Teotihuacan’s Pyramids
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 The pyramids of Teotihuacan rise from the Valley of Mexico like a problem the surviving record cannot quite resolve. By the time the Mexica encountered the abandoned city in the late fourteenth century, its three great monuments — the Pyramid of the […]
The Cascajal Block: Oldest Writing in the New World?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 What Is the Cascajal Block? The Cascajal Block is a small slab of greenish serpentinite, roughly the size of a hardcover book, incised on one face with sixty-two carved signs. It is dated to the late San Lorenzo phase of Olmec civilization, […]
The Princes in the Tower Mystery
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 What the Surviving Record Actually Shows In the spring and summer of 1483, the two young sons of King Edward IV of England, twelve-year-old Edward V (1470 to disappearance 1483) and his nine-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York (1473 to disappearance 1483), […]
The Coso Artifact: A Spark Plug in Geode?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 The Coso Artifact entered popular memory as a riddle: a porcelain-and-metal cylinder pried out of what its discoverers called a half-million-year-old geode in the high desert above Owens Lake. The riddle was solved decades ago. Yet the case remains a useful teaching […]
The Crown Jewels of Ireland
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 On the morning of 6 July 1907, four days before King Edward VII was due to invest a new knight of the Order of St Patrick at Dublin Castle, a messenger named William Stivey turned a key in a safe in the […]
The Minoan Civilization: Lost to the Sea?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 The Eruption and the Civilization Are Not the Same Story The Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete did not vanish in a single afternoon when the volcanic island of Thera blew itself apart around the late seventeenth or sixteenth century BCE. The […]
The Search for El Dorado
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 What Was the Search for El Dorado? The search for El Dorado was the four-century European pursuit of a treasure that did not exist in the form European explorers were looking for. The phrase began as a nickname, el dorado meaning “the […]
Area 51 and Alien Technology
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 A dry lakebed in southern Nevada has carried more legend per square mile than almost any patch of American ground. Locals knew it as Groom Lake. Workers nicknamed it the Ranch. The CIA wrote it into memos as Area 51. For decades […]
The Walls of Sacsayhuamán
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 What Are the Sacsayhuamán Walls? The Sacsayhuamán walls are three tiered terraces of cyclopean polygonal masonry on a hill above Cusco, Peru, built by Inca masons in the fifteenth century. The largest blocks weigh more than one hundred tonnes. They were quarried, […]
The Great Sphinx of Giza
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026 The Great Sphinx of Giza is, by overwhelming Egyptological consensus, an Old Kingdom royal monument carved from the limestone bedrock of the Giza plateau as part of the pyramid complex of the pharaoh Khafre, around 2500 BCE. That sentence does most of […]