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Some ancient places give up their secrets. A few refuse, and stand before us like questions carved in stone. You can date them, map them, measure every block, and still find yourself unable to answer the simplest things. Who raised this? How? Why here, why like this, why at all? At certain sites the usual explanations run out, and what remains is genuine, honest mystery, the kind that serious people still argue over, the kind that no amount of confidence can dissolve. These a

You are floating in warm, clear water off a Greek beach, mask down, breathing slow, and below you a street appears. Not a vague shape. A street. The lines of walls, the rooms of houses, a courtyard, the outline of a town laid out exactly as people left it, three or four metres beneath your fins. You can trace a doorway with your eyes. You can follow a road to where it meets another. Children swam here as children swim here now, except the children who built these walls did so

A monument can stand for five thousand years and be damaged forever in a single careless second. A hand dragged across an ancient carving. A name scratched into a temple wall. A fragment slipped into a pocket as a souvenir. A crowd pressing where a crowd should never press. The deep past survived the rise and fall of empires, the end of the Ice Age, the loss of whole civilisations, only to arrive in our hands at the most dangerous moment of all, the age of mass travel, when m