Every Civilization That Built Pyramids

There are stepped pyramids at Guimar, on Tenerife, and for a long time they drew the sort of visitor who suspects the ancient Egyptians got around more than the textbooks admit. Thor Heyerdahl took a close interest. Then archaeologists from the University of La Laguna excavated them and found that they were majanos, cairns piled up by farmers clearing their fields, and that the pottery inside dated them firmly to the 19th century. Two astronomers who studied the site called their chapter on it “A Modern Myth.”

The word pyramid gets attached to almost anything with sloping sides, which is why this list starts from a definition. Britannica’s is admirably plain: a monumental structure of stone or brick on a rectangular base, with four sloping sides that meet at a point or stop at a flat platform. That flat platform turns out to matter enormously. It admits the mud-brick temple platforms of the Andes and the stone-faced temple bases of Mexico alongside the tombs of the pharaohs, and it means that Egypt, for all its fame, arrives third. Earthen mounds need a heritage body’s say-so.

Every entry below rests on what UNESCO or a national heritage body actually calls the structure, not on what it resembles, and the entries run in order of each tradition’s earliest dated pyramid. Where the record offers only a period, the entry says so. Where official sources disagree about a date, as they do over the oldest of them, it says that too.

Ozieri culture, Sardinia – Monte d’Accoddi

Ercole Contu answered the call reluctantly. Summoned in 1952 to look at a modest hill on a Sardinian plain, the archaeologist was certain, by his own account, that he would be digging out a badly preserved nuraghe, the sort of prehistoric stone tower the island has in abundance. What emerged instead was a truncated pyramid of roughly dressed limestone, 37 by 30 metres at the base and still about 10 metres high, with a ramp 42 metres long running up to the summit.

There was an older building inside it. Santo Tine, excavating between 1979 and 1989, found the Red Temple, a smaller platform whose chapel had its floor and walls plastered and painted in ochre red. That temple burned, and around 2800 BC its successors simply buried it inside the larger structure that survives today. When the first one went up is harder to say. One page of Italy’s Ministry of Culture puts it at around 4000-3500 BC, another at 3500-2900 BC, and the regional government’s SardegnaCultura prefers 3200-2800 BC. Radiocarbon work published in 2011 sides with the earliest.

Scholars have called it an altar, a ziggurat, a temple and a step pyramid, which covers most of the available options. The Second World War found a use for it nobody had proposed. Its height made it a natural spot for anti-aircraft batteries, which were dug in at the corners and badly damaged the upper layers.

Caral-Supe civilization (Norte Chico), Peru

The great buildings of Caral are full of bags. Peru’s Ministry of Culture says that in every construction deposit the builders packed shicras – bags woven from plant fibre and filled with stones – and when an old room went out of use it was stuffed with them and built over. It is not what most people picture when they hear the word pyramid, but it has held up for about 5,000 years in the Supe Valley.

UNESCO counts six large pyramidal structures at the site, and Peru’s nomination file dates platforms at the Central Pyramid to 2700 BC. The biggest, the Greater Pyramid, measures 149.69 by 170.80 metres and climbs to 29.88 metres on its northern side, with a sunken circular plaza at its foot. The Gallery Pyramid kept something stranger. In an offering package on the twelfth step of its central stairway, excavators found a quipu, the knotted-cord record of the Andes, which the same file calls the oldest yet found on the American continent. The Incas were still using the system.

Ruth Shady, who began work at Caral in 1994, led the team that recovered 32 small bone flutes, incised and painted red and black, beside one of the sunken plazas. In 2019 she said they had found no trace of fortresses or weapons of war. ICOMOS records a second absence: with no gold or silver to find, there was very little looting. Poverty, for once, turned out to be excellent protection.

Ancient Egypt

Partway up the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur, somebody changed their mind. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities says construction began at an angle of 55 degrees and had to be eased to 43 degrees when the weight of the blocks made the structure unstable, which is why the finished building looks as though two architects never met. Its owner, Sneferu, first king of the Fourth Dynasty, was not easily discouraged. He also turned a step pyramid at Meidum into a smooth-sided one, and then built the Red Pyramid, the highest at Dahshur, whose white Tura limestone casing was carried off for reuse in medieval times, leaving the rust-coloured blocks that give it its name.

The Egyptian line had begun shortly before, with the six stacked mastabas of Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara, an innovation the Ministry says the architect Imhotep may very well have been responsible for. UNESCO counts more than 38 pyramids in the Memphis necropolis alone, among them the three at Giza, and the Ministry notes that the ruin at Meidum happened gradually, layer by layer, rather than in one dramatic collapse.

The tradition ended quietly at Abydos, where Ahmose I, who ruled from about 1550 to 1525 BC, built the last royal pyramid in Egypt. Later pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings instead. The stone of Ahmose’s pyramid was eventually taken away for other building projects, so Egypt’s pyramid age closed much as it had gone on, with somebody walking off with the masonry.

Mesopotamia and Elam – the ziggurat builders (Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Elam)

In April and May of 323 BC, Alexander the Great set 10,000 soldiers to clearing the ruins of Etemenanki, the great ziggurat of Babylon, and the bricks were hauled away to the east of the city. It was an undignified end for the building usually associated with the Tower of Babel. France’s Ministry of Culture reconstructs it as a perfect cube, its base 90 metres on a side and its seven stages rising to about the same height, and when Robert Koldewey began excavating in 1913 the footprint still measured 91.48 by 91.66 metres.

