Is it you?

For over a year, the Channel Islands community of Sark has been importing their milk from elsewhere. According to the BBC, the community is currently looking for someone to put an end to this nonsense and bring dairy production—and a herd of cows—back to the island.

Sark is three miles long and a mile-and-a-half wide, free of cars and streetlights. Around 500 people live on the island, surrounded by a rocky cliff-lined coast accessible by ferry and boat, under a sky dark enough for the stars to twinkle at night. Sark’s last dairy farmer, Christopher Nightingale, shut his operation down in 2017 due to rising costs and a lack of land stability: The island is still led by a seigneur, or feudal lord (currently, Christopher Beaumont). While feudalism formally ended on the island in 2008, old habits die hard. Farmers on Sark must still lease their land on a short-term basis, which makes it difficult to plan a sustainable business.

The way most U.K. residents get their milk has been changing over the past 30 years. While 89 percent of British households still had fresh milk delivered to their doorsteps in 1980, that number has dropped down to around three percent today. Supermarkets in the U.K. drove small dairies like Sark’s out of business by selling milk below the cost of production, says Richard Young, policy director of the U.K.-based nonprofit Sustainable Food Trust and co-owner of Kite’s Nest Farm. Between 2005 and 2015, half of the U.K.’s dairy farms were driven out of business, and those that remain are mostly large farms with 500 cows or more. Sark doesn’t need nearly so many given its population—a herd of 25 to 35 local Jersey or Guernsey cows should do, says Young.

Richard Axton is the main force behind promoting a Sark community dairy, which is slated to be built this year, and calling for a dairy farmer—or a couple—to come, cows in tow, to the island. The local economy depends mainly on tourism, so the new dairy farmer will be expected to provide for local residents, and then some.

“Sark’s visitors are increasingly going to be old people who walk around the plateau of the island, rather than scrambling down to the beach and they are going to be looking for good things to eat and drink and take home with them,” local Conseiller Helen Plummer said at a meeting in January, during which the community dairy project was discussed.

So, who will satiate Sark’s taste for sweeter, grass-fed milk, cheese, butter, and cream from neighborly cows? If you have the experience and cows to take the job on, a local chocolate company encourages interested applicants to be in touch.

This trove of images captures the 1906 geological event that brought the city to its knees.

The ground shook for one long, terrible minute. In the early morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco, California, convulsed with an earthquake that would destroy much of the city. While geologists’ estimates of the quake’s magnitude vary a bit, it was immediately and obviously clear that the tremblor was strong and shocking. “One side of the country moved north, while the other side stood where it was, and there came a tear through the entire San Mateo county north and south,” remarked Hermann Schussler, chief engineer of the Spring Valley Water Works, in a later court testimony.

The see-saw motion splintered roadways and kindled fires that burned for days. “If San Francisco had been at or near the ‘fault’ line,” Schussler added, “there would not have been anything left of it.” As it was, the effects were vast and devastating. By the time the fires were out, hundreds or thousands of people were dead, nearly half of the city’s population was homeless, and tens of thousands of buildings had been scorched or toppled to the ground—particularly those built atop the soft soils around the Bay. Photographers roamed the changed streets with their cameras in hand, documenting the smoldering rubble and the sprawling tent city in Golden Gate Park, where the military had set up emergency accommodations for the residents who found themselves unmoored.

Several dozen of those first-hand images are up for sale this week at Swann Auction Galleries, where appraisers expect the lot of 40 silver prints to fetch somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000. Some of the images show clouds of smoke billowing into the sky, others show slumping homes or scorched hulls of buildings, and at least one—captioned “relic seekers after the fire”—documents people salvaging or plundering the remains of the blazes.

In the decades after photographers chronicled the harrowing conditions on Civil War battlefields, “commercial and amateur photographers recognized the value of images, especially those that documented a once-in-a-lifetime event,” says Daile Kaplan, the gallery’s director of photographs and photobooks. "These particular photographs were knowingly shot as documents or records," Kaplan says.

But it's not entirely clear who captured them. One print is credited to Willard E. Worden, a Bay Area transplant by way of Philadelphia, where he had been working as a newspaper illustrator. (Once Worden made the leap behind the camera, he mostly trained his lens on seascapes and landscapes, Kaplan says.) The other photos are unattributed, but in light of their different formats and paper stocks, Kaplan suspects that they were shot by multiple photographers.

As the city dusted itself off and began the process of rebuilding, investigators got to work understanding exactly how the destruction had happened in the first place. The quake “spawned a flurry of scientific investigation,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and researchers’ comprehensive reports “demonstrated the importance of accurate, widespread and repeated observations of earthquakes, their effects, and the faults on which they occur.” After examining the displaced ground, the Johns Hopkins geophysicist Henry Fielding Reid suggested that the earthquake must have corresponded to something like the energy released from snipping a taut rubber band. Today, the “elastic rebound” theory is fundamental to an understanding of seismology, according to the USGS. It underpins the idea that faults cause earthquakes, not the other way around.

This information didn’t vanquish the threat of enormous, teeth-baring earthquakes on America’s West Coast—but the photos are a reminder that, as brigades doused fires and troops built shelters, scientists stepped in to help in their own way, too.

The canine remains were buried in a tomb in Orkney, Scotland, over 4,000 years ago.

Civilizations may come and go, but good dogs are forever. In a first for canine forensics, researchers have reconstructed the head of a domesticated dog that lived in Scotland’s Orkney Islands some 4,500 years ago. Based on the size of its skull, the scientists believe the dog must have been roughly the size of a large collie and had features similar to a European grey wolf. Based on the loving gleam in its forensically reconstructed eyes, we believe the pup must have been a very good dog.

Archaeologists uncovered the skull of this particular Neolithic dog in a 1901 excavation of the Cuween Hill chambered cairn, according to a statement from the Historic Environment Scotland, which commissioned the reconstruction along with the National Museum of Scotland. Essentially an enormous passage tomb, the cairn contains four side chambers, a central atrium, and a corbelled roof. In 2018, HES released digital models of the cairn that allow users to explore the interior architecture of the tomb. Unlike other passage tombs, however, the Cuween Hill cairn contained a staggering 24 dog skulls, compared to the remains of just eight humans. According to Steve Farrar, the interpretation manager at HES, that’s a whole lot of dogs for just one tomb.

Despite this abundance of canines, it’s difficult to ascertain the precise relationship between the people of Cuween Hill and their pups. “The vibrant culture of Neolithic Orkney is so far removed from us today,” Farrar writes in an email. “But we do know that dogs had a special meaning to the people at this place and time.” In the past, researchers have stumbled upon dog coprolites (fossilized dung) at a number of Neolithic sites in Orkney, Farrar says. Further analysis of these turds suggests the dogs had a bone-rich diet, which would have likely derived from scraps of human food—all suggesting a close relationship with Neolithic humans.

The Cuween Hill cairn isn’t the only Neolithic tomb in Orkney with an animal connection, according to a story in The Guardian. One tomb on the South Ronaldsay cliffs contained mounds of eagle bones, and another tomb, the Knowe of Yarso in Rowsay, held the bones of 36 red deer. These remains suggest that people living around these tombs held special associations with certain animals, as Alison Sheridan, the principal archaeological research curator at the National Museum of Scotland, told The Guardian.

Forensic artists have reconstructed the faces of many humans who lived in the Neolithic era, but never their best friends. In the case of the Cuween Hill dog, researchers passed its cranium through a CT scan in Edinburgh University’s Royal School of Veterinary Studies in order to make a 3D print as a model. From there, the forensic artist Amy Thornton modeled the skull in clay, cast it in silicone, and topped it all off with a layer of fur that resembles the color and texture of a European grey wolf.

In human facial reconstruction, artists rely on existing research of the relationships between bony features and soft tissues. In comparison, canine facial reconstruction—a field that solely comprises the Cuween Hill dog—has none of that preexisting research. Furthermore, all modern dog species were bred in the past few hundred years, so the Cuween Hill dog has no identifiable modern relative. “So I approached the project purely from an anatomical perspective whilst comparing the skull to skulls of modern domesticated dog breeds with similar morphology for reference,” Thornton writes in an email. So the end result is science’s best guess at what this dog actually looked like—and it’s pretty darn cute. As dog_rates might say, 13/10 would boop.

Ancient Britons had a complicated relationship with the dead.

While laying down some water pipes, workers at the U.K. utility company Thames Water had a workday interrupted in a rather macabre fashion when they unearthed what turned out to be the remains of 26 people who had been ritualistically buried in pits in Oxfordshire. One set of remains belonged to a woman who was interred with her feet cut off and placed by her side, and her arms bound behind her head. The bones are believed to be nearly 3,000 years old.

The utility company turned the work at Childrey Warren, as the site is known, over to Cotswold Archaeology, which carefully excavated the graves and associated areas. The archaeologists unearthed evidence of dwellings, a bone comb, pottery, an animal skull (possibly from a horse), deer antlers for digging, flint tools, and a Roman brooch. “The Iron Age site at Childrey Warren was particularly fascinating, as it provided a glimpse into the beliefs and superstitions of people living in Oxfordshire before the Roman conquest,” said Neil Holbrook, chief executive of Cotswold Archaeology, in a statement. He also added that previous research has uncovered similar pit burials that suggest that Britain’s ancient population may have practiced human sacrifice.

Ancient Britons had interesting relationships with their dead, and not just involving burials. In a 2016 study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, for example, researchers found that some Iron Age Britons were buried in large grain storage pits, only to be exhumed years later. The process was done to retrieve a body part, as a relic of the deceased. This most recent discovery in Oxfordshire also helps refute the idea that the Iron Age people there widely practiced sky burial, in which corpses were left out in the open to decompose or be scavenged. This has often been used as an explanation for why so few Iron Age burials have been found in Britain. (Not to mention that those that have been found are often buried in odd configurations or with body parts removed.)

