🤯 INCRÍVEL: 35 Dangerous Surprises Archaeologists Discovered The Hard Way 😲
Many of us who grew up watching Indiana Jones or The Mummy probably imagine archaeology to be as exciting and action-packed as our favorite movies make it look. In reality, the work tends to be far more methodical, painstaking, and yes, a little boring. That said, it’s not without its dangers or genuinely jaw-dropping discoveries.
One Redditor asked users to share instances of traps that archaeologists had stumbled across or even been injured by on the job, and people came through with some fascinating examples. Scroll down to find the most curious ones, and don’t forget to upvote your favorites!
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In my will, I fully intend to request my coffin lid be spring loaded and filled with confetti cannons. So that a thousand years from now I’ll make an archaeologist’s life a bit more exciting.
Off the top of my head, I know some tombs in South America have cinnabar sprinkled in them. No clue if anyone has died from it though
Edit: TIL y’all are reading this as Cinnabon and not mercury sulfide crystals.
Archaeologist here. A friend of mine was working on a site in England where there had been bombing during the blitz in WW2 and the b**b squad had given the all clear to excavate. The archaeologists later found unexploded shells that they hadn’t found in the survey and had been digging with a pick axe right next to it. Not exactly a booby trap but definitely a holy s**t moment.
Honestly, any booby trap that was still functioning after thousands of years would be of *far* greater archeological value than whatever artifact Indiana was attempting to steal from the tomb.
And yes, booby traps in tombs are totally a thing. Although they generally don’t resemble anything you’d see in an Indiana Jones movie.
There may be a few weird examples of this, but the real dangers of working at a site are heat exhaustion and alcoholism. Mostly alcoholism.
While not likely *intentionally* a booby trap, the use of mercury in the mausoleum of the first emperor of China.
I have all my credit card information and financials on my laptop, so it’s an inviting target.
But if you open it up and start typing on it, your fingertips will be orange and sticky forever.
It’s called the “Curse of the Cheetos Cheetah”.
I can’t think of any traps but archaeologists getting k****d or injured on site is not as uncommon as it should be. Personally, I was temporarily blinded on my last dig before leaving the field.
We also have a lot of fun stories too. If you find an archaeologist, buy them a drink and you’ll have a lot of fun.
There once was a local story of a group of kids who stumbled upon some booby trap laden caverns and such. They were following some route found on an old map. They survived the experience and ironically enough were saved by those booby traps as they were being menaced by a family of criminals. Last I heard they were still living in the Goondocks. They escaped their adventure with some jewels they found on an old pirate ship.
As an archaeologist I can tell you every site is a booby trap when you account for how drunk students get on a field school.
On a more serious note: the biggest dangers to our health are injuries from improper footing, falling material, bad control of tools, sometimes vehicles. More tangibly it’s disease from biting insects, some locations wildlife is a factor. The only potentially dangerous stuff to dig up that I’ve either encountered myself or known people who have is disease from preserved biological remains and unexploded ordinance from past conflicts.
I mean, on the one site I worked on, I was the only one with any familiarity with firearms and explosives so everyone freaked out over nothing every time they found something and I just went ahead and disposed of it. For where that site was and how heavily the area was bombed, I’m sure the only reason there wasn’t anything major left was because the farmers had cleared it out in the ploughing.
Maybe I missed it, but the tomb of china’s first emperor fits this category. The one with the terracotta warriors. They never actually got to the dude because of the lake of mercury.
This is a really good question! Usually the danger while doing archaeology comes from digging accidents (like cave ins and falls) and environment (like getting hurt while camping around a secluded site or heatstroke). A lot of these movies don’t really show digging practices. These days you’re trained to section of a site in an organized manner, level your “unit”, and document everything as you dig down bit by bit. If you don’t do this, you kind of ruin the whole point of digging. For example: the artifact Indiana Jones looted from that indigenous group? The item itself is just as important as where and how it was placed. (So is having a good relationship with locals, if you aren’t a part of the community yourself, your research should be in service to their community and informed by them and their needs). Archaeologists treat sites more like crime scenes and because of that it’s not likely a boobytrap will just “spring out” at you – plus a lot of deterrents may not look or act like a romanticized Hollywood idea of a boobytrap.
Does a pit with a bunch of spikey rocks at the bottom of it count as a booby trap?
Most deaths to that kind of thing are encountered by Grave Robbers and looters not archeologists. People interested in studying artifacts and restoring them tend to be more… careful.
Not a booby trap but, in Tutankhamun’s tomb, when it was first actually opened and Howard Carter put his head inside, the entire place had vases with perfectly dried and preserved flowers and reeds… that, as soon as the relatively hot and moist air outside blew in, completely disintegrated.
I can totally suspend my disbelief to accept that ancient peoples rigged tombs and s**t with booby traps to keep out looters. What I can’t accept is that these rudimentary machines still function perfectly after hundreds of years of no maintenance.
Take a brand new Corolla, stick it in a cave and abandon it for 500 years. See if it still works.
YES!! MY TIME TO SHINE!!
Former archaeologist over here!!
While not a booby-trap. I was working on a civil-war era cemetery dig, and apparently a popular embalming chemical at that time contained arsenic. So if we ever smelled garlic, we had to immediately put on hazmat suits and latex gloves. Dig season is also usually during the summers, when it’s easier to get volunteers. Which means we were always DRENCHED in sweat at the end of the day, because those things do not breathe at all.
