The Dorchester Pot: A Victorian Era OOPArt
What Is the Dorchester Pot? The Dorchester Pot is a small bell-shaped metallic vessel said to have been blasted out of Roxbury Puddingstone in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1852. Reported in Scientific American on June 5 of that year, it became one of the founding cases for the modern category of out-of-place artifacts […]
The Lost Library of Alexandria
What Was the Lost Library of Alexandria? The Library of Alexandria was the research collection of the Mouseion, a royal academy founded in Egypt in the early third century BCE under the Ptolemaic dynasty. At its height it housed perhaps several hundred thousand papyrus rolls, drew scholars from across the Mediterranean, and supported textual editing, […]
The Indus Valley Civilization: An Unsolved Mystery
What Was the Indus Valley Civilization? The Indus Valley Civilization was a Bronze Age urban culture that flourished from roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE across the floodplains of the Indus and now-dry Ghaggar-Hakra rivers. Its planned cities, standardized weights, copper craft, and undeciphered script make it one of the most accomplished and least understood civilizations […]
Sir Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation
What Was Sir Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation? Sir Francis Drake‘s circumnavigation was an English voyage from December 1577 to September 1580 that became the second expedition to sail around the world after Magellan’s. Backed quietly by Elizabeth I, Drake left Plymouth with five ships, raided Spanish settlements along the Pacific coast of the Americas, claimed an […]
The Longyou Caves
What Are the Longyou Caves? The Longyou Caves are a complex of twenty-four hand-cut sandstone chambers near the village of Shiyan Beicun in Zhejiang Province, eastern China. Workers carved them downward from the ground surface into a low hill, leaving smooth pillars, sloped walls, and parallel chisel marks across thousands of square meters. They are […]
The Linear A Script of the Minoans
What Is Linear A? Linear A is the writing system used by the Minoan civilization on Crete from roughly 1800 to 1450 BCE. It survives on about 1,400 inscribed objects, mostly clay tablets and votive items, and remains undeciphered. Although the signs are read aloud through the values borrowed by the later, related script Linear […]
The Disappearance of Percy Fawcett
On the morning of 29 May 1925, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett walked out of a place called Dead Horse Camp in the Brazilian Mato Grosso and into the green wall of the Amazon. With him were his eldest son Jack, twenty-one and freshly inoculated for an expedition his father had been planning since the close […]
The Saqqara Bird: Ancient Egyptian Aircraft
What Is the Saqqara Bird? The Saqqara Bird is a small sycamore-wood object, roughly fourteen centimeters long, found in a tomb near Saqqara in 1898 and now held by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo as accession number JE 33109. Egyptologists classify it as a Late Period bird figurine, likely a votive or weather vane. A […]
The Treasure of the Copper Scroll
What Is the Copper Scroll, and Why Does Its Treasure List Refuse to Settle? The Copper Scroll is a Dead Sea Scroll unlike any other, hammered into thin copper sheets and inscribed with a list of sixty-four hidden caches of gold, silver, and ritual goods. Discovered in 1952 in a cave near Khirbet Qumran on […]
The Anasazi: Vanished Native Americans
The people once called the Anasazi did not vanish. They moved. The cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, the great houses of Chaco Canyon, and the masonry villages of the San Juan basin stand empty because the families who built them walked south and east into the Rio Grande pueblos, the Hopi mesas, and Zuni — […]