43 Dangerous Surprises Archaeologists Discovered The Hard Way

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.

Kinda the opposite of what you're asking, but a major problem in nuclear disposal is how to convince people 10,000 years from now that this super fancy, highly fortified structure isn't the tomb of some great emperor or a temple to the god of the underworld, it's sealing away incredibly dangerous & extremely potent dark magic that *will* k**l any who enter & contaminate the air, water, & land for millenia if it escapes, and have those warnings be not only understood but also taken seriously, & not brushed off as superstition or a bluff.

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.

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.

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.

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".

There was an Egyptian tomb where a corridor went downhill by about 60 feet, and then uphill again.

The engineers put dead animals and fresh plants etc in there before they sealed it up. And so the decline/depression filled with CO2. It stayed like that for centuries. In modern times, when they unearthed the tomb, they found human skeletons centuries younger than the tomb, where people had died trying to get in.

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.

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 is a toxic powder in some Egyptian tombs called Hematite Powder. Its very sharp and can k**l you if you breath in allot of it. It also is very irritating to the skin.


Keep in mind that most tombs have been raided loads of times before the archeologists found them. Back in Egyptian times there were parts of their society that would loot tombs shortly after they were constructed.

There were sliding walls that would drop into place and seal off a tomb. This was not a trap though. It was one of the ways they constructed the pyramid. You need access to the tomb while you build it but you don't want people to access it easily. So they would sometimes have a "seal" that was a granite slab. Finish burying the pharoh and then seal the slab.


Or.... just tell everybody the tomb was sealed and then rob it to your hearts delight. Apparently that was super common


Physical traps don't work after thousands of years. All the physical traps you see in movies are only in movies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're referring to booby traps in ancient tombs and the like, none, because no such thing ever existed, it's pure Hollywood. Any booby trap that *was* built into such a thing would rot into nothingness in years without constant maintenance.

But there are plenty of modern-day death traps waiting. All over the world, old, forgotten landmines from wars decades ago still k**l and maim people every year. In Europe, they run across a few WWII-era unexploded bombs every year. And there are Jebus knows how many sunken ships with hazardous cargo in them that will some day rot away enough to release it. The US has lost some six nuclear bombs over the years.

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 (f**k drowning in sand).