Exploring Lost Places

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Stonehenge

Photograph by Ken Geiger

Nearly a third of all National Geographic grants have gone toward archaeological fieldwork across the globe. Our grantees have unearthed evidence of China's earliest rice production, located ancient shipwrecks off Africa, explored Egypt's Giza plateau, and much more. The first archaeology grant went to Hiram Bingham in 1912 to excavate Machu Picchu-Peru's once lost Inca city. Four years later Neil M. Judd was awarded a grant to begin his excavation of the ancient Anasazi culture's Pueblo Bonito site in New Mexico. In 1938, after receiving the first of 18 grants, Matthew Stirling ventured into the lowlands of Mexico and uncovered colossal stone heads of the ancient Olmec culture.
More recently the Society has supported much of the work of pioneer underwater archaeologist George Bass, as well as that of another premier nautical archaeologist, Robert Ballard. National Geographic has also supported Naguib Kanawati's excavations at Akhmim in Egypt, enabling Kanawati to—among other things—correct many of the errors in the early-1900s documentation of hieroglyphs.
We are committed—as we have been for more than a century—to supporting new archaeology projects around the world.
Sun temple, astronomical observatory, calendar—many investigators have tried solving the riddle posed by that famous circle of stones standing in southern England. Today Mike Parker Pearson and his colleagues might be getting tantalizingly close. The results of their excavations in the surrounding fields are now suggesting that Stonehenge originally served both as a permanent abode for the ancestral dead and as a renowned place of healing.


Link for further photos -

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/lost-places-gallery/?source=link_fb20120829exp-lostcities&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20120829exp-lostcities&utm_campaign=Content