What is Archaeology Travel & Who Are We?
Archaeology Travel is an award-winning website created for those who enjoy exploring our world’s histories, from humanity’s earliest times to the more contemporary pasts. Our aim is to provide resources and tools to help everyone do this in more meaningful and sustainable ways.
We achieve this by publishing articles providing tips and advice for visiting archaeological and historical sites around the world. We also publish regional and thematic guides on world art, archaeology and history. These guides comprise lists and maps of points of interest, which for our members can be added to personalised travel lists and itineraries.
Archaeology Travel is a truly unique travel website allowing you to benefit from the experience and expertise of archaeologists and historians to create individualised itineraries that suit your interests.
Who Are We
Archaeology Travel was founded in 2011 by Thomas Dowson, an archaeologist who trained in South Africa and taught archaeology at universities in England. Over the years a number of archaeology and history students have written for Archaeology Travel. Some were interns fulfilling degree requirements, others wrote for extended periods. See a full List of Previous Contributors and Researchers. Today there is a small team of writers and researchers, archaeologists and historians with professional qualifications in those subject areas, producing the guides on the website.Â
The following are the current writers and researchers producing content on Archaeology Travel.
Thomas Dowson
Born in Zambia, I trained as an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and taught archaeology at the universities of Southampton and Manchester (England). The way archaeology is presented to the public influenced my academic research and teaching. Starting and developing Archaeology Travel has been a dream come true.
Ethan Doyle White
My PhD is in Medieval History and Archaeology, from University College in London. When not visiting archaeological sites and historical monuments at home and abroad, and writing about these for Archaeology Travel, I research and publish on religion in early Medieval England as well as the contemporary uses of heritage.
Alexander Gräf
A fullstack developer, explorer & puzzle solver, born and raised in Germany. I spent a couple of school years in Nigeria, which transformed my way of seeing the world. I am a restless optimist, with a world around me that sometimes needs tweaking to fit mine! Recently, I have been transforming Archaeology Travel into its new shell.
Ricky Menzies
During my undergraduate degree, I spent a year studying in Norway and Finland. It was then I discovered my love for the Medieval North. After completing my BA at Cardiff University I worked as an archaeologist at Cotswold Archaeology. And now I am completing an MA in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies at the University of Iceland and the University of Oslo, where I currently live.
Dulcie Newbury
Currently I am studying for my PhD in archaeology, which focuses on gender and queer theory. With a passion for history and heritage, and the role these can play in mental health and wellbeing, I can often be found exploring new places and writing about them. When not studying, I love to read and travel.
Gianluca Pitzeri
Born and raised in Sardinia, from an early age I dreamt of discovering ancient ruins. Currently I am completing a Master's degree in Archaeology and Art at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia. What particularly interests me nowadays is the potential digital technologies can make to enhancing visitor experience at archaeological sites. This will be he topic of my thesis.
Doaa Yousef
I am passionate about the representation of ancient Egypt; especially in museums. I received education in Egyptology, Museum Studies, Art, and Heritage Studies, and I have a well-established career which provided me with great experiences in teaching and academic writing, exhibitions, collection management and community engagement.
What We Do
Our mission is to encourage and help everyone explore our world’s pasts in more sustainable and engaging ways (read more about our Mission and Vision).
We do this by providing suggestions for where to go and what sites and landmarks, monuments and museums to see, as well as tips on how to make the best of your visits. This information is always based on our personal, first-hand experience, and/or exhaustive research that we carry out.
We present this information in our regional and thematic guides on a unique platform that enables you to build your own itineraries based on your interests.
How do we create a website that you can trust?
In four ways. We produce (1) authoritative content based on (2) first-hand experiences and/or (3) expert research and present this on a (4) technically competent and unique platform.
Authoritative Content
Our articles are based on more than one visit. In the last five or so years, with the widespread adoption of online booking systems, how we get into a site has changed quite dramatically. Thomas has visited the Acropolis in Athens at least once a year in mot years since 2013. Over this period he has seen many changes in the entry process. His article on buying tickets for the Acropolis, first published on Archaeology Travel in 2013, has changed dramatically since then with the various developments over the years. This is why our articles on the Acropolis, and others, are the most authoritative on the internet.
Our guides are similarly authoritative. We are not restricted by what sites and museums we can include. In many regions around the world, what gets included in a list is dependent on who owns or manages the sites. Take Devon in south west England as an example. Anyone looking to visit there and see as many sites and museums as they can needs find the leading national websites, the local government website, as well as websites for privately owned attractions. These different organisations are in competition to visitors, so there is rarely any collaboration between them.
Archaeology Travel cuts through these politics and local situations. We list all sites and museums, without favour. So visitors to this website can make a more informed choice of the sites they want to visit. Our regional lists are either already more inclusive or in the process of becoming so as we continue our research.Â
First-Hand Experience
To write some of the articles we do we visit the sites and museums ourselves. When we visit a site we don’t just enjoy the attraction and then write about it. We are attentive to the many aspects and characteristics of that attraction. Our recommendations and tips then are based on these first-hand observations. In our articles we make it clear what we are basing our decisions on.Â
For instance, when Gianluca visits Pompeii in November, we are mindful that any advice about visiting the site in June is very different. Hence our articles are often supplemented with the experiences of more than one researcher. Our article on visiting Pompeii, although written by Gianluca following his visit in November, is enhanced by observations made by Thomas when he visited in June.
