The Mystery of the Anasazi
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 What Happened to the Anasazi at the End of the Thirteenth Century? Between roughly 1276 and 1300 CE, the Ancestral Puebloan communities living in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest abandoned the cliff-dwellings, kivas, and great houses that their families […]
The Dorchester Pot: A Victorian Era OOPArt
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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 […]
The Lost Library of Alexandria
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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 […]
The Indus Valley Civilization: An Unsolved Mystery
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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 […]
Sir Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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 […]
The Longyou Caves
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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, […]
The Linear A Script of the Minoans
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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 […]
The Disappearance of Percy Fawcett
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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 […]
The Saqqara Bird: Ancient Egyptian Aircraft
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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 […]
The Treasure of the Copper Scroll
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 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, […]