Picture this: In the 1760s, a team of colonial surveyors meets a group of leaders representing major Native American tribes in what will one day become the southeastern region of the United States of America. Together, they head out into the woods. Their task is to mark a negotiated border, by planting posts and notching trees, that will show where colonial settlers' territory ends and tribal territory begins.

They have a list of landmarks that are supposed to mark this division, and as they travel, the tribal representatives watch to see where the border lies and to correct the colonial surveyors when they go off course. In some places, the surveyors marked a royal cipher on one side of a tree, while the tribal representatives make their own marks, now forgotten, on their side of boundary. On one key summit in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, to make the location of the line extra clear, colonial commissioners and Native American headmen even carved their names on trees.

This joint British/Native American survey was an entirely unique effort in the history of American mapmaking. At no other time did the British government attempt to negotiate and systematically mark a border with the tribes they had displaced and encroached upon. But as S. Max Edelson, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, shows in his book A New Map of Empire, this project was part of the Empire’s attempt to control its colonial territories through the technical tools of surveying and mapmaking. The effort established a boundary through North America—from the Mohawk River in New York, down through the Appalachian Mountains to Florida, and around the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi River. From the crown's perspective, the land on both sides of this line still belonged to Britain, but the government officials who led these negotiations believed the effort could limit conflicts between Native American tribes and British colonial settlers by prescribing where each group could live.

“The seriousness of the effort surprised me—how much faith they put in the idea that they could map the land and therefore control it,” Edelson says. “It’s an incredible attempt to try to resolve a problem that maybe couldn’t be resolved.”

In the 1760s, the government in Britain was taking a new approach to its vast colonial holdings, and in 1763, colonial governors and tribal leaders met in Fort Augusta, Georgia, for the first of 10 congresses at which they negotiated a geographic separation. The king had ordered that there should be a limit to colonial expansion—if a tribe claimed a stretch of land, a colonial governor was not supposed to grant it to settlers. The Fort Augusta meeting began with the tribal representatives describing what they believed to be the extent of their territory. Over the course of several congresses, the diplomats agreed on a boundary between tribal lands and the seaboard colonies. This negotiated line was supposed to limit conflict for the foreseeable future.

There are few records of the survey parties that went out to mark the border agreed upon at these summits. Most of the information Edelson found came from the maps themselves, many of which are held today in the National Archives of the United Kingdom. It’s likely, he says, that the Native American representatives traveled along as observers and ratifiers—not doing the technical survey work, but rather making sure the line was marked in the correct places. One boundary map he found includes the names and signatures of the tribal representatives—Emy of Estatoe, Ukenka or the Wolf, and others. Presumably they had been asked to sign off on the map as drawn.

The British government’s Board of Trade, according to Edelson’s research, was motivated at the time by an emerging literature of political economy that argued that harmony and growth came from balancing the interests of the parties involved in a conflict. The effort to negotiate and map this boundary line was forward-thinking for the time. “They spent real money trying to create a settlement that would allow Indians and colonists to live together in some kind of harmony,” says Edelson.

Given the prejudices of this era, though, and the inexorable colonial push west, it was a doomed effort. “We love to imagine an alternative to what we got, this genocidal dispossession, but there wasn’t that much space for that to be real,” says Edelson. Even as the boundary was being surveyed, parts were being renegotiated. The project was finally completed in 1774. The beginning of the war for American independence, which began the next year, destroyed any possibility that the border would be enforced and restrict further colonial settlement. To the extent that this joint survey effort had any lasting effect, it can be seen in the borders of current U.S. states: Some parts, such as the square-shaped notch on the North Carolina/South Carolina border, which once contained Catawba land, still run along the lines negotiated in the 1760s.

Back in 1982, at a shipyard in Seattle, the team building the HMAS Sydney left a surprise for someone in the ship’s mast—a six-year-old bottle of MacNaughton Canadian whisky. They wrote the date on the bottle: April 10, 1982.

Thirty-five years later, it was still there. In 2015, the ship was de-commissioned and taken to a yard in Henderson, Australia, to be taken apart.

A former employee of the Seattle shipyard let the crew there in on the secret. They cut into the mast, and there they found “a small bottle of whisky wrapped in pipe insulation in the forward starboard leg of the main mast,” reports the Weekend Courier.

The whisky is now aged 41 years, and the team plans to break into it soon—no word yet about how well it’s aged in its sloshing years at sea.

Witter Bynner hated Modernist poetry. A rising literary star who was briefly engaged to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bynner felt that the new crop of free-verse poetry movements was becoming absurd. Not only were these poets failing to create real art, but they also took themselves far too seriously.

So he decided to satirize it all.

In February 1916, at a ballet entitled Le Spectre de la Rose, Bynner was criticizing the proliferation of experimental poems to some friends when he made a joke. He asked whether they had heard of the poetry movement known as Spectrism—a name he spontaneously invented based on the title of the ballet.

Later, he told his Harvard friend Arthur Davison Ficke about the trickery, and together the duo decided to make “Spectrism” a reality. Their main goal was to parody the Modernist poetry they so distrusted.

According to Suzanne W. Churchill'sThe Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917, the two men rented a hotel room and “from ten quarts of excellent Scotch in ten days extracted the whole of the Spectric philosophy.” They even devised pseudonyms for themselves. Bynner was to write as Emanuel Morgan and Ficke as Anne Knish.

Bynner submitted the resulting Spectrist manifesto to his publisher, thinking its contents were so ridiculous that his publisher would immediately see through the prank. But, in an omen of things to come, the publisher agreed to print it, thinking it was a real work. Only shortly before publication did Bynner and Ficke let him in on the joke—he agreed to publish it anyway.

That year, the release of Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments added the movement to the pantheon of Modernist poetry. The manifesto described Spectra, also known as Spectrism, as an attempt to “see the spectre in our life and capture the varied light of the spectrum” and argued that “the poet’s spectres should touch with a tremulous vibrancy of ultimate fact the reader’s sense of the immediate theme.”

Writing as Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish (in a drunken stupor), Bynner and Ficke elaborated:

The theme of a poem is to be regarded as a prism, upon which the colorless white light of infinite existence falls and is broken up into glowing, beautiful, and intelligible hues… Just as the colors of the rainbow recombine into a white light,— just as the reflex of the eye’s picture vividly haunts sleep,— just as the ghosts which surround reality are the vital part of that existence,—so may the Spectric vision, if successful, synthesize, prolong, and at the same time multiply the emotional images of the reader.

