Don’s Maps is what happens when somebody keeps following the footnotes instead of deciding the research project has gotten big enough.
Don Hitchcock’s site began around an interest in Paleolithic archaeology and maps connected with Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children novels, then expanded outward into an enormous personal reference covering Ice Age sites, cave paintings, Venus figurines, stone tools, human evolution, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Australian archaeology, rock art, burials, geology, prehistoric technology, and much more.
The scale is difficult to understand from the homepage alone.
The sitemap is the better clue.
It runs through caves, rock shelters, archaeological sites, tools, decorative objects, extinct animals, hominins, maps, translations, photographs, and long topic pages that often combine historic excavation material with newer scholarship and the author’s own explanations.
This is not a minimalist website.
It is a research desk that escaped into HTML.
Personal websites can become reference institutions
One of the strongest features of Don’s Maps is its dependence on primary and specialist material.
Hitchcock reproduces and discusses old excavation drawings, site plans, museum objects, historic photographs, maps, and scholarly papers. He also translates material that is difficult to find in English and explains on the site that he spends substantial time using dictionaries and translation tools to make otherwise inaccessible research available to readers.
That kind of work is easy to underestimate because it does not arrive wrapped in an institutional interface.
The site looks personal because it is personal.
The useful part is that the person kept going.
Pages on places such as Altamira, Chauvet, Willendorf, Dolní Věstonice, Kostenki, Atapuerca, and many less famous archaeological sites gather images and references that would otherwise require bouncing between museum catalogs, academic papers, scanned books, and unrelated archives.
The project also remains actively maintained. Updates continue to add new photographs, discoveries, corrections, and subject areas decades after the Web stopped rewarding large hand-built reference sites with much visibility.
There is an important distinction here.
Don’s Maps is not automatically authoritative simply because it is enormous. Some material reflects Hitchcock’s own synthesis or interpretation, and individual claims still need to be checked against primary scholarship when accuracy matters.
But that does not reduce the archive’s value.
It makes the site’s real contribution clearer: collection, organization, translation, illustration, and persistence.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because independent subject experts and obsessive amateurs built enormous chunks of the useful Web long before every reference project was expected to look like a venture-funded product.
Somebody had to keep the map.
Don kept adding to it.