Expert Research
There are websites that do much the same as Archaeology Travel, and they probably have many more sites and museums listed. They can achieve this because in most cases this information is scraped from other sources on the internet.
All our content is exhaustively researched. From the pinpointing of a site on the map (there are many errors in Google’s maps) to the details about visiting a site or museum, and the information about a site or museum you might read on information panels, leaflets or from a guide. Everything is thoroughly checked.
As professionally trained archaeologists and historians we know how and where to carry out this research. So when a guide to the extraordinary Ice Age cave of Font de Gaume tells you it is the “last polychrome prehistoric painting open to the public anywhere in the world”, we know they are wrong.
Unique Platform
Trustworthy content is not worth much if it is not accessible and presented in a user-friendly manner. For over a year, starting in November 2021, we have been working with Alexander Gräf of portalZINE® to create our unique platform. Alexander has paid close attention to what we want to achieve and created a platform that not only goes beyond our initial expectations, but one that is useful for our readers based on what we understand they want.
Following the pandemic, and for other reasons, when travelling people are increasingly looking for personalised experiences. And they are prepared to spend a bit of time looking for that. Archaeology Travel enables to take our trustworthy information and created itineraries based on their own interests. No other website offers the combination of reliable content with the advanced technical functionality Archaeology Travel does.
None of the above is intended to imply that we do not make mistakes and even get things wrong. We welcome our readers pointing out our errors and/or different points of view.
Why Support Our Work?
With the number of websites available, and now with the advent of AI, you may be wondering what makes us unique. Why should you support us? Two recent anecdotes give an insight into our work and how we stand apart. In March 2025 Thomas Dowson was visiting Roman sites in southern Germany rese. One of the sites on his itinerary was the impressive geotope of Felsenmeer.
Felsemeer is a vast boulder field, over 2 km long and 100 m wide, on the side of Felsberg near Darmstadt. Today part of a nature reserve, and a popular recreation area, in the past this was a quarry for the Romans and later stonemasons. Of particular interest for anyone with an interest in the Romans in Germany, is the near-complete column that lies in place where it was carved. After a few hours scrambling about the mountainside, Thomas still had not found the Roman column, the signs were misleading. Using the QR codes on information panels went nowhere – either the website was no longer live or the webmasters had not redirected the urls attached to the QR codes to the new pages (if such pages actually existed). Thomas then searched the internet. The results were disappointing. Many websites, even well known websites be leading archaeologists, were relying on the same information and photographs published on Wikipedia. Travel bloggers had clearly not found the Roman column.
With the many websites coming up in search results, there was no information to locate the section of Felsemeer with the Roman column. Through perseverance, Thomas eventually found the column. And we now have our own photograph.
On the same trip, Thomas also visited the Roman town of Cambodunum in Kempten, Bavaria. Research for our region guide of Roman sites in Bavaria included questioning various AI apps. In asking for a list of the most important Roman sites in Bavaria none of these applications named Cambodunum. And yet it is arguably one of the more important Roman archaeological sites in Bavaria, perhaps even Germany. Interested to know why the omission, we interrogated the apps further. It was clear that the site was ‘known’ and its significance ‘understood’, but because it is apparently not frequently mentioned it is not considered important. Thinking about this, most tourists who start their journeys in Bavaria start in Munich and head north to the many other well known towns and cities. Few had west. Here is an example of how AI is shaping our knowledge in ways that are, quite simply, inaccurate. Cambodunum is an important site, but it is overlooked for other sites that are better ‘represented’ online.
Archaeology Travel may have less sites than other sites, but we are not in the business of scraping information from Wikipedia and/or Google maps. In any event, that information is unreliable. We have been to the places we write about, we base our guides on the historical significance of sites, not how frequently they are mentioned online. What we have is accurate and reliable, not the results of a n AI popularity contest, and we work tirelessly to increase our coverage.
Read a more detailed article about the limitations of AI and the role we hope to play in travel planning:
➤ AI, Travel Planning & Archaeology Travel: the Case for Human Expertise
Join Our Journey
Up until 2023 the travel and research expenses were met from commissions Archaeology Travel earns by recommending relevant services and products to our readers (see our code of ethics for more about this). Now with the way AI is used to generate answers to peoples’ search queries, organic traffic to our website has dropped significantly. As has our income. This development has severely compromised our ability to fund our operations – producing and maintaining original, informative content. We are not alone, read the stories of other leading websites providing independent content creators similarly impacted over the last two years or so, including Housefresh and Retrododo – just two outstanding examples of independent websites that have been severely impacted by the current trends in AI and search (read more about these developments). Our information is used for answers when people more often than not don’t even visit our website. In fact potential readers are actively discouraged from visiting source websites.Â
We could use clickbait tactics to attract readers to pages full of intrusive adverts. But that goes against our mission and ethics. We want to be part of building a more useful Internet of the future. We are building the Internet we want to find.
This means we have to devise another business model to allow us to continue creating original, reliable and helpful content. The information we produce will always be freely available to all, whether you are looking for tips on buying tickets to the Acropolis in Athens or for a list of Roman sites and ruins in the Netherlands. To use this information with our custom built tools to create travel lists and itineraries requires a paid subscription. Either on a monthly basis, an annual basis or a single payment for a lifetime membership. More details can be found on the page outlining our Membership Plans.Â
Signing up for a membership plan is one way to support our work. You can also share our pages with your friends and family on your social media accounts. Or you can make a one-off donation – as the saying goes, every little bit counts.Â
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