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Every dossier here is free to read and will stay that way. If you want to help, what you are funding is plane tickets.
What the money is for
There is a difference between writing about a place and standing in it. I know because I have done both, and the Giza dossier on this site is the only one written from inside the building. The rest are honest, sourced, and assembled from other people's published fieldwork, and every one of them is marked as such at the bottom of the page.
I would like more of them to be the first kind.
Flights, permits, guides, a decent camera, and the time off work to use them.
That is the whole budget. There is no team, no office and no production company. When a trip happens you will see exactly what it produced, and when one does not, I will say so.
What I will not do with it
Worth stating plainly, because this niche has a bad habit of blurring the line between funding and influence:
- No sponsored content. Nobody pays to appear in a dossier, ever.
- No paywalled research. If I find something, it goes on the open site.
- No supporter influence over conclusions. You can suggest a site to investigate. You cannot buy the answer.
- No affiliate links dressed up as recommendations. If I ever link to a book I earn from, it will say so on the line.
If an excursion is funded and the site turns out to be less interesting than hoped, that gets written up too. A trip that produces a boring answer is still a result, and pretending otherwise is how this field goes wrong.
Ways to help that cost nothing
Money is not the only useful thing, and for most people it is not the best thing:
- Send a correction. If something here is wrong, I want to know, and it gets fixed with a note saying what changed.
- Send a source. Papers, excavation reports, old translations, especially anything in a language I do not read.
- If you have been to one of these places, tell me what the guidebooks got wrong.
- Share a dossier with someone who would argue with it.
Göbekli Tepe, and not for the pillars. For the ninety per cent that has not been dug, and for Kültepe and Karahan Tepe nearby, where the same thing is coming out of the ground right now with almost nobody watching.
After that, Peru, because you cannot settle an argument about whether stone joints are humanly achievable by reading about them. You have to put your hand on one.
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