A thorough analysis of the bones, artifacts, and soil should provide more insights into the lives and burial practices of these Britons, spanning the Iron Age and Roman conquest.

Hopefully it wasn't all in vain.

The golden eagle population in Yellowstone National Park is in a curious, tenuous place; there’s a stable number of these birds of prey, but their reproductive rate is worryingly low. To discover why, this past winter wildlife biologists at Yellowstone began tagging the eagles to track their behavior. The scientific monitoring program, conducted and funded by the park, the University of Montana, Yellowstone Forever, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), helped scientists solve an early mystery: Why the first golden eagle in park history to be fitted with a tracker suddenly turned up dead this past December.

Back in August 2018, researchers attached a transmitter to the first eagle they were able to trap for the study. Todd Katzner, a research wildlife biologist with the USGS who helped develop the novel tracking technology, says the scientists fit the eagle with a little backpack that contained a GPS telemetry device. The unit collects data every hour or so and makes it available to researchers online. So far the program has trapped six eagles, but the first held a special place in the hearts of those involved in the project.

According to transmitter data, the raptor, a female, roamed far and wide—nearly 40 miles north of the protections of the park. Shortly after the bird returned to her territory, it was found dead near Phantom Lake on the Blacktail Plateau. Researchers located the remains thanks to the last logged coordinates from the transmitter. The researchers had a suspect right away.

“The bird was necropsied at a wildlife pathology laboratory and samples of liver tissue [were] analyzed to evaluate lead concentrations,” Katzner says. Outside the bounds of Yellowstone, humans can hunt wild game such as elk and deer. Birds of prey, however, don’t know where the park ends. Biologists thought the bird might have feasted on carrion left behind by hunters, and ingested lead bullet fragments. The lab necropsy showed the five-year-old raptor’s lead levels were way over the lethal level. It’s not unusual for eagles to scavenge the “gut piles” left behind when hunters clean a carcass—some count on it as a source of food—but they can prove deadly.

“Avian scavengers globally are exposed to lead and suffer from lead poisoning,” says Katzner. “Data show that lead levels in birds usually peak during winter—concurrent with timing of hunting seasons. As such, it is not a surprise that a bird that crosses in and out of Yellowstone may have been exposed to lead. That said, as researchers, it is always frustrating when this happens because we care about the animals we study and we care about the success of our research.”

Lead ammunition fragments have been of concern to conservationists and scientists in the United States for years. In fact, lead bullets are considered the primary killer of condors in the wild. Copper shot offers a less-toxic alternative, but is far more expensive.

Perhaps most frustrating is that the best efforts to protect ecosystems don’t always work out, especially when the outside world finds its way into areas we try to keep safe. “This study shows that such exposure matters also to birds in protected areas, not just to wildlife outside of those protected areas,” Katzner says. The biologists hope that the information the bird provided in death can be used to help others avoid the same fate.

Celebrating the local date industry involved a Queen Scheherazade beauty pageant, vendors in veils, and a Taj Mahal.

At first glance, the Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival in the Coachella Valley town of Indio, California, looks like any local fair. The monster trucks are lined up, the Twinkies are frying, and ferris wheels gleam in the desert sun. But other details are out of the ordinary: The fair poster faintly resembles the sweeps and curves of Arabic calligraphy. Domes and minarets appear on the horizon. The official Fair ambassadors—elegant young ladies, becrowned and wearing sequinned, midriff-bearing skirts or harem pants—wave regally. Say hello to Queen Scheherazade and her court.

Held between February 15 and 24, this was the festival’s 73rd year. Although dates are no longer the highlight, and the fair positions itself like any other county fair with carnival rides, livestock exhibits, and musical entertainment, the festival still incorporates curiously “Arabic” elements, which feel out of place in a region that is 71 percent Hispanic and 25 percent white, with a Muslim population in the mere hundreds.

It all began, as most stories of fruit in America do, with the USDA. At the turn of the 20th century, the United States Department of Agriculture’s mission to improve the nation’s agricultural diversity led to the import of date varieties from the Middle East and Algeria to the Coachella Valley. By the early 1900s, promoters launched ambitious marketing campaigns to boost the industry. Taking advantage of the desert landscape, Coachella Valley towns refashioned themselves as American counterparts of the Middle East. The town of Walters became Mecca in 1904, and several streets in the Valley got names like Cairo Avenue and Medina Street, which still exist today. The Coachella Valley High School mascot became the image of an Arab in a keffiyeh. Date shops were designed as replicas of pyramids and Bedouin tents. A festival celebrating the fruit was the natural next step.

In 1921, the town of Indio, located 130 miles from Los Angeles, launched the “International Festival of Dates.” Local press reported that “seven society ladies” had donned Arabian costumes at the opening ceremony, creating a sensation. The promotional pamphlet included an illustration with bedouin tents, camels, and the legend: All “The Wise Men” are going.

After that first date festival, though, interest dwindled until 1938, when the Riverside County Fair merged with the Indio Civic Club (organizers of the date festival) to form the Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival. With a brief pause during the Second World War, the festival has run continuously since, held in mid-February every year. The county fair added traditional American events such as rodeos, carnival rides, and funnel cakes, but the love of faux-Arabia remained.

“In the early half of the 20th century, the Middle East is romanticized and thought of as the place of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights,” says Sarah Seekatz, an associate professor at San Joaquin Delta College, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the creation of “America’s Arabia” to promote the Coachella Valley’s date industry. “It’s seen as glamorous and luxurious and sex-crazed, but also dangerous.” The enthused adoption of a mythic Arabia as the cultural identity of this date-producing town was a convenient way to market the community and the festival for tourism. The motive was “you should visit us, and you should be a tourist because we are this place where you can travel the world without leaving the state,” explains Seekatz, who also chronicled the date festival as part of her dissertation.

The Arabian Nights theme took off after World War II. A local artist, Louise Dardenelle, conceived the Arabian Nights pageant, which became an annual tradition of plays adapted from One Thousand and One Nights (more commonly called Arabian Nights). The production needed a stage, and retired Hollywood art director Harry Oliver, known for his immoderate replicas of bygone eras, built the faux-Middle Eastern Baghdad Stage, replete with minarets, Moorish arches, and latticed windows. The Islamic style was not rooted to any actual place of Islamic heritage. On either side of one facade, signs written in Arabic respectively read “Pastry Shop” and “Dates Shop—The Only One in America.” On the middle wall, a sign written in Farsi said, “Arabian Foods & Sweet Meats.”

The Arab fantasia in the fairgrounds architecture was pan-Islamic, stretching beyond the Middle East for inspiration. Besides the Baghdad stage, there is the Taj Mahal building, which has a mural of the actual Taj Mahal on one exterior wall. Other areas have names such as Shalimar Lawn and Magic Carpet Stage.

Like the annual play, the Queen Scheherazade beauty pageant has been held since 1948. Contestants, most of them accomplished local students, dress in bejewelled, gossamer-thin harem pants, and compete for scholarship money. The Queen and her court, comprising a Princess Dunyazade and Princess Jasmine (the first and second runners-up), greet fairgoers and make promotional appearances.

Both the Arabian Nights pageant and the Queen Scheherazade contest have become enduring traditions. At first the pageant was a community affair, showcasing local talent, but its popularity has led to professionals doing costume and theatrical design. It is now California’s second-oldest outdoor play, outrun only by the Ramona pageant, in neighboring Hemet, writes Seekatz, in her 2016 book, Images of America: Indio’s Date Festival.

Seekatz has been tracking how the festival has changed over the years. In the beginning, local businesses and vendors participated in the Orientalist depictions, dressing up in Arab garments—headdresses, veils, and all. But by the 1970s and ‘80s, the depiction of the greater Middle East was beginning to change in the United States, spurred by geopolitical turmoil such as the Iran hostage crisis, oil embargoes, and the Gulf War. The days of a blue-eyed Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia or an electric Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra—portrayals that glorified the mythic Orient—were over. After 9/11, American popular culture overwhelmingly depicted Muslims as terrorists and threats.

The fair followed suit. In 2003, the fair’s shooting gallery used a sketch of an Arab as targets. The camel races were run by men in U.S. military garb, not Arab headdresses, as in the past. An American flag was raised on the Baghdad stage, in an event called “Salute to America,” which preceded the Arabian Nights musical pageant, and has become a continuing tradition. “Let’s face it, it’s kinda weird now, this Arab thing,” a fairgoer told Lorraine Ali, a journalist who wrote about visiting the fair as a child in the 1970s and then returning after 9/11.

There are hardly any Middle Eastern voices in coverage of the festival, so it’s hard to tell what actual Muslims thought of the cultural appropriation. Seekatz directed me to Ali’s 2003 article in Newsweek. She writes about her bewilderment at the sight of blue-eyed men in fez caps at the 1973 festival, which she attended with her father, an immigrant from Baghdad. But the initial confusion gave way to joy. “[We’d] whoop and holler at the camel races and marveled at the pyramid of dates in the Taj Mahal building—India? Arabia? Who cared?—and ate corn dogs next to freckled kids at the ‘Arabian Nights’ pageant.”

In many ways the framework of the date festival mirrored that of its primary source of inspiration. The tales of One Thousand and One Nights draw from Arab and Indian folklore, from Ottoman literature and Egyptian mythology. Its status as global folklore has given it a universalism that has led to widespread adaptations. The tales, and particularly the character of Scheherazade, have inspired writers as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, and Salman Rushdie. That a small community in Southern California might also like to use it to celebrate (and sell) their date industry is perhaps not the point of contention. Ali’s dad deemed the genies and flying carpets too innocent to cause offense.

Perhaps what irked Ali is how the date festival used the fantasy of Arabia like its own genie in a bottle: a powerful, wish-granting force that could be subdued and called to action at will. The organizers used grand domes and beautiful harem women as a marketing trope when it was convenient. But when this notional Muslim world became threatening in the national consciousness, the turbaned Arab face became a target at the gun range, the costumes were (mostly) retired under the guise of heightened political awareness, and the remaining vestiges of mythical Arabia were preceded by reassuring renditions of patriotism, such as the American flag flying on the Baghdad stage (which appears on this year’s Fair calendar simply as “Pageant stage”). “I couldn’t help feeling that the fair was apologizing for once having promoted a place and people whose very existence is now viewed as anti-American,” rued Ali.