The form was already ancient by then. Ur-Nammu, who ruled from 2112 to 2095 BC, built ziggurats at Ur, Eridu, Uruk and Nippur, piling stages of dry mud brick and facing them with kiln-fired brick laid in bitumen. Leonard Woolley began excavating at Ur in 1922 and reconstructed its missing upper stages from ancient descriptions. The facade and great staircase visitors see were restored in the 1980s under Saddam Hussein.

The Elamites built the largest ziggurat outside Mesopotamia. Untash-Napirisha’s ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil originally measured 105.2 metres a side and about 53 metres high in five levels, faced with baked bricks inscribed in cuneiform with the names of gods in Elamite and Akkadian. UNESCO says it was never completed, and the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal destroyed it about 640 BC. ICOMOS records the hundreds of baked bricks found there unused, still waiting for a wall.

Chavin culture, Peru

At the crossing of several dark galleries inside Chavin de Huantar stands a 15-foot blade of white granite, carved with a creature that is part human and part feline, with large eyes, a mouth full of teeth and long claws. Julio C. Tello, who began studying the site in 1919, named it the Lanzon for its resemblance to a lance. John Rick of Stanford started excavating in 1995, and Stanford’s magazine calls it an object of worship and perhaps an oracle, with priests supplying the voice.

The buildings around it are truncated pyramids of stone and mud mortar, in the words of Peru’s Ministry of Culture, built and occupied between roughly 1500 and 300 BC. Inside them runs what UNESCO describes as an internal gallery system with an intricate network of vents and drains unprecedented in South America. Some passages lie more than 40 feet below the surface, and the acoustics seem designed to disorient: echoes arrive from many directions. In 2001 excavators found 20 decorated marine-shell trumpets, or pututus, in a single gallery.

The 20th century treated the oracle badly. Parts of the complex were farmed, some galleries served as livestock corrals, and stones were carried off piecemeal for building in the surrounding area. Then in 1945 a landslide scoured the top of the temple and filled most of the galleries with mud and rubble. A caretaker named Marino Gonzales afterwards cleared the mud from many of them. Whatever the Lanzon once foretold, it evidently did not include that.

Cuicuilco, Basin of Mexico

Byron Cummings got into the pyramid at Cuicuilco with explosives. Between 1922 and 1925 his team blasted away the volcanic rock that had buried it, partly destroying the outer walls in the process, so the walls visitors see today belong to the interior of the building. It was at least an efficient way past the volcano.

The volcano was Xitle, which INAH dates to about AD 250 and which spread a lava field of some 70 square kilometres over this corner of the basin, up to 33 feet thick in places. Older books dated it centuries earlier. Claus Siebe’s radiocarbon study of 2000 explained why: those dates came from human artefacts that were already old when the lava arrived.

What the lava sealed is unusual. The Gran Basamento is not a four-sided pyramid but a truncated cone, 110 metres across and 22 metres high in INAH’s figures, built in eight stages around a core of nothing but compacted earth and faced with unworked basalt only in the last of them. INAH knows of no other Preclassic ceremonial building in the Basin of Mexico made this way. On its summit stood a succession of oval altars of river cobbles, some coated in a red pigment that appears to be cinnabar. The survivors of the eruption scattered, many apparently to Teotihuacan. The lava is now the Pedregal de San Angel district of Mexico City, and the site’s entrance faces the housing built as the Olympic Village for the 1968 games.

Kingdom of Kush (Napatan and Meroitic), Sudan

Taharqa went into his pyramid at Nuri with 1,070 servants, all of them stone. The shawabtis, figurines meant to do the king’s work in the afterlife, were stacked in neat rows along the walls of the burial chambers, where the Harvard University-MFA Expedition found them in 1917. Taharqa ruled Egypt as well as Kush, the fourth king of the 25th Dynasty, and UNESCO notes that he is the only Sudanese sovereign mentioned by name in the Old Testament. His is the largest pyramid at Nuri, a cemetery of 82 tombs whose first burial dates from 664 BC.

Kushite pyramids took the Egyptian idea and changed the proportions. The Meroitic ones are much smaller and more steep-sided, and UNESCO singles out the pyramids of Gebel Barkal, Nuri and Kurru for their steep angles and decorated sides. From the 3rd century BC onwards, most royal burials took place at Meroe instead.

That is where Giuseppe Ferlini arrived in 1834. The Italian treasure hunter demolished four small pyramids and found nothing of value, then turned to a large one still intact on a hilltop, which by his own account he took down in two stages, 15 days and then 20, until it was level with the hill. In its burial chamber lay the jewellery of Queen Amanishakheto. Ludwig I of Bavaria bought part of it in 1837, and Munich became the first city in Europe to display art from Meroe. UNESCO calls Ferlini’s treasure hunting very deleterious, which is putting it gently.

Olmec (La Venta), Mexico

Nobody can quite agree what shape the Great Pyramid of La Venta is. When Robert Heizer’s team cleared it of vegetation in 1967 and 1968, they concluded it had a round, fluted appearance, and published it in 1968 as “The Fluted Pyramid of the La Venta Site.” Britannica describes a clay mound shaped like a fluted cone. INAH calls it the main pyramidal foundation, 30 metres high, with a possible central stairway.

It is made of rammed earth, clay and sand, braced inside with limestone slabs, because the nearest stone quarries were a long way off. Its last construction stage dates to about 400 BC, and INAH considers it the oldest structure of its type and size. Around it the Olmecs buried offerings on a scale Gillespie and Volk know nothing comparable to elsewhere in Mesoamerica: three mosaic pavements of polished serpentine blocks and two further deposits of serpentine, laid in pits and covered over at once.

