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Luke Caverns

30 places · 101 video stops

The Atlas

Every place Luke has filmed at or told the story of, pinned where it is. Numbers follow the map from the American Southwest, south through Mesoamerica and the Andes, across to Egypt and out to the far shores.

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World map with every place in the atlas
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Map of North America

Region 01

North America

  1. 1Gila WildernessNew Mexico, USA · 33.23° N, 108.27° W · 1 videoEleven days on foot, unsupported, through the uncharted canyons of the Gila. The crew charted at least two archaeological sites nobody had recorded.
  2. 2AppalachiaEastern USA · 36.60° N, 82.20° W · 6 videosForgotten petroglyphs and megaliths, and the big cats that early explorers swore they saw in these mountains.
  3. 3Great Falls of the MissouriMontana, USA · 47.50° N, 111.28° W · 1 videoWhere Meriwether Lewis and his men first ran into an animal nothing had prepared them for.
  4. 4Ice Age AmericaNorth and South America · 34.06° N, 118.36° W · 2 videosThe world of the dire wolf and the other giants that vanished at the end of the last Ice Age. The pin sits on the La Brea Tar Pits, where more dire wolves have been dug up than anywhere else.
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Map of Mesoamerica

Region 02

Mesoamerica

  1. 5The Olmec HeartlandVeracruz and Tabasco, Mexico · 18.10° N, 94.04° W · 11 videosColossal stone heads, a language nobody can read and a people whose own name for themselves is lost. Luke's longest-running obsession.
  2. 6The Maya LowlandsCampeche and Quintana Roo, Mexico · 18.30° N, 89.60° W · 15 videosJungle of Stone country. Unexcavated pyramids, palaces and whole cities under the canopy around Calakmul, Kohunlich and the backroads of Quintana Roo.
  3. 7BecanCampeche, Mexico · 18.52° N, 89.47° W · 1 videoA Maya city ringed by a moat, and a great pyramid you can still climb.
  4. 8The Black HoleCayo District, Belize · 17.18° N, 88.68° W · 1 videoA sinkhole that opened at the end of the Ice Age. The Maya went down into it. So did Luke, on a rope.
  5. 9TeotihuacanState of Mexico, Mexico · 19.69° N, 98.84° W · 1 videoThe Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, built by a city whose founders are still a mystery.
  6. 10TenochtitlanMexico City, Mexico · 19.43° N, 99.13° W · 1 videoThe Aztec capital on its lake, and the few megalithic monuments that survived the conquest.
  7. 11HueyatlacoPuebla, Mexico · 18.93° N, 98.15° W · 1 videoA dig whose stone tools were dated far too old for the textbooks, and what happened to the people who said so.
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Map of South America

Region 03

South America

  1. 12Machu PicchuCusco Region, Peru · 13.16° S, 72.55° W · 5 videosThe megalithic city in the clouds. Luke has been up the mountain eight times and still has questions.
  2. 13Cusco and the Sacred ValleyPeru · 13.51° S, 71.98° W · 3 videosInca stonework that fits like it was poured, and the legendary Chincana tunnels said to run beneath it.
  3. 14The Nazca LinesIca Region, Peru · 14.74° S, 75.13° W · 1 videoGiant figures drawn on the desert floor that only make sense from the sky.
  4. 15The AmazonBrazil, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia · 4.50° S, 63.00° W · 8 videosPercy Fawcett vanished looking for a lost city here. Lidar is now finding thousands of them.
  5. 16Ciudad Perdida (Teyuna)Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia · 11.04° N, 73.93° W · 1 videoThe mountain-top citadel of the Tairona, older than Machu Picchu and never found by the conquistadors.
  6. 17Port FamineStrait of Magellan, Chile · 53.63° S, 70.93° W · 1 videoCiudad del Rey Don Felipe, the lost Spanish colony at the bottom of the world, finally located with lidar and ground-penetrating radar.
  7. 18Easter Island (Rapa Nui)Chile · 27.12° S, 109.35° W · 1 videoOne of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth, and its stone ancestors.
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Map of Egypt and the Old World

Region 04

Egypt and the Old World

  1. 19Giza and the Nile ValleyEgypt · 29.98° N, 31.13° E · 15 videosThe Great Pyramid, its voids and its missing capstone, and everything Hollywood gets wrong about ancient Egypt.
  2. 20The Osirion at AbydosEgypt · 26.19° N, 31.92° E · 2 videosEgypt's strangest building. A New Kingdom cenotaph, or something much older?
  3. 21AlexandriaEgypt · 31.20° N, 29.92° E · 2 videosThe library that held the ancient world's knowledge, and the long, slow story of how it burned.
  4. 22Göbekli TepeŞanlıurfa, Türkiye · 37.22° N, 38.92° E · 3 videosCarved stone enclosures built 11,000 years ago by people we still call simple hunter-gatherers. Luke disagrees.
  5. 23AkrotiriSantorini, Greece · 36.35° N, 25.40° E · 1 videoA Bronze Age city buried under volcanic ash. Was it the real Atlantis?
  6. 24StonehengeWiltshire, England · 51.18° N, 1.83° W · 1 videoNew discoveries at the world's most famous stone circle.
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Map of Far shores

Region 05

Far shores

  1. 25Angkor WatSiem Reap, Cambodia · 13.41° N, 103.87° E · 2 videosThe largest religious monument on Earth and the mind-blowing engineering behind it.
  2. 26MauritiusIndian Ocean · 20.30° S, 57.58° E · 3 videosThe island of the dodo, and a hundred-year collapse told through the Dutch sailors' own journals.
  3. 27The Southern CapeWestern Cape, South Africa · 34.10° S, 20.40° E · 1 videoHome of the bluebuck, the first large African mammal to go extinct in recorded history.
  4. 28TasmaniaAustralia · 42.00° S, 146.60° E · 1 videoThe Tasmanian tiger, and the explorers and settlers who saw it before it was gone.
  5. 29New ZealandSouth Island · 43.50° S, 171.00° E · 1 videoTwelve-foot birds, the ancestors of the Māori who hunted them, and the explorers who found their bones.
  6. 30Wrangel IslandArctic Ocean, Russia · 71.24° N, 179.40° W · 2 videosA frozen island where the last mammoths held on for 6,000 years after the rest were gone.

Here be dragons

Off the map

Some stories have no coordinates.

Coastlines from Natural Earth via world-atlas. Pins mark the site, or for a region the place most of its stories happen.