Herschel Island, also known as Qikiqtaryuk, is fragile and losing ground. The whalers are long gone, and the Inuvialuit who once called it home now only pass through every once in a while, as a seasonal place to camp, or as a stopover while they’re out hunting. This 45-square-mile island in the Beaufort Sea, north of the Arctic Circle, is largely abandoned, and threatened by erosion and rapidly vanishing permafrost.
That could be a death knell for the island’s graveyards.
The island can be a tough place to live. On one hand, it’s beautiful—treeless but strewn with wildflowers and roaming caribou. On the other, it spends nearly half the year stuck in ice and near-darkness, occasionally broken by a few hours of twilight. It’s also a vexing place to bury the dead.
In the 19th century, the demand for whale oil and baleen led whalers to meet the challenges of Arctic life, and the island’s population swelled to 1,500. Whalers often spent the winter hunkering down aboard their ships, but they sometimes died there, too. Digging graves in the tundra was a tall order. To make it easier to pierce the frozen ground, one visitor observed, fires were sometimes kindled, again and again, until the earth yielded to a shovel.
Today, the island houses four graveyards and a handful of other graves isolated on various bluffs. One graveyard holds the remains of 24 whalers laid to rest between 1890 and 1916. (There’s also a marker for the wrecked whaling ship Triton, which went down nearby with its crew.) Another contains the graves of two Royal North-West Mounted Police officers who died in a 1918 typhoid outbreak. Two other graveyards hold the remains of more than 100 Inuvialuit people, buried as recently as the 1950s.
The environment is already taking a toll on these memorials. Wind erosion has begun to whittle away at wooden markers, and some hilltop graves have slipped. A frost heave brought some remains to the surface. Efforts to repair this damage, a historic resources report noted, “are thwarted by the relentless freeze-thaw action of the arctic ground.” In consultation with the Inuvialuit, the park management team steered visitors away from these especially sensitive sites, and piled fresh dirt atop the exposed remains.
The island has been shortlisted as a UNESCO World Heritage site; in 2008, the World Monuments Fund named it one of the planet’s 100 most-endangered locales. But there are still choppy waters on the horizon. Temperatures there have risen by about 2.5°C over the past century, according to a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface. In 2017, CBC reported that University of Edinburgh researchers working on the island had found that the land was disappearing at a rate that appeared to be higher than ever before. Some of the island’s historic buildings have been moved inland to escape the reach of rising water, Yukon News reported—but as shorelines erode, there’s only so far they could go before they would run into unstable permafrost. Like other Arctic sites, this island will face a slew of threats in a warming world—and if its land washes out to sea, its graveyards could go with it.
They originated as ancient Chinese funerary markers.
The world’s largest single-family burial ground lies in a forest in Qufu, a city about 300 miles south of Beijing. The Cemetery of Confucius serves as the final resting place of the revered sage, along with more than 100,000 of his descendants from nearly 80 generations. Stone plaques mark many graves, and while most are simple slabs, some are hoisted atop bases carved to resemble tortoises.
These sculptural stelae—free-standing stone slabs that bear information—are not unique to Qufu. Tortoise-mounted tombstones can be found across East Asia, although they originated as ancient Chinese funerary markers, and are most prominent in China. While some stand directly above individual remains, others were placed near a burial site. In imperial mausoleums, for instance, funerary stelae are often housed in separate pavilions, according to Jay Xu, director of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. He adds that those afforded these expertly carved markers were usually high-ranking officials and members of the elite, and their stelae record glowing biographies, praising their accomplishments.
Adding a tortoise served to emphasize the goodness of the dead. Regarded in Chinese culture as auspicious creatures that symbolize longevity, the tortoise would convey that a person was so virtuous that their spirit could live forever. Tortoises are also seen as powerful beings that could carry heavy loads; one myth holds that a giant sea turtle known as Ao supported Earth on its back.
It wasn’t until the golden age of Chinese culture that artisans likely began producing these highly symbolic gravestones. “Turtles carrying stele started in the Han Dynasty, a time when Chinese culture as we know it became formalized,” Xu says. “The use also became more diverse because you could use it for any purpose. But it originated as the tomb marker—as a carrier of one’s biography, so descendants can forever remember an ancestor’s great deeds and pay tribute to them.”
Tablets on tortoise shells were also made to commemorate landmarks, from temples to parks, with inscriptions chronicling each site’s origin story. The Temples of Confucius and Yan Hui, near the Cemetery of Confucius, together house 25 examples, dating from the Song to the Qing Dynasties, that record various structural renovations. With an 800-year gap between the earliest and most recent stelae, this collection also illustrates how the iconography of the tortoises developed. The earliest figures have plump, benevolent faces that crane skywards as if to greet any visitors. But later shells have dragon heads emerging from them, at times with jaws open to reveal rows of teeth.
This latter depiction represents the powerful Bixi (赑屃), one of the nine sons of the mythological Chinese Dragon King. During the Han dynasty, many stelae bearers took on this hybrid appearance, although their dragon characteristics can be very subtle.
One such funerary plaque, acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art, originally marked the grave of an unidentified 46-year-old woman. Dating between 219 and 316 CE, it stands 22 inches tall, anchored by a shell-bearing creature that seems wholly turtle-like, were it not for its low-relief fangs and whiskers. Anne Bromberg, the museum’s Cecil and Ida Green Curator of Ancient and Asian Art, says that the compound creature also represents two of the four central figures in the Chinese constellations that “show how the Chinese understood the nature of the universe. To have the dragon and the tortoise is to show that the dead woman is in fact blessed and protected under the care of magic figures.”
Many other funerary Bixi remain in situ. The world-famous collection of 13 imperial Ming and Qing mausoleums, near Beijing, features one pavilion with a stele mounted on a fierce, dragon-headed, 50-ton tortoise. The 26-foot-tall tablet commemorates the deeds of the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Di, known as the Yongle Emperor. Later rulers were honored in a similar fashion: In the mausoleum complex known as Dingling, a Bixi lies at the base of a memorial to the 14th Ming emperor Wan Li.
Perhaps the largest, most imposing example in China resides in the Ming Xiaoling mausoleum near Nanjing. Ming dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang, or the Hongwu Emperor, was buried there in the late 14th century, and his triumphs are inscribed at length upon a stele known as “The Stele of Godly Merit and Saintly Virtue.” The nine-foot-tall Bixi at its base—bulbous and stoic—is on its own higher than many other stelae; the massive stone slab rising from its shell extends another 20 feet skywards.
Over time, these carved carapaces also appeared in China’s neighbors, as Chinese culture crossed borders to influence language, food, and art. One notable seventh-century tablet in Gyeongju, South Korea, balanced on the back of a benevolent turtle, marks the burial mound of Taejong Muyeol, ruler of the Silla kingdom.
More stylized examples are found in Japan. In Kamakura, the tombs of Shimazu Tadahisa and Mori Suemitsu, founders of 12th- and 13th-century samurai clans, are separated by a stone tablet lifted on an alligator-like Bixi. Further west, in the Tottori prefecture, daimyō, or great lords, of the Ikeda clan are commemorated with plaques on turtles with thick, circular shells that bring to mind the savory pancakes known as okonomiyaki.
But it’s in distant Okinawa, Japan’s southern cluster of islands, where the most jaw-dropping expression of these tortoise-shaped memorials lie. Here you’ll find examples of kamekōbaka, or turtleback tombs—ancient family vaults with roofs that resemble a curved tortoise shell. This unique form was meant to symbolize a womb. As Clarence J. Glacken writes in his 1955 publication, The Great Loochoo: A Study of Okinawan Village Life, “In popular lore, the turtleback tomb is associated with this last belief: on death one returns to the womb of nature from which he came.” Glacken goes on to note that such iconography was introduced from China; inspiration likely came specifically from the Fujian Province, where turtleback tombs are often decorated with a geometric pattern.
Funerary practices, of course, have evolved over time. While the symbolic meaning of these sculpted stelae has not disappeared, new ones are no longer in high production, Xu says. We have devised more effortless methods of burial and commemoration that are, in some cases, automated and digital. Painstakingly carved, these tall tablets and the mythological creatures supporting them survive as ancient artworks. But they’re also reminders of the universal human desires to be remembered and live beyond this world.
