupation layers.

Why it stays here: the retraction is correct on the evidence, but the question of what is actually under the terraces has not gone away.

Retraction notice · full dossier

Retracted

Places

One location at a time: what stands there, what the sky does above it, and the questions still open. See all seventeen →

The eroded pyramid of Amenemhat III at HawaraDigging now

Hawara and the Labyrinth

Egypt · 29.27° N

Herodotus said it surpassed the pyramids, then it vanished. Radar found room-shaped anomalies under the mud. In May 2026 Egypt started digging again.

Photo: Markh, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Great Pyramid of GizaVisited

Giza and Saqqara

Egypt · 29.98° N

Aligned to true north to within a fifteenth of a degree. I stood in the King's Chamber and understood less than when I arrived.

Photo: Nina Aldin Thune, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

T-shaped pillars in Building D at Göbekli TepeAncient Apocalypse

Göbekli Tepe

Türkiye · 37.22° N

Ten-tonne carved pillars raised by people with no pottery, no metal and no farming, then deliberately buried.

Photo: Zhengan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The zigzag terrace walls of SacsayhuamánAncient Apocalypse

Sacsayhuamán and Machu Picchu

Peru · 13.51° S

Blocks over a hundred tonnes with joints you cannot fit a blade into, cut on faces that were then buried inside the wall.

Photo: CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The hill of Visocica near Visoko, BosniaResolved

Visoko

Bosnia and Herzegovina · 43.99° N

The hill called the Pyramid of the Sun. What the geologists found, and why people keep coming anyway.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons, see file page for licence and author

Retracted

Gunung Padang

Indonesia · 6.99° S

A real megalithic terrace, a 27,000-year claim, and a journal that withdrew the paper eighteen months later.
Stacked basalt columns at Nan Madol, MicronesiaIn progress

Nan Madol

Micronesia · 6.84° N

Ninety-two artificial islets of stacked basalt, raised on a reef in the open Pacific.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons, see file page for licence and author

The trilithon stones in the west wall at BaalbekIn progress

Baalbek

Lebanon · 34.01° N

Roman temples on a platform of the largest worked stones ever set in a wall. The Romans left no record of them.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons, see file page for licence and author

Threads

The same story, found in more than one place. Not proof of contact, but a record of where a motif turns up, and what kind of link that could mean.

The Cosmic Hunt

What is there
A bear, pursued into the sky, becomes the Great Bear. The same core motif appears among Siberian, North American and some European hunting cultures.
What is proposed
Julien d'Huy's statistical reconstruction of motif variants suggests the story could be tens of thousands of years old, old enough to have travelled with the first people into the Americas.
Type of connection
Possibly common descent. One of the few motifs with a quantitative case for a shared, ancient origin rather than separate invention.
What stays open
The statistical method itself is debated, and the motif catalogues it depends on are incomplete.

Primary texts: the Library →

The Flood

What is there
Deluge accounts appear in Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Aboriginal Australian and North American traditions, many recorded before those cultures were in contact.
What is proposed
Independent memory of real regional flooding at the end of the last glacial period. Or a shared narrative structure any river-dwelling people would arrive at. Or diffusion along trade routes earlier than we assume.
Type of connection
Unresolved. Arguments for convergence and for contact both exist, and no single case here is strong enough to settle it.
What stays open
Sea level rose roughly 120 metres after the last ice age. Whatever coastal world existed before that is now underwater, and we have surveyed almost none of it.

Aligned to the Sky

What is there
Giza to true north. Newgrange to the winter solstice sunrise. Chichén Itzá to the equinox. Stonehenge to the summer solstice. Different continents, different millennia.
What is proposed
That any agricultural society watching the horizon would arrive at solstice markers independently, since the sky is the one calendar everyone has.
Type of connection
Most likely convergence: independent invention, not shared descent.
What stays open
Convergence explains the impulse. It explains the precision less easily, and the precision is what you notice on site.
What if

Convergence is the sensible answer to why the same stories keep appearing, and I think it is mostly right. People everywhere watch the same sky, fear the same water, and bury the same dead.

But convergence explains the subject better than it explains the detail. Why seven, so often? Seven gates, seven judges, seven sisters, seven sages. There is a tidy answer, namely seven visible wandering lights in the sky and seven days to a moon's quarter, and it may well be the whole answer. It just always feels like slightly less than the question deserves.

Library

Ten texts, free to read in full, each with the vintage of its translation stated up front. Open the library →

Full text · 1902 translation

Enuma Elish

The Babylonian creation epic, where the Anunnaki are assigned their stations and humanity is made from a god's blood. L.W. King's translation, free to read in full.

 Full text · 1876 translation

The Flood Tablet

George Smith's translation of a deluge story older than Genesis, the find that made headlines worldwide in 1872.

 Oxford ETCSL · modern

The Sumerian King List

Alulim ruled 28,800 years. Then the flood came, and suddenly the reigns are human-length. Nobody knows what those numbers are doing.

Watch & Explore

The videos ask the question in ten minutes. The archive holds what didn't fit: sources, maps, and the parts still open.

Latest video

[ video title goes here ]

Link this card to your most recent upload, and point the description of that video back at the matching dossier above.

Why I started this

I went to Egypt expecting an answer. Standing in the Valley of the Kings, and later inside the Great Pyramid, I came out with a longer list of questions than I'd brought.

That surprised me more than the monuments did. I had assumed the ancient world was mostly settled, that archaeologists had it figured out, and what was left were footnotes. Standing there, I couldn't square that assumption with what I was looking at.

The more I read afterwards, the more I found the same pattern everywhere: a real archaeological answer in some places, genuine and ongoing disagreement in others, and a fair number of places where nobody actually knows yet. I couldn't find anywhere that organised those three honestly. Most things I read had already decided which one they wanted to be before they started.

I wanted a place that hadn't decided yet. That's what this is.

Sky and stone

Almost every place in this archive was built by people who watched the horizon far more carefully than we do. They knew where the sun would rise on the shortest day. They knew which stars vanished for a season and came back. They put that knowledge into stone, at a scale that cost them decades.

We inherited the buildings and lost the reason. I do not think that is a small thing to have lost.

This archive is not an argument. It is a record of going to look: what stands there, what the sky does above it, what has been proposed, and what is still missing. I am not qualified to close these questions. I am only stubborn enough to keep asking them out loud.

NS WE 062° jun118° dec

Sunrise azimuths at 29.98° N, the latitude of the Giza plateau. Approximate, ignoring refraction and local horizon height.