The 20th century nearly finished it off. Complex A, the ceremonial precinct beside the pyramid, was damaged between 1958 and 1984, and Heizer wrote that bulldozers had left nothing on its surface that could be identified as being there in 1955. The rescue came from a poet. Carlos Pellicer began moving the great monuments to a park in Villahermosa in 1956, and it opened on March 4, 1958. One 38-tonne stone travelled more than 150 kilometres at 20 kilometres an hour, while Pellicer sat up all night worrying about it.

Maya

Calakmul means “two neighbouring pyramids,” a name supplied by Cyrus Lundell, who recorded the site in 1931 and was evidently not in the mood for poetry. The larger of the two, Structure II, rises 180 feet, which INAH ranks as the second-highest Maya pyramid after the one at Tonina in Chiapas. Its core is very old. Excavation has shown that a monument some 12 metres high stood there between 400 and 200 BC, and its earliest building, a vaulted chamber with a frieze of large stucco masks, is older than the stone structures at Uaxactun and El Mirador once thought to be the oldest in the region.

Maya pyramids were not only temples. On June 15, 1952, Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, having lifted a slab with holes in it from the floor of the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, cleared a staircase deliberately packed with rubble and reached the crypt of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who ruled the city from 615 to 683. The king lay in a stone sarcophagus with a fish-shaped hollow, small fragments of jade arranged over his face as a mask.

At Chichen Itza, El Castillo is famous for having 365 steps, 91 on each of its four stairways plus the platform on top, and for the serpent of shadow that forms on the north staircase at the equinoxes. INAH does the arithmetic itself, then relays some researchers’ caution, since the monument was restored in the 20th century. The calendar in stone may be partly the restorers’.

Numidian kingdom, Algeria

A bey of Constantine, so the story goes, once turned his cannon on Medracen in the hope that treasure would fall out. Colonel Brunon, who excavated the monument in 1873, did not believe a word of it, since there was not a single cannonball mark on the stone. The legend survived anyway, which says a good deal about how people have looked at the place.

Algeria’s heritage office, the OGEBC, calls it a mysterious monument of pyramidal form, more than 18 metres high and more than 58 metres across, built of dressed stone. It is an odd hybrid: a round drum ringed with 60 Doric columns and topped by a stepped cone, a North African circular tomb, the bazina, in classical dress. Carbon-14 dating of cedar beams from its gallery places it in the fourth century BC, and the office supposes it was built for King Gaia or one of his predecessors.

The builders hid the entrance well. It sits on the third step of the cone, more than 5 metres off the ground, and nobody found it until 1850. When Brunon’s men finally reached the burial chamber, 3.30 metres long and 1.45 metres wide, there were no human bones, only lime, scorched sandstone and the traces of a fire. Earlier visitors had already smashed part of the back wall. Brunon had an iron-lined door fitted at the entrance, which was rather like locking the stable after the horse had been robbed.

Zapotec (Monte Alban), Mexico

UNESCO’s description of Monte Alban is unusually blunt: its terraces, dams, canals, pyramids and artificial mounds “were literally carved out of the mountain.” The Zapotecs chose a summit 4,921 feet above sea level, levelled it into a main plaza 328 yards long and 197 yards wide, and lined the result with platforms and pyramid bases. From about 500 BC to AD 850, by UNESCO’s reckoning, this was their capital.

The buildings run from the South Platform, at 40 metres the highest construction in the city, to System IV, a stepped pyramidal base of three staggered bodies whose exploration tunnels expose a megalithic wall from Monte Alban’s first epoch. Building J is shaped like an arrowhead and faces northeast, unlike everything around it, and INAH thinks it was probably an astronomical observatory. Its walls are faced with carved slabs recycled from earlier buildings, including some of the famous “dancers.”

The site’s most famous modern moment came on January 9, 1932, when Alfonso Caso opened Tomb 7. Inside were more than 150 gold pieces, 24 silver objects, a skull covered in turquoise mosaic and goblets of rock crystal. The tomb was Zapotec, but the treasure was not: it was Mixtec, left by a later people who reused some of the old Zapotec tombs for their own dead. Caso carried the find to the state governor in a small trunk, the objects wrapped in tissue paper, which is not how national treasures usually travel.

Cholula (Tlachihualtepetl), Mexico

When Hernan Cortes and his army entered Cholula in November 1519, the Great Pyramid looked like a small hill covered in trees, soil and weeds. It had been abandoned and ruined eight centuries before the Spaniards arrived, and it took the friar Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinia, to recognise it later as the ruins of an ancient temple.

It had been built in instalments. By the second century BC there was a first pyramid about 427 feet on each side, made of adobe blocks stuck together with mud into an enormous core. A second, close to 558 feet a side and almost 148 feet tall, was covered in stucco painted in bright colours. Over both rose the third and true Great Pyramid, more than 1,300 feet on each side, which people from other towns called Tlachihualtepetl, the artificial hill. INAH, which manages the site, names no single culture as its builder, and the name was evidently given by outsiders.

The Spanish added a storey of their own. The Santuario de Nuestra Senora de los Remedios was built on the summit in 1594. In 1931 the architect Ignacio Marquina began exploring the interior by tunnel, and by the time his work ended his team had dug some 8 kilometres of passages. Cholula is therefore a pyramid with a church on its roof and a modern labyrinth in its belly. From the street it still looks like a hill.

