Real objects and surprising episodes from the past.
8 stories · Latest first
Nearly two millennia after Vesuvius buried Pompeii, a carbonised loaf retains a familiar round shape. Its survival opens a small window onto an ordinary working day.
Antiquarium, Boscoreale, Italy · 23 July 2015. Photo: Jebulon · CC0 1.0. Original image unchanged; displayed proportionally.
The Lycurgus Cup can appear green in reflected light and red in transmitted light. Tiny particles in the glass help explain the change.
British Museum, London · 17 September 2010. Photo: Johnbod · CC BY-SA 3.0. Original image unchanged; displayed proportionally.
An Inka khipu can look like a tangle of strings. Its knots, colours and structure helped record information—and some questions remain open.
Museo Machu Picchu, Casa Concha, Cusco, Peru · 28 May 2018. Photo: Pi3.124 · CC BY-SA 4.0. Original image unchanged; displayed proportionally.
The surviving gears of the Antikythera mechanism look nothing like a working instrument. Their arrangement reveals a much more precise purpose.
National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece · 2009-11-11. Photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto · Attribution (commercial use explicitly permitted). Source photograph retained without further edits; displayed proportionally.
On Yap, a large rai can stay where it is while its ownership changes. The story remembered about the stone helps explain its value.
Yap, Federated States of Micronesia; exact village not supplied · 2007-06-22. Photo: Scot Nelson · CC0 1.0. Original photograph, unchanged; displayed proportionally.
Roman dodecahedra have holes, knobs and an unmistakable shape. Knowing what they look like has proved much easier than knowing what they did.
Oxfordshire find; photographic location unspecified · Photographic record 2019-09-27. Photo: The Portable Antiquities Scheme / William Burleigh · CC BY 2.0. PAS-supplied composite of real object photographs, reproduced without further editing.
The bulky shell kept its occupant at surface pressure. Moving underwater meant putting a person inside a machine with joints.
U.S. Naval Undersea Museum, Washington, USA · 2012-02-19. Photo: Clemens Vasters · CC BY 2.0. Photographer-supplied version (Flickr filename includes edited-1) reproduced without further editing.
A German pharmacist sent cameras aloft on homing pigeons. Some of the pictures came back with an unexpected extra at the edges: the photographer’s own wings.
Historical photograph, circa 1909. Photo: Julius Neubronner · Public domain. Original image, unchanged.
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