The Fair might have taken a cue from Coachella Valley High School, which responded positively in 2014 to a complaint from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee about its snarling Arab mascot. The school designed a new mascot, featuring the image of a “Mighty Arab,” which honored the school’s heritage without propagating Islamophobic stereotypes (and was approved by the Committee).

As the Coachella Valley grew more diverse, populated with newer arrivals who had no connection to the date industry, and the industry itself found other ways to sell its fruit, the allegiance to the Valley’s Arabian mythmaking waned. The fair’s date vendors have found other avenues of promotion, current Fair manager, Veronica Casper, writes in an email. Today, visitors might amble amongst date groves and enjoy a date shake or ice cream. There are still date-focused cook-offs at the fair, and some vendors sell date shakes and other treats, including date beer, but the offerings are meagre compared to the festival’s early days.

This was the first year without the fair’s camel and ostrich races, although camels were there for rides and an educational exhibit, according to Casper. Today, a Disneyfied Aladdin, stripped of any significant allusions to an Islamic world, is one of the last vestiges of a long affair with a mythic Middle East. The Oriental sheen remains, but only as the feeble afterglow of a remarkable cultural and agricultural heritage.

Like the Christmas tree, they were probably a German import.

In the spring of 1895, Louis C. Tiffany, of stained-glass and jewelry fame, held a lavish “Mayflower Festival” to benefit a local hospital. “Among the evening's entertainments,” writes culinary historian Cathy K. Kaufman, “was an Easter egg tree, dazzling with different colored eggs.”

This wasn’t unusual at the time. In the era before plastic eggs, many Americans carefully emptied whole eggs of their contents and colored them brightly for Easter, occasionally hanging them on tree branches with scraps of ribbon or thread. In 1890s New York, it was even something of a craze. But despite brief bursts of popularity, Kaufman writes, today “egg trees are a dismal failure when compared to Christmas trees, found only in a few public fora and very scattered homes.”

Much like the Christmas tree, the custom likely came to the United States with German immigrants, entrenching itself among the Pennsylvania Dutch. (Although the Easter egg tree is typically a bare-branched tree hung with eggs, rather than an evergreen.) Across parts of Pennsylvania and Appalachia, Kaufman writes, women considered egg trees a type of good-luck charm, especially when it came to fertility.

The Easter tree achieved more widespread popularity in 1950, after Katherine Milhous, an American author, published the Caldecott Medal-winning children’s book The Egg Tree. Pennsylvania Dutch scholar Alfred Lewis Shoemaker credited The Egg Tree with a “nationwide acceptance, overnight, of the custom of decorating a tree with colored eggs at Easter.” Milhous herself prepped and painted 600 eggs for the New York Public Library’s Easter tree that same year. But Shoemaker spoke too soon. The tradition slowly faded in New York, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art only discontinuing its yearly Easter egg tree in the 1980s. Hollowing out fragile eggs and hanging them on trees, Kaufman writes, seemed unable to compete with the relative ease of simply placing eggs in a basket.

Today, the American Easter egg tree tends to be a craft project shared on Pinterest, or springtime decor for churches or town squares. But in Europe, the egg tree endures. Easter egg trees have hundreds of years of history, especially in Germany. The exact origins of the Ostereierbaum are mysterious, but eggs have long been a symbol of rebirth and spring.

Until recently, one spectacular example of an ostereierbaum ruled them all. In Saalfeld, Germany, one local couple, Volker and Christa Kraft, decorated their home garden’s massive apple tree with tens of thousands of decorated eggshells. In 1965, the then-sapling could only hold 18 plastic eggs. In 2012, after years of drawing thousands of awed visitors each spring, the Krafts hung 10,00 hand-painted eggs from their tree. Volker told the Associated Press that any more would strain the family's storage capacity. “I would have to sleep with the eggs otherwise.”

Unfortunately, hanging 10,000 eggs became too arduous for the aging Krafts, and the town briefly struggled to find another suitable tree to showcase the family’s eggs. This year, on April 5, the mayor hung the first of the Kraft’s gorgeous eggs on a locust tree near the town’s Blankenburger Gate. But whether plastic or painted, hanging or hard-boiled, chances are both Americans and Germans will enjoy a lot of eggs this Easter.

La Catrina is an icon of Día de Muertos and the focal point of this doll-making workshop.

With her lipsticked leer, painted eye sockets, and feathered hat, La Catrina is the reigning queen of Día de Muertos—the Day of the Dead.

Throughout Mexico City, the fashionable skeleton makes multiple appearances. In the district of Roma, La Catrina pops up, in a flash of color, on the wall of a taquería-packed street corner. Head to the Museo Mural Diego Rivera to see the grande dame draped in a serpent-shaped boa, posed next to Frida Kahlo. Tostitos has even debuted a La Catrina chip package.

And now, you can develop your own take on La Catrina in a new Day of the Dead-themed crafts workshop. “There is no Día de Muertos without Catrina,” says the 45-year-old crafts specialist Azucena Mendoza, sitting on her sun-drenched rooftop in Mexico City. The former TV reporter, once an anchor with Televisa, retired from journalism eight years ago. As part of a new side business, she started studying, making, and selling Mexican handicrafts. This past year, she added La Catrina doll-making classes to her list of offerings.

The figurines are crafted using cartonería, a regional cardboard-based handicraft similar to papier-mâché. Most revelers in Mexico make La Catrina dolls ahead of the main Day of the Dead events on November 2, but the workshop is available year-round.

As a reporter, Mendoza used to shoot Day of the Dead news stories in San Andres Mixquic, home to one of the city’s largest cemeteries—and host to fervent celebrations. It was in interviewing local artisans that she got her first crash course in popular art traditions.

“I thought, ‘I’d love to do something like this,’” Mendoza says. “So I just started learning about the techniques that I liked.”

I wanted to try my hand at sculpting my own Day of the Dead altarpiece, so I joined Mendoza for a three-hour lesson. We met at her home in San Juan in Mixcoac, a tranquil, church-filled enclave in the otherwise frenetic Mexican capital.

Before we got our hands dirty, I got a primer in La Catrina’s history. However synonymous with Day of the Dead, the skull-faced beauty only dates back about a century. In 1910, foreshadowing the Mexican Revolution, the Mexico City-based printmaker Jose Guadeloupe Posada published a satirical sketch that skewered the insouciance of the upper-classes. The illustration, meant to depict a cold-as-death aristocratic woman, decked out in Western-style finery, later melded with other cultural traditions in Mexico, including a playful acceptance of mortality.

“We like laughing,” Mendoza says, “and we love laughing at tragedy.”

In the sprawling craft markets of La Ciudadela and El Bazaar Sabado, that quirky sense of humor is out in full force. Between bright, patterned textiles and Frida Kahlo magnets, the shelves are stocked with wooden Day of the Dead-themed dioramas. The tiny scenes feature painted miniatures carved from clay: dapper skeletons shooting pool, using skulls in lieu of balls; a red, long-tailed devil chatting up a pretty skeleton in a shimmering gown. Some even feature captions, where the punchlines are more overt. “Alcoholicos Anonimos,” reads one, above a pair of skeletons clutching brown beer bottles and passed out in a park, then continues in Spanish, “But why anonymous if everyone knows them?”

Turning to the doll, Mendoza and I sculpted a simple wire armature to make the torso and the head, and then another for the two arms. She showed me how to stuff aluminum foil around the frame to give the effect of a full, billowing skirt. “Here’s where the fun comes,” Mendoza added, taking out a box of paper scraps and a jar of homemade paste.

According to Cesáreo Moreno, chief curator of visual arts at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Illinois, la cartonería first developed because cardboard was already a cheap and abundant material to work with. “Mexicanos have always been naturally great recyclers,” Moreno says. “Of images, of materials—you name it.” Now one of Mexico’s most popular handicrafts, it can be seen in toys, masks, festival decorations, and—perhaps most famously abroad—the piñata.

Appropriately, La Catrina itself is a recycled image—first a protest against the extravagance of the elites, and now a Day of the Dead staple. The versatile materials used in La Catrina doll-making also emphasize the ephemerality of the creations. Mendoza, for instance, reuses her children’s schoolbooks. “But only the old ones,” she assured me.

With the doll’s frame in place, I added layers of gooey paper. Each scrap was glazed in a glue made from boiling, and then refrigerating, a mix of one part flour and two parts water, which can be stored for about two weeks. As the outer layer dried, I molded a white skeletal head from air-drying clay, then gouged out two eye sockets.

The day before, at the Templo Mayor, the Aztec pyramid that lies in partial ruins in the Old City, I got an eyeful of skeletal imagery at the on-site museum. A tzompantli, or Mesoamerican display rack, showed rows and rows of real sacrificial skulls. A life-sized sculpture of Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of death, revealed a male form with ribs and organs exposed. Spotlit behind glass cases, other human skulls had been adorned with shells and pyrite stones into grinning, cartoon-eyed masks.

Though they might seem macabre, the repurposed bones point to a unique metaphysics. “There’s this whole cosmic understanding of life and death as being one and the same, not the opposite,” says Moreno.

When the Spanish conquistadors locked horns with indigenous leaders, a syncretic, both Catholic and pre-Hispanic, worldview was established, in which death was honored and celebrated. Though the Day of the Dead might represent the “quintessential celebration” of this worldview, says Moreno, the same attitudes and imagery persist in Mexican culture year-round: “Death is not something that is only relegated to wakes and funerals, but rather, every day.”

And above all, adds Moreno, “when Mexicans look at death, we can’t help but somehow end on a humorous note.”