Nazca culture (Cahuachi), Peru

Giuseppe Orefici, who worked at Cahuachi for 42 years, did not believe it was a city at all. There were no kitchens, he pointed out, no rubbish heaps and no housing; people lived on the outskirts and came in for ceremonies.

Peru’s Ministry of Culture describes a group of truncated adobe pyramids built by the Nazca culture, which it dates to 200 BC-AD 900, standing between 15 and 40 metres high, and calls the complex the largest mud-built ceremonial centre in the world. Several of them are, in the nicest sense, cheats. Britannica describes them as terraced, adobe-faced natural hills, and the main pyramid, 28 metres high and 100 metres long, is built against a hill with seven stepped platforms inside it. Orefici counted between 32 and 34 groups of temple structures with pyramids, and in 2015 he estimated that less than 1 percent of the site had been excavated.

Cahuachi sits near the Nazca Lines. Orefici noted the same felines and killer whales on the geoglyphs and on the pottery dug up here, and a 2024 study in PNAS associates some of the lines with pilgrimage routes to and from the site. Looters have been at work since the Spanish conquest, and a 2016 study says the digging has intensified since the 1960s to supply the antiquities market. As Orefici said of the whole Nazca region in 2005, “Everything that has been preserved by the desert is being destroyed now by man.”

Teuchitlan tradition (Guachimontones), Mexico

From the air, the Tequila Valley is covered in circles. Phil Weigand and his wife Celia, poring over aerial photographs in their first field season in 1970, found hundreds of buildings shaped like concentric circles, most of them around the volcano. When they finally reached one of them, it was, Weigand recalled, “a circular compound whose beauty, symmetry, and monumentality far exceeded the expectations we had formed from the aerial photographs.”

That compound was Guachimontones, and INAH describes its pattern precisely: a central pyramid, a raised circular patio around it, a circular bench around the patio, eight to twelve rectangular platforms on the bench and funerary crypts beneath some of them. The pyramids are stepped cones rather than squares. El Guachimonton, the first circle, measures 410 feet across and has 12 platforms. El Azquelite has a central altar 126 feet in diameter and 33 feet high, climbing in 13 concentric steps, and INAH suggests a pole for the ritual of the voladores may once have stood on top. Even the name is plain-spoken; guachimontones is a regional word for a pyramid or structure. INAH dates the site’s apogee from 100 BC to AD 450.

The Weigands had expected to stay for a summer, “or at most two.” They devoted about the next 30 years of their lives to the valley, much of it spent arguing for the protection of sites that Archaeology magazine counts among the most heavily looted in Mexico.

Rome

Gaius Cestius, a Roman politician and member of the priestly college of the epulones, the officials who organised sacred banquets, left precise instructions in his will. His tomb was to be a pyramid, and it was to be finished in 330 days. Rome’s tourism office says the heirs stood to lose their inheritance if it ran over. It went up beside the Via Ostiense between 18 and 12 BC, when pyramids had become a Roman fashion following the conquest of Egypt in 31 BC.

The Soprintendenza Speciale di Roma gives its height as 36.40 metres on a square base 29.50 metres a side, a concrete core faced with brick and clad in slabs of Luna marble. It is the only one of that Roman series to survive. Another, the Meta Romuli near the Vatican, was demolished by Pope Alexander VI in 1499. The burial chamber, about 23 square metres, was walled up at the funeral after the Egyptian custom and painted with nymphs and four winged Victories.

It survived by becoming useful. Between 272 and 279 it was absorbed into the new city wall begun by the emperor Aurelian, who became one of the Roman emperors who were assassinated, killed in a household plot in 275. Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery beside it in 1821, and Shelley wrote of the spot that “It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

Teotihuacan, Mexico

Twice, rain has done the archaeologists’ work at Teotihuacan. In the autumn of 1971 a downpour opened a depression at the foot of the Pyramid of the Sun’s staircase, and Ernesto Taboada, chief of the archaeological zone, found the entrance shaft of a cave running about 100 metres beneath the pyramid. In the fall of 2003 another storm left a sinkhole nearly three feet wide at the foot of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, and Sergio Gomez of INAH followed it down into a tunnel. In 2015 he reported large quantities of liquid mercury in a chamber at its far end.

The Pyramid of the Sun is 65 metres high and 224 metres a side in INAH’s figures, the largest building in the city. Its date is a range rather than a year: one account has it raised in a single campaign during the Tzacualli phase, AD 1-150, while a 2013 study argues for AD 170-310. Its shape is partly modern. A drawing made in 1823 shows four tiers, and by one archaeologist’s reckoning the present fourth tier dates from Leopoldo Batres’s reconstruction of 1905-1906, part of Porfirio Diaz’s celebrations for the centenary of Mexican independence.

Nobody even knows what the city’s own inhabitants called it. In the thirteenth century, speakers of a Uto-Aztecan language arriving from the north found the place abandoned and half-ruined and named it the place of the gods. The builders were long gone by then, so they were in no position to object.

Moche, Peru

About 140 million adobe bricks went into the Huaca del Sol, by the count of Peru’s tourism ministry and the Huacas de Moche project, and World History Encyclopedia notes that each one was stamped with a maker’s mark. The project calls it one of the largest adobe structures in pre-Hispanic America, originally some 345 metres long, 160 metres wide and 40 metres high. Only about a third of it survives. Treasure hunters tore into it in the 17th century, and one account says the Spanish went so far as to divert the river through it to flush out the gold.

