These archaeology trivia questions cover the subject and not just its treasures, in four rounds: the first diggers and antiquarians, how digging became a science, survey, excavation and the lab, and words, laws and digs today.
Read the full guide
From Nabonidus to the trowel
First diggers and antiquarians opens with a king of about 550 BC and ends with Pompeii. How digging became a science has stratigraphy, Pitt Rivers, Petrie and Troy. Survey, excavation and the lab asks the working words: provenance, cut and fill, overburden, palynology.
For a museum night or a history class
Each round plays on its own, and the question sheet prints with a separate answer key. Words, laws and digs today suits a mixed table: it asks about the first stone tools, a shipwreck dive webcast to children and geoglyphs found with artificial intelligence.
Questions and answers
Which easy archaeology trivia questions open a round well?
Which is the simplest survey technique? In which order do survey, excavation and analysis come? Out of what did archaeology develop in the 19th century? The answers are a surface survey, in that order, and antiquarianism.
Are Tutankhamun and Pompeii in the pack?
Pompeii is, as the year the digging began, 1748. The tomb of Tutankhamun is not: other packs of the site ask it, so this one asks the methods and the people who shaped them.
Where were the answers checked?
All answers were compared on October 3, 2026 with the English Wikipedia article Archaeology, which is linked under each question. Living archaeologists are not answers, and disputes over the reburial of human remains are left out.
The first known attempt to date an ancient temple was wrong by about how many years?Answer: 1,500. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Flavio Biondo wrote a systematic guide in the early 15th century to the ruins of which city?Answer: Ancient Rome. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
From which year is the earliest example of the word archaeologist in the great historical dictionary of English?Answer: 1824. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
In which year did excavations begin at Pompeii?Answer: 1748. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
The king known as the first archaeologist studied the foundation deposit of which earlier ruler?Answer: Naram-Sin of Akkad. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Megalithic sites were among the first places dug by archaeologists. Which famous one is named first?Answer: Stonehenge. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Under which Chinese dynasty did Ouyang Xiu and Zhao Mingcheng found the study of ancient bronze inscriptions?Answer: The Song. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What was the motto of the 18th-century antiquary Richard Colt Hoare?Answer: We speak from facts, not theory. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What was the profession of Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre, who dug at Pompeii?Answer: Military engineer. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which Chinese writer, in a book of 1088, criticized scholars for misreading who made ancient bronze vessels and why?Answer: Shen Kuo. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which German scholar of Roman antiquities has been called the father of art history?Answer: Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which Italian traveler of the fifteenth century is today called the father of classical archaeology?Answer: Cyriacus of Ancona. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which king of about 550 BC is known as the first archaeologist?Answer: Nabonidus. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Who offered one of the earliest definitions of archaeologia, in 1685, in a collection of Roman inscriptions?Answer: Jacob Spon. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
How digging became a science 14
By which name is the movement of the 1980s, led by a group of British archaeologists, known?Answer: Post-processual archaeology. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
The development of what was one of the major achievements of archaeology in the 19th century?Answer: Stratigraphy. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
The dig at Hissarlik in the 1870s stood on the site of which ancient city?Answer: Troy. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What did Jacques Boucher de Perthes and Christian Jürgensen Thomsen begin to do with the artifacts they had found?Answer: Arrange them in chronological order. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What did Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery call the more scientific approach they proposed in the 1960s?Answer: The New Archaeology. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
When did archaeology become a professional activity?Answer: In the first half of the 20th century. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Where a site was occupied by several cultures in turn, where do the things left by the more recent ones lie?Answer: Above those of the earlier ones. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which army officer, who dug on his own land in England in the 1880s, is widely regarded as the first scientific archaeologist?Answer: Augustus Pitt Rivers. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which was the first approach to archaeological theory to be practiced, in the late 19th century?Answer: Cultural-historical archaeology. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Who dug at Hissarlik in the 1870s with Frank Calvert and Wilhelm Dörpfeld?Answer: Heinrich Schliemann. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Who is called the father of archaeological excavation?Answer: William Cunnington. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Who made his own excavations in Virginia in 1784, using the trench method?Answer: Thomas Jefferson. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Who was the first to investigate the Great Pyramid in a scientific way, during the 1880s?Answer: William Flinders Petrie. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Whose highly disciplined digging in the 1920s and 1930s brought the science on swiftly?Answer: Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Survey, excavation and the lab 17
A dug feature such as a pit or a ditch has two parts. One is the cut. What is the other?Answer: The fill. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
If a survey finds no materials in an area, what is the area deemed?Answer: Sterile. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
In September 2014 drones mapped in 3D the ruins of which Greek city?Answer: Aphrodisias. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
In which country did small drones help researchers make three-dimensional models of sites in days and weeks?Answer: Peru. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
In which order do the three phases of an archaeological investigation usually come?Answer: Survey, excavation, analysis. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Satellite imagery is an example of which kind of remote sensing?Answer: Passive. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Seen from the air, how do plants grow above a buried stone wall?Answer: More slowly. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What does a laser altimeter measure?Answer: The height of the instrument platform above the surface. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What does lidar stand for?Answer: Light detection and ranging. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What is the recorded exact location of an object or feature called?Answer: Its provenance or provenience. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What is the topsoil removed at the start of a dig also called?Answer: Overburden. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which is the most expensive phase of archaeological research, in relative terms?Answer: Excavation. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which is the simplest survey technique?Answer: A surface survey. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which method is used to study the pollen collected from a site?Answer: Palynology. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which part of an investigation usually takes the most time?Answer: Post-excavation analysis. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Who pioneered the regional survey of settlement patterns in 1949, in the Viru Valley of Peru?Answer: Gordon Willey. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
With which hand tools is the exposed area usually cleaned once the topsoil is off?Answer: Trowels or hoes. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Words, laws and digs today 15
The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, sites, cultural landscapes and what else?Answer: Biofacts or ecofacts. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Before which millennium BC did writing, as it is known today, not exist?Answer: The 4th. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
The first conviction for transporting artifacts illegally removed from private property, under a federal act of protection, came in 1992. Where?Answer: Indiana. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Historical archaeology is the study of cultures that have some form of what?Answer: Writing. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
How many new geoglyphs in Nazca has artificial intelligence helped to discover?Answer: 303. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
In 1937 the director of which museum said it would no longer buy or accept collections from looted contexts?Answer: The Southwest Museum. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Live underwater video of which shipwreck project was webcast for a week in 2000 and in 2001?Answer: Queen Anne's Revenge. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Out of what did archaeology develop in Europe during the 19th century?Answer: Antiquarianism. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Prehistory makes up more than what share of the human past?Answer: 99%. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Since the passage of which act of 1966 has cultural resource management been a growing concern in the United States?Answer: The National Historic Preservation Act. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What is cultural resource management also called in the United Kingdom?Answer: Cultural heritage management. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What is the umbrella term for activities that falsely claim to be archaeological?Answer: Pseudoarchaeology. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
What is the volunteer archaeology and preservation program of the United States Forest Service called?Answer: Passport in Time. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Where were the first stone tools developed, 3.3 million years ago?Answer: At Lomekwi in East Africa. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology
Which field aims to systematize archaeological measurement with methods from physics, chemistry and engineering?Answer: Archaeometry. Source: Wikipedia: Archaeology