Gravestone inscriptions, beyond the simple “name, date of birth, date of death” templates, are both a lasting, permanent record of a life, and also a record that the person buried under has very little control over. They’re also a valuable and extremely under-studied corpus of linguistic data, albeit a frequently misleading and opaque one. Linguists around the world go into graveyards, dutifully record what they say, check them against historical records, and try to find out the answer to the most basic questions. Who are these people, and these communities? What was important to them?
Before we get into inscriptions, I should mention that this article focuses on western Europe and North America. The traditions worldwide are just too varied to write about in one article; some of the people I talked to mentioned that entire dissertations have been written about the gravestones of a single city.
Elise Ciregna, a religious studies professor at Harvard and the president of the Association for Gravestone Studies, says that inscriptions have existed as long as people could chip letters into stone, but that the more detailed inscriptions we see today—biblical verses, poetry, descriptions of the life of the buried—date back to the 1600s. The key running theme of gravestone inscriptions is that they are for the living, and even for a more specific task: they reaffirm and reiterate membership in a group, and the beliefs that are part of the culture of that group. This does not necessarily mean that they are particularly informative about the life of the specific deceased, but they are full of useful, sometimes subtle cues about the community the deceased belonged to, and what they valued.
Ciregna mostly studies colonial gravestones in the American northeast. There are language conventions in the 17th century that, she says, are usually associated with the Calvinist faith. They’re pretty gloomy and direct; you see a lot of stuff like “Here lyeth the body of Elisabeth the wife of William Pabodie who dyed May ye 31st 1717 and in the 94th year of her age.” But you can get some pretty decent information from that. Ciregna noted how common it was for women’s inscriptions to mention their relationship to men. “Wife of,” “consort of,” “widow of,” “daughter of.” This kind of information was, to them, the most important thing, which tells you a bit about the gender relations of the time period.
By the 19th century, you’ll see more and more elaborate inscriptions, and also a change in tone. The epitaphs become less gloomy, more celebratory. Here’s one: “She is not dead but sleepeth.” Another, written by Pearl Starr for her mother, the notorious “Bandit Queen” of the American west:
Shed not for her the bitter tear Nor give the heart to vain regret ‘Tis but the casket that lies here— The gem that filled it sparkles yet.
Ciregna ties that newfound optimism and cheer to the changing religion—Calvinism to various less gloomy forms of Protestantism—in the northeast. But there are other clues within the engravings; a sheaf of wheat was commonly used to mean a successful businessman. A broken tree branch or broken column means somebody was cut down too soon. A skull and crossbones, which was common at the time, didn’t mean the person was a pirate; it was a symbol that everybody dies, that death is simply a part of life. Others told of the racist views of the time; Ciregna said she saw more than once a column for a black person whose inscription carried a message of “in life he was black, but in death he joins the white community.”
John O’Regan, a sociolinguist at University College London, told me about one very minimal inscription he found: nothing more than a name, Thomas Beale. Turns out Beale was at one point a successful businessman and trader, but lost much of his fortune. One day he disappeared; his body washed up a few weeks later. Records show that it was believed he died by suicide, such a taboo that he wasn’t given any other information on his gravestone at all, even though his family remained wealthy enough to spring for an expensive box tomb.
The role of the actual stonecutter is also a pretty unheralded but vitally important factor in gravestone inscriptions. Stonecutters during before the late 19th century charged by the letter, and often persuaded clients to choose lengthy poems for epitaphs. One very successful Massachusetts stonecutter, Alpheus Cary, actually wrote a book on appropriate epitaphs; among the standard poems and bible verses were poems he wrote himself.
John O’Regan, of University College London, grew up in Hong Kong, and a few years ago constructed a linguistic corpus of inscriptions from a Protestant graveyard in Macao. O’Regan is a sociolinguist, and was particularly interested in the in-group mentalities he saw in the language of these stones, mostly dating from the 19th and 20th centuries.
“The gravestone inscriptions are teaching the people who visit the cemetery about what the most valued things in one's life are,” he says. “What is it to be a good mother? What are the values of a good mother?” He specifically looked at content words—nouns and adjectives—and found a great deal of similarity among the stones. One notable thing he found was the predominance of the present simple tense.
The present simple tense is the most basic of English verb forms: I write, she writes, he does not write. It seems so basic that it couldn’t possibly imply any sort of meaning beyond the obvious, but it’s actually fairly specific in its use. It’s most commonly used to make statements of fact, and for schedules and routines. “I wake up at 9 a.m.,” that kind of thing. The present simple is almost too simple; because it by nature can’t carry much detail or nuance. Scientific papers use it regularly, as they’re presented as statements of fact. “Where it becomes interesting is, the language that is used for science, to make scientific truth statements, transfers into what we consider, as human beings, to be our fundamental beliefs, or things we believe very strongly,” says O’Regan. The same verb form that’s used for science is also used for faith, religion, and politics.
These sorts of statements are what O’Regan calls “universalizing truths.” By the way they’re constructed, they leave no real room for debate; if you say, “There is one God,” you are not initiating a discussion. These are meant to indicate conclusiveness and also a more profound truth than, say, “John Smith was a man who believed in a singular God.”
O’Regan also noticed a use, maybe even a more frequent use than in normal conversation, of the definite article “the.” Typically you use “the” along with a noun only after you’ve introduced it, as in, “I went shopping and bought a book and a shirt. The book was for my sister, and the shirt was for my brother.” But the gravestone inscriptions he studied use it right away, with no introduction: “the lord,” “the dead,” “the cross,” “the redeemer.” These imply that the reader of the inscription, whoever it is, is in the same group as the composer of the inscription, and shares the composer’s values. There are even references to “the heathen,” which, for a western cemetery in Macao, certainly meant the Chinese. None of this would necessarily be clear to someone who didn’t share at least some values with the deceased; cemeteries are for the in-group, not outsiders.
Katharina Vajta studies French at Gothenburg University, and wrote a paper a few years ago on gravestone inscriptions in Alsace. Alsace has over the past few centuries been a part of Germany, France, Germany, and France again; its residents originally spoke a German dialect known as Alsatian. “While in theory you might expect [the inscriptions] to be the language of the ruler, that wasn't always the case, so I started to see if I could find any patterns,” says Vajta. In 1871, Alsace became officially German after the Franco-Prussian war. People buried in Alsace would have fought for both sides, and yet only those who fought for France chose to put their military accolades on their tombstones—despite the fact that the disputed region wasn’t even in France anymore.
That’s not to say that no gravestones in Alsace are written in German. “It's really inflecting or mirroring the linguistic change in the region,” says Vajta. “You can find gravestones where, in the same family, there are sometimes four, five, ten people buried in the same grave. Some are in French, some in German, some no language at all. You can follow that on a single gravestone.”
Gravestone linguistics are shifty and unclear, for all their definitiveness. How much do you really trust the veracity of the statements? When was the last time you saw “in life, he was a real jerk” on a gravestone? But there’s information there, historical data to be pored over and analyzed. Spooky but productive.
For hundreds of years, puzzle-lovers have tried to decode mysterious riddle menus. Published in puzzle books, cookbooks, magazines, and newspapers, the "enigmatic" menu items were disguised with clever wordplay. In the literary free-for-all before copyright legislation, many of these menus were copied over and over, giving readers of different countries and eras the chance to puzzle out what kind of drink "Counterfeit agony" could be. (Answer: champagne, of course.)
While many riddle menus were published in the 18th and 19th century, attempts to decode them have persisted until recently. In the food history journal Petits Propos Culinaires, readers attempted to solve one such riddle menu in 1984, and got pretty far. They were helped along by one unusual contributor of Petits ProposCulinaires who had uncovered the handwritten explanations to the same menu written by Sarah Yeates, an 18th-century Pennsylvania lady. The reader's knowledge of the era's slang and culture made her a riddle menu champion, but even she didn't have some of the answers. Sometimes, publications came with an answer key, but most of the time, readers were left to ponder.
Recently, we gave Atlas Obscura readers a real head-scratcher to decode. Writer India Mandelkern transcribed a set of 18th-century riddle menus from the British Library, and we published one for your puzzle-solving amusement. Our readers didn't disappoint: They offered up a whole banquet of conjectures, suggestions, and downright brilliant answers to the mysterious riddle menu. As is almost traditional at this point, some menu items remain baffling, awaiting a new generation of puzzle-solvers.