Across the plain stands the Huaca de la Luna, two truncated-pyramid temples built entirely of earth. The Moche, whose state the project places between AD 100 and 850, periodically buried the old temple and built a wider, higher platform on top, laying adobe carefully over the painted images of their god as they went. Its north facade, 24 metres high, climbs in seven stepped platforms of polychrome reliefs, with the Mountain God at the top holding a knife in one hand and a severed head in the other. The remains of sacrificed captives were found in both temples.

Neither name is Moche. Nineteenth-century European and North American travellers, unaware of any society older than the Incas, attached the two buildings to the main Quechua deities, the Sun and the Moon. The Moche have been misattributed for a long time. At least the bricks are signed.

Amazigh kingdoms of the Djeddars, Algeria

The Djeddars were the last of their kind. When these 13 square-based pyramids went up on two hills near Frenda, in western Algeria, the great royal tombs of Numidia and Mauretania were already centuries old, and the Algerian archaeologist Rachid Mahouz has argued that their late date is precisely what makes them special: they are the last such monuments raised before Islam. Algeria’s UNESCO tentative-list entry dates them to the 4th-6th century AD in one place and the 5th and 6th in another.

Three stand on Djebel Lakhdar and ten on Djebel Araoui, some 6 kilometres away. The tallest reach 18 metres, on bases from 11.5 to 46 metres a side. Narrow corridors lead inside to funerary chambers, and the largest opens into a labyrinth of 20 compartments, with Christian symbols, hunting scenes and animals carved above the doors and inscriptions that look Latin but cannot be read. Who was buried in them is unknown. The tentative list speaks only of the vitality of the Amazigh kingdoms.

French troops began exploring nine of the tombs in 1865. Fatima Kadra studied the three oldest in the late 1960s, and AFP reported in 2019 that they were the only ones explored since independence, while several had never been entered at all because earth and stone had collapsed inside. “The French archives on the Jeddars are not available,” Mahouz has said, which leaves the Djeddars much as they started: monumental, Christian, royal and anonymous.

Goguryeo (with Baekje’s stepped stone tombs), Korea and China

“Wish Tomb of Haotaiwang as solid as mountain” ran the inscription on bricks found so often at a great stepped tomb at Ji’an, in China’s Jilin province, that they gave the owner away. Haotaiwang, born Tan De, was the 19th king of Goguryeo and died in 414, the year a stele 6.4 metres high was raised nearby to tell the story of the kingdom’s founding. UNESCO says the 12 imperial tombs of Goguryeo take a stepped pyramid form constructed of stone.

The king’s own tomb has 16 terraces, 65 metres a side and 14 metres high in the Jilin provincial gazetteer. The General’s Tomb is smaller and tidier: 31.58 metres a side and 12.40 metres high, seven tiers of dressed granite made of more than 1,100 blocks, with three huge stones leaning against each side, the smallest weighing about 15 tonnes. China’s national heritage administration captions it the Oriental Pyramid.

The idea travelled south. At Seokchon-dong in Seoul, the founding elite of Baekje, who appear to have been of Goguryeo descent, built stone-mound tombs in the same manner, and the Seoul Baekje Museum calls Tomb No. 3 a pyramid-shaped tomb 50 metres on a side, possibly that of King Geunchogo. After 1945 people built houses on top of the mounds, and some ten households were still living on Tomb No. 3 when it was designated a historic site in 1975. In May 1983 road-widening work sliced its base with a backhoe, leaving human bones in the cut.

Tiwanaku (Akapana), Bolivia

Some time in the 18th century a Basque miner decided the Akapana must be full of treasure and dug into the top of it. He destroyed almost the entire central part of the pyramid and the buildings on its summit, seems to have found nothing at all, and, as the archaeologist Alexei Vranich puts it, went bankrupt as if in revenge.

UNESCO calls the Akapana the most imposing monument at Tiwanaku, a pyramid originally of seven superimposed platforms with stone retaining walls, rising to over 18 metres on a base that ICOMOS measures at 194 by 194.4 metres. Only the lowest platform and part of one intermediate wall survive intact. Stone channels carried water down from a sunken court on the summit, the pyramid is ringed by very well-preserved drainage canals, and its main west entrance was guarded by black chachapumas, part puma and part man. By UNESCO’s dating Tiwanaku flourished as a planned city between AD 400 and 900.

Later centuries treated it as a quarry. Blocks from Tiwanaku went into the church of San Pedro in the village, built between 1580 and 1612, and in the 1900s workers dug stone out of the pyramid’s base for the railway between Guaqui and La Paz. Yet in 2007 archaeologists led by Roger Cossio found a ruler or priest, about 1,300 years dead, in a niche inside the Akapana, buried with a diadem and a fist-sized pendant of solid gold. The Basque miner had simply been digging in the wrong place.

Troyville-Coles Creek and Plaquemine peoples, Louisiana

The Great Mound at Troyville went for $100. In the summer of 1931 its owner reportedly sold the dirt to a bridge contractor, who worked day and night with a steam shovel to level it, and about 21,000 cubic yards of it became fill for a bridge approach over the Black River at Jonesville. Winslow Walker of the Smithsonian hurried down to excavate what he could before it disappeared, and found woven cane matting, palmetto fronds and wooden planks inside, evidence of complex engineering.

At 82 feet it had been the tallest mound in Louisiana. When William Dunbar landed there on October 23, 1804, he measured the “tower or turret” at 80 feet and judged that its base covered an acre. By the Civil War it was down to 50 feet. Cane from inside it has since been radiocarbon dated to between AD 679 and 778.