With this lightheartedness in mind, I began tracing little flowers along my doll’s colorless cheekbones. I painted her skirt and bodice in a bright azur. “Frida Kahlo blue,” said Mendoza approvingly. For the details, she instructed me to use a toothpick in lieu of a paintbrush, a technique popularized by artisans of alebrijes, the fantastical, intricately decorated creatures sculpted from either paper, cardboard, or wood.

“You can make little dots, or a line with dots around it, and just keep adding to it. That’s the way to start,” Mendoza said. Though Mexico boasts many acclaimed cartonería masters, the forms are forgiving enough for beginners. For Mendoza, “It depends more on your creativity than your technique.”

Raised in Chihuahua, close to the border with the United States, the former TV anchor grew up with Halloween, not Día de Muertos. But when she moved to Mexico City for work and began seeing the Day of the Dead altars, “It was like a flash,” Mendoza says, “and I never had decorations for Halloween again.”

Unlike the ghosts and ghouls of Halloween, however, the Day of the Dead serves a higher purpose. In highlighting the liminality between the living and the dead, the festival nurtures a connection with lost loved ones. “If you truly believe that, it’s comforting,” says Mendoza.

By the time our three hours ended, I was still deep into fussing with my doll’s lacy boa and wide-brimmed cap. “You can never end. You can keep adding, and adding, and adding,” Mendoza said at the close of the workshop.

Just like our earthly cycles of existence, the creation of a La Catrina figurine is potentially infinite. It seemed a pretty fitting metaphor for the culture that first inspired—and keeps renewing—the dapper queen of death.

A conspicuous rise in urine suggests that the Neolithic Revolution took place beyond the Fertile Crescent.

While most would likely consider the invention of the toilet to be a positive development in human history, it may prove an obstacle for future researchers interested in understanding our day and age. Just ask the authors of a new study, out today in the journal Science Advances, which looks at salts deposited in ancient urine to learn about one of humankind’s most pivotal transformations.

Like the researchers who used poop remains to trace the rise and fall of Cahokia, this team used pee to outline population growth and systems of animal husbandry at Aşıklı Höyük, in present-day Turkey. The findings indicate that, around 10,000 years ago, the site saw a massive leap in its populations of humans and some animals, including goats and sheep. The hunter-gatherer society that had previously occupied the site would not have been able to achieve that kind of population growth, so the pee could point to the advent of agriculture and animal domestication, powerful engines of expansion and innovation.

Jordan Abell, the study’s lead author and a graduate student at Columbia University, says that evidence of Neolithic farming and herding has been accumulating at Aşıklı Höyük for years. Some of his co-authors had found that the more elevated, newer layers of the site contained far more sheep bones than older layers, along with evidence of animal management practices like selective culling. Abell and his colleagues knew that a larger population would have had to leave other clues behind as well. Realizing that “humans and animals pee, and when they pee, they release a bunch of salt,” the team knew just where they had to look next.

Studying the salt levels in 113 samples—including trash, bricks, and hearths—taken from different spots around the site and different moments in its history, the team saw a huge increase in salts in the layer of the site dating to about 10,000 years ago. In fact, this layer had about 1,000 times the salt of the older layers, even those that had experienced human habitation. The team did the math: They estimate that, for about 1,000 years, an average of 1,790 people and animals urinated daily at the site. (To confirm that the salts came from urine, the team accounted for salts that would have been deposited by 1,000 years of rainfall and debris, among other factors, and found that there was still salt left over.)

The study further complicates the notion that the Neolithic Revolution towards agriculture launched in the Fertile Crescent, an area comprising parts of the Middle East but stopping short of Turkey. Thanks to pee, we’re now closer to knowing that the people of Aşıklı Höyük enjoyed a similarly sedentary lifestyle at the same time.

Some of the vessels contain tissue samples, while others held a dubious "cancer cure."

Two months ago, a landscape artist stumbled upon a cache of hundreds of glass bottles buried behind Arkansas’s purportedly haunted Crescent Hotel and Spa. As reported by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, archaeologists who were subsequently called to the site found that some bottles contain what appear to be tumor and tissue samples preserved in alcohol. Others hold a tincture once marketed as a cancer cure. Together, the vessels tell the story of a dubious chapter in the state’s medical history.

Sitting high in the Ozark Mountains overlooking Eureka Springs, the rambling Victorian building operated as the Baker Hotel and Health Resort between 1938 and 1940. Norman Baker founded the Arkansas resort after being driven from his home state of Iowa. In 1925, Baker had founded KTNT—Know the Naked Truth—radio with sponsorship from the chamber of commerce in Muscatine, Iowa. He used the station to hawk his cancer cure—a feckless combination of corn silk, red clover, watermelon seeds, and water—throughout the U.S. Radio was a common vehicle for the dissemination of fishy cures in the 1930s, a period during which cancer became one of the leading causes of death in the country. The American Medical Association pressured the Federal Radio Commission to crack down on Baker, and he lost his radio license in 1931, after which he turned around and sued the AMA (he lost the case) before making his way to Arkansas.

Baker had led a colorful life even prior to his radio quackery. Dressed flamboyantly in white or purple suits, he first made his fortune as a vaudeville performer and as the inventor of a whistling mechanical instrument. A lavender tie and car tied his look together.

When he arrived in Eureka Springs, Baker purchased the downtrodden Crescent Hotel building, painted the walls his signature shades, and began recruiting new patients. His advertisements and brochures claimed, “We cure cancer-tumor without operation, radium or X-ray. We treat all ailments. We do not cut any organ.” These assertions, combined with increasing evidence that he was coercing his “patients”—over 40 died—and their families, got him nabbed for mail fraud in 1940.

As the Democrat Gazette reports, the bottles that appear to contain tissue will be sent away for analysis, specifically to the state’s crime lab and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Along with the glassware—including several bottles of what Baker called “Cure #5”—Arkansas Archaeological Survey members unearthed reels of 16mm film advertisements for the cancer elixir, a medical dispensing spoon, and a bone saw.

“Baker was a charlatan touting that he had the cure to cancer. Obviously that proved not to be the case,” says Jack Moyer, the hotel’s vice president. Although they don’t contain a healing cure as Baker claimed, the newly rediscovered bottles are a welcome verification of a local legend built on tall tales.

Dragons, flea circuses, mermaids, and more wonders of the city.

There’s an old game in which someone throws a dart at a map, and then dreams of traveling wherever it lands. If you happened to find yourself in Manhattan in the early 1950s with a wide-open afternoon, you could have tried the same thing with this dense, boisterously illustrated map, and then ventured out to see the everyday wonders that awaited you there.

On the chart he titled “The Wonders of New York,” New Jersey–born cartographer Nils Hansell sketched out more than 300 diversions, from Manhattan's southern tip up to 96th Street. The illustration now also graces the cover of the book Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps, by University of Maine geographer Stephen Hornsby. Inside, Hornsby makes the case that maps like this one—colorful, flamboyant, and not especially useful for navigation—were the offspring of the advertising culture that boomed in the mid-20th century.

In that vein, Hansell’s map is essentially selling the idea of Manhattan as the place to be. It captured the borough’s buzz, Hornsby writes, in the form of the “gleaming modernist skyscrapers and the new United Nations building, trans-Atlantic liners, and newly introduced jet passenger planes.” On a block-by-block level, though, those emblems take a back seat to the smaller sights that have always made the city deliciously, deliriously strange.

The map’s annotations read like an insider’s guide to Manhattan’s most rakish characters, showiest attractions, and least-plausible lore. Here be dragons (in Chinatown), and also prancing fleas, ships inside green glass bottles, and a nearly-nude opera singer hoisting a severed head on a platter. The flea marks the old site of Hubert’s Museum, a former Catholic school on West 42nd Street where, for nearly 40 years, visitors could watch Roy Heckler’s trained fleas pull off strange and strangely enchanting feats. (When prodded by Heckler’s tweezers, the fleas Petey and Peaches shimmied and waltzed, and a trio named Napoleon, Marcus, and Caesar hauled miniature cannons and chariots. “Not as exciting as a horse race,” Heckler once conceded, “but they get there just the same.”) Hansell also marked a building where all of the elevators were operated by redheads—or so he claimed—and near City Hall, a mermaid signals the place where P. T. Barnum once drew crowds with one of the mythical creatures’ "skeletons."

Some of the spots were only accessible to men with fat pockets; others also extended an invitation to their glittering wives. Not everyone had the income or inclination, for example, to slurp the “famous Sunday chicken soup” at the Plaza, let alone strut around the Waldorf-Astoria’s Peacock Alley promenade, which was, The New York Times put it, “open to anyone who looked rich and powerful and wanted to display appropriate plumage.”

Other attractions were more democratic, and the map's outer edges are littered little tips to help people make the most of their time. Anyone ambling around Central Park should note that a lap around the Reservoir takes 20 minutes, he wrote. He also declared that the park’s ice rink had “the best skating in town,” and that a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge would make for the "best Sunday walk."

At first read, a couple other notes on the dense margins seem to relate some pretty tall tales. Surprisingly, however, some of these head-scratchers have a grain of truth in them. For instance, a 1696 royal charter really did grant Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church the right to dead whales that land along Manhattan’s shoreline. The document allowed church wardens and other officials to “seize upon and secure” the whales, and then “tow ashore and … cutt up the said Whales and try into Oyle and secure the Whalebone,” and funnel any profits back into the church. (“Trinity has never claimed a drift whale,” says the church’s archivist, Joseph Lapinski. “But I suppose the right to do so has never formally been rescinded.”) Other notes, like the one marking the spot where the pirate Captain Kidd was said to have squirreled away his loot, are a whole lot harder to fact-check without some shovels and a swashbuckler’s disregard for the law.

