The Archaeology Channel Tours
The Archaeology Channel Tours is a program set apart from others by our commitment to storytelling and expert guidance. We believe that a tour should be far more than a photo-op or checking off a bucket list. For us, a tour is an opportunity to perform our mission to tell the human story, in this case by bringing people to the real sites where history took place. We like to embed the background in the tour process, so each destination represents an episode in the historic timeline and has a comfortable place in the temporal, cultural and environmental context. We also like to design unique tours not offered by others.
Just below, you can see our upcoming tour schedule.
Scotland & the Isles
Around 4000 BC, Neolithic farmers, largely replacing the hunter-gatherers of the earlier Mesolithic Period, transformed much of the landscape of Britain, including Scotland, from dense woodland to grassland, probably through slash-and-burn clearing. Although some evidence suggests Mesolithic people already had built ritual sites, the great earthworks and megalithic monuments are the work of settled farmers, mostly dating to the Neolithic (4000-2200 BC) and Early Bronze Age (2200-1600 BC) periods. Some of the most significant sites of the Scotland Neolithic are concentrated in the Hearth of Neolithic Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site, the initial focus of our tour. Other key Neolithic sites in Scotland include the Grey Cairns of Camster, Clava Cairns, and the rich archaeological landscape of Kilmartin Glen on the Scottish mainland, and the standing stones of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides islands. Our tour will visit all these sites, and it will conclude with three full days visiting a full array of sites in the Outer Hebrides, including the well-preserved Iron Age Broch (stone fort), Dun Torcuill.
Dates: September 17 - 27, 2026
Click here to view the itinerary and register for your spot!
Registration Deadline: June 17, 2026. Spots are limited, so register today!
Going with the Flow of the Ancient Rivers: Upper Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent
The latest research suggests that the roots of civilization are to be found in southeastern Anatolia and adjacent part of the Fertile Crescent. Archaeologists have discovered to their amazement that settled communities with ritual features, possibly temples, containing sculpted monoliths existed here nearly 12,000 years ago, possibly even before the advent of agriculture. The best-known of these sites is Göbekli Tepe, but more research is revealing a complex of similar sites not far away. Much remains to be learned, but now it seems that these late-Pleistocene, pre-pottery sites launched the development of plant cultivation and animal domestication. They apparently mark the beginning of Neolithic culture, which spread widely in all directions over the following millennia, reaching the Atlantic Ocean about 6000 years ago and setting the stage for civilization. Subsequent cultural and historical developments in this part of upper Mesopotamia involve a sequence of cultures and civilizations that are central to human history in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Europe. Among these cultures are the Hittites, Assyrians, Greeks, Armenians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and Crusaders. Perhaps nowhere else in the world could we have designed a tour offering an opportunity to experience such a diverse cross-section of human civilization.
Dates: October 6-16, 2026
Click here to view the itinerary and register for your spot!
Registration Deadline: July 6, 2026. Spots are limited, so register today!