First Course
A Fool’s head with a Lilliputian Sauce, garnish’d with Oaths, A roasted Turnspit, The revenue of being proud in a pye, and The Grand Seignour’s Dominions roasted
For the very first item on the menu, Sarah Yeates provided the likely answer: calling someone a "calf's head" was once an insult and a synonym for "fool," one that even Shakespeare used. Cooking a whole calf's head was once a much more common practice, and reader Christy from Massachusetts posited that a Lilliputian sauce could be "a small sauce: that’s any derivative of the five mother sauces." The garnish of oaths remain a mystery, though many readers wondered if the following dish, a roasted Turnspit, could have something to do with the dark tradition of turnspit dogs, bred especially to run upon wheels that rotated meat before a fire. Gabriele Kahn of Uslar, Germany, suggested another connection: both "spit" and "pike" are sharp metal rods, so the answer could be pike, a type of fish.
As for the revenue of being proud in a pye, readers Cemal Polat from Turkey and Kate Fennimore from Livonia, Michigan, had dueling yet intriguing answers. Polat believed the answer to be "mincemeat pie, as the punishment for the pride is being broken on a wheel" after death in Hell, in some Christian lore. Less gruesome is Fennimore's answer: peacock pie, from the term "proud as a peacock." Polat had the decisive answer for the Grand Seignour’s Dominions roasted: The Grand Seigneur was another term for sultan, so the answer is a simple roasted turkey.
Side Dishes
An unruly Member, The best part of an Office, The inside of a Snuff Box roasted, A Maid with Jump Sauce, surrounded with Beaus fool’s Coats, A Dutch princesses pudding
The sole response to the unruly member menu item suggested it could be genitalia of some kind, but it refers to a different organ entirely: tongue, a once-popular dish. In the Bible, the tongue is referred to as an "unruly member" given humans' ability to carelessly chatter. The inside of a snuff box roasted, wrote Kate Wood from Cambridge in the United Kingdom, possibly refers to the vintage delicacy of tortoise, since tortoiseshell was once used to make elegant snuff boxes. A Maid with Jump Sauce, surrounded with Beaus fool’s Coats was a stumper, but a Dutch princesses pudding less so: orange pudding, a reference towards royal dynasty of Orange.
Second Course
The Conveyors of Venus roasted, A couple of Threshing poets, The Divine part of Mortals fry’d, The Supposters of a Squeaker Stew'd
Here, Atlas Obscura readers distinguished themselves. Many pointed to the painting of Venus by Botticelli, which depicts the goddess floating to shore on a scallop shell, making scallops a likely answer to The Conveyors of Venus roasted. But another explanation came via Alexander Gourlay of Providence, Rhode Island: the doves who pull her chariot. Several Atlas Obscura readers brilliantly divined the answer to A couple of Threshing poets: duck. As Julie from New York noted: "Stephen Duck was a poet who wrote The Thresher's Labour in 1730." The Divine part of Mortal's fry'd was also no match for our readers: the most divine part of a man is his soul, and sole is also a kind of fish.
As for The Supposters of a Squeaker Stew'd, with "supposters" likely meaning "support," two readers have clashing but probable answers. Timo Tuokkola, of Thunder Bay, California, wrote that it could be stewed pig's feet, as "squeaker" is an old term for pig. Elizabeth King from Australia, on the other hand, had another theory: "stewed potatoes, a squeaker being a sausage which is often "supported" on a bed of potatoes."
Third Course
Three Dragons swimming in Cows blood and Indian powder, Quagmires, quintessence of Toes, sweet Turds and a transparent Cock standing in the middle, Three fiery Devils smother’d in their own Dung, Two Quakers hashed, and A Sign in the Zodiack butter’d
At the third course, the riddles got harder. Rebecca Woodman from Maine gamely investigated the Three fiery devils, reporting that "according to the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a Devil is ‘the gizzard of a turkey or fowl, scored, peppered, salted and broiled; it derives its appellation from being hot in the mouth.’" Other than that, our readers were stumped, with the exception being A Sign in the Zodiack butter’d: Cancer the crab would go well with butter.
"The Desert" (Dessert)
A plate of Oxford scholars, A plate of Couplers, A plate of prize Fighters, A plate of Mischief Makers, and A plate of Two hundred thousand pounds
Many readers were left befuddled by the dessert section as well, but a little digging shed some light on this part of the riddle menu. According to one commenter on Mandelkern's original posting, the Oxford scholars could be nothing but a fruit called warden pears: "warden" being the title of Oxford's heads of colleges. A plate of "couplers", according to the readers of Petit Propos Culinaires, refers to more pears (since a couple is known as a "pair”). The prize fighters remain mysterious, but a plate of mischief-makers less so thanks to the PPC: it refers to "medlars," a vintage fruit, or a meddler. The two hundred thousand pounds is likely another fruit-laden reference: the sum of £100,000 was once referred to as a plum.
Liquors
The Joke of a puppet Shew, Counterfeit Agony, The twelfth part of a Chaldron of Coales, A Soliders Habitation, with a pretty Lady in it
Reader responses came in strong once more when it came to booze. The Joke of a puppet Shew could be nothing but punch, as several readers pointed out (Punch and Judy puppet shows were massively popular at the time this menu was written.) Champagne is counterfeit agony, and in a flight of brilliance, Sean Malloy from San Diego pointed out that a "chaldron" was a vintage unit of measurement. Every chaldron was made up of 12 "sackes," so the answer would be sack, a type of "fortified white wine," he wrote.
The mention of A Soliders Habitation, with a pretty Lady in it, had readers suggesting barack. Elizabeth King explained that barack "is a type of brandy which is often flavored with peach (a pretty lady,)" or maybe even with honey, both terms for lovely women. But the PPC, all those years ago, also published a compelling answer from Yeates, the 18th-century riddlemaster: a soldier's habitation could also be a tent, referring to Spanish tent wine (or vino tinto.) Regarding the pretty lady, Yeates’s answer was toast, as in the toast of the town, or the prettiest lady around. After all, the wine of yesteryear often came with a float of toast.
Until this week, Pachycephalosaurus seemed like a friendly neighborhood herbivore. The scariest thing about these dinosaurs, which have been frequently depicted placidly munching on greenery, was the unique architecture of their skulls: domed, sloping, pointy around the edges, and 10 inches thick. They might have butted heads, but that didn't make them seem dangerous, exactly.
But now, new research presented at a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, raises the specter that Pachycephalosaurus was a different beast entirely, reports National Geographic. Paleontologists always surmised, on the basis of the fossils' dull, wide back teeth,that they only ate plants, but it now seems that the fronts of those jaws would have been adept at shredding a prehistoric steak.
Mark Goodwin of the University of California’s Museum of Paleontology and David Evans of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum presented the findings, based on an unusually intact skull containing the first-known fossil of Pachycephalosaurus’ front jaw. The flat teeth in back and sharp teeth up front—not unlike our own dental division of labor—suggest an omnivorous diet.
The skull was discovered in eastern Montana’s Hell Creek Formation, a dinosaur hotspot that has yielded many a major find over the years. The skull dates back to between 66 and 68 million years ago, just at the tail end of the reign of the dinosaurs, and it belonged to a juvenile. Goodwin also proposed not long ago that Stygimoloch and Dracorex—previously thought to be distinct species—are actually just Pachycephalosaurus at different stages of life. It's clear our understanding of these unusual creatures is going to continue to evolve.
Philip Currie, a paleobiologist at the University of Alberta who attended the Albuquerque conference, said he’s not sure what evolutionary role this dentally bipolar jaw might have played. It would help to know what Pachycephalosaurus was actually eating, which might be determined by studying carbon isotopes in the tooth enamel, or comparing the newfound teeth to bite marks on other Hell Creek fossils, National Geographic explains.
Whatever comes of it, the find is another example of how hard it is to understand animals that haven't walked the Earth in tens of millions of years—even when we think we have a good handle on them. “If I found one of them [the teeth] isolated, I would swear it belonged to a theropod,” a generally carnivorous suborder of dinosaurs, said University of Edinburgh’s Stephen Brusatte in an email. “My jaws opened pretty wide when I saw.”
Fill out the form below to tell us about the best bronze statue where you live, and if you've got one, email an Instagram-ready picture of it to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “Incredible Bronze.” We’ll publish a collection of our favorite submissions in an upcoming article. Help us immortalize your favorite statue all over again!
In Cancale, the seasonal absence of men meant women ran the show.