Several of the spots have disappeared over the years, so the map now feels like a relic. The 14th Street Armory, which also housed the annual Poultry Show, came down decades ago. The historic music row known as Tin Pan Alley has all but vanished. Gone are most of the typewriter repair shops, too, and while fishermen do still cast from piers around the city, bait-and-tackle shops are few and far between. You won’t find many pushcarts on Orchard Street anymore, but you will find a museum that chronicles the people who stocked them.

Still, even the busiest corners of New York City remain full of wonders, if you look closely enough—and, happily, some of them have gotten more accessible in the years since Hansell drew his grid. If you’re craving a quaff, McSorley’s Old Ale House now serves women. The artist placed the Explorers Club near Columbus Circle, but it has since trekked to the east side of Central Park and now also opens its rolls to adventurers with no regard to gender. The street grid may stay the same, but the world on top of it is constantly shifting. Whether New York has lost its fundamental weirdness, though, is still up for debate.

An illuminated manuscript interpreted the prohibition on graven images in a creative way.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the second commandment, God lays down a law: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image," that is, don't make any images or idols to worship. The fifth book of the Old Testament, Deuteronomy, which is thought to have been written later than the other books, gets more specific, by warning against making an image that looks like a man, woman, beast, bird, fish, or “any thing that creeps upon the ground.”

As in many, maybe all, matters of Jewish law, the exact meaning of this rule has been debated for centuries. At times, Jewish leaders (and leaders of other religions) have advised artists to avoid any representation of human figures. At other times this scriptural stricture is interpreted more loosely. But in the early 14th century, it resulted in a remarkable illuminated manuscript that illustrates the story of Exodus without ever showing a human face.

Some of the figures simply have empty circles where their faces would be. But others, the ones representing Jewish characters in particular, have bird-like heads and human bodies. It is “the earliest surviving example of the phenomenon of the obfuscation of the human face,” scholar Marc Michael Epstein writes in his book Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts, and it’s a mystery. Why did the artist choose these avian heads? And what do they mean?

"It's so gloriously weird, and yet it goes so much to the depth of what people thought and felt," Epstein says in an interview. "The people who created this manuscript were interested in thinking about a metaphor that encompassed the way they expressed themselves as Jews in that time and place."

Based on the style and other clues, the manuscript can be dated to the early 14th century, from the upper Rhine region of southern Germany. Today it's held by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, but little is known about its creation or the patron who commissioned it.

Before the medieval period, the text of the Haggadah, recited on Passover as a retelling of Jewish exodus from Egypt, was often included in larger texts. This is one of the earliest extant examples of a stand-alone Haggadah. Originally 50 pages (47 of which survive), it’s signed by a scribe named Menahem. The beginning and the end of the text feature full-page illustrations, showing a family at a seder table and the rebuilt city of Jerusalem, a reference to the end of the seder, which imagines that it will be celebrated "next year in Jerusalem." Throughout the text, marginalia show the events of the Exodus story and families observing Passover traditions—following Moses through the Red Sea, performing a hand-washing ritual, making matzo.

None of these figures have human faces. The Egyptian figures, along with the celestial ones, such as angels, the sun, and the moon—have blanks where they’d normally have ears, eyes, noses, and mouths. The Jewish figures all have facial features and large, pointed beaks. Some have pointed ears.

For many years, the manuscript has been called the "Birds' Head Haggadah," for obvious reasons. But the ears stand out as even more unusual, and have been a point of contention among scholars. Ruth Mellinkoff, who studied medieval art, identified them as pigs’ ears and argued that the Haggadah’s figures are anti-Semitic representations. (In Jewish tradition, pigs are unclean animals.) But Epstein has a different theory: The ears indicate that the figures are griffins, mythical lion-eagle-human hybrids associated with holiness. The lion had long been a symbol of Jewish strength, and the eagle was a symbol of German imperial power, going back to the reign of Charlemagne. The figures in the Haggadah showed both Jewish identity and their affiliation with local rulership, Epstein posits.

"It would be great if someone was brave enough to refer to it as the 'Griffins' Head Haggadah,'" he says.

Although the Haggadah contains the most famous example of these sorts of half-human figures, scholars believe it just happens to be the longest-surviving text of its kind. Most likely there were manuscripts in the 13th century that used this work-around, and the style continued to show up throughout the 14th century in European Jewish art. Around this time, some rabbis advised Jewish people to avoid creating any images of humans or animals. Others suggested that only human faces were out of line. The Haggadah was, in this context, a document that tended toward a freer, more liberal view of religious practice.

But the law against graven images was not always interpreted so strictly. “Jewish avoidance or neglect of visual art has usually been more historically contingent than theologically necessary,” writes Melissa Raphael, a religious scholar at the University of Gloucester. When Jewish communities were thriving in the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age or in the Byzantine Empire, it was the tastes and ideas of the dominant religions that pushed Jewish artists to avoid depicting people. Before the Middle Ages, Jewish art of certain eras readily depicted people.

The figures of the "Birds’ Head Haggadah," then, can be seen as a product of the time, place, and culture in which it was made. Many of the Jewish bird-figures wear pointed hats, used in Christian art to distinguish adult Jewish men from Christians. Faced with this sort of discrimination, perhaps the artist created the Haggadah as a way to show the power and unity of the Jewish people.

“The non-Jews, by contrast, are literally blanks—nothings,” writes Epstein. “[They] have become faceless and powerless—erased like the objects of their idolatry.”

This story originally ran on October 24, 2018.

Researchers recreated Wari chicha for science and happy hour.

Ever longed for a president you could just have a beer with? Inhabitants of Peru’s Wari empire may not have schmoozed with their leaders over a pint. But new research, published in Sustainability, indicates that making and drinking chicha, an indigenous brew, contributed to the vast pre-Columbian empire’s impressive political and cultural cohesion.

From 600 until 1100, the Wari Empire covered an Andean expanse equivalent to the distance between New York City and Jacksonville, Florida. While smaller than the subsequent Incan Empire, Wari rule was nevertheless expansive. It was multilingual and multiethnic, governed by a series of provincial capitals under an imperial Wari elite, with a capital located in the city of Wari just northeast of present-day Ayacucho, Peru. The Wari people practiced terraced agriculture, distinctive weaving, and, like the Inca, used ornately-knotted khipu fibers as a form of administrative recordkeeping. This political and technological sophistication, says Ryan Williams, Associate Curator at Chicago’s Field Museum and Principle Investigator of the Sustainability study, allowed the Wari to assert their rule over the greater part of the Andes.

Two decades ago, a team of archaeologists excavating the empire’s southernmost administrative center, Cerro Baúl, stumbled upon a unique Wari site: an ancient brewery. Now, Williams’s team has used chemical analysis of chicha-soaked pot shards to learn more about how brewing shaped Wari rule.

While the Incas and contemporary indigenous Andean people mostly enjoy chicha made of corn, the concentration of seed fragments scattered across the brewery site led archaeologists to suspect that the Waris made their chicha from molle. Also known as Peruvian peppercorns, this spicy red berry can be found today in tabletop pepper grinders. Using DART mass spectrometry to analyze traces of chicha left on pot shards, collaborators Ruth Ann Armitage of East Michigan University and Josh Henkin of the University of Illinois at Chicago determined that the Cerro Baúl brew was likely made of the spicy molle. Wari people, likely elite women, would have soaked and boiled these peppercorns to extract their sticky, sugary resins, then fermented the resulting concoction to achieve a delicately flavored, yet intensely alcoholic beverage. Working alongside indigenous communities from the area, some of whom still make chicha de molle, researchers brewed their own version to test against ancient samples.

For Wari elites, beer-drinking was serious politics. Up to 200 Wari leaders, as well as leaders of neighboring groups, would regularly gather at the Cerro Baúl brewery for ritualistic drinking and politicking. While consuming the brew out of three-foot-tall clay vessels decked out with images of Wari deities and rulers, they plotted, sealed deals, and pledged their allegiance to the Wari empire.

By comparing rare elements in these pot shards to the unique elemental compositions of nearby soils, Williams’s team found that the vessels’ clay came from a site about five miles from the brewery. This is significant, says Williams, because none of the other local potters used the same clay, indicating that these elites had first dibs on resources and unique access to the technological innovations needed to work with the material. The style of the vessels, including their unique designs, are also consistent with those used in the Wari capital, over 600 miles away. For Williams, this combination of local materials and imperial iconography reveals a society in the process of solving a question as pertinent in ancient Peru as it is in Brexit-obsessed Europe: How can a large state create political unity across cultural and geographic diversity?

For those looking to create a little unity today, Chicago’s Field Museum, Williams’s home institution, has partnered with an area brewery to create a chicha de molle-inspired Wari Ale, incorporating Peruvian peppercorns and blue corn. A pint may not build you an empire, but the culinary heritage of one of the Americas' great civilizations is certainly worth a toast.

The rabbit was pampered and definitely not butchered.

Fay Worley had come to the archives in pursuit of brown hare bones. Worley, who works as a zooarchaeologist at Historic England, wanted to run new DNA tests on these bones, which had been collected from Roman sites in Britain, to confirm the animals’ species. Upon opening one box, Worley found a fragment that seemed too small to have come from a hare, and told her colleagues, “I think this might be a rabbit.”

The researchers sent the tiny tibia out for radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis, worried that the bone might have come from another, less ancient bunny. But the resulting analysis proved Fay right and revealed that the rabbit lived in the first century, suggesting that rabbits came to Britain 1,000 years earlier than previously believed. As far as the archaeological record is concerned, this bone came from the first British bunny.

Archaeologists first uncovered the fragment of the bunny bone in 1964, during an excavation of Fishbourne Roman Palace in West Sussex, England. But they stored it in a box where it gathered dust for decades until Worley re-examined the bone in 2017. “The bone had remained unrecognised in the box for 55 years, around twice as long as the Flavian Palace was occupied,” writes Naomi Sykes, an archaeologist from the University of Exeter who is leading the work, in an email. The bone fragment itself is small, just four centimeters, so it’s easy to see how someone could have missed it.