The Louisiana Division of Archaeology says that in the Troyville-Coles Creek period, roughly AD 400 to 1100, “Pyramidal mounds with flat tops, and sometimes with stepped ramps leading up one side, came into style.” They were made of earth, never stone, and were enlarged over the centuries until some carried temples on their summits. The Plaquemine people who followed kept building them. At Medora, the culture’s type site, one mound was a flat-topped pyramid 125 feet on a side and 13 feet high. As for the Great Mound, its modest remains survive on Willow Street and Second Street in Jonesville.

Sican (Lambayeque), Peru

Cinnabar, a red mineral pigment, covers much of the cheeks and forehead of a Sican funerary mask in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, over an alloy of 74 percent gold, 20 percent silver and 6 percent copper. The Met says as many as five such masks could go into a single burial, one on the head of the textile-wrapped body and four stacked at the feet, and that the lords who wore them were buried deep inside monumental mud-brick platform mounds.

Peru’s submission to UNESCO’s tentative list describes two great settlements in the La Leche valley, Pomac and Tucume, made of monumental adobe constructions of truncated pyramid form. They were built with huge adobe retaining walls around cells packed with loose earth and offerings, and each grew by adding a new stage on top of the old. The first group was founded at Pomac around the 8th century and abandoned in the 11th after El Nino; the people moved a few kilometres to Tucume, and together the two settlements hold about 50 buildings. Peru’s text calls Huaca Larga at Tucume, 700 metres long and 25 metres high, the most extensive adobe building in Peru and probably in the world.

Peru calls the tombs at Pomac the richest in the Americas, with offering groups weighing more than 5 tons. They also suffered centuries of pillage, which Peru says intensified in the last decades of the 20th century. Enough survived to fill the Museo Nacional de la Cultura Sican.

Sailendra Java (Borobudur), Indonesia

Borobudur has a foot that almost nobody has seen. Its lowest level carries 160 relief panels of the Karmawibhangga, scenes of cause and effect, which J.W. Ijzerman rediscovered in 1885 and Kassian Cephas photographed in 1890-1891 before they disappeared again behind a broad stone base. A small section at the southeast corner was opened in 1943, and Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs says the rest remain almost entirely covered by a retaining wall.

UNESCO describes the monument as a “stepped, unroofed pyramid consisting of ten superimposing terraces, crowned by a large bell-shaped dome,” built in the 8th and 9th centuries AD during the reign of the Syailendra Dynasty. Five square terraces form the base of the pyramid, three circular platforms rise above them carrying 72 openwork stupas, each holding a statue of the Buddha, and the Ministry counts 1,460 narrative panels and 1,212 decorative ones. Britannica says it lay buried under volcanic ash from about 1000 until 1814. That year Thomas Stamford Raffles sent the engineer H.C. Cornelius to investigate a mound that, UPI reported, local villagers knew only as Borobudur Hill.

It has been restored twice, by Theodor van Erp in 1907-1911 and by Indonesia and UNESCO in 1973-1983, when about one million stones were removed, chemically treated and catalogued by computer. When that work was done, the archaeologist Soekmono told TIME that “The structure is engineered to last another 1,000 years.” In the early hours of January 21, 1985, nine bombs exploded among its stupas. Nobody was hurt.

El Tajin culture (Huastec/Totonac per UNESCO), Mexico

Diego Ruiz was looking for illegal tobacco. In March 1785, searching near Papantla for clandestine plantations, he came upon the Pyramid of the Niches instead, and the Gazeta de Mexico reported his find that July. When the artist Carl Nebel arrived around 1831, he wrote that nobody had seen it except some local Indians, news that would have surprised Ruiz.

The pyramid is 36 metres square at the base and rises in six steps to a temple, each storey lined with square niches under an overhanging cornice. INAH counts 365 of them and links the number to the solar calendar. Around it, UNESCO’s inventory lists 17 ball courts, 168 public buildings and a population of 15,000-20,000, in a single phase of occupation from 800 to 1200. Who built it is less certain. UNESCO attributes the city to the Huastecs and Totonacs, the latter still living in the area, while Mexico’s Secretaria de Cultura says it is not possible to affirm that the ancestors of today’s inhabitants were its builders.

The pyramid’s present appearance owes something to the 20th century. From 1939 the archaeologist Jose Garcia Payon rebuilt it with local Totonac workers, injecting concrete and fabricating artificial stones of concrete and iron for the incomplete niches. In the late 1940s the workers, paid Mex$4.35 against a legal minimum of Mex$6, protested by toppling the road signs pointing to the site. Garcia Payon replaced them with signposts made of cement.

Khmer Empire, Cambodia

When French archaeologists began taking the Baphuon apart in the 1960s, they painted a number on each of its 300,000 sandstone blocks to match an entry on a master plan. Then came the war, and the Khmer Rouge destroyed the records. Pascal Royere, who led the project, later described what remained as “a 300,000-piece puzzle to which we had lost the picture.” Work restarted in the mid-1990s, the temple was inaugurated on July 3, 2011, and more than 10,000 pieces were left over on the forest floor.