The manifesto also contained several Spectrist poems, including Ficke’s “Opus 200,” which parodied T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

If I should enter to his chamber
And suddenly touch him,
Would he fade to a thin mist,
Or glow into a fire-ball,
Or burst like a punctured light-globe?
It is impossible that he would merely yawn and rub
And say—“What is it?”

Bynner, meanwhile, criticized poets who took themselves too seriously—describing, in his "Portrait of a Poet," a writer trying to pass his masturbation off as art:

Out of the infinite darkness,
Without end, without beginning
He towers; and above him his genius,
Sends down ray after ray.

From his calm and careless hand
Drop the bright bubbles of his dreaming;
He showers them indifferently: precious globes,
Beside whose luminous iridescence
The sun is blackness.
At his feet Lap the Flames of Hell...

A later recruit to Spectrism, Marjorie Allen Seiffert, who Bynner and Ficke convinced to join their fake movement apparently by locking her in her room "determined that not until she had become Spectric should she emerge," parodied middle-aged male writers under the pen name Elijah Hay. According to The Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917, her work featured nostalgia for a lost boyhood when “‘Night’ was not a ‘sodden’ fool, but a ‘lion /No ... a python’ or ‘a siren.’”

Despite Bynner and Ficke’s assumption that Spectra was an obvious joke, their movement was immediately accepted as legitimate and received widespread media attention. Though a number of reviews were negative—including one from The New York Herald that called the movement a “daughter of Futurist poetry, a granddaughter of vers libre, and no relation at all to real poetry”—the book was immensely popular. One journalist said it was “as close to being a best seller as poetry ever reaches.”

In an ironic twist, The New Republic asked Bynner himself to review Spectra, being unaware of the book’s true authorship. Bynner agreed. His review was positive, though he spent much of it critiquing the Imagist movement he despised. Imagists, unlike Spectrists, he wrote, “were so concerned with ‘technique’ that they ‘don’t connect’ with readers.”

Spectra thus went mainstream. The book The Young Idea: An anthology of opinion concerning the spirit and aims of contemporary American literature dissected the movement for several pages. Magazines like Poetry, Others, The Little Review, Reedy's Mirror, and Forum all accepted for publication Spectrist poems.

Others: A Magazine of the New Verse—the experimental poetry magazine that published the likes of Wallace Stevens and whose emphasis on free verse led to the accusation that it was “a haven for the wildest orgies of proud-spirited youth”—especially embraced the new Spectrist movement. Not only did Others publish numerous Spectrist poems, but in January 1917, they dedicated an entire issue to the new genre.

Bynner’s elaborate practical joke had more than succeeded. According to author Lynn Cline, Spectra “was just convincing enough to be believable in a day when everyone was trying the new and was afraid of rejecting it.”

Yet the joke, in many ways, was ultimately on Bynner himself.

In April 1918, when Spectra was announced to have been a hoax—apparently because Bynner admitted to being its true creator during a Q&A—the revelation provoked a flurry of media coverage, including a feature in the New York Times Magazine. But the general reaction was bafflement. Though many poets—including William Carlos Williams—admitted to having been duped, they expressed confusion as to how such thought-provoking pieces could be mere spoofs.

In fact, the public liked Bynner’s and Ficke’s Spectrist poems much more than the poets' “real” work. An article in The Little Reviewsummed it up best: “I confess to a deep ignorance of the nature of the hoax. If a man changes his name and writes better stuff, why does that make the public so ridiculous?”

Bynner was dumbfounded. For years after, he struggled to escape the legacy of his Spectrist writings. He later wrote: “the worst of it is that I can't get rid of Emmanuel Morgan! ... I don't know where he leaves off and I begin.”

Separately, he confessed that “many a discerning critic of poetry is convinced to this day that, liberated by our pseudonyms and by complete freedom of manner, Ficke and I wrote better as Knish and Morgan than we have written in our own persons.”

He added: “Once in a while we think so ourselves.”

In a recent analysis of the Spectrist movement, the poet Bob Perelman said: “the real scandal for me … is that there is no hoax poetry … That to me says something quite interesting and provocative about poetry. That maybe poetry itself has something tremendously hoax-like at its heart.”

Agreeing with popular sentiment, Perelman added: “It’s the best thing that the hoaxers ever wrote, were these hoax poems.”

Perhaps, by the end of his life, Bynner accepted this, too. His final book before his death, New Poems 1960, featured experimental poems based on his dreams. A review of it notes that the book “recalls the wildness of the Spectra poems in its enigmatic (and at times bizarre) verses.” Spectra lived on.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

From the beginning, photography has entranced inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs with fabulous possibilities, with companies as varied as Kodak, Fotomat, and Facebook seeking their fortunes via photographs.

But long before Instagram, the first true turning point of modern photography was the photo booth, with one of the earliest fully-functioning versions premiering in Hamburg, Germany at the First International Exposition of Amateur Photography in 1890. Known as the Bosco Automat, it took 3 minutes to develop a ferrotype.

The first attempts, though, had similar problems: they produced photographs on tin that quickly faded, among other issues, in addition to requiring a team of humans to actually operate them. And while they were ostensibly coin-operated, this too was a bit of a ruse.

The machines "are stand-alone arrangements that consist of a photography column and a chair for ‘poseying the subject’,” Rolf F. Nohr, a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art in Germany, wrote in the 2013 book (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes. “However, almost all of these early techniques are just ‘semi-automatic’ techniques that require a ‘machinist’ that takes care of the coin-automatism, carries out the regulation of chemistry, explains the function of the machine to the customer, or just takes reorders.”

Enter, a few decades later, a Serbian immigrant named Anatol Josepho, whose Photomaton, in 1925, exploded in popularity, ushering in an era where trips to carnivals and boardwalks were incomplete without a small strip of grainy black and white photographs. It also made Josepho a millionaire.

In the beginning, it wasn't easy, though. The Photomaton took years to create, as Josepho tinkered with chemical formulas in hopes of finding a faster-developing process while maintaining picture quality. After running a successful photography studio in Shanghai, Josepho decided to relocate to America to secure financial backers to build his machine. He later raised $11,000 (approximately $150,000 these days), building the first Photomaton in midtown Manhattan and opening for business in 1925. Lines quickly wrapped around the block, with as many as 7,500 people a day paying a quarter for a strip of eight photographs (that’s $1,875 a day in 1925 or more than $25,000 in 2017 dollars.) The Photomaton became known as “Broadway’s Greatest Quarter-Snatcher”; Josepho, meanwhile, started dating a silent film actress.