Rabbits are native to Iberia, a peninsula that includes parts of Spain, Portugal, and France. Historians previously believed the Romans introduced the rabbits during the medieval period. This estimate originated from the writings of the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, who wrote that legions of Romans brought the critters from Spain to serve as a gourmet dish.

According to the researchers’ analysis, Britain’s first bunny was, perhaps unsurprisingly, rather pampered. The largest residential Roman building ever discovered in Britain, the opulent Fishbourne palace contained intricate mosaics of dolphins and geometric box hedges. The rabbit would likely have been an exotic new addition in the palace’s sprawling menagerie, which included fallow deer from Turkey and brown hares from Germany, Sykes says. The bone bore no evidence of butchery, and a special signature in its bones pointed to another, more putrid indication of its domesticity. "When they are in a hutch they tend to eat their own poo,” Sykes told the BBC. “Wild rabbits don't do that to the same extent.”

Since the first century, rabbits have become a lovable scourge, costing Britain over £260 million a year. Victorian England became enthralled with breeding fancy rabbits, leading to variations such as the extremely cute and useless English lop. Nineteenth-century breeders even developed a template for what they called the “Ideal English Rabbit,” which features a precise constellation of 33 spots and a butterfly-shaped mark on its nose.

The researchers will continue to study the bunny tibia to learn more about its genetic background and its possible relation to modern rabbits. The bone will be on view at Fishbourne this coming week in celebration of Easter. You can also see a 3D model of the bone here, though it’s regrettably not as cute as a real bunny.

Despite its massive size, it had been overlooked for 40 years.

Museums are teeming with secrets, some of which will stay unknown or unknowable forever. But when researchers follow their curiosity, no mystery is safe. In this case it was two scientists who happened upon the same drawer, at the same museum in Kenya, three years apart.

Matthew Borths, curator of fossil primates at Duke University was researching hyaenodonts, ancient precursors of modern mammalian carnivores, six years ago at the Nairobi National Museum. In one drawer he came across a unique set of remains: mammalian cheekbones, teeth, jawbone fragments, and claws. And large. He contacted a colleague at the University of Ohio, paleontologist Nancy Stevens, who revealed to him that she had also opened the same exact drawer years earlier, and was equally as intrigued. Since 2017, the pair have been analyzing the remains and just published their findings in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Turns out the fossils were as unusual as they expected, and belonged to one of the largest carnivorous mammals to ever walk the Earth.

The new species was dubbed Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, based on the Swahili for “big cat from Africa.” However, this massive predator was no cat; its dental structure is more like that of a hyena. The species roamed the wilds of Kenya around 22 million years ago, sporting canines nearly four inches long, in a skull bigger than that of a rhinoceros, atop if a 3,000-pound body. (That’s about the same size the average female hippo.)

The remains were originally unearthed between 1978 and 1980 at Meswa Bridge, in western Kenya. However, the excavators were on the hunt for fossils of Miocene primates, so when they found the fossils of S. kutokaafrika, they simply put them in a drawer to be cataloged later. Nearly 40 years years, it turned out. “Imagine our surprise when first seeing this giant specimen! Across the globe, new species await discovery through the careful examination of museum collections,” says Stevens, who coauthored the study.

S. kutokaafrika shared a domain with the ancient relatives of hippos, rhinos, and elephants, and likely stalked them through patchy forests, says Borths. However, life changed for all those creatures as the continents continued to shift and change. “Africa slow-motion crashed into Eurasia, the East African Rift was rising up, and plants and animals isolated for millions of years in Eurasia and in Africa started to interact,” he adds.

Relatives of S. kutokaafrika survived the disruption and crossed into Europe and India, where they became apex predators for millions of years until their extinction around 9,000,000 years ago, possibly due to shifts in climate and rain that impacted their prey.

According to Borths, the research highlights the importance of museums and their collections for comprehending deep history: “It’s a huge collaborative effort between researchers and museum staff and through that collaboration, we can glimpse past ecosystems.”

A find from Hawai'i's cliffs.

In 1991, botanists from the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG), a Hawai'i-based nonprofit, discovered the rare and beautiful Hibiscadelphus woodii, a native flower and relative of the hibiscus. The plant, found growing on a cliff in the Kalalau Valley in the island of Kauai, was officially named four years later, which made it the seventh recorded Hibiscadelphus species. In 2016, H. woodii was classified as extinct.

The last time the vibrant flower had been seen alive was in 2009—until recently. Earlier this year, scientists from NTBG made an exciting discovery while using drone technology in a very remote part of the Kalalau Valley’s steep cliffs: H. woodii was growing again. This study, lead by GIS coordinator and drone specialist Ben Nyberg, revealed three individuals of the rare plant growing in a small cluster on the cliff face. “We had a grant from Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund aimed specifically at rediscovering the species,” says Nyberg. “Still photos captured one individual in late January 2019, [and we] confirmed identification and found an additional two individuals in late February.”

H. woodii tends to grow as a small tree, and produces vivid yellow flowers that are known to turn maroon with age. According to Nyberg, this particular genus is “extremely rare and only found in Hawai'i,” nectar-rich, and “most likely pollinated by Hawai'ian honeycreepers.”

Botanists at the NTBG have discovered a remarkable 11 new plant species in the cliff region over the last few decades. In a statement given to National Geographic, NTBG research biologist Kenneth R. Wood said, “When examining floristic diversity throughout the Hawai'ian Islands, no other valley compares to Kalalau in the number of its unique species.” Part of the reason for this is the sheer inaccessibility of the valley. Hence the drone. (Wood was rappelling down the perilous face when he discovered the flower in 1991.) “The cliffs provide protection from invasive species,” says Nyberg.

Before rediscovering the flower this year, scientists did make efforts to propagate H. woodii through grafting, cutting, and cross-pollination. But nothing stuck. Now a drone has opened the valley up to research in a way it never had been before. As for the future of the H. woodii, Nyberg says they will once again try to be active in keeping it alive. “We are exploring a drone cutting mechanism that with some testing could provide a platform for collecting plant material such as seeds or cuttings.”

Toward a new definition of eternity.

In 1894, the two-year-old son of Marion and Robert Crawford died in the East London district of Stepney. When they buried Robert Jr. in the city’s only publicly run cemetery, the Crawfords had planned, eventually, to join him there. They purchased a single plot, and dug deep enough to accommodate multiple future burials, so that their coffins could be stacked atop their son’s. The lettering across the top of the headstone makes their intention quite clear: “The Family Grave of Robert and Marion A. Crawford.” But they never did join their son. Perhaps they moved away. Perhaps they died in anonymity, with no further children to arrange for their burial.

Robert Jr. now shares his narrow, subterranean space with a complete stranger. His headstone has been turned around, and a new name has been added to it. With no further burials after Robert Jr.’s, the Crawfords’ grave was considered abandoned. And at the City of London Cemetery & Crematory, abandoned graves do not stay that way.

This curious, double-sided headstone is just one of many shared graves with surprising backstories. Staff at this cemetery bury newcomers on top of long-term residents, flip the headstones around, and inscribe the names of the more recently deceased on the opposite side for all to see.

Dying in London is not cheap. You can expect your family and friends to cough up a colossal sum for a small patch of grisly real estate (easily over $15,000), or to travel a serious distance to visit your grave. One third of London’s inner-city boroughs have zero—as in, none—available grave plots. With space dwindling and costs rising, people are increasingly warming to the idea of reusing burial plots. It may be the only way to maintain burial traditions and keep the dead close to the living.

Behind the growing popularity of grave reuse is a man named Gary Burks. Burks’s family moved into a house inside the City of London Cemetery walls when he was six, after his father got a job digging graves and mowing the grounds. Now in his 50s, Burks is the site superintendent. He and his team have made it their mission to make burial sustainable, without having to expand, and thereby put out living Londoners. “Any land that’s suitable for burial is also suitable for housing,” he says. “And we have a housing crisis as well.”

London has struggled to fit both living and dead within city limits for two centuries. The metropolis’ population skyrocketed with the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the 1800s, and that meant more dead bodies. The city’s graveyards—most of which were in the yards of neighborhood churches—couldn’t keep up. Mourners watched as overworked gravediggers dismembered dead relatives to cram them into tiny spaces. Heavy rains exposed coffins shoved hastily in shallow graves. City-dwellers stepped right into some graves, through the loosely-packed soil cast atop them. Gases from rotting corpses had to be “tapped” by undertakers to prevent explosions. Some cemetery workers even died while doing this, choked by putrescent fumes.

So wretched had the situation grown that in the 1830s Parliament promoted the establishment of seven large, privately run cemeteries on what was then the edge of the city. These “Magnificent Seven” include now-famous destinations such as Highgate Cemetery and Kensal Green, where tombstone tourists can pay respects to the likes of Karl Marx and Mary Ann Cross, the author better known as George Eliot.

But these cemeteries weren’t made for the masses—from the very beginning they were expensive and exclusive. In 1856, the publicly run City of London Cemetery opened as an affordable—and popular—alternative. Too popular, in fact. “In those early days, especially when there were cholera outbreaks, we were burying 9,000 people a year,” says Burks. That’s nearly 25 burials every day. The public graveyard quickly had to expand.

Many of London’s extravagant private cemeteries that made a killing off the flashiness of the Victorian era were finding it hard to stay afloat by the 1940s. Their land was nearly full, and the city had grown to engulf them. No new land meant no new burials—and no new income. Add to this the shift away from elaborate funeral rites and toward cremation, and even graveyards with available space fell out of fashion. The grand deathscapes, in some cases overcrowded with bodies, were overrun by nature. In the coming decades, nonprofits would have to step in to maintain some of these spaces as parks and historic sites.

