Source: Wikipedia
Most ancient monuments survive because they are made of something durable. Stone lasts. Metal lasts. Fired clay lasts. Their survival requires nothing from anybody.
There is a category of…
Source: Wikipedia
Archaeology depends on context. An object in the ground is surrounded by information — what layer it sat in, what was beside it, how it was arranged, what the…
Weaving was invented independently in every inhabited part of the world, which is a strong indication that the problem has a limited number of solutions. Here are eleven of the…
For most of the history of ocean navigation, a ship's crew could tell you how far north or south they were with reasonable confidence and had very little idea how…
The common feature is that nobody is doing anything for most of the duration. The work is at the beginning and the end, and in between the food is changing…
The counterintuitive fact underlying all of this is that mixing two soft metals frequently produces something substantially harder than either, and the reason is geometric. Here are twelve.
1. Why…