In March 1927, The New York Times ran the headline, “Slot Photo Device Brings $1,000,000 to Young Inventor," on their front page. An investment group led by Henry Morgenthau, a former ambassador to Turkey and founder of the American Red Cross, had offered Josepho a buyout and royalties for his patent. He accepted. The next year, he sold the European rights.

“I don’t remember the things that started me on the invention,” Josepho told the Times in 1927. “The idea gradually grew on me that it would be a great thing commercially to invent a coin-in-the-slot machine which would automatically photograph the sitter, develop the photographs, dry them and deliver them.”

Josepho, who died in 1980, later added, “I shall certainly dedicate much of my life and this newly acquired wealth to helping my brother inventors achieve the same success.”

Josepho lived long enough to see photo booths become ubiquitous, making one's portrait pretty easy to come by and speeding the way toward the age of the selfie. But in the very early days self-portraits were still a pretty novel commodity, even as people were already finding new uses for them.

“Unexpectedly, the photographing booth at the Woodlawn country fair … has become a detective agency,” The Inter Ocean, a Chicago newspaper, reported in 1902. “A picture taken of George Wiseman, former clerk at the Colonial Hotel, is expected to lead to the fugitive’s arrest.”

Andrew Egan is writer and editor of Crimes In Progress. His work has appeared in Forbes, ABC News, Tedium, and more. His novel, Nothing Too Original, is available now for Kindle and paperback.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Maps of North Carolina's Outer Banks may not necessarily be accurate from one year to the next. Sometimes, new islands pop up among the string of larger barrier islands along the coast—like the latest addition off Hatteras Island. The new island was formed from an existing sandbar by currents and storms over the last several months.

There's a good chance "Shelly Island"—the name given to it by an 11-year-old visitor, which seems to have stuck—won't be around next year, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper reports. The same currents that created it could wash it away, or they could grow it and connect it to Hatteras Island's Cape Point, a popular fishing spot. For now, the island is a mile long and nothing but sand. Best not to expect to build a vacation home there.

The golden sands have been attracting seashell collectors, but getting to the island is not easy. Local officials warn that only experienced boaters should attempt the crossing. Even though it is short, strong currents rip through the narrow inlet, and while it is tempting to wade across, decades worth of fishhooks could also lurk in the sand. Oh, and then there are sharks and rays swimming around. Beachcombers are advised to exercise caution.

On Saturday morning, June 25, in Staphorst, Netherlands, a small town around 75 miles west of Amsterdam, a wallaby appeared near some railroad tracks. Trains were briefly halted. People were confused. Eventually, Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), the national rail service, offered a picture.

:-) ^ML pic.twitter.com/JJ9gh45h63

— NS online (@NS_online) June 24, 2017

Pretty soon, according to Agence France-Presse, the wallaby—christened "Skippy" by NS—hopped off into the town and disappeared, only to have locals spot it again a few hours later. One of them, Patrick Dunnik, created a lasso and roped one of the wallaby's legs, and two friends then helped him bring Skippy to the ground. Skippy was later taken away in an "animal ambulance" while authorities try to sort out where it came from.

And where might that be? No one seems to have any idea, though it might have been kept as a pet. The marsupial also could have escaped from a zoo, since that's where most of the Netherlands' 500 or so wallabies live. If you have a collection of exotic pets and one is missing, authorities would like to hear from you. If you're a zookeeper, please check your habitats.

A post shared by Nikola Čuljić (@nikola_culjic_art) on Feb 3, 2017 at 9:04am PST

Serbian artist Nikola Čuljić has an incredible talent: he creates sketches that seem to jump off the page. Using only colored pencils, markers, and pastels, he plays with lighting and angles in order to trick viewers into thinking his work is three-dimensional. (His Bored Panda article on the subject is appropriately titled, "3D Drawings That I Create To Confuse People.")

Needless to say, he is succeeding. Even in his only four years of drawing, he has mastered the art of dimension deception.

A post shared by Nikola Čuljić (@nikola_culjic_art) on Jun 19, 2017 at 12:16pm PDT

A post shared by Nikola Čuljić (@nikola_culjic_art) on Apr 21, 2017 at 10:37am PDT

You can see more of these astounding not-quite-3D images on Čuljić's Instagram feed.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

If you were a thief in 1700s England, and wanted to tell a fellow thief that you had spotted a naive rich man ("rum cully") and you can’t wait to rob his house ("heave the booth"), but you don’t want some do-gooder to overhear and send you to the gallows ("nubbing cheat")—how would you communicate this without tipping off authorities or scaring away your precious mark?

During the 16th through 19th centuries, your answer would be to speak in Thieves’ Cant. This secret language, known as a cant or cryptolect, has long since fallen into disuse. But despite its covert purpose and disputed origins, it has had a surprising impact on contemporary spoken English—in fact, you might even speak a bit like an old-time thief yourself.

Thieves’ Cant, also known as Flash or Peddler’s French, existed in many forms across Europe. The cant flourished in England during a 16th-century population boom, when less work was available amid greater competition and crime appeared to be on the rise, according to Maurizio Gotti in his 1999 book The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds. Many early cant speakers, who often were peasants or newly jobless soldiers, were considered "particularly numerous and dangerous” by more well-off groups.

These thieves and rogues lived free, lawless lives, and met in “flash houses” (public gathering spots) to find camaraderie and share useful intel about the area. King Henry VIII announced in the early 1500s that vagabonds were ransacking the countryside, supporting reports that an estimated 13,000 "rogues and masterless men" were running amok, according to Gotti. While the number of masterless men may have been an exaggeration, their heightened visibility meant there was an increased interest in criminal activity among non-vagabonds. Those excluded from the underworld wanted to learn about it, at least partially in order to safeguard themselves.

Most Thieves’ Cant dictionaries in England were ostensibly published in order to save people from falling victim to criminals and their sneaky ways. During an uptick in crime in 1561, John Awdeley published one of the earliest English cant dictionaries, The Fraternity of Vagabonds. In a poem to the reader, Awdeley explains that the words he compiled came from interviews he conducted with men, women, and children who were “ruffling and beggarly,” on the condition that they remained anonymous, lest they be killed by their fellow vagabonds for spilling the beans. He includes short definitions and lengthy explanations of various scams to warn the public. A "ring faller," for instance, will drop worthless copper rings in front of naive villagers, and pick their pockets when they bend down.

