IELTS Reading: archaeology passages
Excavations, ancient sites and artefacts, and what they reveal about the people who left them.
62 passages mainly about archaeology · 27 more that touch on it · from 81 full tests
Passages mainly about archaeology
Each passage opens as a timed 20-minute practice with its 13–14 questions. Submit to see your band estimate and the sentence that proves every answer.
- The Builders of Stonehenge
- Raising the Great Pyramid
- Bodies from the Bog
- The Dead Sea Scrolls
- The Silent Army of Mount Li
- The Moai of Rapa Nui
- The Stone That Unlocked Egypt
- Reading Migration from Ancient Bones
- What Ancient Teeth Can Tell Us
- Reading the Seabed
- Doing It Again
- Ground Worth Defending
- Should Ruins Be Rebuilt?
- The Making of an Egyptian Mummy
- Dig Now or Leave It for the Future?
- The Rediscovery of Mohenjo-daro
- The City of Stone
- The Palace of Knossos and the Minoans
- The Moulds of Anyang
- Reading the Hillforts
- The Antikythera Mechanism
- Tracing the Obsidian Road
- The Case for the Copy
- The City Carved from Rock
- Reading the Unreadable
- The Cave Paintings of Lascaux
- The Hill with a Belly
- The Price of a Brooch
- The Gate of Ishtar
- Drawings on the Desert Floor
- Rescuing the Past, Losing the Place
- Should Popular Historical Sites Be Closed?
- The Decipherment of Linear B
- The Ship beneath the Mounds
- The Knots That Kept the Accounts
- The Archive in Clay
- Gold from the Mountain: Las Médulas
- The Great Houses of Chaco Canyon
- The Mounds of Cahokia
- The Rediscovery of Machu Picchu
- Copies and Originals
- Should Public Money Fund the Search for Historical Wrecks?
- Opening the Skull: Trepanation in the Ancient World
- The Lewis Chessmen
- The Gundestrup Cauldron
- The Staffordshire Hoard
- The Hanging Gardens of Babylon: Myth or History?
- The Potters Who Crossed the Pacific
Show 14 more archaeology passages
- The Town Without Streets
- A Library in the Ashes
- A Gallery in the Sahara
- Chan Chan, the Adobe City of the Chimú
- The Uffington White Horse
- The Caves at Ajanta
- Sigiriya: The Rock Fortress of Sri Lanka
- The Moche of Peru's Desert Coast
- The Oseberg Ship
- The Cliff Dwellings of Mesa Verde
- The Dunhuang Caves and Their Hidden Library
- The Jars of the Plain
- The Kingdom on the Hill
- The Disc That Refuses to Speak
Other passages that cover archaeology
These passages have a different main subject but deal with archaeology along the way.
27 passages
- Keeping Bees: A Partnership Thousands of Years Old
- From Bean to Bar
- From Wolf to Dog
- The First Riders
- The Living Staircases of the Cordillera
- Radiocarbon Dating: A Clock in Carbon
- The Mirror: Reflection and Revelation
- Building Hadrian's Wall
- Seeing Beneath the Soil
- What Coins Tell Historians
- The Stone of Justice: Hammurabi's Laws
- The Dead in the Glass Case
- The Amber Road
- The Wine of the Ancient Mediterranean
- The Kingdom of Aksum
- The Bronze Age Tin Trade
- The Voyagers Who Filled an Ocean
- Reading the Wedge-Shaped Signs
- The Library of Ashurbanipal
- Amateurs and the Past: Partners or Intruders?