The oysters of Cancale have been pursued by kings and conquerors for more than a millenia. In 56 B.C., Julius Caesar's troops left behind piles of pearly shells in figurative oyster graveyards called middens. More than 1,500 years later, King Louis XIV, the Sun King, cemented Cancale’s status by demanding that his briny bivalves come from no other place but Cancale.
But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the women of Cancale were as well known as the town's oysters. For during a time when talk of women’s suffrage was in its infancy, and female politicians and businesswomen were rare, retrieving the royal oyster necessitated a uniquely organized and largely women-run town. From working tirelessly in the mucky oyster beds, to policing the harbor and negotiating export contracts, women proved so essential to the town’s survival, and elite gastronomy, that newspapers and artists extolled their brawn and beauty.
From the 16th century to the early 20th century, Cancale’s bread and butter was earned through fish from the New World and oysters from Brittany's "Emerald Coast." Fueled by the Age of Discovery, royal financiers counted on the trade in cod fish to fill their coffers and deliveries of oysters to fill their banquet tables. Already a seafaring people, boys in Cancale grew up with the expectation that school was a mere holding pen. Once grown, they set sail from the harbor, the fairy tale castle of Mont-Saint-Michel rising out of the sea in the distance, and navigated westward to the “New Found Land.” Across the Atlantic, along what is today Canada’s eastern coastline, they spent several months fishing waters rich with cod, which they preserved in salt for export.
These annual expeditions left the small town of Cancale depleted of men for a good part of the year, sometimes more. The dangers of sailing, malnutrition, and disease also meant that more men set sail than would ever return, leaving many women either temporarily or permanently without fathers, brothers, or husbands. The Cancalais integrated this harsh reality into the culture: If no news came of a ship or its mens’ fate, tradition required that the women wait four years before they begin mourning the disappeared as dead. Young widows and women subsisting apart from men thus became sewn into the lifestyle. Managing household affairs, earning a living, and operating independently were essential to the women of Cancale at a time when it was a rarity elsewhere in Europe.
However, for one season each year, men and women did work together. In early spring, the entire town gathered as hundreds of ships worked together to perform the all-important task of dredging the bay and seeding the oyster beds. Officials brought out and distributed drag nets from under lock and key. At the signal, Cancalais in each ship dropped the nets into the bay. Over the better part of a day, ships moved back and forth across the waves, pulling the oysters from their natural beds for seeding in the parcs.
Once the men sailed for the Americas, though, women took charge. The famously fast tides of the Bay of Cancale rushed over seven miles of extended beach "like a racehorse.” Twice a day, the oyster parks flooded with more than 355 billion gallons of water, bringing needed nutrients, before emptying out and exposing the marked and divided mud flats just as quickly. 19th- and 20th-century writers described with awe the sight of women constantly “stooping and standing for hours in the wet, sticky sand, exposed to all weathers.” Dressed in high, over-the-knee boots, they skillfully made their way through the limey mud, bending to gather oysters in woven baskets. “Hurrying in from the beds,” they kept “just in advance of the rapidly-in flowing tide.”
The women not only worked in the beds, but formed the bedrock of industry operations as well. Women negotiated contracts, filling orders to Paris and elsewhere. Women also acted as law enforcement, settling disputes and resolving quarrels in the harbor, and keeping peace on the cliffs above the bay. The phenomenon so captivated Americans that a newspaper headline stated, “The Women of Cancale: Oyster ‘Parks’ Are Cultivated By Women Who Load Ships And Act As Policemen.”
Meanwhile, the status of Cancalais oysters continued to grow. The oysters were such pearls of French gastronomy that in 1806 a famous Parisian restaurant was named after Cancale’s rocky promontory, Rocher de Cancale. Known for its oysters and opulence, Rocher de Cancale regularly hosted famous artists such as Balzac and Alexander Dumas. An 1846 text described it as “the homeland and classic sanctuary for the finest dinners, for those valuing genuine and complete superiority.”
Soon enough, the women of Cancale found themselves similarly romanticized. In 1877, John Singer Sargent painted the women standing among the tidal pools, where the water’s glossy shimmer reflects the figures and clouds above. "Fishing For Oysters at Cancale" and the "Oyster Gatherers of Cancale" put the young artist on the map, while his work’s debut at a New York City salon helped bring the Cancalaise to Americans’ attention.
British and American writers took to the imagery and the story too. Writing for the English Illustrated Magazine in 1908, Gilda Brook described the “perfect cloud of women and children in their picturesque white caps,” and opined that their laborious occupation “cannot be unhealthy, judging by the appearance of the people, for I never saw more hale and hearty specimens.” A 1905 Baltimore Sun article similarly reported that the oyster ladies were the “prettiest of Brittany” and possessed a “hardy femininity.”
The women’s efforts also became part of a broader discussion about women’s work and rights. A 1909 article in the Ohio newspaper The Delphos Daily Herald reads, “It seems strange to Americans, whose ideas of oyster gatherers is bewhiskered fishermen with sloops and dredges … But women do the work, and they do it so well that the French government is not unwilling to give the sex credit for the success of the cultivation.” The Detroit Free Press underscored such credit by stating that many women garnered wages that “more than equal” their male counterparts, and that “when the men do return, they find that the town has been managed so well in their absence and the thrift of the women has been so well exercised that they are content not to meddle.”
Whether on account of their labor or the stories and art depicting it, the women of Cancale became figures of a growing suffrage movement. Headlines underscored power (“A French Town Where Women Rule”), and subtitles accentuated politics (“Women Rule Amid Oysters -- A Sight For Suffragists: Feminine Police Keep Order and Feminine Labor Carries on the Industry That Makes Cancale Famous.”) Thrust into the limelight by haute cuisine, and refracted through the lens of American newspapers, the feminist foray along Brittany’s Emerald Coast made waves throughout the globe.
During the Japanese summer festival Obon, ancestral spirits come home.
On a sweltering morning in August, three generations of the Tasaki family walk up the hill to the family grave. There, five generations of Tasakis have been laid to rest; they look out over the rice terraces in Takachiho, a rural mountain town in southern Japan. Toshiko, wearing a bonnet that shades her face from the relentless sun, sweeps around the grave with a twig broom while her son, Tomonori, refills white porcelain cups with offerings of water and sake. His wife, Tomoko, lifts three-year-old Hibito up to arrange fresh flowers in bamboo-shaped plastic vases. A curl of incense smoke rises as Toshiko brings her hands together in prayer. It's silent except for the drone of cicadas.
Cleaning the grave is the first ritual of Obon, a Japanese summer festival when ancestral spirits are welcomed back home for a three-day family reunion in the world of the living. During Obon, they’re honored with offerings of favorite foods, bonfires, and lively dances, before being led back to the land of the dead on a river of floating lanterns.
Like any family reunion, there’s cooking to be done after the cleaning. “A lot of Obon foods food are for display rather than consumption,” says Elizabeth Andoh, author of the cookbooks Kansha and Washoku, who was born and raised in New York but has made her home in Japan since the 1960s. One of those food offerings is mizunoko. Toshiko helps Hibito scoop the mixture of diced eggplant and uncooked white rice onto a persimmon leaf, which they lay on the family tomb and in front of the mossy Buddhist statues, called ojizousama, that dot the family farmland. “It’s like a bento for when our ancestors go back to heaven, to ensure that they get there,” explains Tomoko. In other parts of Japan, mizunoko might be served on a lotus or taro leaf, with chopped cucumbers mixed in.
While Obon is celebrated all over Japan, the flavors therein vary from family to family and region to region. In Shikoku, people press stripes of sushi ingredients into a box, not unlike a layer cake. Called hakozushi, it's commonly served at summer family gatherings. Bondara, stewed and dried codfish, is a go-to in Kyushu since dried foods keep better in the heat. Buddhist supply shops offer customized sets of Obon altar decorations, such as bamboo fronds or dried Chinese lantern plants, depending on local traditions.
In nearby Saga prefecture, where Tomoko grew up, the cucumbers and eggplants take on another form. Skewer each of them with four bamboo legs, and add tails made out of cornsilk, and these typical summer vegetables become shouryouma, or “spirit horses." The cucumber horse is long and sleek, symbolizing ancestors' swift journeys home to their families. The eggplant cow, plump and sturdy, embodies ancestors' leisurely return trip, a load of souvenirs with them in tow.