In 1566, not long after Awdeley’s dictionary went to the press, a man named Thomas Harman publishedA Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds. In the forward Harman writes that the dictionary was “for the utility and profit of his natural country,” and rather than publishing the words for mere entertainment, he “thought it good, necessary, and my bounden duty, to acquaint your goodness with the abominable, wicked and detestable behavior of all these rowdy, ragged rabblement of rakehells.” Harman’s book was so popular it was published several more times, including a reprint in the 1800s.

The tradition of printing updated Thieves’ Cant dictionaries spread to other English-speaking countries in the 19th century. In 1859, George W. Matsell, a police chief from New York, published The Rogue’s Lexicon to help people read criminal testimonies in public police reports, but added that many canting words “have come into general use.” Matsell’s dictionary includes words modern English speakers might recognize, such as “brag,” “gab,” “peepers,” “rat” (a cheat, as in, “to smell a rat”), “oaf,” and, the best word for face, “mug.” Even a French-English cant dictionary was published.

Dictionaries themselves were a fairly new phenomenon in the English language during this period, but as they began to be compiled, some included, perhaps in an effort to be more comprehensive, sections devoted to cant. The 1760 New Universal English Dictionary by Nathan Bailey, for example, has one of these sections, which includes linguistic gems such as “badgers,” defined as “a crew of desperate villains” who throw murdered bodies in a lake, and “bear-garden discourse,” defined as “common, dirty, filthy nasty talk.”

Thieves’ Cant was also popular in fiction, including famous books such as Oliver Twist, in which Oliver’s inherent goodness is apparent when he is unable to speak cant like the criminals around him. Luckily for the reader, Dickens also included a Thieves’ Cant glossary in the back.

While the exact origin of Thieves' Cant is elusive, researchers usually regard it as a mix of English, Latin, French, Russian, Italian, Yiddish, and some versions of Romany. You can see this variety of influences in its vocabulary, which over time included anglicanized slang words such as "lingo" from Portuguese, "spado" (a sword) from Spanish, or "carouse" (to drink freely) from German. It mostly seems that in England, the syntax was based on English, and many existing English words were combined to form different meanings. For example, in some dictionaries eggs are translated into “cackling farts,” Gotti writes, because a chicken is a “cackling cheat” (with “cheat” being the cant word for “thing”), and “farts” denotes anything vulgar related to the body. “Kidnapper” (“kid,” for child and “napper,” stealing) likewise formed in the same way.

According to the literary scholar Linda Woodbridge in her book Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature, early “crime pamphlets,” short books about the lives of criminals and the poor, may have popularized the idea that all criminals spoke cant, prompting and possibly contributing to words found in the numerous dictionaries. (Woodbridge also notes that cant dictionaries include language and slang used by the poor, not just criminals.)

So many Thieves’ Cant dictionaries were published and so many references to the language existed in fiction that historians throughout the years began to wonder whether they were all legitimate. In 1890, a critic named W.W.N. wrote to American Folklore wondering if Matsell just reused English Thieves’ Cant terms, calling the words “exceedingly fishy.” As Julie Coleman, English professor at Leicester University, writes in her book A History of Cant and Slang Volume 2, dictionaries seemed to copy off one another, making word origins harder to track. For example, an entry for the word “nuts” (to be fond of) appears in a few different dictionaries surrounded by the same words and definitions. But, Gotti notes, a few court testimonies exist that “have been found to confirm the validity of the terms mentioned [in the many dictionaries he reviews in his book].” Of course, that tells us little about how frequently or how long these exact words were used.

Thieves’ Cant eventually fell into disuse after the 19th century, but it may have evolved into various other cants and slangs, including children’s songs, Cockney Rhyming Slang, and a secret language for gay men called Polari. It also inspired the creators of the Dungeons and Dragons games, which have faithfully kept (a fictional) criminal cant alive. Even modern spoken English contains echoes of the cryptolect, proving that, even after all these centuries, you can’t keep a good cant down.

New York may be a bustling metropolis, but the city also boasts roughly 30,000 acres of parkland full of lush greenery. But these parks have an important rule: Look but don't dine. If a weed, such as mugwort, is edible, it's against park rules to pick and eat it. Local foragers, who comb through foliage for edible and medicinal plants, have fought the rule for decades. Steve Brill has led foraging tours of Central Park since the 1980s, and was even arrested for foraging back in 1986. Despite the legal threat, he and others continue to lead tours, pick plants, and chow down in parks across the city. But now there's a new—legal—source for edible greenery in New York. It also happens to be floating on the East River.

A barge that once carried sand to construction sites now carries Swale, a forest meant for foraging. Started by artist Mary Mattingly in 2016, Swale provides an aboveboard place for foragers—or anyone—to pick everything from onions to plums wherever it's docked. Brooklyn Bridge Park's Pier 6 is Swale's current home, but it will move to the Bronx's Concrete Plant Park on Friday, June 30.

From shore, Swale looks like an unassuming, rusty, industrial barge—with a few trees poking up over the sides. On board, the 40-by-130-foot barge is a lively place. In the corner sit white tanks used to filter and treat water from the East River for use on board. Gravel paths wind through the compact landscape, past a hill and lush planting beds, to a small shed and a patch of green lawn.

Swale isn't a community garden, of the sort scattered all over the city, where locals can plant their own food, but rather a food forest, "specifically using permaculture techniques, not gardening techniques," explains Amanda McDonald Crowley, an art curator and Swale's community outreach specialist. Permaculture techniques, coupled with people harvesting plants that would normally take over, eliminate the need for pesticides or chemical fixes for soil deficiencies. Next to the blueberries, for example, are small conifer saplings that acidify the soil, which makes blueberry bushes happy.

Young fruit trees, including apples and beach plums, are scattered around the barge, while shrubs, greens, and vines make up the understory. The greenery is diverse, but there are some common favorites mixed in. "We've deliberately planted a lot of more conventional herbs and spices that people will recognize more immediately," says Crowley. Familiar plants make Swale more accessible for people who aren't experienced foragers. "Everyone knows basil and tomatoes," notes Mattingly. But plenty of Swale's foliage is only recognizable to the trained eye (and palate). "Different communities of people really know different plants," she adds. Plants such as mint, mugwort, and kale are popular in some neighborhoods but not in others—it all depends on the local mix of cultures and cuisines, of which New York has many.