My background is rather convoluted, I am British. I studied Medieval history to A-level, trained as a locksmith ( the last year it was legal to practice non-destructive entry (lockpicking). Moved to Munich as an historical beer tour guide and Second World War guide both there and Dachau. Went to Uni to study “History and philosophy of Science with Russian History and Literature”. First and only year this course was available, one of two who took it and both of us withdrew early in second year. It was impossible to complete, more contact hours than any other course and was running all over campus! Went on to train under my uncles as a structural carpenter. I am now 33 and still an avid amateur historian and general f*****t.
The following is a non-cited but pretty d**n accurate spiel…
The use of booby traps is far more common than you would think. There are examples that extend back over five thousand years. The most common is the use of water diversion. Dating back to the babylonians and Hittites, there are examples of cantilevered stone walkways that open outlets that would flood a chamber when depressed/triggered. They have been negated though due to rivers naturally being diverted due to erosion etc. Drop falls were pretty prevalent, but again, the sheer passage of time have gunked up the mechanisms or the pits have been filled by the slow ingress of sand/soil.
There are examples of large stones designed to fall on invaders, but much akin to wall bows (where bolts fire from wall apertures) the potential energy storers (whether a crossbow like strap of tendon or suchlike) the passage of time has denatured them past use.
It is my, admittedly meagre, understanding that the most advanced of these traps were developed in South America and Egypt (including sand traps(nasty, they use weight displacement to allow sand to flood in ([darn] drowning in sand).
Valley of the kings has a stair well in one of the tombs where they purposely made the stairwell steep and purposely made steps at odd heights to throw someone’s balance off allowing them to tumble down the stair well and at the bottom is a deep put so they break a limb and are stuck with no way out.
Probably some post-war zones in Vietnam.
I knew an archaeologist k****d why excavating WW1 trenches. Not an intentional trap but the end result was the same.
The first emperor of China is buried in a mound style pyramid full of booby traps and mercury rivers. The gov doesn’t want to go in and get rekt, so they forbid anyone from trying to enter.
It may not be of any historical value, but during the Vietnam War, there was actually a hole placed in the ground on my family’s property; supposedly connected to other tunnels and holes. My cousins tried to trick me into going into it until my uncle came across us and they got in major trouble. Apparently, the hole was boobytrapped and no one knew how to turn them off anymore. I asked for more detail from my cousins later on and they theorized everything from pockets of napalm to explosives. I have no idea if they were still just f*****g with me (but probably).
I saw a YouTube video many years ago that I haven’t been able to find since and the details are murky, but I remember the gist of it was that there was a tunnel system under a German city that the Nazis used to stash some of their gold (allegedly). It was mentioned that these tunnels were likely boobytrapped and the German government didn’t want archaeologists messing with a site that was likely wired with bombs in an actual city. I’ve tried to find it again, but all that comes up is the N**i gold train craze that wound up yielding nothing.
Some jungles in Vietnam still have spike pits, tree traps, and explosives. In some instances, there are active pen traps and watch bombs.
I’ve heard a theory that King Tuts tomb and the curse associated with it (sudden mysterious deaths of initial archeologists soon after inspecting the tomb) may have been some form of toxic micro dust, that was laid across and throughout the entire tomb, and when the seal was broken and air flow kicked up the dust, it was inhaled and wreaked havoc on people who came into contact with it.
Again, I have zero evidence to back this up, it is something I heard theorized, but also don’t underestimate the Egyptians for being able to create such a substance.
I know that the tomb of Qin Shi Huang (the emperor that is buried in a massive mound surrounded by the terra-cotta Warriors) is rumored to have all sorts of traps (and amazing treasures) but the tomb is not planned to be opened (which is great, in my opinion).
2 of the more amazing treasure rumored to be inside… the ceiling is covered in gems to mimic the stars in the sky and the entire known earth is supposedly rendered on the ground with rivers and oceans of flowing mercury simulating water. Tests around the edge of the mound have found high concentrations of mercury.
The Oak Island Money Pit:
A man made pit with platforms roughly every 10 feet. Nobody has ever successfully excavated it as it was booby trapped to flood with water although multiple excavation attempts have been made.
Oak Island in Canada supposedly has a secret treasure buried deep down. There were many different kinds of traps and stuff that have made digging up the island a nightmare.
Several people have gone bankrupt trying to uncover it. There’s also tales about a curse.
“The curse” is said to have originated more than a century ago and states that seven men will die in the search for the treasure before it is found. To date, six men have died in their efforts to find the treasure.”
There’s a history Channel miniseries about it.
There’s one in Mesopotamia that keeps luring armies to the region and causes them to lose and leave in shame.
Not set off, but the legend says that the first Chinese emperor’s grave would contain poison and k**l anyone who opens it. Archeologist aren’t scared of the poison but the grave hasn’t been opened for so long that it may get destroyed if air gets in.
The achaeologists who opened Tutankhamon’s tomb had a horrific rate of unexplainable deaths, days or even weeks later. The origins of the “curse of the Mummy’s Tomb”, I suspect.
One theory I like is >!”ancient pathogens that humans have lost their immunity to”!
A few years ago a person was going thru some old WW1 stuff, put on an old gas mask and inhaled and died. It seems the filter still had some remnants of old mustard gas in it.
I heard somewhere about some tombs having massive lakes of algae infested waters. something about the waters left them incredibly acidic or something, basically falling in it would cause seriously gruesome injuries.
A part of Ancient Egypt had made a huge pit of snakes to protect a tomb before and the snakes bred to where there were King Cobras everywhere. It nearly k****d two but medicine and some survival instincts saved them. At least if this book I read it correct but I am not sure.
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