While this long-standing tradition is practiced in many parts of Japan, younger generations have been riffing on it in new ways, carving their summer vegetables into elaborate creations and posting them online. For some people, shouryouma represents a special way to pay tribute to their loved ones.
Tatsuya Ezura, who is studying to be a pilot, made an eggplant Cessna—complete with cucumber wings—for his late grandmother. “I wanted to be a pilot for a long time, but I gave up for a while. Now I’m working hard but I can’t show that to my grandmother,” he explains. “I made this cucumber airplane so that my thoughts might reach her.”
Masashi Isamu carved his shouryouma into the shape of a dog. “My grandmother passed away last February, so this is her arabon, the first Obon following one’s death,” he says. “She was very close to our golden retriever, Coron. I think she would be very pleased.”
After Obon, Coron ate the eggplant, though Shouryouma aren’t usually consumed. Japanese etiquette blogs note that the traditional method of disposal for Obon offerings is returning them to the earth or releasing them into a river. A more modern option calls for sprinkling the offerings with purifying salt, wrapping them in white paper, and throwing them out with the trash. Victoria Yoshimura, a Buddhist priest at Shonenji Temple in Takachiho, says that it’s a misconception that Obon food offerings shouldn’t be eaten by the living, though: “It’s rude to waste food in Buddhism, and this is blessed food as it has been offered to the hotokesama [deceased ancestors, who themselves have become buddhas].” Keeping up with the steamy Japanese summer weather, however, when food spoils quickly, is a challenge.
In the valley downriver from Takachiho, Tomomi Kinoshita chats with her ancestors about family updates—a successful tennis match, a daughter’s date—as she serves them a meal. “Hai, douzo,” she says, setting red and gold lacquer dishes on the butsudan, the Buddhist family altar. There, she offers incense daily to photos of deceased family members. Her husband is the eldest son of his family, so their household maintains the Kinoshita family butsudan—and though more and more Japanese are taking advantage of rare time off at Obon to travel, siblings who move away are traditionally expected to come back this time of year and pay their respects.
During the three days of Obon, the population rural towns such as this one—many have since left for larger cities—will swell. Tomomi will be feeding both living and dead houseguests. But rather than cooking special foods for the departed, she says, “our ancestors want to eat the foods they usually ate in life.” As Toshiko puts it, “We’re all one family. So if we’re eating jelly, we’ll serve them jelly, too.” With one caveat—the ancestors are vegetarian. “Both Shinto and Buddhism occur simultaneously in Japan,” explains Andoh. “Most rituals associated with end-of-life ceremonies, like Obon, are Buddhist, and any ritual food related to a Buddhist ceremony is going to be shoujin-ryouri, without flesh.”
Rakugan, neon-hued sweets made from sugar and rice starch pressed into the shape of peaches, bunches of grapes, bananas, and lotus flowers, are the icing on the Obon altar. Another must for sweet-toothed spirits is dango, chewy balls of mochi. The Kinoshitas love them topped with a dusting of nutty, roasted soybean powder. But for the ancestors, they leave them plain. “I don’t know why, but spirits like white dango,” laughs Tomomi.
On the last night of Obon, the Kinoshitas gather with their neighbors at the river that cuts through the center of town. With them is a small wooden boat that Tomomi’s father-in-law makes every year. It's always stuffed by her mother-in-law with gifts for the ancestors: flowers, fruit, a bottle of saké, and more dango.
“We say goodbye in our hearts,” says Tomomi, as the neighbors lower their boats and glowing paper lanterns into the water and watch them bob downstream. Then, a riot of fireworks explodes overhead and everyone heads back to the town’s summer festival for beer and an Obon folk dance called bon-odori.
Tomomi says that Japanese people feel happy during Obon because they get to meet their loved ones again. Even Andoh’s parents, the children of Jewish immigrants, were so moved by the tradition that their last wishes were to be cremated and taken with her to Japan. “They had seen Obon several times in the course of my being in Japan, and they loved the way the departed were treated, rather than being thrown into some cemetery where people never go,” she says. “The fact that ancestors are acknowledged, revisited, that things are shared with them, it’s rather nice and it helps bring a sense of closure to the living. I think a lot of the rituals in Japan surrounding death are actually to benefit survivors.”
For Tomoko, Obon is about gratitude for those who came before. “Thanks to them, I can say I’m alive," she says. "Without them, I don’t exist.”
Conquering a culinary anxiety isn't always pretty, but it can be pretty tasty.
Earlier this month, I finally faced my own personal greatest food fear and tasted some fresh durian. In the end, it didn't make me a convert to the controversial fruit's fan club, but it did prove to be an enlightening experience. I didn't like it, but I feel much more open to trying things like durian candy. Getting over my fear managed to broaden my horizons.
To celebrate having conquered my fear, I invited Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about their own experiences overcoming food fears. You wrote in to share stories about everything from conquering a life-long aversion to eggs to suddenly being confronted with a seafood dish that was still alive. The results of these brave taste tests were equally varied, but every single one of your stories was relatable and entertaining.
We've assembled a collection of our favorite responses below. If there's still a food out there that you can't bring yourself to eat, perhaps these stories will inspire you to finally take a chance and try it.
Feared Food: Sushi
Describe the experience of actually trying it for the first time.
“It was life-changing. The flavors are amazing.”
Did you like it?
“It was AMAZING! I've been making up for lost time ever since and it's now one of my favorite meals!” — Nicole, Tampa, Florida
Feared Food: Odorigui (Ice Gobys)
Describe the experience of actually trying it for the first time.
“I was living in rural Japan on a JET Program and was invited by a bar owner friend to the local ‘restaurant owners group’ party to try something new. I walked in the door and everyone was downing small shot glasses of live fish (about the size of a minnow) as if it were some kind of fraternity hazing ritual. Apparently, odori-gui (literally ‘dance eating’) is a Japanese delicacy consisting of eating still live seafood where the ‘fun’ comes from the consumed creature dancing its way from your mouth, down your esophagus, and then writhing and dying in your stomach. I was handed a glass of my own to try. My strategy was simple: let the fish die in the glass, and then drink up. I waited patiently until the fish in the glass stopped moving. And then I tried it. The moment the ice gobies hit my tongue, they instantly revived and started to struggle. I struggled as well. After a good 30 seconds of wrestling them around in my mouth, I had to spit them out.”
Did you like it?
“In my three years in rural Japan, this was the only food I ever had to spit back out. I did not like it. But, given enough beer and with enough courage, I probably would try it again.” — Andy ("Mack") McCarthy, Houston, Texas
Feared Food: Pig Intestines
Describe the experience of actually trying it for the first time.
“The taste was exactly like the scent of a barnyard: dirt and manure. I chewed twice, horrified each time, then managed to gulp it down. My husband was appalled that I swallowed it; he spat his into his napkin.”
Did you like it?
“No. Never. Even though some people have told me I probably got intestines that weren't properly cleaned. Never taking a chance of getting that taste in my mouth again!” — Jenny Gibbons, Portland, Oregon
Feared Food: Balut
Describe the experience of actually trying it for the first time.
“Our family visited Cambodia, and our guide suggested we try one. I was terrified but my 7-year-old dug right in. I figured if he could eat it, then so could I. It was delicious! I was afraid of eating beaks and feathers, but after stirring it up, it was like chicken soup with a really pungent garlic chili sauce.”
Did you like it?
“I most definitely would eat it again. But only in a roadside stall in Cambodia!” — Michelle, Saskatchewan, Canada
Feared Food: Raw Tomatoes
Describe the experience of actually trying it for the first time.
“I have accidentally ingested tiny bits of raw tomatoes various times over my 52 years, but I have an extreme aversion… like I would rather find and eat a fly in my food. I have no idea why raw tomatoes create such a problem, but I can't even cut them. I LOVE cooked tomatoes in pasta sauce and salsa, but I have to leave the room if someone is even cutting them. We grow them in our garden, and I was in a fix where I needed to cut some up to cook them and I was home alone... So I just bit my lip, held my breath, used a sharp knife, and got through them quickly. I still can't bring myself to eat them raw though. I have eaten armadillo in Costa Rica, insects in Mexico, and Guinea Pig in Peru, so I am an adventurous eater. I would rather eat any of these things a thousand times rather than have one bit of a raw tomato.”
Did you like it?
“I'm going to be fine if I never eat another raw tomato in my life, so I guess I haven't really overcome my biggest food fear.” — Wendy Bigler, Nagano, Japan
Feared Food: Escargot
Describe the experience of actually trying it for the first time.