Almost everything on the barge is edible or medicinal, but whatever isn't has some other purpose. The bark of the ash tree, for example, can be used to make cordage. Even the edible plants might have a secondary use, like the Hopi Red Dye Amaranth, which can be eaten and used to dye fabrics. "We've always got staff on board to help people think about what they should pick and point them in the right direction," says Crowley, and small signs note the uses for each plant. Workshops are frequently held that give visitors a chance to get hands-on experience.

Guidance is one advantage Swale has over city parks—illicit foragers in parks are on their own when it comes to identifying and preparing plants, which might be contaminated with heavy metals that may lurk in urban park soil. Conditions are a bit more comfortable on the barge, too. "We are shielded a little bit by being on the water because the water's more temperate," says Mattingly. "It's not quite as harsh in the winter on the water, and it's cooler in the summer."

Being on a barge does present some unique challenges. The Coast Guard's approval process can be strict, and there are plenty of other permits to be secured wherever the barge is docked. It bobs up and down whenever a boat passes by, an effect that is worst at low tide, and the lightweight gangway can seem a little precarious at times. "The liability of having the barge is, at times, unnerving," Mattingly admits.

Despite the risks, Mattingly hopes to find a long-term home, where a community can shape the forest based on its needs. What that looks like is "going to depend on the neighborhood it ends up in," says Mattingly. "We want to care for spaces and be given the opportunity to care for them."

Hundreds of years ago, on north Kodiak Island in Alaska, native peoples, like pretty much everyone living near water, liked to fish. Their method, though, didn't involve fishing rods or lures but a large fish trap, made of stone.

The fish trap, which was recently discovered by archaeologists at the Alutiiq Museum, worked pretty simply, and, one presumes, effectively. It consisted of two corrals, each with stone walls that were low enough for salmon to swim over at high tide but high enough to trap them during low tide.

That method of fishing was pretty common across the coast of the North Pacific, Patrick Saltonstall, the archaeologist behind the discovery, said, but before now had not been known to happen as far north as Kodiak, which is 1,000 miles northwest of Seattle and 500 miles west of Juneau.

And while the method is simple, Saltonstall said that operating the fish trap was probably real work.

"I imagine that it was reused year after year and that it was owned by a community or an extended family," Saltonstall said.

How long ago might the trap have been used? Within the last 2,000 years, archaeologists said, meaning that, for all of the water that's flown over it since then, it's aged pretty well.

In 1929, the American Record corporation—the company that, after a long chain of mergers and acquisitions, would eventually become Sony Music Entertainment—put out its first record.

Seventy years later, having reached the top of the industry, Sony quietly stopped printing records altogether. It was time to evolve, and to leave vinyl behind in favor of their shiny, relatively new invention, the CD.

Earlier today—nearly thirty years later—they took it back. As Agence France-Presse reports, Sony Music Entertainment just announced that they're going to start making records again, starting next March.

Sony are to begin producing vinyl again amid surging demand, almost 30 years after abandoning the format https://t.co/clE33AL0KZpic.twitter.com/sU4VtU8F0u

— theQuietus (@theQuietus) June 29, 2017

Vinyl is making an undisputed comeback: as Forbes reported in April, sales are set to clear $1 billion this year, for the first time all millennium. Fans wax poetic about wax's sound quality, and the physicality of interacting with an object rather than pressing a button.

New Sony discs will spin out of a factory southwest of Tokyo. They'll include classic Japanese pop albums, as well as contemporary chart-toppers.

But first, the company needs to do some hiring—they are "scrambling to find older engineers familiar with how to make records," AFP writes.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The Neolithic monument at Avebury may be less well known than Stonehenge, but it is fantastic. Sprawling over an area of about 20 acres, there’s an outer ring, 1,000 yards in circumference, of stones stood on end—originally, they may have been 98 standing stones. Insider, there are two more, smaller stone circles.

Some archaeologists have speculated that, when this monument was built, more than 5,000 years ago, its creators began with the outer circle. But now a team from the University of Leicester has mapped a hidden stone square in the center of the monument, which they believe was built even earlier,The Guardian reports.

The team used radar technology to find the position of the stones in the square, some of which were moved or destroyed in the 17th or 18th century. They found a shape with sides about 32 yards long. Most intriguingly, this square was centered around a mysterious, long-gone wooden structure.

When “archaeologist and marmalade magnate” Alexander Keiller worked on this site in 1939, he found post holes and other evidence that a wooden structure had once stood at the center of the stone circle. He thought this was probably a medieval shed of some sort.

But the Leicester team believes it may have been much, much older. Team leader Mark Gillings told The Guardian, “Our working interpretation is that the house is the first thing. It falls into ruin but they’re still remembering and respecting it. They put a square around it about 3000 BC and then the circles. It’s like ripples on a pond coming out from the house.”

No one knows exactly what this wooden structure would have been used for. Perhaps it was the dwelling of an important person, a meeting house, or a ritual space. The stone square itself is “highly unusual,” The Guardian says—a new clue in the mysterious ritual life of England's past.

While plenty of species in the animal kingdom are known for their songs, there are just two that can keep a beat: Humans and cockatoos. Even chimpanzees, our close relatives, can't master rhythm when they're banging on trees. But as this video from Science shows, male palm cockatoos have been observed drumming on tree limbs with sticks and seedpods while trying to attract a mate.

For the study, researchers recorded 18 male palm cockatoos drumming, and analyzed the sounds. They found the birds maintained a consistent rhythm, one that was just as regular and predictable as human drumming. The birds, native to northern Australia, will sometimes sing along with vocalizations, but other times they just drum. The researchers also found that there's not one frequency the birds prefer to tap at — each bird's beat is unique.

The other thing that sets these birds apart is their use of tools. Most animals create and use tools for finding and catching food. Anything else might be a waste of energy. But palm cockatoos use tools—sticks and dry seed pods—to beat on hollow tree limbs, something that won't get them any closer to a meal.

Palm cockatoo nests are pretty spread out, but their drumming sounds don't carry long distances. That means the male birds, the authors write, "appear to be more like solo musical artists or the beat setters of musical ensembles (for example, drummers in western rock bands) who have their own internalized notion of a regular pulse." They even have the rock 'n roll hairstyle to match their drumming skills.

During World War II, the U.S. government wanted your hair.

Americans contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. For some this meant enlisting in the armed forces, for others it was conserving food and gas. For Mary Babnik Brown of Pueblo, Colorado, it meant sending her knee-length hair to the government—for purposes that are still disputed to this day.

Babnik Brown was born in 1907 in Pueblo, and grew to be a popular local dancer by her early teens. She even earned the nickname “Arcadia Mary,” after the club where she was often found showing off her moves.

