Certain places are renowned for archaeology and the remains of ancient civilisations. The US doesn’t tend to be one of them – but perhaps it should be. While city architecture rarely goes back earlier than the 19th century, head off the beaten path and you can find wall paintings, rock carvings and impeccably preserved pre-Columbian dwellings. In September 2022, the oldest known man-made structure in North America was discovered in Louisiana. Here’s where to find these tucked-away windows on the past.
Archaeological sites are rarely more scenic than Lapakahi State Historical Park on the island of Hawaii’s North Kohala coast. The ancient fishing settlement is set against a backdrop of palm trees and shimmering blue waters and fringed by a striking beach with black and white stones.
Visitors can follow a series of trails with information panels explaining the significance of structures such as canoe storage houses, religious shrines and an ancient burial site. The remains have been partially restored to give a fascinating glimpse into the life of the fishing community – Koai'e – that lived here in the 1300s.
Ancestral Puebloans built what was effectively a huge trade centre in the heart of the New Mexican desert. Chaco Culture is made up of a series of huge stone buildings, constructed around AD 850, and it’s believed the hub was used as a ceremonial and administrative centre despite the arid landscape and long winters.
The park is located around 150 miles (241km) northwest of Albuquerque and accessed via dirt roads. Visitors can take ranger-led tours to view the remains of the impressive multi-storey ‘great houses’ up close and to learn about the spiritual significance of the surrounding mountains and mesas. A designated International Dark Sky Park, this is an atmospheric place to view the stars too.
The blazingly beautiful White Sands National Park is home to many fossils and fossilised footprints, including those of mammoths and sabre-toothed cats dating back up to 30,000 years. Archaeologists made perhaps their most exciting discovery in late 2020 when they unearthed a set of human footprints around the shore of the ancient (now evaporated) Lake Otero.
Research on the fossilised footprints (pictured) revealed them to be 21,000-23,000 years old, meaning they were here before the park’s signature gypsum dunes and are the oldest known human footprints in North America. Covering around a mile (1.6km), it’s also the longest track of fossilised human footprints ever discovered. They belong mostly to children and teenagers, including a child under three, and other prints show the people crossed paths with mammoths and giant sloths.
From a distance, Cliff Palace resembles a sprawling, intricate sandcastle city. Tucked in an alcove beneath the bluffs in Mesa Verde National Park, the Ancestral Puebloan ruin is believed to have been built between AD 1190 and 1260. It’s also the largest known cliff dwelling in North America.
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The palace’s 150 rooms and kivas – spaces used by Puebloans for religious rituals and meetings – are carved out of sandstone and supported by wooden beams and mortar. It’s incredibly well-preserved and (to keep it that way) tours are strictly with the park’s rangers and involve climbing ladders and steps.
Spread across six square miles (15.5sq km) and with an estimated population of 10,000-20,000, Cahokia was once bigger than London. Or at least, London as it was in AD 1250, which is when North America’s first-known city reached its peak. The land is dotted with more than 100 earthen mounds and their origins are shrouded in mystery.
An interpretive centre and gallery reveals what is known about the site, located a few miles outside Collinsville and across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. It’s thought to have been settled around AD 600, with a series of ‘Woodhenges’ – calendars made with red cedar posts that line up with the rising sun on certain days of the year – built by the Cahokia around AD 1100.
You’ll need a 4WD vehicle or a strong pair of legs to reach River House Ruin, a sandstone cliff dwelling built by Ancestral Puebloans between AD 900 and the late 1200s. The nearest town is Bluff, around 12 miles (19km) away, and it’s a five-mile (8km) hike from the highway, following a path characterised by deep sand and rocks. It’s well worth the effort, though.
The early desert dwelling is made up of a series of well-preserved rooms, some arranged over two storeys, tucked beneath apricot-hued cliffs. A one-mile (1.6km) trail follows the base of the structure and allows visitors to peek at hundreds of petroglyphs including an image of Kokopelli, a fertility deity and trickster god depicted with a flute and feathered headdress.
Around 30 minutes’ drive from River House Ruin you'll also find one of the finest surviving examples of Ancestral Puebloan wall art in Bears Ears National Monument. This petroglyph panel stretches for 300 feet (91m) and has rock art spanning more than 2,500 years. Images of fertility deity Kokopelli and a flute-playing bighorn sheep are marked onto the rock above clearer, more recent Ute and Navajo carvings.
Serpent Mound Historical Site in Peebles is around 70 miles (113km) east of Cincinnati. Thankfully there isn’t a real snake slithering beneath the grass. This is actually the world’s largest serpent effigy, a mound that winds across a plateau in the shape of a snake. Known as the Great Serpent Mound, it’s more than 1,300 feet (396m) long, 20-25 feet (6-7.6m) wide and protruding from the grassy ridge by up to five feet (1.5m).
