Ensconced in the forested interior of modern-day Guinea-Bissau, the capital of the Kingdom of Kaabu, Kansala, was the region’s best-kept secret. Although far removed from major European trade routes, the city nevertheless dominated West Africa’s Senegambia region between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Kaabu traded with the Europeans and was involved in the slave trade,” says archaeologist Sirio Canós-Donnay of the Spanish National Research Council. “But no European ever set foot in the capital and they didn’t know where it was or even what it was called.”

With little to no previous archaeological evidence to draw on, a team of archaeologists and local sociologists and historians led by Canós-Donnay, Guinea-Bissau's National Research Institute (INEP), and Senegal's Ziguinchor University pieced together a timeline of Kaabu’s rise and fall. They pored over accounts of Islamic travelers and second-hand reports relayed by English, French, and Dutch traders, and compiled oral histories sung by local musicians and storytellers called griots. “The way history was reproduced and consumed was the domain of the griots,” Canós-Donnay says. Indeed, Kaabu is said to be where the kora, or West African harp, originated.

The team gleaned that while Kaabu consisted of a confederation of territories, its elected rulers—both women and men—hailed from three royal provinces that rotated into the seat of power at Kansala. Illustrations of Kaabu settlements depict zig-zagging mud fortifications, some with thatched roofs, multistory square towers equipped with defensive features including arrow slits and ramparts, and moats filled with thorns. “We have relied on local knowledge of these histories to connect archaeology with oral traditions to locate Kaabu sites,” says Canós-Donnay.

After excavating remnants of the kingdom in Senegal and armed with approximations of Kansala’s location, Canós-Donnay turned her focus to traces of a settlement in northern Guinea-Bissau where the team has unearthed evidence indicating it was a capital. “It’s interesting they chose a location so out of the way of any European trade routes for a kingdom deeply invested in trade,” she says. “They may have foreseen the danger posed by the Europeans and chosen a place they wouldn’t go for fear of disease and attack.” The team has only just begun to explore what remains of Kansala. They have identified two concentric enclosure walls, the ruler’s house, royal quarters, European cannons, and stone foundations of a gunpowder magazine said to have been blown up by Kaabu’s last king, who opted to destroy Kansala rather than surrender it to an enemy kingdom. “The capital’s dramatic end is still well remembered across the whole region,” says Canós-Donnay.

Local griots and elders, some from the village of Tabato, 60 miles southwest of the site, will now work alongside researchers and students from Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and the Gambia to explore the findings from the capital. “It’s been rewarding to confirm oral traditions,” says Canós-Donnay. “The griots we’ve talked to are excited to be part of this conversation between archaeology, folklore, and traditional ways of reproducing history. Even the village elders have been behind the archaeology because we’re helping prove all these stories they’d heard from their grandparents.”

As described by the chroniclers of the sixteenth-century Spanish de Soto expedition, the woman known to history as the Lady of Cofitachequi made a dramatic entrance to an audience with Hernando de Soto and his officers somewhere in what is now South Carolina. On May 1, 1540, she was borne to the meeting on a litter decorated with brilliant white cloth. The chroniclers marveled that such a beautiful woman ruled one of the alliances of towns in the American Southeast now known as Mississippian chiefdoms. She evidently exercised canny diplomacy and headed off direct conflict by allowing the Spaniards to spend at least 10 days at Cofitachequi, a large town that lay along a river at the heart of her realm. The Spanish soldiers, some 600 strong, took over half of the settlement, building several temporary structures and robbing the chiefdom’s main temple of a cache of pearls before heading northwest. Another expedition led by the Spaniard Juan Pardo traveled to Cofitachequi between 1566 and 1568, and English colonist Henry Woodward recorded visiting in 1670. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, there are no more references to Cofitachequi in the historical record.