“We went to a two-Michelin-star restaurant, L'Escargot Montorgueil, in Paris 49 years ago. The specialty, of course, was snails. I had never eaten one, but ordered some as an appetizer. The waiter brought the dish and stood by as I forked the first little morsel out of its shell. It wasn't little, and it had rather long ‘horns’ sticking out of its head. I really didn't want to eat it, but managed to choke it down. The waiter asked, in French, if it was to my taste, and I responded that it was ‘tres bon.’ He went away, and I worked my way through more snails, especially enjoying the garlic butter that enveloped the snails. And the bread! And the wine!”
Did you like it?
“Yes, after a few snails, I really liked them! Yes, I have eaten them again, but wouldn't without the garlic butter and bread to go with!” — Kris Quinn, Washington
Feared Food: Eggs
Describe the experience of actually trying it for the first time.
“I found eggs horrifying and revolting until I turned 40. A neighbor asked me to make deviled eggs for a party. I spent so much time and energy on the dish that I figured I might as well try it. Oh my god, it was the greatest thing I'd eaten in ages. I now eat at least a dozen hard-boiled eggs every week. I've even explored poached (awesome) and scrambled (ok).”
Did you like it?
“Still not big on fried.” — Kirsten, New York
Feared Food: Blueberries
Describe the experience of actually trying it for the first time.
“I liked them until, as a child, I saw a worm crawling out on one. I didn't eat them again until I was in my 20s.”
Did you like it?
“Yes, I have bushes in my backyard!” — Laurel, San Francisco, California
In 1554, in the town of Sens, France, Colombe Charti went into labor. It was her first pregnancy, and she had carried the fetus close to term. But something went wrong. Though her contractions stopped, Charti’s baby was never born.
For three years after that, she lay in bed, recovering, and for the rest of her life she would have strange pains in her abdomen. Her neighbors believed (quite logically) that the baby was still inside her. After she died 28 years later, her husband enlisted two surgeons to autopsy her body in hope of discovering the truth.
The object that the surgeons found inside Charti was hard and roughly ovoid. Though at first the surgeons thought it was a tumor of some sort, when they broke through the scaly outer shell, they found shoulders and a head, two arms, knees bent towards the chest, legs and feet, fused together. It had one tooth, and if it had been born, the fetus would have been a girl with a full head of hair.
The Sens baby is one of the earliest extensively documented cases of a lithopedion—a never-born “stone baby” that calcifies over time. It’s a very rare condition: There are only 300 or so known cases, going back to prehistory. Lithopedion most often form after pregnancies in which the fetus grows outside the uterus and is too large to be reabsorbed by the mother’s body. Instead, it dies unborn, and can remain in its mother’s body for the rest of her life.
The oldest known lithopedion, which has been dated to more than 3,100 years ago, was found at an archaeological site in Texas, with its limbs skeletonized and “bound by a thickened, calcified membrane,” the researchers who identified it wrote when they reported the find in 1993. The first documented case in medical literature dates back to the 10th century, in an influential guide to surgery written by the Andalusian surgeon Al-Zahrawi.
In the 16th century, the Sens lithopedion was treated as a curiosity, passed from hand to hand over the following centuries, as medical experts debated the mechanism of its creation, as rheumatologist Jan Bondeson details in an article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. In the three centuries after the Sens case, 46 more were documented in medical literature. Physicians discovered that lithopedions formed in three different ways—the surrounding membranes calicify while the fetus does not, the membranes rupture and the fetus calcifies, or both the membranes and fetus calcify, as in the Sens case. Often, these cases weren’t discovered or documented until late in the lives of the women carrying them. A 1949 review of cases found that of 128 documented cases, nine of the women spent at least 50 years with a lithopedion in their abdomens.
Abdominal pregnancy, in which a fetus grows outside of the uterus or the fallopian tubes, represent only one out of every 10,000 to 30,000 pregnancies. Of those rare occurrences, fewer than 2 percent end up producing lithopedions. Lithopedions have become even more uncommon as prenatal care has improved. Abdominal pregnancies pose unique risks to both mothers and babies, and they may be terminated early on. In any case, they are often closely monitored, and a fetus that did not survive would be removed before it could begin to calcify.
The most famous lithopedion—the one from Sens—eventually disappeared. The surgeon who extracted it eventually sold the specimen to a merchant, and from there it passed through the hands of a goldsmith and of a jewel merchant to King Frederick III of Denmark, who bought it in 1653. Over the following decades, the lithopedion grew more fragile, and lost an arm and its jaw. In the 19th century, it ended up in the Danish Museum of Natural History, where it was lost or discarded.
Some universities and medical museums still have lithopedions in their collections, though—a macabre reminder of the mysteries the human body can hold and hide during a person’s lifetime.
New laser imaging shows Izapa's suburbs were like mini-capitals.
The ancient Izapa kingdom, located in the southern part of present-day Mexico, sprawled out over 170 square miles, so rural villagers seeking a taste of city life in the capital had quite a haul ahead of them. But it turns out that those on the outskirts had a feel for the city right at home. New research reveals that the kingdom—which peaked from 700 B.C. to 100 B.C., sometime between the Olmec and the Maya—consisted of more than its capital city, also known as Izapa. It boasted some 40 satellite settlements, each of which was deliberately modeled in the capital’s image.
The research, published in the journal Antiquity, demonstrates for the first time that there was more to the kingdom than its central city. Though the study calls Izapa “the largest and best-known pre-Hispanic city in the lowland Pacific region of southern Mesoamerica,” its suburban regions had gone all but ignored, save for some incomplete, if accurate, maps. “No kingdom, no state, no polity,” with very few exceptions, “is just a capital city,” says Robert M. Rosenswig, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Albany and coauthor of the study. “I knew there were going to be other centers around.”
To find those centers, the researchers used lidar technology, which uses lasers beamed down from and bounced back to a small plane to see through thick vegetation to the landforms and structures beneath. Because lidar can be used through even the most hazardous and impenetrable jungle terrain, Rosenswig says, the technology is “exploding” among archaeologists, in Mesoamerica and beyond. Now they are collecting reams of data without setting foot on a site.
But that data on its own doesn't precisely explain what a mound under the jungle canopy actually is. Rosenswig says the team spent months visiting each and every mound their lidar had documented, and dated ceramic sherds found at sites to determine whether the settlements were occupied at the same time as the capital. What they found were about 40 sites, and saw that each was laid out just like the city of Izapa. Together, they form what the researchers call the “Izapa pattern.”
According to the pattern, each settlement featured a pyramid at its northern end—likely the site of rituals and ceremonies—and a plaza to the south. This means that all across the kingdom people would have seen the same thing when facing north: the Tacaná and Tajumulco volcanoes framing the local pyramid. These findings reveal more than Izapa’s scale, but also demonstrate a cultural unity that persisted across wide distances. The volcanic view “indicates kingdom-wide rituals physically structured by the built environment,” the researchers write, that “reinforced the political and social hierarchy through cosmological association.”
Izapa isn’t the only ancient kingdom to replicate itself throughout its domain. El Ujuxte, in Guatemala, demonstrates similar internal consistency—but with distinct patterns all its own. Rosenswig draws a parallel between these Mesoamerican societies and Christian Europe, where Catholic sites resemble each other in layout (but differ from Protestant sites, for example). So the Izapa pattern may not be an anomaly, but Rosenswig wasn’t expecting it, either. It's just that hardly anyone had looked.
The barely edible container was the progenitor of pie.
Even on Halloween, prying open the lid of a stiff, sealed coffin would be considered a ghastly endeavor. But in Medieval Europe, sawing the top off a well-executed coffin revealed something delicious, rather than disgusting. A coffin, spelled coffynin 12th-century English, referred to self-standing pastry made from flour, water, and sometimes fat. Like a sort of medieval Tupperware, coffins preserved the foods they contained and were rarely eaten. During the Tudor period, the English loved pastry cases so much that they developed a saying: “If it’s good, tis better in a Coffyn.”
