StonePages is what happens when two people start putting photographs of ancient stones on the Web in 1995 and then simply keep going. Long before location apps, social photo feeds, and polished heritage portals, Diego Meozzi and Paola Arosio were building an online guide to European megalithic sites one visit at a time.
The site’s own history is unusually well documented. It says the project began in 1995 and was originally intended as a guide to the major megalithic monuments of Europe. Meozzi and Arosio did not just compile place names from books. They traveled, photographed sites themselves, wrote descriptions, and distinguished firsthand material from information gathered from other sources.
That matters. StonePages is not merely an old directory whose links survived. It contains fieldwork.
By 2001 the project reported more than 5,000 photographs and information on over 500 archaeological sites. The subject matter ranges across stone circles, standing stones, dolmens, chambered tombs, alignments, and other prehistoric monuments. Famous places sit alongside structures that are much easier to miss unless somebody has already done the legwork.
The website also preserved its own technical evolution. It was renamed Stone Pages in 1998 and went through several redesigns as the Web changed. Its data moved from a flat-file system into an SQL-backed database. That little detail makes the site useful to web historians as well as archaeology readers: this was a serious information project adapting to the Web while both the tools and expectations were still being invented.
There is also Stone Pages Archaeo News, which expanded the project beyond a photographic field guide into an archaeology-news resource. The result is less like a single homepage and more like a small independent publishing operation that happened to grow out of two people visiting old stones.
For a modern webmaster, StonePages is a reminder that useful sites can begin with a brutally simple advantage: the creator has gone somewhere, seen something, measured something, photographed something, or otherwise done work that cannot be generated by rearranging everybody else’s summaries.
That is also why the site still matters in 2026. Search results can tell you that a monument exists. StonePages preserves the accumulated decisions of people who spent years deciding which monuments were worth finding, how to describe them, and what they actually looked like on the ground.
The larger 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many projects built on the same old-Web principle: somebody cared enough about one subject to make themselves useful.
Explore StonePages and its megalithic site guides
Nearly three decades after its launch, StonePages is still a good argument for fieldwork plus HTML.