This aerial shot gives some idea of the enormity of the mysterious beast. It’s believed to have been constructed by Native Ohioans, though archaeologists haven’t been able to pinpoint a specific culture or date, with estimates varying wildly from 321 BC to AD 1070. There are three burial mounds – two created by the Adena culture between 800 BC and AD 100 and one by the Fort Ancient culture (AD 1000-1650) – nearby.
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Locations don’t come much more impressive than the perch occupied by this high-rise building, tucked into limestone cliffs in the desert of Camp Verde. Montezuma Castle was built and occupied by the Sinagua people, believed to have lived here from AD 1100-1425, and used as an abode with 20 rooms.
It was among the first four sites given the designation ‘National Monument’, in 1906, and for decades visitors could access it via a series of cliffside ladders. Now, to prevent further damage, it can only be viewed from the ground. The site encompasses further dwellings around Montezuma Well (pictured), six miles (9.7km) from the castle – some of them more than 1,000 years old.
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National Geographic once described Moundville as ‘The Big Apple of the 14th Century’. The 29 flat-topped earthen mounds, crafted by Native Mississippians around 800 years ago, may not quite measure up to the skyscrapers of modern New York City but they speak of a sophisticated and advanced civilisation.
Today the archaeological park, on the Black Warrior River near Tuscaloosa, preserves 326 acres of the grounds. Visitors can follow a nature trail and paths that weave around the mounds, which were once topped with nobles’ homes and ceremonial structures. There’s also usually an annual festival celebrating the site and Native American culture.
The nine masonry buildings that make up vast Kinishiba once contained up to 500 rooms and housed up to 1,000 occupants. The Pueblo village, constructed by pre-Columbian Mogollon people between AD 1250-1350, was abandoned in the late 14th century for unknown reasons. Visitors to the site, which is in a grassy valley on land belonging to the White Mountain Apache Tribe, are required to check in at the Nohwike’ Bágowa Museum.
The earthen mounds at Poverty Point dwarf most others in size and also age – the oldest, Lower Jackson Mound, has been dated to around 3900 BC. The mounds and concentric half-circles were shaped by hand, without domestic animals and several centuries before the wheel was invented.
What isn’t yet known is the purpose of the site, though ongoing archaeological studies into the ground and artefacts suggest it may have been both residential and operated as a trade centre. Adding to the mystery, Poverty Point was abandoned sometime around 1100 BC and another Native group moved in around AD 700 – contributing another mound to the landscape.
Stone circles are so often shrouded in mystery. Bighorn Medicine Wheel, in northern Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest, goes one further and is shrouded in snow through the winter months. In summer, it melts away to reveal limestone rocks scattered in a wheel shape with spokes encased in a large circle.
Experts have dated the mountaintop site to at least AD 1300, and it forms part of a chain of American Indian archaeological sites up to 7,000 years old. It’s thought that the pattern was used to predict astronomical events such as the Summer Solstice, though the truth remains something of an enigma. The wheel is protected by a fence, on to which dreamcatchers and prayer cloths have been tied.
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Hopewellian people – made up of various Native American groups – gathered around the grassy mounds and enclosures of this National Historical Park for ceremonies from feasts to funerals. The mounds, built around 2,000 years ago and containing structures up to 1,000 feet (30.5m) wide, are preserved across six separate locations in the park.
Visitors can follow a self-guided trail around the mounds or, in summer, sign up for a ranger-led tour for a more in-depth look at the structures and archaeology. There’s also a museum, located inside the visitor centre, with artefacts unearthed during an excavation in the 1920s. These include tools used by Hopewell artisans, whose broad network from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains allowed them to gather a range of materials such as copper and sharks’ teeth.
This soapstone boulder was once a sacred site for Cherokee people, who believed an ancient giant creature called Judaculla landed here when jumping from one mountain to another. Carvings of stick figures, claw marks and winged shapes are etched into the rock, which archaeologists have dated between 2000 and 200 BC.
There’s evidence that humans inhabited this rugged land of canyons and cliffs more than 11,000 years ago, though the striking structures of Bandelier National Monument were built by Ancestral Puebloans around AD 1150. The Los Alamos site is home to the remnants of stone walls, petroglyphs and buildings that have been expertly carved into sheer rock faces.
A network of ladders and stone steps provides access to Alcove House, a vertiginous clifftop site that was once home to around two-dozen Ancestral Puebloans. The park has an extensive network of hiking trails that weave through forest and connect different villages, plus a visitor centre with exhibits of pottery and tools used by the inhabitants.
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They might not be much to look at, but beneath these two mounds contain remnants of the oldest known man-made structure in North America. In September 2022, radiocarbon analysis revealed that Mound B (originally constructed 11,000 years ago) was reconstructed around the same time of Mound A, both being completed roughly 6,000 years ago. Sediment core samples suggest that this was a ceremonial site and while similar mounds in Louisiana have been destroyed, these star-aligned mounds are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.