The Burke and Wills Expedition
What Was the Burke and Wills Expedition? The Burke and Wills expedition, formally the Victorian Exploring Expedition, was the 1860 to 1861 attempt to cross the Australian continent from south to north. Robert O’Hara Burke (1821-1861), an Irish-born police superintendent, led nineteen men out of Melbourne’s Royal Park on 20 August 1860 with twenty-three horses, […]
The Hollow Earth Theory
The Hollow Earth Theory is a clearly falsified hypothesis that nevertheless built one of the most durable storylines in modern Western thought. Modern seismology and satellite gravimetry have closed the geophysical question: the Earth is a stratified solid with a thin crust, a silicate mantle that transmits shear waves, a liquid iron-nickel outer core, and […]
The Yonaguni Monument
What Is the Yonaguni Monument? The Yonaguni Monument is a submerged rock formation off the southern shore of Yonaguni-jima, the westernmost inhabited island of the Ryukyu archipelago in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. It rests at depths of roughly five to twenty-five metres in cobalt water, and its largest face descends in stair-like terraces that, to a […]
Petra: The Rose City
What Is Petra, and Why Does the Rose City Matter? Petra is a Nabataean caravan capital carved into the iron-rich sandstone of southern Jordan, where Aramaic-speaking traders cut tombs, temples, and a thirty-mile water network into the living rock between roughly the fifth century BCE and the first century CE. At its first-century peak the […]
The Zapotec Script: Understanding Mesoamerica’s Inscriptions
On a limestone slab set into the floor of a temple corridor at San José Mogote, a small village in the Etla arm of the Valley of Oaxaca, a sprawled human figure was carved sometime around 600 BCE. Between his legs, two glyphs sit close together: a numeral and a day-sign. Joyce Marcus (b. 1948), […]
The Disappearance of Lord Lucan
The disappearance of Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan (18 December 1934 to last seen 8 November 1974), is, on its surface, the story of an English peer who vanished after a murder in his own house. Read closely, it is something stranger: a single overnight gap in a life that had otherwise been […]
The Giant Stone Spheres of Costa Rica
In the lowland deltas of southern Costa Rica, more than three hundred near-perfect stone spheres rest in fields, museum lawns, and the floors of houses where they have been used as garden ornaments since the 1930s. They are the work of the Diquís culture, carved between roughly 600 and 1530 CE, and they constitute one […]
The Treasure of Lima
What Is the Treasure of Lima? The Treasure of Lima is a legendary buried hoard said to have been removed from the Peruvian capital in 1820, entrusted to the British merchant captain William Thompson aboard the brig Mary Dear, and concealed by his mutinous crew on Cocos Island, a small volcanic landmass roughly 550 kilometres […]
The Olmecs: Mesoamerica’s First Civilization
Who Were the Olmec? The Olmec were Mesoamerica‘s earliest complex civilization, flourishing on the humid Gulf Coast of Veracruz and Tabasco between roughly 1500 and 400 BCE. They built three successive capitals, carved colossal basalt portraits of their rulers, worked jade with extraordinary care, and bequeathed an iconographic vocabulary later civilizations would translate, edit, and […]
The Voyages of Captain James Cook
What Were the Voyages of Captain James Cook? The voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-1779) were three British Admiralty expeditions into the Pacific between 1768 and 1779 that produced the first accurate European charts of New Zealand and the eastern Australian coast, the first crossing of the Antarctic Circle, and the first sustained European contact […]