Early pastry coffins were constructed to be architecturally sound above all else, and often lacked seasoning or fat. In other words, they were bland, solid, often rectangular dough-boxes. Chefs raised and sealed the glutinous dough around concoctions that might sound peculiar to modern palates. High on that list was lamprey, the eel-like fish with spiraled teeth emulated in many a horror film. At the time, the fish was so prized that, according to one medieval account, “After lampreys, all fish seem insipid to both the king and the queen.” Combined with mint and parsley, but also cinnamon, ginger, saffron, and ground almonds, the sweet-savory (and sometimes vinegary) concoction would be sealed inside a coffin for cooking. Once cooked, coffin lids could be removed or cut into, and the interior juices, perhaps, further cooked with wine or vinegar.
Ironically, edible coffins also housed the living: Using pastry coffins to entertain by covertly hiding birds, frogs, and people was a royal affair. These coffins could feature ornate designs made of dough and other, truly inedible flourishes, such as pigments derived from mercury and lead. Most historically memorable was likely the surprise pastry coffin of Sir Jeffrey Hudson, later dubbed Lord Minimus. The remarkably small person was “served” to King Charles I by the Duchess of Buckingham, which entailed him charging through the coffin’s crust dressed in a tiny suit of armor. Unlike many dwarves of the era, who were treated as indentured servants at best, Jeffrey eventually became a well-educated and adored part of the royal family—a circumstance disrupted by his capture by pirates.
Ultimately, coffin containers made way for the sweet, flaky, and edible pie crusts we know today. As fat and sugar became more accessible, supple doughs (called short crusts) with sweeter fillings found a place at the table. Not known for their indulgences, Puritans took special offense to the rectangular Christmas pies shaped like baby Jesus's manger. Meanwhile, "cutting corners" by rolling out a round dough saved precious time for settlers in the New World, further transforming the medieval pastry box into the recognizable round pie. So while the word "coffin" slipped out of fashion, pie still has one wedge in the grave.
In the spirit of Halloween, consider a tour of graveyards, memorials, and other places in touch with the afterlife.
As All Hallow's Eve grows nigh, skies darken early, leaves fall from the trees, and the soul harkens to feel a little closer to the world of the dead. That might mean seeking out a house with a history of hauntings, paying respect to a departed hero, or remembering the horrors of history.
At this time of year, it's easier to remember that New York has a long past layered below its modern facades. Here are a few places in the city that might evoke the haunting holiday spirit, and that we visited for a recent segment with New York Live on NBC 4, which you can watch below.
When Eliza Jumel moved into this mansion in 1810, she told everyone it was haunted. Built in 1765, it's now the oldest house in Manhattan, and some visitors have claimed to encounter her ghost there. Stephen Jumel was a wealthy merchant, and after his death, his wife Eliza was briefly married to Aaron Burr, the former vice president. Though she quickly sued for divorce—a very unusual choice at the time—Burr died just before their split was finalized. Eliza herself lived for decades and died in the mansion in 1865, when she was in her 90s.
Once, the house would have been in the country, and now it's hidden among residential buildings, on a hill close to the water. It serves a museum filled with period furniture, much of which once belonged to the Jumels.
The Morris-Jumel Mansion offers visitors regular "paranormal investigations" that share the history of the house, while offering a chance to attempt to measure the presence of unusual electrical signals and other potentially ghostly activity.
In 1991, the ashes of the poet Langston Hughes were interred beneath this public art installation at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In the Langston Hughes Lobby, just beyond the museum's entrance, tiled rivers flow through the cosmogram, created by artist Houston Conwill. It includes "lifelines" for both the poet and Arturo Schomburg, the museum's namesake, which intersect in Harlem.
Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss) was buried in a family plot in Queens. He died on Halloween, after letting a fan punch him in the stomach—meant to be a feat of strength. Houdini was skeptical of mediums, but he believed in the possibility of the afterlife and left his wife certain code phrases so she could identify messages from his spirit after his death.
For many years, his widow held a seance there each year. Now, fans of the magician and escape artist leave rocks on his grave (a Jewish tradition), along with playing cards and other possibly magical objects.
Three days after Titanic sank, the boat that rescued survivors brought them here. No information had been released about which passengers had survived, and the area was crowded with families, newspaper reporters, and people eager to hear what had happened out in the ocean. Today, the only remains of the gate are still standing, a reminder of the eerie history of this spot.
You can watch our segment with NBC New York Live below.
In West Virginia, the pursuit of coal has led many drilling outfits to move mountains—or, at least, to strip their peaks. Sometimes, that involves navigating around the graves that have been up there for generations, and may be the last traces of towns that have been purchased by the coal companies.
To access seams of coal running through the mountains like buried black streams, mountaintop mining companies often remove hundreds of feet of rock and soil. In the process—which, speaking to PBS Newshour in 2017, Duke University biogeochemist Emily Bernhardt likened to “decapitation”—everything springing from the mountain is leveled, and often hurled into river valleys. By design, mountaintop removal mining has a large footprint—even if coal companies might argue that they tread softly. In 2009, John McQuaid, writing about mountaintop mining for Smithsonian, boarded a plane flying over dozens of square miles of mountain tops gouged out by explosives, and reported that the scene looked like “huge quarries scooped out of the hills.”
A mine can’t exist where a town does. So, after most of its residents accepted buyouts from a coal company in the late aughts, the community of Lindytown, in Boone County, all but disappeared. The church was bulldozed, and most of the homes were, too. The nearby cemeteries are still there—islands of the dead towering above felled forests. Visiting requires some logistical contortions, The New York Times reported: To conform to government regulations for surface-mining terrain, a visitor would need to “make an appointment with a coal company, be certified in work site safety, don a construction helmet, and be escorted by a coal-company representative.”
There’s the Jerrell family plot, roughly the size of tennis court, and, on a hill between Cook Mountain and Montcoal Mountain, one known as the Webb Cemetery. That one holds 37 graves, some of which date back two centuries and are marked by inscribed fieldstones. A mountaintop mining site booms a little ways up the ridge. It’s not an uncommon sight: "Cemeteries are strewn throughout mines all over the state," Tom Clarke, then the mining and reclamation division director for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, told National Geographic in 2013.
That same year, the Associated Press reported, six descendants of the people buried in the Jarrell cemetery sued the mining company Alpha Natural Resources in Boone County Circuit Court, alleging that the activity had encroached on their ancestors’ resting place. Driving the steep roads seemed to require four-wheel drive, and when you reached the top, "it was like going up on a mesa," says Tom Rist, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs.
Plaintiffs said mining activity occurred within 100 feet of the graveyard, and that blasts had caused headstones to buck out of the ground. (Alpha denied this.) In 2o15, "the case was settled favorably for the parties involved," says Rist, though the terms of the settlement are confidential.
From state to state, laws vary widely with respect to human remains discovered during construction other land-altering projects, says Tanya Marsh, a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law who studies the treatment of graves and remains. "In some states, there is no reporting requirement at all," Marsh says.
In West Virginia, the law was updated in 2010 to stipulate that if human remains are uncovered during alterations on private land, work must stop while the sheriff and historic preservation officers investigate, Marsh adds. The year before, the AP had reported that some mountaintop graves across the state had been relocated or lost, sometimes without the descendants' families ever hearing about it until they went looking. "In all states, the kin of the deceased have rights to protect graves," Marsh says. While this can provide some protection for marked graves, Marsh adds, "the only way to protect unmarked graves is for the state to enforce its laws regarding grave desecration."
The long-term future of these isolated mountaintop cemeteries is uncertain—but they’re a stark reminder of how the activities of the living can affect the dead.
Every good dog deserves a proper send-off, but few pups reach a level of fame that earns them a memorial that will be visited for generations. These seven graves comprise a macabre memorial tour of the Western world's most beloved fallen canines. These burial sites and monuments hold or honor dogs in a manner befitting humankind's best friend.
Opened in 1899, the Cimetière des Chiens, or Cemetery of the Dogs, is the oldest pet cemetery in Europe. Here among the dog toy–decorated tombs and stone doghouse mausoleums is the final resting place of one of the biggest canine celebrities of all time, Rin Tin Tin. The world-famous German Shepherd appeared in nearly 30 Hollywood films, and is largely responsible for the popularity of the breed as pets. Rin Tin Tin's descendants starred in even more films and the Adventures of Rin Tin Tin television series. Despite being an American movie star, Rinty is buried in France, where he was found and rescued from the trenches during World War I.
Speaking of oldest pet cemeteries, hop across the Atlantic to New York and you’ll find Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, the first in the United States. Founded in 1896, its five acres holds more than 80,000 dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, reptiles, monkeys, and horses. Oh, and a lion, and even some humans.