- The Swahili Trading Cities
- Letters from the Counting House
- The Kingdom of Kush and the City of Meroe
- Building the Viking Longship
- The Kon-Tiki Expedition
- The Mary Rose: Loss and Recovery
- How the Cat Domesticated Itself
Key archaeology vocabulary
Words worth knowing before you read about archaeology, each with the sentence it appears in.
| Word | Meaning | Example from a passage |
|---|---|---|
| hoard noun | a collection of valuable objects that has been hidden or stored away | “The hoard consists of ninety-three objects: seventy-eight chess pieces” Test 409 |
| ecclesiastical adjective | connected with the Christian church and its organisation | “an ecclesiastical centre and a busy centre of ivory carving” Test 409 |
| stylised adjective | carved or drawn in a simplified way rather than realistically | “Faces throughout the set are stylised rather than individual, with broad noses and heavy brows” Test 409 |
| concealed verb | hid something carefully so that other people would not find it | “that a merchant concealed stock that was waiting to be sold” Test 409 |
| excavated verb | dug out of the ground by researchers or archaeologists | “fragments of comparable work have been excavated there” Test 409 |
| corrosion noun | the gradual damage and decay of a metal caused by chemical reactions with its surroundings | “had protected the metal from the corrosion that ordinary soil would have caused” Test 412 |
| elaborate adjective | having many complex parts or details; carefully and intricately made | “one of the most elaborate pieces of metalwork to survive from the European Iron Age” Test 412 |
| stylistic adjective | relating to the characteristic way something is designed or made | “On stylistic grounds the silverwork is usually placed in the La Tène period” Test 412 |
| plunder noun | goods taken by force, especially during a war or raid | “carried home by a returning warrior or taken as plunder” Test 412 |
| antiquity noun | the ancient past, especially the period of early civilisations long before the present | “At least one side plate has been lost since antiquity” Test 412 |
| excavation noun | the careful digging up of a site in order to recover buried objects | “Their excavation of the surrounding soil produced several hundred more pieces.” Test 415 |
| filigree noun | delicate ornament made from fine twisted threads of gold or silver | “many of them decorated with gold filigree and red stones” Test 415 |
| inlaid adjective | decorated with pieces of another material set into the surface | “nearly all of them made of gold and many inlaid with garnets” Test 415 |
| conservators noun | specialists who clean, repair and preserve objects held in museums | “conservators later spent years matching hundreds of loose stones back to their settings” Test 415 |
| vaulted adjective | built with a curved roof or a series of arches | “terraces carried on vaulted arches of brick” Test 419 |
| ingenious adjective | cleverly designed and original | “described the ingenious machinery used to lift the water to the highest level” Test 419 |
| unanimous adjective | in complete agreement with one another | “for all its inconsistencies, is unanimous about the city” Test 419 |
| attribution noun | the act of stating who or what is responsible for something | “The attribution of the water-raising screws is disputed” Test 419 |
| hampered verb | made difficult to do or to achieve | “Work at the site has been hampered by modern building” Test 419 |
| sherds noun | broken pieces of pottery or other fired clay objects | “Similar sherds were later recognised on islands hundreds of kilometres away” Test 421 |
| ornamented verb | decorated with a pattern or design | “ornamented vessels usually form only a small proportion of a collection” Test 421 |
| dentate adjective | having a pattern of small tooth-like marks | “the potter pressed a small toothed implement into the surface, leaving rows of tiny dentate marks” Test 421 |
| archipelago noun | a large group of islands lying close together | “The oldest known Lapita pottery comes from the Bismarck Archipelago, off the coast of New Guinea” Test 421 |
| inferred verb | worked out indirectly from available evidence rather than stated directly | “the link between the Lapita world and the Polynesians of today was inferred mainly from pottery styles” Test 421 |
Question types in these passages
- True / False / Not Given · 44 passages
- Multiple choice · 23 passages
- Note completion · 20 passages
- Summary completion · 19 passages
- Table completion · 18 passages
- Short-answer questions · 17 passages
- Flow-chart completion · 14 passages
- Sentence completion · 14 passages
- Multiple choice (choose more than one) · 12 passages
- Yes / No / Not Given · 12 passages
- Matching features · 11 passages
- Matching information · 10 passages
- Matching headings · 8 passages
- Matching sentence endings · 8 passages
- Diagram label completion · 2 passages
- Summary completion (word list) · 2 passages