The Baphuon, a three-tiered temple mountain built for Udayadityavarman II in the mid-11th century, was in Britannica’s words an immediate prototype for the later and more famous Angkor Wat. The form itself began with Bakong at Roluos, consecrated in 881 under Indravarman I, which the APSARA National Authority calls the first real pyramidal shaped temple built in Cambodia and the first with five tiers. Britannica adds that it was the first Cambodian temple built mainly of stone. Angkor Wat followed in the 12th century under Suryavarman II, and Britannica calls it the world’s largest religious structure, covering some 400 acres.

The grandest ambition was at Koh Ker, briefly the Khmer capital in the 10th century. ICOMOS calls Prasat Prang there a stepped pyramid 38 metres high, 35 in another passage, and says nothing later surpassed its height and scale. Its summit plinth is believed to have held the world’s largest linga at that time, a record that would have been difficult to dispute.

Chimu, Peru

Chan Chan is melting. When ICOMOS evaluated the Chimu capital in 1985 it described the ruins, built of unbaked clay mixed with dried straw, as literally melting away, and asked for the site to go straight onto the List of World Heritage in Danger, which it did in 1986. UNESCO calls Chan Chan the largest earthen architecture city in pre-Columbian America, once covering about 20 square kilometres around nine walled citadels.

Its pyramids are earth as well. Peru’s Ministry of Culture names two great truncated pyramids in the core, Huaca El Obispo and Huaca Toledo. El Obispo, the tallest and most prominent, covers 28,500 square metres; Toledo, a stepped adobe pyramid, was badly mangled by treasure hunters in the colonial period. Huaca Arco Iris, also called El Dragon, rises in two levels, and its reliefs have been read as a memorial to a strong El Nino. At Huaca Takaynamo, built in the Early Chimu period between 900 and 1150, excavators recovered relief fragments of fishing scenes in yellow ochre, white, red and green. Legend says the city’s founder, Taycanamo, arrived by sea on a balsa raft.

The end came overland. In about 1470, after a long war, the Inca Tupac Yupanqui carried the Chimu king Minchancaman off to Cuzco. The Spanish founded Trujillo nearby in 1535, treasure hunters plundered the ruins, and the wooden beams that held up the roofs disappeared in the 17th century. What remained was left to the rain.

Mississippian culture, North America

Monks Mound is named for a group of Trappist monks who lived on one of the smaller mounds nearby. According to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site they never lived on the big one, though they did garden its first terrace, which is how the largest man-made earthen mound on the North American continent came to be named for its gardeners. UNESCO calls it the largest prehistoric earthwork in the Americas, built in fourteen stages and rising in four terraces to 30 metres.

The National Park Service, describing the mounds at Ocmulgee in Georgia, says Mississippian platform mounds “tended to be flat-topped pyramidal structures with ramps for easier access to the summit,” with wooden buildings on top serving as homes, temples and storehouses. They were earth and wood, never stone, and most were built in stages, sometimes over a century or more. Cahokia, which UNESCO calls the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, once covered nearly 1,600 hectares with some 120 mounds, and between 1050 and 1150 it held 10,000 to 20,000 people.

Ocmulgee has a modern distinction of its own. Between 1933 and 1936, more than 800 Depression-era relief workers dug there under Arthur R. Kelly, in what the Park Service’s planning document calls the largest archaeological excavation ever to have occurred in the eastern United States. The park’s main unit is also bisected by the Norfolk Southern Railroad, whose vibrations, the same document notes, helped crack the floor of its reconstructed earth lodge.

Toltec (Tula), Mexico

The four stone warriors on top of Pyramid B at Tula were not found there. INAH says the Atlantes were discovered to the north of the building and set in their present position by archaeologists, who reasoned that they must have held up the temple. Jorge Acosta found them in 1940, basalt figures just over four metres tall, each carrying a spear-thrower in the right hand and a bundle of darts, with a butterfly-shaped breastplate on the chest and a solar disk on the back.

The pyramid beneath them, the Temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, is a pyramidal base of several staggered bodies, originally covered with carved stones. The surviving panels show eagles and vultures devouring bloody hearts and a procession of jaguars and coyotes. Acosta found that procession only on the east side. In June 2026 INAH reported two carved slabs thought to have come from Pyramid B, one of them a feline walking the other way, so the animals may well have gone all the way round.

Tula peaked between 900 and 1000 and collapsed in the 12th century, which is how the Burnt Palace got its name: Acosta found charcoal and the remains of burnt, collapsed roofs on its floors. The Aztecs who came later honoured the Toltecs so highly that “to have a Toltec heart” meant to be worthy and excel in all things. They also systematically looted the site, which is a curious way to show respect.

Ychsma (Pachacamac), Peru

“A very dirty Idol made of wood” was how Francisco de Xeres described the god of Pachacamac when Hernando Pizarro reached the sanctuary early in 1533. Pizarro had come, he told the lord of the place, for the gold. The priests produced very little, so he demanded to see the oracle, found it in “a very dark chamber with a close fetid smell,” and “ordered the vault, in which the Idol was, to be pulled down, and the Idol to be broken before all the people.” Believers held, says Peru’s Museo Nacional, that a single movement of the god’s head would cause earthquakes.

The sanctuary was old long before the Spaniards. Around 1100 the Ychma made Pachacamac their centre of power. Peru’s 2012 management plan for the site counts about 15 ramped pyramids, and a 2021 Ministry of Culture study calls the ramped pyramid characteristic of the central coast in the Late Intermediate Period of 1100-1470. The Inca arrived around 1470, made it a provincial capital, added a Temple of the Sun and kept the oracle, subordinated to their own purposes, rather than removing it.