Back then, staff at the City of London Cemetery were quick to take heed of the decline of London’s luxurious cemeteries. “In the 1960s, when we still had loads and loads of space, a superintendent called Ernie Turner saw the risks,” says Burks. The cemetery still needed to make sure that there could continue to be burials, and revenue to sustain operations. Being a public entity, the cemetery pushed a piece of legislation in 1969 that extinguished Londoners’ ownership over their graves after a long period of abandonment. Though putting time limits on burial may seem callous, or not in keeping with the idea of eternity, it was a well-received step toward solving England’s burial crisis. Just eight years later, Parliament passed a law mandating all new grave plots be leased rather than owned, with renewable lease terms ranging from three to 100 years. The City of London Cemetery barely used this authority, which allowed them to retroactively enforce lease terms, until the early 2000s, when another piece of legislation made it even easier to reuse graves. This granted that after 75 years of abandonment—long enough, the staff figured, to be respectful of the dead, but short enough to make reuse sustainable—a grave could get another occupant. At the current rate of burial, Burks calculates that the cemetery can recycle its graves nearly in perpetuity, without needing more land in any foreseeable future.

To be reused, abandoned graves must be deep enough to hold at least one more coffin (eight feet). The only digging required to determine grave depth is in cemetery records. In the locked, fireproof basement of the cemetery’s office building sit 88 large books, each weighing over 55 pounds and together boasting a total of more than 26,000 pages. “In this cemetery I’m very, very lucky,” says Burks. “Because the grave plans are perfectly legible.” Perfectly legible, too, are the columns most important to Burks and his team: the date and depth of the last burial. In this column, Burks and his team found that many abandoned graves have depth remaining for not just one but for multiple coffins, allowing a single reused grave to house multiple family members—or, even, to be reused again, space permitting, after another 75 years of abandonment.

Once graves have been identified as eligible, the staff move on to emotional considerations. They write to all families for whom they have addresses on file that their graves are being considered for reuse. Grounds staff members hang notices on the stones. They post announcements at the cemetery gates and on their website, and buy ads in local newspapers. Then they wait. If a descendant objects any time within six months of these notices, the grave is not considered abandoned and will not be reused for at least another generation. So far, the cemetery has reused roughly 1,500 of its graves.

Customers looking to buy reused grave plots, which are about one third the price of “virgin graves,” aren’t required to reuse the headstone. Legally, the cemetery can throw away a headstone if the lease on the plot below is expired, and some do literally go into the trash. But Burks tries not to reuse graves at the expense of history. “We don’t remove a memorial where we can read the inscription,” he says. “If the memorial is in really good condition … we simply turn the memorial around. The old inscription stays on the back and the new inscription will be placed on the front.” No stone unturned, as they say.

The City of London Cemetery & Crematory has no big names to draw crowds from the posh high streets of the city center, onto the London Overground, and through the unglamorous and sometimes unkempt streets of East London’s Manor Park. But there, amid 200 lush acres and nearly a million bodies (so far), the grave of Robert Jr. and many others have been asked to forgo eternity for the needs of a more immediate future.

In 2012, a London family lowered the body of 80-year-old James Joseph Corbett into the grave space originally intended for Robert Jr.’s parents. “Loving husband, dad, and granddad,” the headstone’s new front reads. “Sadly missed.” In burying Corbett, his family brought an unexpected new chapter to the story of young Robert Crawford, whose memory had been to crumble. And perhaps, somewhere years down the line, another Londoner may join them.

Corey Gray and Sharon Yellowfly want to bring gravitational wave astronomy to speakers of the language.

Whenever her son detects a strange force rippling in the fabric of spacetime, such as a gravitational wave or binary black hole, Sharon Yellowfly begins the delicate work of translating the vocabulary of his work—astrophysics—into Blackfoot, an indigenous language. Blackfoot traditionally has no words for these kinds of observations. Sometimes her act of translation is as simple as mashing two words together. Other times, it rises to the level of poetry. After hearing an astronomer describe the sound black holes make as a “chirp,” Yellowfly translated the term into biixiini_gi, or "bird singing."

For the past 21 years, as a lead operator at the California Institute of Technology’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), Yellowfly’s son, Corey Gray, has helped to run machines that detect gravitational waves. These violent ripples travel through spacetime like waves created by a pebble dropped into a pond. They can be caused by the collision of two black holes or the collapse of supernova, and there are even some still rippling around from the birth of the universe—you know, small things.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves over a century ago in his general theory of relativity, but scientists only first observed these ripples in 2015, thanks to LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, where Gray works. (It seems like we’re always going to be catching up to Einstein). When Gray, who is a member of the Siksika Nation of Alberta, Canada, found out about this major scientific milestone, he began to think about the press releases. They would no doubt be translated into widely spoken languages—French, Japanese, Mandarin. “That’s when I thought it would be freaking cool to get my mom involved and translate this news into Blackfoot,” Gray says, adding that he isn’t quite fluent in the language himself. “This way she would be a poet for Einstein and astrophysics. A code-talker for gravitational waves.”

After asking for permission to break the embargo on talking about the discovery—so he could tell his mom—Gray pitched her the idea. With some understandable trepidation, she said yes. Yellowfly had just two weeks to translate astrophysical jargon into words that had never before existed. “When Corey emailed me the press release, I opened it, and was like ‘Oh my goodness,’” she says. “‘What is the word for that! What does this mean?” She called relatives for help and asked Gray to explain meatier topics. Right before the announcement deadline, Yellowfly completed a full translation of the press release into Blackfoot , one of the 17 languages it appeared in. The mother-son duo also released a video of Yellowfly reading the release out loud. Since 2015, she has translated five additional press releases on LIGO discoveries.

Though she now lives in southern California, Yellowfly grew up on a reserve in southern Alberta, Canada. In 1957, she enrolled in the Crowfoot Indian Residential School, as was required by Canadian law. These boarding schools were a long and cruel tradition in Canada, where governments and churches pursued a policy of cultural genocide to stamp out the culture of First Nations people, according to a 2015 report from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yellowfly remembers that the first French word her mother learned during her own boarding school experience was “sauvage,” the slur the nuns lobbed at their indigenous pupils.

“The school wanted to get rid of everything that made us native,” Yellowfly says. “The language, the religion, the ideology—everything that was Blackfoot.” If the nuns caught children speaking their native language, the children weren’t allowed to return home over the weekend, and could be physically punished. Yellowfly remembers how she and her classmates developed an underground whisper network in which they spoke to each other in Blackfoot whenever the nuns were out of sight. These small acts of rebellion helped Yellowfly cling to her identity and language.

Blackfoot is an agglutinative language, meaning its words are sculpted out of morphemes (linguistics’ smallest building blocks) that can stand on their own, even if removed from the word, according to Eldon Yellowhorn, a professor of First Nations studies at Simon Fraser University. Instead of sentences, Blackfoot relies on long phrases all built around a root word swathed in prefixes and suffixes. For example, the word for “goodbye” in kitakitamatsinopoao, which is comprised of the morphemes that individually translate to “you and I will see each other again.”

Yellowfly deconstructed the press release’s intimidating jargon into four categories. First, she identified traditional words that already exist in Blackfoot, such as naduusi (Sun), gagaduusi (star), and spuu?ts (universe). Second, she noted words that could be directly translated by combining traditional words. For example, “black holes” becomes sigooxgiya—a merger of the Blackfoot words for “black” and “holes.” Similarly, “binary black holes” becomes nadugisstsii sigooxgiya. This approach is similar to how Blackfoot linguists have coined other new words, Yellowhorn says, such as miiksskimmapi, the word for “robot,” which translates to “iron man.”

(In order to indicate sounds and inflections unique to Blackfoot, Yellowfly peppers her translation with symbols and capitalization defined by a key in the press release. For example, “?” indicates a glottal stop, or a consonant produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. In English, we pronounce the word “button” with a glottal stop, skipping over the “o.” Yellowfly also capitalizes “A” to indicate when the vowel should be pronounced like it sounds in “acorn.”)

The other two categories required more careful consideration. Yellowfly grouped together conceptual words that require a deeper understanding of physics for proper translation. Take the interferometer, an instrument that splits a beam of light in two to create a measurable interference pattern, and is how observatories such as LIGO detect gravitational waves. There is nothing in Blackfoot remotely close to this, so Yellowfly created a new word inspired by what the instrument actually does. She landed on Anatsiwayagidutsim gii idumuya issxgwibiists, which translates to “light-splitter and marry/union measurements.”

In a way, Yellowfly’s conceptual translation makes it easier for someone unfamiliar with an interferometer to grasp what it does. She translated “gamma rays”—radiation emitted from the decay of atomic nuclei—into igaguu esstuumsKuutsp aanatsiists AsAxgaasimya, or “many provisions of self-strengthened lights exploding.” “Gravitational waves,” on the other hand, became Abuduuxbiisii o?bigimskAAsts, or “they stick together waves.”

The final and most challenging category in Yellowfly’s system concerns words or phrases that require an additional layer of certain poetic license. “There were words that would take four or five pages to explain,” she says. The most prominent challenge, of course, was how to translate “Einstein’s theory of relativity.” Yellowfly knew she only had to translate the phrase, not the theory itself. She chose bisaatsinsiimaan, or “beautiful plantings.” Bisaatsinsiimaan does not translate in any direct way to the theory itself, but rather acts as a metaphor for Einstein’s legacy. “This was a brilliant man who had this theory that hadn’t been proven,” Yellowfly explains. “The plantings of his ideas would be harvested by people later on, on so many different levels.”

Precontact Blackfoot territory ranged over a wide swath of Western prairie in what is now Canada and the United States, according to a report from the Blackfoot Language Resources and Digital Dictionary. But according to a 2011 census, just 3,250 people speak Blackfoot as their mother tongue. Over the past century, Blackfoot-speaking tribes began to recognize the need to preserve their language before it disappeared entirely. In 1989, Donald Frantz, a linguist at the University of Lethbridge, and Norma Jean Russell, a native expert on the Blackfoot language, compiled the first Blackfoot dictionary of stems, roots, and affixes. It’s now gone through several updates, most recently in 2017.

