Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Finding My Way from Stonehenge to Samarkand

By Brian Fagan

Fagan_stonehenge_9780195160918When I sat down to compile my latest book From Stonehenge to Samarkand, I found my greatest inspiration in the writings of a virtually forgotten English writer, Rose Macaulay. Her classic book, Pleasure of Ruins, first appeared in the 1950s and was reprinted with evocative photographs by Reny Beloff a decade later. Macaulay got me thinking about the sheer excitement of seeing an archaeological site with your own eyes. She fell in love with ruins—something I have never been able to do—but, like her, I have been lucky enough to experience remarkably intense emotional connections with archaeological sites both ancient and relatively recent, spectacular and seemingly inconspicuous.

This kind of emotion is something that seems alien to a scientist, but it shouldn’t be. Archaeology is not the study of deserted earthworks and abandoned cities, of artifacts and statuary. It’s the study of people, people like us who loved and hated, were born, grew up, fell in love, got married, had families, and eventually died. Anyone who quests for the past, even scientists, is searching for the people of the past—and there’s nothing wrong about feeling an emotional connection with them. Visiting a deserted Great Zimbabwe in Central Africa during a full moon was a truly extraordinary moment in my own life. So was gazing over the ramparts of the Iron Age hill fort at Maiden Castle in southern England on a foggy, lowering day, a place with serried earthworks attacked by a Roman legion in 43 AD. I could almost hear the war cries of the attackers, the screams and yells of the defenders, and the crackling flames of huts torched in the melee. It was all a dream, of course, but for a brief moment the deserted hill fort came alive.

Modern archaeological travelers have a very different experience from those of their predecessors. I was lucky enough to visit many of the great sites in the 1950s, when getting to many of them was still a mild adventure and you were likely to have places like the Valley of the Kings, Petra, and Angkor Wat virtually to yourself. I find that solitude and antiquity go well together, for it is then that you can make an emotional connection with the past. Walking alone along Hadrian’s Wall in northern England on a winter’s day with a promise of snow, exploring the deserted lake beds and their chronicle of early human evolution at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania on a blazing hot day, finding Jean François Champollion’s name high on a column at the Temple of Amun at Karnak, Egypt—these rank among the many archaeological experiences that I will never forget.

In recent years, I’ve had the opportunity to visit many of the same sites again, only to find them completely changed. The experience is still unforgettable, but starkly different because of the sheer mass of visitors. Package tours and crowds transform these situations into events that are simultaneously less memorable and also rather sobering from a conservation standpoint. Instead of profound soundlessness, I now recall the roar of diesel buses in the Valley of the Kings, or standing in line in the defile of a royal tomb sweating profusely and literally watching the priceless paintings peel off the wall. Just last year I accompanied a tour to the Roman city of Ephesus in Turkey. We shuffled down the main street in dense groups, each with our own guide, each waiting for the group in front of us to move on. At Angkor Wat, a sacred complex on a scale that beggars the imagination, there are few facilities for visitors—the Cambodian government cannot afford them. The already-worn temple steps are slippery smooth from thousands of visitors a day, the magnificent friezes worn shiny by generations of massaging hands. Instead of exhilaration, I came away feeling deeply depressed. Yes, the Parthenon is still magnificent to behold, Machu Picchu high in the Andes remains an unforgettable place, but much of the magic is gone now that cultural tourism with its cruise ships, jumbo jets, and diesel buses has become a booming international business.

Over the years, I’ve developed an informal list of sites to avoid because of the crowds: the Parthenon (alas), the Valley of the Kings, Stonehenge (you cannot get near the stones), the temples at Sounion and Aegina in Greece, Ephesus (the most visited archaeological site in the world), the Colosseum in Rome, Pompeii (where you’ll swim through crowds in high season), and Mesa Verde, Colorado, (only in the summertime). However, there remain plenty of sites that still intoxicate me: Avebury (only a few miles from Stonehenge, where you can walk through the stone circles), Hadrian’s Wall, Palmyra in Syria and Petra in Jordan, Olympia in Greece, site of the original Games (an expansive field of ruins that is strangely moving), the amphitheater at Epidauros, also in Greece (in spring and fall, a place where the acoustics enchant), Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (which is truly spectacular), Ta Proem, a Khmer temple near Angkor Wat (where serpentine tree roots envelop the ruins in a romantic frenzy), the brooding moiae of Easter Island, massive ancestral statues that ring the coast, the huge city of Teotihuacán on the edge of the Valley of Mexico (much visited, but large enough to swallow crowds and a brilliant statement of ideological and supernatural power that humbles you) and, finally, well off the beaten track, the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar on the Orkney Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean north of Scotland, where you will step into the heart of a deeply evocative ancient landscape.

From Stonehenge to Samarkand recalls more leisured times when archaeological travel and enjoying these famous sites still involved a modest degree of adventure. I hope the writings therein will encourage a new generation of archaeological travelers to wander away from the familiar and overcrowded to places where our forebears still haunt the landscape and even unspectacular archaeological sites can come alive with a little imagination.


Brian Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the world’s leading archaeological writers and an internationally recognized authority on world prehistory.

Recent Comments

  1. Seth Kolloen

    I visited Chaco Canyon on a weekday in the summer, and even then it was mostly empty. You can explore all the ruins and hang out in the mysterious temple/sports arena/who knows place . You’ll have them mostly to yourself.

Comments are closed.