A travelling archive of ancient places, the sky above them, and the things we still cannot account for.
Update · 12 October 2026
The Durupınar dig reports no bedrock in its drill holes and a lot of dark, organic-rich soil. Every laboratory result is still pending, nothing is peer-reviewed, and a 1996 geological study still calls the formation natural. The straight answer, the sources and the open questions:
Read the Durupınar update →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 A dating paper on Gunung Padang was retracted in 2024.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.
Four kinds of page, each doing a different job.
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.
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.
Recent research, checked against its own sources. Each carries a plain label saying whether it is peer reviewed, disputed, or an unreviewed preprint.
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.
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.
12 Oct 2026
Andrew Jones of Noah's Ark Scans told Fox News Digital that core drilling at 12 locations at Durupınar found "mainly soil," some boulders and no bedrock, to about 18 to 20 metres. More than 300 soil samples are waiting for laboratory analysis, expected over the winter, with a fuller report in spring 2027. Pottery found beside the formation is tentatively dated by style from the Copper Age to the Iron Age.
Why it matters: if the cores hold up, the "folded bedrock" description of the formation needs revisiting. A natural slope deposit would also contain soil and boulders, so it narrows the natural explanations without proving a built one. Almost everything comes from the team itself, and no independent geologist has logged the cores.
Fox News Digital, 2 Oct · Fox News Digital, 3 Oct · Durupınar dossier
Oct 2026
On 1 October, Noah's Ark Scans, the independent group funding and promoting the Durupınar dig, issued a press release quoting radar engineer Dr. Khosrow Bakhtar that the subsurface pattern his system detected is "100% NOT a geological formation." Days earlier, the academic project's own Andrew Jones had said the opposite kind of thing: that no material had been identified as wood and no lab results were in yet. Both statements are from the same 2026 excavation, led by Prof. Dr. Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University.
Why it matters: Bakhtar's own hedge, "it could be a ship, it could be a spaceship," undercuts the certainty of his headline more than it supports it. The claim is a press release from an organisation that also solicits donations, not a lab report, and it has not been peer-reviewed.
6 Aug 2025
Stone tools at Calio, southern Sulawesi, dated to at least 1.04 million years, show hominins, not modern humans, reached the island by crossing a deep-water barrier long before Homo sapiens existed. No hominin fossils have been recovered at the site, so who made the tools is still unknown.
Why it matters: this pushes the earliest known seafaring, or at minimum deliberate water crossing, back by hundreds of thousands of years, and does it with a species we cannot yet name.
Hakim, B. et al., Nature, 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09348-6
31 Aug 2026
Two unrelated claims keep getting merged into one. In 2024, a Japanese and Egyptian team (Sato et al., Tohoku University) used ground radar and resistivity scans on Giza's Western Cemetery and found a real, cautiously reported L-shaped anomaly, backfilled with sand, of unknown purpose. Separately, a 2022 paper by Biondi and Malanga claiming radar-imaged chambers inside the Khufu pyramid was retracted by its journal, Remote Sensing, in August 2026. The authors dispute the retraction.
Where it wrings: the same two researchers held a press conference in March 2025 announcing a vastly bigger claim, structures and a tunnel network reaching about two kilometres down beneath the Giza plateau, never peer-reviewed. Many scientists dismissed it, and the geophysicist Retraction Watch consulted calls the method physically impossible for this use. That claim is still circulating online as if it were the same thing as the cautious 2024 study. It isn't.
27 Mar 2026
At Buto, in the Nile Delta, a Saite-period structure, possibly a tomb or temple around 2,600 years old, was located using combined satellite radar and electrical resistivity tomography, published in Acta Geophysica. Buto was occupied from roughly 3800 BCE to the early Islamic era, and most of it has never been excavated.
Why it matters: this is the boring, reliable version of what the Giza claims above are pretending to be. Same category of technology, actually peer-reviewed, actually cautious about what it found.
Acta Geophysica, 2026, via Phys.org
Open question
Amenhotep III's original core and Ramesses II's later additions sit on measurably different azimuths. Studied by Schwaller de Lubicz from 1937 and still unresolved: astronomical realignment and simple river-facing practicality both remain live explanations.
Why it's here: not a new discovery, but a genuinely open question in mainstream Egyptology that most guidebooks skip entirely.
7 May 2026
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. A campaigning foundation reports a megalithic wall there; that is not confirmed.
Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities · full dossier
4 Jun 2026
A team led from Curtin University, with Sheffield Hallam and other partners, matched the mineral grains of the six-tonne Altar Stone most closely to sandstone in Caithness, about 700 km from Stonehenge. Their ice-sheet modelling suggests glaciers could at most have carried it part of the way, as far as the Dogger Bank, so the authors conclude that people moved it the rest, probably in stages over land and water. The exact source is not yet pinned down.
Why it matters: if the authors are right, it is direct evidence that Neolithic people moved megalithic stone across most of an island, on purpose, for reasons we do not understand. Whether glaciers did part of the work was a live argument, and the modelling answers it for this one stone only. The same question sits under Sacsayhuamán and Baalbek.
Clarke, Veness et al., Journal of Quaternary Science, 2026 · Curtin University release. I read the release and a press summary, not the paper.
26 Feb 2025
Stone tools at Bété I, in southern Côte d'Ivoire, including heavy picks, were dated by luminescence and electron spin resonance to about 150,000 years ago. Pollen, phytoliths and plant wax in the same sediments point to wet tropical forest. The authors call it the oldest clear association between humans and that habitat in Africa; the oldest secure association before this was about 18,000 years old.