Yellowfly did not consult the dictionary’s official writing system for her project, and decided instead to work phonetically to preserve the local inflections of what she calls her own “accent” of Blackfoot. “You kind of lose the beauty and flow of the language when you’re not speaking it or hearing it, and the inflections mean a lot,” she says. Like most languages, Blackfoot branches out into a web of local dialects with distinct phonetics, lexicon, grammar, and slang—almost none of which lands in the official dictionary. In her eyes, Yellowfly’s own translation incorporates the distinct way she learned to speak Blackfoot.

This customization does make it more difficult to read. Frantz had to conduct some guesswork to understand Yellowfly’s translation, he writes in an email. The official dictionary, as its name suggests, is perfect for linguists but somewhat inaccessible to actual members of the Blackfoot community, according to the Blackfoot Language Resources and Digital Dictionary project. Yellowfly’s translation includes a key to help people understand how she defines her own phonetics.

At the age of 23, while speaking with her mother in the kitchen, Yellowfly came up with the idea to create her own Blackfoot dictionary. Her mother referenced a piece of toast, a word that does not exist in Blackfoot, by coining a new term that roughly translates to “bread that is burnt.” Yellowfly began compiling words as her parents spoke them to her, a project she tabled after they passed. But her recent translation work for LIGO inspired her to pick up the project again.

Yellowfly sees her dictionary less as an academic project and more as a way to impart the language to her two sons and two daughters, who all speak varying degrees of Blackfoot. “There were so many things I wished I had asked my parents, but they’re gone now and all that knowledge and experience and words are gone with them,” she says. “I know that when I’m gone, my kids will have some questions. This will be a little bit of me that will be with them.” Ever the organizer, Yellowfly divides her dictionary into three sections: a traditional dictionary, one that includes commonly used words for real-life situations, and a third that contains personal dialogues between people in her life.

Since the first astrophysics translation, Gray and Yellowfly have worked together to spread awareness of gravitational wave astronomy to Blackfoot speakers, and introduce members of the scientific community to them. Gray helped organize a traditional Blackfoot grass dance competition at the tribe’s annual pow wow before rushing home to monitor the first “triple” detection of a binary neutron star. A few years back, the two co-presented their results at an indigenous language symposium at the University of Lexbridge, which is located in Blackfoot territory. Relatives from their tribe came out to hear them speak. Last summer, Yellowfly visited Gray for a tour of LIGO’s observatory, where she got to see the 2.5-mile-long arm of the interferometer that first detected a gravitational wave.

Though Gray has always considered himself a mama’s boy, this project has brought the two even closer together. They text often, about Gray’s work and random vocabulary questions that pop up as he tries to improve his grasp of the language. “As I’m getting older, I don’t have to be as much of a disciplinarian,” Yellowfly says. “So Corey now feels like a child who is also my friend.”

“My mom is a superstar,” Gray says, meaning every sense of the word.

A little bit of sweet news.

Several types of creatures make themselves at home on the tippy-tops of buildings. You have your gargoyles, their stone gazes fixed forever on the horizon, and pigeons, their poop splattered in putrid white polka dots. And, on some urban rooftops, you have bees.

Beekeepers tend to hives atop several Paris landmarks, including the Opéra Garnier, Musée d’Orsay, and Notre Dame. More than 180,000 honeybees were said to flit around the hives atop the sacristy, their honey doled out among cathedral staff. So when a blaze recently torched Notre Dame's wood roof and demolished the spire, apiarists were eager to know how the colonies had fared.

For the beekeeper Nicolas Géant, who cares for Notre Dame’s hives, aerial images of the scorched building were a good omen. “If you look at the photos from the sky, you see that everything is burnt, there are holes in the roof, but you can still see the three beehives,” Géant told NBC News.

The hives are stacked slightly below the portion of the roof that went up in the flames. The fact that the hives hadn’t burned was promising, but it didn’t necessarily mean that the bees had survived the clouds of hot, gray smoke. (Géant explained to CNN that it’s possible that the hives would have handled that alright, since beekeepers regularly blow cold smoke into hives to lull bees into a honey-feast stupor while the humans do their work.) Then, a few days after the blaze, he got the news he had been waiting for: A cathedral spokesperson told him that bees had been seen buzzing around the hives, the Agence France-Presse reported. At least some winged residents had made it through.

While it’s too soon to tell for sure just how many hung in there—Géant told CNN that he hadn’t yet gotten up to the roof to inspect the hives—he was overjoyed by what he’d seen so far. At this point, that sign of life amid the wreckage felt precious, he said. He called it "a miracle."

For centuries, they’ve been toppled by lightning, wind, and more.

Fire made quick work of the 300-foot spire that stood until recently atop Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral. As orange flames engulfed the lead-clad wood, smoke billowed skyward in thick, gray clouds. Sirens wailed, and so did onlookers’ voices. The blaze ate away at the spire until the structure leaned and then finally splintered and fell, like a tree trunk cleaved from its roots.

Cathedral spires often become key components of a city’s skyline, and that was the case with Notre Dame. Writing in The Atlantic after the spire collapsed on April 15, 2019, the journalist Sophie Gilbert called the cathedral’s top and towers “stately and certain in the springtime, as familiar as the sun.” Spires can serve as iconic architectural reference points, but that doesn’t mean they’ve had it easy.

Ever since they started soaring over towns, centuries ago, cathedral spires have had a rough go of it. Spindly and often fragile, they’ve suffered scores of indignities. Some have been rattled by wind, others battered by military assaults, pierced by lightning, or caked with guano. Notre Dame is no stranger to this fate. The cathedral’s first spire, which went up in the mid-13th century, was damaged and dismantled at the end of the 1700s, and the one that recently met a fiery end was a 19th-century replacement designed by the architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.

Some pointy towers began jutting up above European streets in the age of Charlemagne, but those were more like “wooden canopies—not quite exactly spires like we typically think of them,” says Robert Bork, an art historian at the University of Iowa who specializes in Gothic architecture. (Bork’s friends call him Spire-Man, on account of his abiding love for—and rigorous scholarly consideration of—all things peaked and soaring.) The stereotypical spire, which Bork calls “a tall, pyramid-shaped hat,” really began crowning cathedrals in France in the middle of the 12th century, just as Gothic architecture became the style du jour.

Symbolically, Bork says, spires emphasized the relationship between the heavens and Earth. They also functioned like an arrow pointing to holy ground (Notre Dame’s spire was even known as la flèche or, “the arrow”). Spires draw attention to a church from a distance. A triangular topper “does visually what the bells do sonically,” Bork adds. “Bells called out to people’s ears, but the spire called to your eyes.”

In the late Middle Ages, Bork says, a spire was also essentially “a barometer of what the social conditions [were],” and residents’ sentiment toward the church. If the church was a respected civic monument, public funds were sometimes funneled toward a big, fancy, spire; puny spires tended to rise above places where locals weren’t so keen on the clergy. The 466-foot spire at the 15th-century Strasbourg Cathedral in Alsace, France—which Bork characterizes as a “crazy-ambitious tower”—had ample funding because the church “had basically been co-opted by the town government.” Afterwards, Bork adds, “the families started feeling like the church really belonged to them. We have a big donation book where you can see who gave how much money on which day and their records. You know, ‘widow-so-and-so gave the whole family fortune to the cathedral-building project.’” And since spires are built from the bottom up, “you can read the tower almost like you read growth rings in a tree,” Bork says. “If they succeed in building all in one go, then you know the money is flowing and the social purpose is unified.”

At Strasbourg, the result is a spire with skeletal, winding staircases, gang planks, and switchbacks. “It’s just completely insane,” Bork says. “It doesn’t look like it should stand up, and it wouldn’t stand up if it weren’t held together with iron reinforcements.”

Many spires were the tallest structures in the towns they rose above, and they were sometimes outfitted with belfries, lookouts, or other design elements that made them a type of community infrastructure. The bells might toll to herald a religious service, or to tell townspeople that it was time to head to the market, or return home. Several examples across France, England, and the Baltic region soared hundreds of feet, Bork adds, setting “a class for height that really wasn't exceeded until the Eiffel Tower.”

The Strasbourg spire is the tallest medieval example that still stands. Meanwhile, several of its immense contemporaries eventually met spectacular ends. Lightning spelled the death of the wooden spire on top of Old Saint Paul’s, in London. Centuries later, the English historian William Benham would recount that the fire caused the spire's lead coating to pour "down like lava upon the roof." Lighting also defeated spires on Saint Mary’s church in Stralsund, Germany; and Saint Olaf’s in Tallinn, Estonia. Over the years, several spires on France's Rouen Cathedral were lost to gusts and sparks. The spire on the cathedral in Lincoln, England, blew down in a 16th-century storm, and a storm also felled the one on Saint Elizabeth’s church in Wrocław, Poland. The wooden spire on the top of the cathedral in Beauvais, France, was a victim of poor engineering and a time crunch, Bork notes—it collapsed of its own accord in 1573, just a few years after it was built, because its supports buckled before anyone could fix them.

Stone spires have weathered the centuries a little better than the flimsier wood ones, Bork says, but they’re not totally safe, either. “The stone ones are heavy, and so they put stress on the foundations and sometimes they sink and sometimes they crack.”

Notre Dame will eventually be rebuilt. Restoration proposals and funds are already pouring in. When renovations get underway, crews will face a conundrum familiar to conservators and art historians the world over: How do you balance a fidelity to an object’s past while girding it for the future? In “a perfect world,” Bork says, it “might be nice to try to put all of that [wood] back,” but restoring the whole roof would require a whole lot of oak. “Some people really want you to say, ‘It’s got to be the original material exactly, because we want the precise archaeological truth,’” Bork says. There’s a loveliness to that, he thinks, but given the circumstances, he believes it would be reasonable to use modern, durable material inside, and cover the outside with a metal sheathing that evokes what was lost. With the right covering, he says, passersby might find the replacement “indistinguishable” from its dearly departed predecessor—and hopefully the new one will soar over the city for centuries to come.