The useful question about any unusual shoe is what it was standing on. Almost every answer is a property of the ground rather than a preference of the wearer. Here…
Look at any vernacular building and the roof tells you the weather before anybody mentions it. Here are eleven of the things a roof is arguing with.
1. The Steep…
The technical term for this is path dependence: an early decision constrains everything afterwards, not because it was right but because too much was built on top of it. Here…
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…