In the mid-twentieth century, scholars using the accounts of the de Soto expedition attempted to identify the location of Cofitachequi. Initially, some believed it was on the banks of the Savannah River, but now most researchers think it was somewhere on the Wateree River in north-central South Carolina. Several mound sites in the river valley might have been the town de Soto knew as Cofitachequi. “It’s not easy to figure out where Cofitachequi was,” says archaeologist Adam King of the University of South Carolina. He points out that finding Spanish artifacts at a site isn’t enough to tie it to de Soto’s descriptions. “European artifacts entered Indigenous trade and kin networks, so finding them at a site doesn’t mean the Spanish were there,” King says. However, identifying traces of Spanish-style structures at a site might help clinch its identification as Cofitachequi. “It was a medieval army traveling with pigs and horses,” says King. “They should have left a substantial footprint—if we can find it.”

The significance of locating Cofitachequi would go beyond simply identifying a stop on de Soto’s journey. “It’s often thought that Mississippian people were powerless and that after de Soto came through, their societies fell apart and they were erased from the landscape,” says King. “But Cofitachequi was a named place that endured for a long time. Finding it would help us tell that story.” Today, several Indigenous groups, including the Muscogee and Catawba Nations, claim a connection with the chiefdom. “Towns like Cofitachequi weren’t really towns so much as social groups,” says King. “They were people with histories, and those histories are connected to people who are still here.”

When de Soto and his men left Cofitachequi, they forced the ruler they were so fascinated with to come with them as a hostage. For several days, the Lady of Cofitachequi traveled with her captors past the limits of her realm. Before reaching the lands of the next powerful chiefdom, though, she outwitted her guards and slipped away, presumably making her way back to Cofitachequi, where her descendants would continue to live for many generations.

The ancient Egyptian city of Tjenu, or Thinis, as it was later known to the Greeks, is as enigmatic as the many gods of Egypt’s pantheon. Although its existence is attested by ancient writers, the city’s location remains unknown. The early third-century B.C. Egyptian historian Manetho wrote of Thinis as the ancestral home of Egypt’s first rulers. These rulers, however, were interred at the sacred site of Abydos. For more than three millennia, the temples at Abydos—one of Egypt’s oldest cities and the cult center of Osiris, god of the underworld and afterlife—hosted festivals dedicated to Egyptian gods and kingship. “There’s literature characterizing the early kings, who were buried in the royal cemetery at Abydos, as Thinite, or part of the Thinite Dynasty,” says archaeologist Matthew Adams of New York University. “But there are times throughout the Pharaonic period (ca. 3100–332 B.C.) when Thinis is referring, in a general sense, to the broader region, including Abydos, rather than the ancient city of Thinis itself.” Abydos’ Umm el-Qa’ab cemetery held the tombs of 1st Dynasty rulers, including King Narmer and Queen Merneith, and the 2nd Dynasty kings Peribsen and Khasekhemwy. Most of these rulers probably hailed from Abydos, which was likely Egypt’s capital, not Thinis, as Manetho implies.

Whether home to Egypt’s first pharaohs or not, Thinis became an influential political center of the 8th nome, or province, in Upper Egypt. “From the Old Kingdom (ca. 2649–2150 B.C.) on, Thinis was a provincial capital,” says Adams. “It had a mayor, overseers of priests, and extensive cemeteries that developed across the Nile.” Early Dynastic (ca. 3100–2649 B.C.) and Old Kingdom texts attest to the existence of a census, taxes, and irrigation systems. “Thinis seems to be this province’s primary administrative center for most of Pharaonic history,” says Adams.

Egyptologists know that Thinis’ sprawling cemeteries at the site of Naga ed-Deir on the Nile’s east bank lie across the river from the modern city of Girga—under which the remnants of Thinis may be buried. “The general location of Thinis can be identified because of these cemeteries,” Adams says. “But where, exactly, is the ancient archaeological site? It’s an open question.” A century ago, archaeological ruins were visible around the edges of Girga, but they were either obliterated or built over, and, explains Adams, can no longer be seen. “Nobody has gone looking or done archaeological reconnaissance or testing to find them,” he says. As with many ancient provincial towns in the Nile Valley, which have seen thousands of annual floods, Thinis’ remnants likely remain obscured under layers of alluvium that have been deposited over the millennia. For now, it seems that the once-great city, a potential key to understanding the rise of Egyptian civilization, has been lost to the desert from which it came. “It would be an extremely interesting site to investigate,” says Adams. “I would certainly urge somebody to give it a try.”