As recounted in a 1990 article in the Colorado Springs Gazette, by the 1940s, Babnik Brown was employed at a broom factory and volunteered with the United Service Organizations (USO) at the Pueblo Army Air Base (now the Pueblo Memorial Airport), where she taught GIs how to dance. By this time, she had also earned another nickname—“The Lady With the Crown.” This had nothing to do with dancing, but rather with her incredibly long hair, which she claimed had never been cut, save for a few minor trims. Her tresses were around 34 inches long, and she often wore them braided and wrapped around her head like ... well … a crown.

In addition to her hair’s remarkable length, Babnik Brown took terrific care of her locks and used only basic shampoos to keep them clean. Another 1990 newspaper article, from the Allegheny Times, quotes a historian who describes Babnik Brown as having, “fine blond hair, which had never been bleached or touched by a hot iron.” For years, her hair was little more than a source of pride and local fascination.

In 1941 the War Department put out a call to the American public—for hair. The government requested donations of long, healthy hair, not to make wigs, but to use the strands in the development of military instruments.

In 1943, Babnik Brown spotted one of these vague calls for women’s hair in one of the Pueblo papers. While the exact advertisement she saw does not seem to have been preserved, according to a 1943 report in The New York Times, a similar ad answered by a Long Island woman requested “patriotic blonde” hair that had never been “primped with curling irons or treated with chemicals of any kind.”

Babnik, eager to contribute more actively to the war effort, responded to the ad with a letter offering her long locks. She received a response from the Washington Institute of Technology, dated November 26, 1943, asking for a sample to see if it made the grade. The letter stated that her hair had to be at least 22 inches long and untouched by chemical treatments—neither condition being a problem for Babnik Brown. Authorities promised that, should the hair prove usable in “meteorological instruments,” she would be reimbursed in United States War Savings Stamps.

She soon received word that her hair would be ideal. So, for the first time in her life, Babnik Brown cut her hair—all of it. She later said that she cried for days afterward and wore a bandanna for months to hide her shorn look. When she was offered the promised savings stamps, Babnik Brown turned them down, satisfied just to have contributed. Then, for decades, she heard nothing about how her hair was used, or even if it was used at all.

Babnik Brown went on to work with the State Federation of Labor, and never moved out of her hometown. But in 1987, at the age of 80, she finally received word about the fate of her donated hair. It came in the form of a letter from President Ronald Reagan himself, wishing her a happy birthday. The surprising letter not only thanked Babnik Brown for her selfless donation, but also mentioned that her hair had been used to create the reticule in the famous Norden bombsight—a top-secret WWII targeting device.

The Norden sight was a complex mechanical computer designed to allow bomber planes to drop their payloads with an accuracy unheard of in its day. The sight was considered so important that it is said to have been armed with explosives so that it could be destroyed on the fly, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. Reagan’s letter to Babnik Brown rather casually mentions that her donated hair was used as the actual crosshairs of the device.

As the story was reported by the Associated Press, the developers of the sight had trouble finding a material for the crosshairs that would not flex or deform in the constantly shifting altitude and temperature of a bomber. They tried conventional wire, and even the silk of a black widow spider, before the military found Babnik Brown’s blonde hair to be a perfect fit.

However, Reagan’s letter may have overstated the reality of the situation, as a number of modern historians are pretty sure the Norden sights didn't use human hair at all. The Museum of Aviation in Georgia claims that no one has seen a Norden bombsight with anything but crosshairs etched directly onto the glass, and that the sight was in use long before Babnik Brown's donation. On their website, they state, “One important thing to remember is that all of this took place before the Internet when fact checking research was a very time consuming and laborious task.” According to them, the story connecting Babnik Brown’s hair to the Norden bombsight began with Reagan’s letter and was passed on from there.

Still there are others, such as Mike Wright, President of the Pueblo Weisbrod Aircraft Museum, who are still open to the idea. “My understanding is that they used [her hair],” he says. “We have two Norden, and you wouldn’t be able to tell.”

Whether her hair was ever actually used in a Norden sight or not, Babnik Brown was presented with an award from the Colorado Aviation Historical Society in 1990 for her selfless wartime service and sacrifice. Babnik Brown passed away in 1991, but her locks live on in both history and legend.

Joseph Peterson is a software engineer by day and rare manuscript enthusiast by night.

Peterson is the founder of Esoteric Archives, a website he built 20 years ago that publishes transcripts, translations and other information about rare historical texts. He’s also one of the virtual volunteers helping Chicago’s Newberry Library transcribe and translate a series of rare religious manuscripts written between the 15th and 19th centuries.

The manuscripts, titled The Book of Magical Charms, The Commonplace Book and Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft, are part of the Newberry’s multidisciplinary project “Religious Change, 1450–1700,” which explores how the printed word changed religious interpretation in Europe and the Americas. These rare manuscripts may contain writings that are unavailable anywhere else, according to Chris Fletcher, the Andrew Mellon fellow who is coordinating the project.

The aforementioned manuscripts will be featured in a September 2017 exhibition of the same title alongside more than 150 items including Bibles, poems, maps, music and art. The project also takes place on the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, a religious doctrine that eventually ignited the Protestant Reformation.

In the lead up to the September exhibition, the Newberry is crowdsourcing transcripts of texts with Latin and English, which were made available after the site launched in May, according to Jen Wolfe, the library’s Digital Initiatives Manager. The Commonplace Book and The Book of Magical Charms each have Latin and English sections, while the Cases of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft is in English. Anyone can visit the online “Transcribing Faith” portal for the project in order to transcribe and translate the texts without having to visit the library.

Much like updating a Wikipedia page, anyone can start transcribing and translating, and they don’t need to sign up to do so. So far Peterson says he has plowed through “between 30 and 40 pages” of The Book of Magical Charms, which was written in England. He started working on the Newberry’s texts “to see how well it works.”

The manuscripts hold odd insights and secrets. The Book of Magical Charms, for example, outlines occult arts that describe caring for toothaches, cheating at dice and speaking with spirits. The Commonplace Book is believed to have been written by multiple individuals between the 16th and 19th century, based on several factors including the multiple handwriting styles, the transition from print to cursive, and the shift from Latin to English. It contains poems, lists and passages from famous Christian authors like St. Augustine of Hippo.

Penned by Increase Mather, the Harvard president and Puritan minister who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials, Case of Conscience Concerning Witchcraft, which was likely written for publication, both defends the Salem Witch Trials and criticizes the use of “spectral evidence,” meaning apparition of witches or spirits in dreams or visions. The changes and corrections within the text, once transcribed, will indicate which ideas made it to the final book and which ones were removed, Fletcher says.