Why it matters: rainforest destroys organic material and hides everything under canopy, so a large part of the human record may be somewhere we have barely looked. The limits are real: it is one site, quarrying destroyed it in 2020 to 2021, and the original tool collections were lost in the 2011 civil war, so the artefacts are known from excavation records. The authors say the classification of the tools needs further study.
10 August 2026
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
30 Jul 2026
Pärssinen and colleagues report in Nature that airborne laser scanning over parts of Acre and Amazonas in Brazil has revealed more than 20,000 pre-colonial earthworks, and they estimate roughly 24,000 to 30,000 in the region they attribute to what they call the Aquiry civilization. In one survey block, satellite imagery showed 30 structures and LiDAR showed 156.
Why it matters: the Amazon was long described as pristine wilderness. It now looks like a heavily engineered landscape, and almost none of it has been excavated. Treat the population figure, 1.25 to 3 million at a peak around 100 to 300 CE, with care: it rests on assumptions about people per site and how many sites were in use at once, and the south-eastern limits are unsurveyed.
Pärssinen et al., Nature, 2026, as reported by The Debrief. I read the press report, not the paper.
18 Jun 2026
Macleod and colleagues report in Nature DNA from 46 people buried in four cemeteries along the Angara River near Lake Baikal in Siberia. Eighteen carried plague DNA, from two previously unknown strains, in two outbreaks about 5,600 to 5,300 and 5,100 to 4,900 years ago. Wild marmots are the believed source, and the disease was likely the pneumonic form, which does not need fleas or rats.
Why it matters: deadly epidemics did not wait for cities or farming, and the rat-and-flea story belongs to later outbreaks. The sample is small, with 31 of the 46 from one site, and the authors hedge the marmot source and the role of a gene feature in the strains' severity.
Jan 2026
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.
2023 to 2024
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.
March 2024
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.
Twenty-two sites, each with its own dossier: what stands there, what the sky does above it, and the questions still open. See all twenty-two →
Digging nowEgypt · 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
VisitedEgypt · 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.
Photographed on site
VisitedEgypt · 25.70° N
Built for a festival where the gods crossed the river. The king who expanded it didn't quite agree with the original axis, and nobody has settled why.
Photographed on site
Ancient ApocalypseTürkiye · 37.22° N
Ten-tonne carved pillars raised by people with no pottery, no metal and no farming. The temple story is being rewritten by its own excavators.
Photo: Zhengan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ancient ApocalypsePeru · 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.
Photographed on site
ResolvedBosnia and Herzegovina · 43.99° N
The hill called the Pyramid of the Sun. What the geologists found, and why people keep coming anyway.
Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
RetractedIndonesia · 6.99° S
A real megalithic terrace, a 27,000-year claim, and a journal that withdrew the paper five months later.
Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In progressBolivia · 16.55° S
Sub-millimetre precision in one of the hardest stones there is. The archaeologist who dated it to the Ice Age used real astronomy and a false premise.
Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In progressMicronesia · 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
Lebanon · 34.01° N
Three 800-tonne stones in a wall, a 1,650-tonne one abandoned in the quarry, and a temple axis that may point at the Pleiades, or at nothing.
Photo: Guillaume Piolle, licensed CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Türkiye · 39.44° N
Has Noah's Ark been found? Not yet. A 1996 study calls this boat-shaped formation near Mount Ararat natural. The 2026 dig reports no bedrock in its drill holes and is waiting for lab results.
Photo: Wikkiwooki, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Jordan · 30.33° N
The facades get photographed. The achievement is the water engineering, and a 2024 dig under the Treasury is still turning up tombs.
Photo: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Mexico · 19.69° N
A hundred thousand people, and we do not know what they called the city, what they spoke, or who ruled them.
Licensed CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ancient ApocalypseMexico · 19.06° N
The largest pyramid on earth by volume. The Spanish took it for a hill and built a church on top.
Photo: Hajor, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Ancient ApocalypseUnited States · 32.64° N
Hunter-gatherers raised a mound of 238,500 cubic metres in months. A 2025 study argues nobody was directing them.
Photo: Jennifer R. Trotter, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
United States · 48.00° N
Thousands of hand-dug pits on Isle Royale and the Keweenaw. Lake mud dates the mining boom to about 6,500 years ago, and the famous 1.5-billion-pound estimate is disputed.
Photo: US National Park Service, public domain, via nps.gov
Ancient ApocalypseTürkiye · 38.37° N
Eighty-five metres down, room for up to twenty thousand people, and a dating problem: you cannot radiocarbon-date rock that was carved away.
Photo: Betül Balcı, free to use under the Pexels licence, via Pexels
Bahamas · 25.76° N
A submerged line of limestone blocks. The geology says beachrock; the shape keeps making people look twice.
Illustration, no verified photo yet
Iraq · 30.96° N
A ziggurat, a city abandoned for reasons the sources disagree on, and a Sumerian lament in which the Anunnaki decide its fate.
Photo: khezez, free to use under the Pexels licence, via Pexels
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.
Primary texts: the Library →
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.
Twelve texts, free to read in full, each with the vintage of its translation stated up front. Open the library →
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 translationGeorge Smith's translation of a deluge story older than Genesis, the find that made headlines worldwide in 1872.
Oxford ETCSL · modernAlulim ruled 28,800 years. Then the flood came, and suddenly the reigns are human-length. Nobody knows what those numbers are doing.
The videos ask the question in ten minutes. The archive holds what didn't fit: sources, maps, and the parts still open.
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.
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.
Sunrise azimuths at 29.98° N, the latitude of the Giza plateau. Approximate, ignoring refraction and local horizon height.
One letter each Sunday: what was found this week, where I am going next, and one question worth carrying around.
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