There are hundreds of tourist sites and experiences that are too crowded, too over-developed or too expensive. They’re the places we always see on TV or as backdrops in movies, or places we’ve read about in books or seen on the covers of travel magazines; it’s always sunny in the photos, and the sites always look pleasant and amazing to visit. But are they?
It’s a question publisher Dorling Kindersley has tackled head-on in The Road Less Travelled: 1,000 Amazing Places Off the Tourist Trail, a book that controversially picks the world’s top tourist sites – and then casts them effortlessly aside in favour of less publicised places. Instead of visiting the Pyramids of Giza, with their “unbroken procession of tourist buses”, the book’s authors say tourists should head to the pyramids of Meroe in Sudan, where they can “have the tombs all to themselves, with little more accompaniment than the sound of the desert wind in heir ears”.
One of the most fascinating cities in history (and you can watch our video interview with John Julius Norwich to find out about other great cities in history) is Chichen Itza, which was built by the Mayans between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. The settlement here in what is a dry and arid region is down to the discovery of two cenotes - large, natural sinkholes which lead to an abundant supply of freshwater. This laid the basis for agricultural development, and in time the city would grow to become a political, cultural and trading powerhouse which dominated the region.
Submitted by Sean Williams on Fri, 10/23/2009 - 20:00
Two giants of travel and world heritage teamed up this Thursday, as UNESCO and online community site TripAdvisor launched a partnership to help save some of the world's greatest cultural sites. The pairing will see TripAdvisor pledge an initial $1.5million (£919,000) towards UNESCO's ambitious World Heritage Centre, from which the UN's culture wing will observe and preserve some 890 sites on its World Heritage List. These include some of the planet's most celebrated ancient places, such as Stonehenge, the Theban Necropolis and Chichen Itza.
Submitted by Sean Williams on Tue, 09/29/2009 - 09:30
New research suggests the giant step pyramids of the ancient Mayas may in fact have been used to make music on a colossal scale. Experts were already aware of the 'raindrop' sounds made by the footsteps of those ascending Chichen Itza's famous El Castillo pyramid. Yet the comparison of El Castillo's sonic phenomenon with another of Mexico's Maya structures has led two scholars to conclude that creating 'rain music' was the pyramids' main function.
Submitted by Sean Williams on Fri, 08/14/2009 - 15:49
Archaeoastronomy is a bit of a mongrel discipline, a hybrid of archaeology, anthropology, astronomy and history. As with most archaeological tributaries, its professionalism is very much in its infancy, and can trace its roots back little further than a couple of centuries. The first archaeoastronomical assertions, many argue, were made by the 18th century antiquarian William Stukeley, when he deduced some sort of astronomical use for Stonehenge due to its apparent alignment to several celestial events. Interest in the religious and cultural significance of historic monuments grew, and in 1973 the term ‘archaeoastronomy’ was finally coined by American anthropologist Elizabeth Chesley Baity, at the behest of several scholars. Essentially, the discipline seeks to explore the anthropology of astronomy – that is, how past people made sense of celestial events and how these phenomena in turn affected them – rather than the mere history of astronomy.
Highlighted Quote:
Archaeoastronomers have established astronomical significance at the ancient Incan city of Cusco via the geographical alignments of various buildings collated with ethnographic records
