Archaeologists Reveal What They’d Love to Discover in 2025

Archaeology teaches us so much more about the history of the world and humanity every year, revealing new secrets, reshaping our understanding of the past, and conjuring new mysteries to be solved by researchers.

As we enter 2025, Newsweek asked archaeologists what they would love to see discovered during the year. Here’s what they told us.

Monica L. Smith, Professor, Department of Anthropology and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian Studies, UCLA

What I would love to see discovered in 2025 is a bilingual inscription (on any medium—stone, pottery, metal) of a Mesopotamian language and the Indus script.

The ancient Indus culture was in the area of modern-day Pakistan and western India, and the heart of the ancient Mesopotamian culture was in the modern-day country of Iraq.

We know that there were trade relations between the two regions in the third millennium BCE because there are some objects that have been found especially in Mesopotamia that could only have come from the Indus region.

And there are, in Mesopotamia, some references to speakers of what they called the “Meluhhan” language that they associated with the Indus. But…while we can read what the Mesopotamians wrote, the Indus script is as-yet undeciphered.

It would be a true Rosetta-stone moment to encounter a bilingual, which might be something excavated in any of the localities of the Indus and Mesopotamian culture, or could well be in a museum storeroom of long-ago excavated material that has not yet been fully cataloged.

Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, Profesor Principal de Arqueología, Departamento de Humanidades, PUCP

The discovery of the long-lost Late Moche King of northern Peru would be the most
interesting to be seen next year.

In the past 30 years, the archaeology of the Moche, that lived in the north coast of Peru, has produced some of the most spectacular discoveries of royal tombs, like the one found in Sipan and Huaca Cao.

These discoveries revealed an incredible complex civilization that predates the Incas by 800 years, yet capable of producing the most exquisite gold and silver jewels.

But one piece of the puzzle is still missing, the last King of the Moche, who ruled just before the collapse of this civilization, which is more intriguing than the collapse of the Maya.

Michael E. Smith, Professor of Archaeology and Former Director, ASU Teotihuacan Research Laboratory, School of Human Evolution & Social Change, Arizona State University

I would love to see insights like those of Riris et al. applied to the resilience of early cities.

Cities today bear the brunt of the negative effects of climate change, and there is a big effort to figure out what cities can do to adapt to warmer temperatures and environmental deterioration.

Do early cities have lessons to teach us about why some cities were successful over time while others declined? Unfortunately, we currently lack the methods and data to evaluate this notion.

So, what I would like to see discovered in 2025 are the methods and data to produce new insights about the resilience of early cities, and the ways they adapted to a wide range of shocks. Then we can see whether they hold insights for cities today.

Elizabeth Graham, Emeritus Professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology, UCL Institute of Archaeology

In 2025? Plans are to get lidar images of the site of Lamanai in northern Belize, which dates from about 1600 B.C. to historical times.

Professor Joann Fletcher, Department of Archaeology, University of York

Certainly more ancient Egyptian finds from our part of the world here in Yorkshire, England, which is not only home to the most northerly temple ever created for Egypt’s gods almost 2,000 years ago, but where increasing amounts of evidence is being identified in the most unlikely of places and all part of our ‘Ancient Egypt in Yorkshire’ Project.