The Spanish were less accommodating. Xeres records that the local lords who came with gold and silver “wondered greatly that the Captain should have dared to enter where the Idol was.” The sanctuary was abandoned in the colonial period. A god said to shake the earth with a nod of his head had not, in the end, frightened one Spanish captain.

Purepecha (Tzintzuntzan), Mexico

Seen from above, a yacata is shaped like a keyhole. INAH describes a pyramidal portion on a rectangular plan, up to 10 staggered bodies high, joined to a semicircular section that gives the whole a conical silhouette. Five of them stand in a row on the Great Platform at Tzintzuntzan, an artificial terrace that INAH’s visitor guide puts at 400 metres long, 210 wide and 9 high, built from stones carried there by hand. Their cores of earth and stone were faced with precisely cut slabs that the Purepecha call xamanu, many of them engraved, and were apparently painted red.

Tzintzuntzan, the place of hummingbirds, was the capital of the Tarascan state, with an estimated 30,000 people when the Spaniards arrived, and the Mexica never managed to conquer it. In 1478, native histories say, the Mexica ruler Axayacatl led more than 20,000 soldiers into Michoacan and all but 200 of them perished. INAH’s guide dates the culture to 1300-1522, while its site page admits that many doubts remain about the city’s exact age.

The end came by negotiation rather than battle. Cristobal de Olid entered Tzintzuntzan on July 25, 1522, without a fight. It did not save the last ruler. In February 1530 Nuno de Guzman had the cazonci Tangaxoan II garrotted and burned, and had the ashes thrown into the river. Some of his servants gathered what they could and buried them at Patzcuaro, with a gold shield, lip plugs and ear ornaments.

Mexica (Aztec), Mexico

On February 21, 1978, workers from Mexico City’s electricity company, digging at the corner of Argentina and Guatemala streets, struck a stone covered in reliefs. A few days later Felipe Solis Olguin identified it as Coyolxauhqui, the dismembered moon goddess, and the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan came back out of the ground. It had once been thought to lie beneath the Metropolitan Cathedral. A brick water collector built around 1900 had sliced straight through it, destroying every construction stage in a strip two metres wide.

The Mexica enlarged the temple seven times, each new version encasing the last, and INAH says every enlargement was consecrated with captives taken in a flower war. Stage II, from 1376-1427, is the oldest excavated, and still carries its twin shrines: the sacrificial stone on the side of Huitzilopochtli and, on the side of Tlaloc, a Chac-Mool that keeps traces of its colour. The final version, the one seen and destroyed by the Spanish, rose about 45 metres, and by 1521 it had been razed to its foundations.

Accounts of the sacrifices have grown in the telling. The friar Diego Duran claimed that 80,000 people were sacrificed when Ahuitzotl enlarged the temple, and some authors have believed him. The INAH bioarchaeologist Ximena Chavez Balderas answers that the osteological evidence is conclusive: sacrifice existed, but not at that scale. Between 1948 and 2013, excavators recovered the remains of 153 sacrificial victims at the Templo Mayor. That is a grim enough number. It is not 80,000.

Kosrae (Lelu), Micronesia

Kosraean kings were buried twice. According to a 2015 study in Science Advances, a dead king, anointed with coconut oil and bound in mats and coloured cordage, lay in his tomb at Lelu for up to 3 months. Then his bones were exhumed, cleaned, re-bound and dropped into a deep hole in the reef off the islet of Yenasr.

The tombs that held them are flat-topped truncated pyramids, and the dossier Micronesia submitted to UNESCO calls the type unique to the Pacific: a core of columnar basalt, a facing of flat coral slabs and a single crypt dropping straight down from the top. They are not large, 2.1 to 3.3 metres high in a 2022 survey, while the walls of the high chiefs’ compounds reached 6-7 metres. The 2015 team estimated that more than 12,000 individual coral colonies went into three of them, and legend says the coral was passed from hand to hand along a human chain stretched across the reef. Uranium-thorium dates on 24 corals put their construction in the 14th century, earlier than the AD 1400-1600 the official dossier gives.

Lelu itself was partly built on reclaimed reef, and at its height held over 100 walled compounds and about 1,500 people. After 1830 the royal tombs were no longer used. When the German South Seas Expedition opened them in 1910, one still held a 50-year-old man and a dog, radiocarbon-dated to between 1824 and 1850. His bones never made the final journey to the reef.

Songhai Empire (Tomb of Askia), Mali

Gnarled timbers stick out of the Tomb of Askia at Gao like pins from a cushion. They are permanent scaffolding, made of hasu wood and left in place so that masons can climb up and replaster the mud surface, and ICOMOS observes that centuries of replastering have probably altered the shape of the building significantly. Beneath the timbers is a stepped pyramid of mud brick, about 17 metres high on a base 17 by 15 metres.

Its builder was Askia Mohamed, emperor of Songhai, who set out on pilgrimage to Mecca in 1496. ICOMOS records a story that, passing through Egypt, he was so impressed by the pyramids that he resolved to build one of his own when he got home, but it frames the story with care: “It is said.” The tomb could just as well belong to a far older Saharan tradition of ancestral mounds raised over graves, going back as early as the first millennium BC. UNESCO declared it World Heritage in Danger in 2012.

It may also be empty. ICOMOS notes a debate over whether Askia Mohamed was buried there at all, and the general belief in Gao is that he was not. His empire fell in 1591, when a Moroccan army armed with muskets shattered the Songhai at Tondibi. By the middle of the 19th century Gao was a village of 300 to 400 houses with one remaining monument, and it was this one.