Cathy Hamaker, an exhibit developer at the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis and another volunteer transcriber, works on the texts whenever she has a moment during her lunch break. Hamaker heard about the project on social media and decided to apply her background in medieval history and knowledge of Latin to the task.

On the page she’s currently transcribing and translating from The Book of Magical Charms, she uncovered instructions to complete a conjuring—Hamaker isn’t sure if it’s for a specific spell—for which the individual must do so under a crescent moon as well as have incense, a sword and holy water.

“Once I finish this page, I’m going to start another one,” Hamaker says. “It really is like solving a little puzzle … It’s challenging, but for someone like me, it’s really fun.”

These informal historical documents, Fletcher says, reveal information about the writers’ everyday lives and ordinary concerns as well as providing insight into the “enchanted” nature of European religious culture of the 17th century, a time when information about magic and supernatural beings were part of one’s understanding of the world.

“Using our books that are illustrated or annotated, we’re trying to get people to understand what it was like to go through these really enormous changes that caused a great deal of anxiety and also a great deal of excitement,” Fletcher says.

On the morning of September 26, 1815, George Wilson was arrested. For walking.

“It never reached my apprehension, however, until chastised by your all-powerful authority that walking alone on the skirt of a wild heath, remote from the ordinary intercourse of the busy throng, was a violation of public morals or a breach of the peace,” Wilson griped in his memoir.

Except, that’s not exactly what happened.

Just over two weeks earlier, on September 11, 1815, 50-year-old Wilson had taken his first steps on a 1,000-mile walk, one of several feats of long-distance walking called “pedestrianism” that enthralled Britain in the early 19th century. He walked on a pre-measured circuit around Blackheath common, an area of public grasslands outside of Greenwich, for a sum of £100.

The crowds of people who’d come to watch the “Blackheath Pedestrian,” as the press called him, were lively but manageable. However, as Wilson tramped on, the number of spectators grew. By the day of his arrest, he’d walked an astounding 751.25 miles around Blackheath while, according to a contemporary report, the crowds had grown to “thousands and tens of thousands of idle and disorderly persons.”

“So many mouths required an adequate provision of beer and spirits; booths were erected and the Heath wore the appearance of an extensive fair,” wrote a lawyer who analyzed Wilson’s arrest in the months after. The Heath was alive with acrobats and “rope-walkers,” fire-eaters and ballad singers, dog fights and pony races. “Brothels were brought in from London to the spot, and drunkenness and debauchery were rife upon every part of Blackheath,” the lawyer continued. “At night, the neighborhood was assailed by the shouts of intoxication, and the families in the vicinity disturbed by every species of riot and confusion.”

Bookmakers were doing a brisk business in bets, but after seeing Wilson easily put down 50 miles a day and more, those who had bet against him now tried to stop him. Though Wilson was himself “quiet, inoffensive, and unassuming,” and only 5-foot-4 and 121 pounds, he had protectors armed with 10-foot staves, bludgeons, and in one case, a bayonet, sweeping the path in front of him. Local authorities were understandably nervous: The riotous carnival atmosphere was ripe for insurrection and violence.

So when Wilson was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace, it wasn’t without reason. The magistrates were right in thinking that if Wilson were stopped long enough, the crowds would disperse. During his hearing on October 5, Wilson was acquitted of the charges, and although he’d by then lost the challenge, he hadn’t lost the affection of the nation. A two-pence ballad entitled “The Quizzical Quorum or the Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Black Beaks of Blackheath” made it clear what everyone thought of the magistrates’ “comical warrant,” and even better, the London Stock Exchange allegedly took up a collection of £100 for him.

Wilson was famous the country over for his endurance, but exactly why watching a man walk around in circles for weeks on end was so exciting is down to three peculiarities of late Georgian culture: the growing love of sporting spectacle and sport as entertainment, the deep and abiding affection for gambling, and the prominence of pubs.

Pedestrian matches, along with boxing and horse racing, emerged at the very beginning of leisure culture, when the Industrial Revolution had begun to mean that more people had more free time and more free money. These matches prefigured the later sport-as-entertainment model: They were among the first organized sporting events for the masses, relying on both the athleticism of the participants and the pageantry of the event itself, offering a respite from the grim realities of working down a mine, in service, in trade, or on a farm. “It was just something different in their lives, because life at the time was harsh, certainly for the working classes,” says Archie Jenkins, a former physical education teacher and now sports historian.

Pedestrianism also had an advantage over other sports: There were few barriers to participating. All a contender needed was the ability and will to walk, and working people did that all the time. “Everybody had to walk, unless you were one of the 10 percent who had a horse,” says Derek Martin, a retired lawyer and sports historian who has researched the history of pedestrianism. Spectators therefore already had a built-in understanding of the sport. “You appreciated a good walker.”

Couple that with the fascination of watching someone do something that seemed physically challenging to the point of impossibility, and pedestrianism was a hit. “It’s the fun in watching people kill themselves slowly in front of you, to some extent. Or like Formula 1 racing, secretly you want to see a crash,” says Martin.

This fascination was certainly present from the beginnings of popular pedestrianism, which started with the exploits of Captain Robert Barclay Allardice. Barclay, a 29-year-old Cambridge-educated Scottish gentleman and son of a Member of Parliament, walked 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours in 1809 on Newmarket Heath near Cambridge. When he limped over the finish line on July 12, he had earned his enormous pay-off.

Barclay’s initial wager was £1,000, a mind-boggling sum considering that the average farm worker earned just £50 a year. As Professor Peter Radford writes in his book The Celebrated Captain Barclay, side-bets pushed Barclay’s take up to £16,000, roughly 320 years of income for most of the people cheering for him. The total amount of bets made by spectators on Barclay’s walk, The Times reported at the time, came to £100,000, or about £7.5 million in today’s money.

Britons loved, and still love today, gambling. “They would gamble on anything—if it moved, they would gamble on it,” says Jenkins, explaining that there were virtually no laws restricting gambling. “We used to gamble on people running backwards, how many stones they could pick up in an hour over a set distance. [Pedestrianism is] something to gamble on.”

That fact was not lost on anyone, particularly publicans. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, pubs actively organized pedestrian matches. They would put up the competitors, advertise, take bets, offer spectators a place to discuss the bouts over a pint, and then sit back and reap the profits. “The publicans became the entrepreneurs, they saw a way of making money getting people into the pubs, with gambling as well,” Jenkins says.

