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Luke Caverns

Explorer · Anthropologist

Lost cities, first explorers & the wild edges of the map.

Luke “Caverns” Reagan goes looking for the ancient Americas and the forgotten frontier: unexcavated Maya pyramids, Olmec heads, the Amazon’s lost cities and the animals the first explorers saw before they vanished.

Watch the latest Open the atlas
Subscribers
205K
Views
14.7M
Places mapped
30

Channel figures from the YouTube Data API, Oct 6, 2026, rounded down.

Luke Caverns in a khaki field shirt against a wall of jungle leaves
Luke Caverns, in the fieldEst. 2021

Latest dispatch

Fresh from the field

All 102 videos

Documentary34 min

Major Discoveries at Machu Picchu: LiDAR finds Ruins & Buried Highway

12
Machu Picchu, Cusco Region, Peru

The Atlas

30 places. One map.

Every pin is a place Luke has filmed or told the story of. Tap one to see the videos.

Open the full atlas
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World map of every place in the atlas
  1. 1Gila Wilderness1
  2. 2Appalachia6
  3. 3Great Falls of the Missouri1
  4. 4Ice Age America2
  5. 5The Olmec Heartland11
  6. 6The Maya Lowlands15
  7. 7Becan1
  8. 8The Black Hole1
  9. 9Teotihuacan1
  10. 10Tenochtitlan1
  11. 11Hueyatlaco1
  12. 12Machu Picchu5
  13. 13Cusco and the Sacred Valley3
  14. 14The Nazca Lines1
  15. 15The Amazon8
  16. 16Ciudad Perdida (Teyuna)1
  17. 17Port Famine1
  18. 18Easter Island (Rapa Nui)1
  19. 19Giza and the Nile Valley15
  20. 20The Osirion at Abydos2
  21. 21Alexandria2
  22. 22Göbekli Tepe3
  23. 23Akrotiri1
  24. 24Stonehenge1
  25. 25Angkor Wat2
  26. 26Mauritius3
  27. 27The Southern Cape1
  28. 28Tasmania1
  29. 29New Zealand1
  30. 30Wrangel Island2
  31. 31Atlantis3
  32. 32Gods, dragons and myths3

On location

Boots on the ground

Rappelling into a Maya sinkhole in Belize. Eleven days on foot through the Gila. Climbing pyramids in Campeche that nobody has excavated. This is where the camera goes with him.

Every expedition

Field series

Pick up a notebook

All series

Deep time

Every story, in the order it happened

Walk the timeline
  1. 200,000 BCHueyatlaco
  2. 2,560 BCGiza and the Nile Valley
  3. 1,290 BCThe Osirion at Abydos
  4. 500 BCThe Amazon
  5. AD 500Ciudad Perdida (Teyuna)
  6. 1325Tenochtitlan
  7. 1598Mauritius

The logbook

Most watched

The five videos the Raiders have played the most.

View counts from the YouTube Data API, Oct 6, 2026.

  1. 01The Burned Knowledge of Alexandria's Library1.5M views
  2. 02The Olmec Mystery679K views
  3. 03The Extinct Appalachian Jaguars... that Explorers saw527K views
  4. 04We’ve Finally Found Magellan’s Lost Colony in South America523K views
  5. 05What existed before the Great Pyramid?471K views

Can't decide?

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The podcast

Raiders of the Past

Long conversations, trip recaps and debates about the ancient world, often with Jahannah James.

Every episode

As heard on

Luke on other shows

All 19 appearances

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Members and patrons get extra videos you won't find on the main channel, and the merch store helps keep the boots moving.