1903 in archaeology

Explorations

• Thomas Gann makes first scholarly investigation of Lubaantun.
• Raphael Pumpelly explores at Anau in Turkestan.

Excavations

• Excavations at Assur are continued by a team from the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft led initially by Robert Koldewey.
• Excavations at Orchomenus (Boeotia) are begun by a team from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities led by Heinrich Bulle and Adolf Furtwängler.

Finds

• The remains of "Cheddar Man" are found within Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton, dating to approximately 7150 BCE.
• KV43, the tomb of Pharaoh Thutmose IV, and the burial chamber of KV20, the original tomb of Thutmose I, in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, are discovered by Howard Carter for Theodore M. Davis.
• The first Ramesses III prisoner tiles are found by sebakh-diggers in Egypt.
• Elk's Head of Huittinen, a Mesolithic stone carving, is found in southern Finland.

Miscellaneous

• Salomon Reinach suggests that cave paintings are expressions of "sympathetic magic".
• Cubiculum from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, with fresco wall paintings first installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Publications

• G. Baldwin Brown – The Arts in Early England, vol. 1.
• Teoberto Maler – Researches in the Central Portion of the Usumatsintla Valley: report of explorations for the Museum, 1898–1900, vol. 2, completing a detailed description of Yaxchilan and nearby Maya sites.

Births

• March 22 – Mary Chubb, English archaeologist and author working in Egypt and the Near East
• August 7 – Louis Leakey, Kenyan paleoanthropologist
• Kenneth Murray, English-born archaeologist working in Nigeria