The Blackheath Pedestrian’s aborted attempt to walk 1,000 miles in 20 days was by no means his only feat of long-distance walking. Wilson, son of a bankrupt shipbuilder father and pawnbroking mother, was a working man, whether that meant peddling books and pamphlets door-to-door or tax collecting in the villages around his native Newcastle. But by 1814, Wilson was penniless and in debtors’ prison. Desperate, he took bets from his fellow prisoners: He claimed he could walk 50 miles in 12 hours. After measuring up the prison yard (33 feet by 25-and-a-half feet) Wilson made 2,575 circuits, finishing the full 50 miles with four minutes and 43 seconds to spare. He won £3 and 1 shilling.

After he was released, Wilson turned to walking for money full time, making him one of the first professional sportsmen, but soon found that Barclay’s windfall was the exception, not the rule. There wasn’t a lot of money in professional walking. To supplement his income, Wilson sold picture postcards of himself in his walking kit (his green silk cap and pantaloons), made public appearances on stages across the country, and wrote his memoirs.

In 1822, he decided to end his career on a spectacular note: walking 90 miles in 24 hours. On Easter Monday, before a rowdy, ballooning crowd of 40,000 people at the Town Moor racecourse in Newcastle, he did it with 14 minutes to spare. A day that could have ended in triumph, however, was plunged into disappointment when Wilson’s appeal to the crowd for donations in appreciation of his magnificent endurance yielded a pittance. He walked away in disgust.

Wilson died on the 11th of April 1839, in Newcastle, at the age of 73. By this time, the popular passion for pedestrian events was waning. “I suspect that was because the financial situation of the country got worse and people were more concerned with making a living and keeping their head down,” says Martin. “After that, people weren’t prepared to go and give money to walkers.”

There was another reason, too: Newly-minted Victorian morality was starting to disapprove. Over the next 30 years, pedestrianism took on new dimensions as a sport, encompassing running and sprint races, but to many Victorians, it remained too working class, too mired in gambling and boozing, and, when it came to the long-distance feats, too easy to fake or cheat.

Middle and upper class athletes, often Oxford and Cambridge grads who wanted to raise the sport out of the muddy morass of the pub-cum-betting house, began forming athletics clubs. Initial membership was restricted to only other middle and upper-class sportsmen and explicitly not artisans, labourers, or “mechanicals.” These more structured clubs nevertheless flourished, giving rise to running, football, rugby, and cricket clubs. By the end of the century, football took the place of pedestrianism in the hearts of working class sport fans and several former pedestrians found new vocations as trainers of new football clubs.

Today, pedestrianism of the kind that Wilson and Barclay might recognize still exists in racewalking, an Olympic sport. But it can’t command nearly the crowds that they did. And it’s got a bit of a reputation for, well, looking silly. In 2012, long-time sports commentator Bob Costas told American Way magazine, “Look, I know that they are athletes…. But it looks so funny. You know what it really looks like? It looks like a person who has to go really bad. ‘I gotta go, gotta go, gotta go right now’—except they just don’t want to break into a full-scale sprint.”

Entertainment starved Georgians would almost certainly not agree.

It hasn’t been around since the Stone Age, but the famous Flintstones House in Hillsborough, California has been on the market since 2015. It finally sold this week for the astounding price of $2.8 million.

According to Curbed San Francisco, the cartoonish home went for $1.4 million less than the original asking price, though around $2 million more than the $800,000 it commanded when it last sold in 1996.

The bulbous home was constructed in 1976, by forming rebar and wire mesh over giant inflated balloons, which were then covered in a thick material that gives it its distinct cartoon stone look.

The buyer has not been disclosed, but they probably make more than a blue-collar quarry crane operator.

In 1904, German doctor Bernhard Bendix teamed up with educator Hermann Neufert to do something radical: create a school with few to no walls. Their idea spawned what came to be known as the open air education movement, which spread through the United States and most of Europe before the outbreak of World War I. Their aim was simple: combat the rising tide of tuberculosis.

At the time, many professionals believed that the cramped quarters and lack of access to fresh air in many schools exacerbated the risk of disease. To keep kids healthy, they needed to modify the current system: keep class the same, but emphasize ventilation—and, in many cases, relocate schools to the forest.

The result? Countless classrooms with neatly arranged desks and chalkboards that sat in the middle of the woods.

Many of these schools were made from tents or prefabricated buildings. Some, as in the video above, emphasized exercise. They paired outdoor games with frequent health check-ups to create an education experience designed around disease prevention.

The movement became so popular that it inspired five international conferences from 1922 to 1956. By the late 1950s, however, it fizzled out, largely because of improved public health and sanitation practices.

But open-air education was no great delight. These schools clung to their promises of fresh air and ventilation even during the winter months. One man described to The Independent his experiences in Aspen House, a school with a roof, desks, and a chalkboard—but no walls.

“At the height of summer the sunlight poured in; on a rainy autumn day the child on the end of a row could reach out and get his or her hand wet,” he said. But in the winter, it was freezing. "Sometimes, when we got there in the morning… the snow would have blown in on to the tables and chairs and we would have to clear it off before we could start."

Other schools instituted what were known as “sitting-out bags,” thick blankets that kids wore to keep warm during the winter.

Class outside? Not all fun and games.

At Göbekli Tepe, an ancient site in southern Turkey, archaeologists have been digging and discovering things for years. First excavated by a German archaeologist in 1996, it was built around 12,000 years ago, possibly as some kind of a holy site, though until recently, archaeologists weren't entirely sure.

But new research published Wednesday in Science Advances sheds some light on what the structure's purpose might have been: to display skulls for a skull cult.

Archaeologists use "skull cult" to describe prehistoric peoples who venerated skulls to the point of worship, indicated most frequently by modified skulls left in their wake. Archaeologists recently found three such skulls at Göbekli Tepe, each bearing incisions along the sagittal axes of the head, or lengthwise down the center between one's ears.

"Because no signs of healing could be detected, modifications were probably performed shortly after death," the authors write in the study.

So what was the point? The authors float two theories, one of which—simple veneration of the dead—seems plausible. The other, though, is a bit more heavy metal.

The skulls could've been associated with, they write, "the display of dispatched enemies through either active 'branding' of individuals or functional modification of the skull for display." It might've been a way to make them stand out among other skulls at the site, in other words, or just a way to attach them to something for an exhibit. Not unlike in a museum.