How long should a group spend at an archaeological site?

Every site has a number attached to it -- two hours for this, ninety minutes for that. Those numbers are usually honest and almost always wrong for a group, because they describe one person walking at their own pace and stopping when they feel like it.

A group does not have a pace. It has a series of transitions, and the transitions are where the time goes.

Because a stop costs more than the talking in it. Each one has a fixed overhead: bringing the group together, waiting for the last few, getting attention, and then releasing them again afterwards. In our own timings that overhead runs to several minutes per stop regardless of how long the explanation lasts.

That is why a route with twelve short stops runs longer than one with six longer ones, even when the total speaking time is identical.

The arithmetic is unromantic but it is the single biggest lever most guides have over their schedule.

Times per stop, not a total for the site. A total tells you whether you failed; per-stop times tell you where, and early enough to change something.

Two places, in our field notes. The first is the entrance, where ticketing, cards and turnstiles absorb a chunk that is easy to leave out of a plan entirely. The second is the exit, where a group that has been together for two hours suddenly needs the toilet, the shop and a photograph.

Neither is guiding, and neither shows up in a published duration. Both belong in yours.

If your routes routinely run long, the cause is more likely stop count than pace. Our destination field notes publish per-stop walking order and durations for the sites we have tested, and you can see how the broadcast works if repetition is what is eating your schedule.

Timing observations come from our own field tests at Ephesus, Miletus, Didyma, Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe. Photograph is our own. Per-stop durations for specific sites are published on our destination pages rather than estimated here.