At the center of the cemetery is the War Dog Memorial that honors the dogs that served in World War I and is encircled with tributes to the space dog Laika (who is not buried in the cemetery), as well as the dogs who helped with search and rescue following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Sirius, a dog who lost his life in the September 11 terror attacks, is also memorialized.
As we all know from The Wizard of Oz, “There is no place like home.” Unfortunately for the film’s beloved pooch, Toto’s own puppyhood home—as well as his gravesite—was bulldozed by the state of California in 1958 to make way for the Ventura Freeway.
Many years later, concerned that there was nowhere to commemorate the celebrity pup, some fans got together and launched an online campaign to build a memorial for Toto at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. Robert Baum, great-grandson of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, even attended the dedication to pay his respects to the canine movie star. The crowd sang a rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
This unassuming memorial stone is dedicated to a mysterious dog named Boomer who is said to have died trying to save his master. As the story goes, Boomer, who had just three legs, was running alongside a railway line when a fire broke out on the train. Seeing this, the dog supposedly lifted his leg mid-run and attempted to put the fire out with his urine—a heroic bit of multitasking that unfortunately cost the dog his life. While this tale may seem a bit outlandish, it nonetheless inspired the creation of the Boomer memorial under which the dog is said to be buried.
The tombstone of Greyfriars Bobby reads, “Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.” The little skye terrier is said to have stood vigil at his owner’s grave for 14 years. His dedication and loyalty became legendary, and when the dog finally died in January 1872, he was laid to rest in Greyfriars Kirkyard, not far from his owner’s grave.
It’s a heartwarming story that has inspired numerous books, films, and even an episode of Futurama. Unfortunately, it seems the whole thing may have been just a publicity stunt, and the original Bobby was just a stray who found that by lingering around the churchyard he could get snacks from sympathetic visitors who assumed he was mourning the loss of his owner.
Owned by no one but beloved by all, Brownie, a large, brown, short-haired stray dog, lived on Beach Street for 15 years, and became known far beyond his seaside home as the Town Dog of Daytona Beach. Locals, Beach Street merchants, and tourists all donated funds to keep Brownie well fed and well cared for, and they even established a Florida Bank and Trust account in his name to make sure there was always enough money to buy dog food and pay vet bills. Each year, the townspeople bought Brownie a dog license, his tag always #1—signifying that he was the official goodwill ambassador for the town.
When Brownie died on Halloween in 1954 at the age of 15, the entire city mourned the good boy’s passing and 75 people attended his funeral. The mayor gave the eulogy.
This quaint New Jersey graveyard, started in 1918 by a husband and wife who loved their pets almost as much as they loved each other, is the eternal resting place for thousands of beloved pets. Many celebrities who performed in nearby Atlantic City buried their companions here, and showbiz pups including Petey from the short-film series Our Gang and Rex the Wonder Dog also rest here.
Rex was a star attraction at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier during the 1930s and 1940s. Many people flocked to see this dynamic dog bravely take to water skis. Another star dog was Paradiddle Ben. He has one of the most notable tombstones, engraved with the masks of comedy and tragedy. Services at Clara Glen could be very elaborate. It is said that the burial of one Atlantic City bartender’s dog featured 20 limousines.
This story originally ran on March 13, 2017, and has been updated with minor edits.
More than 1,000 were spotted off the coast of Monterey, California.
It is said that as far as humans are concerned, the deep sea might as well be another planet considering its vast unexplored corners and mysteries.
That sense of mystery was certainly present last week when marine scientists witnessed a sight never before seen by humans: a deep-sea vista of over a thousand octopuses, dotting the ocean floor, curled and wedged among the rocks.
This discovery was made off the coast of Monterey, California, an area known for its flourishing marine ecosystems. But this finding was surprising even to scientists who are already accustomed to the extraterrestrial nature of marine ecology.
“We were really excited,” says Chad King, chief scientist on the Exploration Vessel Nautilus. The research team was looking for deep sea sponges and corals, not the single largest cluster of deep-sea octopuses ever recorded. “What’s really amazing is we never saw an end to them. And we still don’t know the full extent of how many octopuses are down there. We know there are at least a thousand, there could be a lot more.”
The light purple octopuses, a deep-sea species (Muusoctopus robustus), were almost entirely brooding females, tucked into nooks with outward-facing arms wrapped around their bodies. They take this defensive position to protect each of their dozens of white incubating eggs, says King. Video footage shows them gently cleaning and aerating their clutches among gardens of orange anemones.
They were found in the outer reaches of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary beside an underwater mountain, two miles below the surface, within a seemingly endless expanse of dark cold water.
The footage gathered by the E/V Nautilus seems to show subtle shimmering in the water, which suggested to the researchers that this was also the site of some kind of seep, in which fluid flows from underground. One of the main questions on King’s mind is what kind of fluid was coming out of the rocks, and why the octopuses chose that place to congregate. “One of the burning questions we have is what is causing that shimmering,” says King. “They’re choosing this area for a reason.”
The only other sighting like it was the discovery of over 100 brooding octopuses off the coast of Costa Rica in 2013, which at the time was groundbreaking. A study about the sighting was published this year by Ph.D. student Anne Hartwell at the University of New Hampshire, who specializes in ocean mapping.
When Hartwell saw footage of last week’s discovery she was ecstatic. “It’s unbelievable. Having a second site means there’s that much more opportunity to learn so much more,” she says. “We don’t know more than we know about these octopuses.” She says octopuses are usually solitary creatures, so such a large grouping has surprised cephalopod experts.
Among the unknowns are what these octopuses eat, why they cluster together, how they chose their brooding location, and how long it takes them to incubate their eggs.
Exploring the dark reaches of the deep ocean is what the E/V Nautilus is all about, being only one of a few ships in the world that has the moniker “Exploration Vessel.”
“This is what they do, they go into the unknown. We’ve explored less than one percent of the world’s deep sea, and this is what can happen because we don’t know about it,” says King. “This is a rare discovery, only the second of its kind and the largest of its kind. This is a brand new story to tell.”
To see into the future, young women held mystical meals.
These days, Halloween is a spooky holiday, devoted to ghoulish fun. But for young women in the British Isles and United States, Halloween once was the prime time for love rituals: the day when occult ceremonies could offer a glimpse into the future. Romanticized by poets such as Keats and Burns, these love rituals supposedly allowed young women to divine the identity of their future husbands. Out of all such ceremonies, the most elaborate, meaningful method was the dumb supper.
“Dumb,” in this case, is a synonym for mute or silent, as the most essential rule was that a dumb supper be conducted in complete silence. “Perhaps for many centuries,” writes scholar Paul B. Frazier, “young women have tried to use magic in this manner.” According to folklorist Wayland D. Hand, the dumb supper has roots in an English “love divination,” one that was once “fairly well known.” Americans, especially in rural regions, perpetuated the custom into the 20th century. From Oxfordshire to Ozark county, Hand observes, the ritual was performed with “considerable conformity.”
Young women typically held dumb suppers, but men sometimes attended as well. The setting was usually an isolated place free of disturbances, such as an abandoned or otherwise empty house. In Frazier’s account of a dumb supper, two teenage girls in turn-of-the-century Kentucky “prepared a supper backwards in every respect. The tables were set as wrongly as possible; the chairs were turned backwards; the meal was to be served dessert first.” If anyone spoke a word, the spell was broken. When everything was prepared exactly right, then, at midnight, the spirits of the husbands-to-be would walk through the door, or even arrive in person.
Whether apparition or real, whoever sat next to a girl was sure to be her future husband. In romantic novels and short stories, a dumb supper was the ideal time for a long-lost sweetheart to coincidentally show up. Victorian newspapers, especially in the American South, outlined the process of conducting a dumb supper, while Edwardian novels made them into thrilling plot points. After all, for many young women (and occasionally men), dumb suppers were party games with a supernatural thrill. But in spookier accounts, dumb suppers could herald spinsterhood and death. If a coffin appeared at midnight, that meant that one of the young women wouldn’t marry at all, and would likely die soon.
Sometimes, as Frazier relates, the dumb supper could even predict murder. According to one account from Missouri, two young women set their table in a deserted house. At the stroke of midnight, one saw a coffin, which, horrifyingly, “moved of its own volition” to rest beside her. The other woman was probably happy to instead see a young man walk through the door at midnight, his apparition summoned by the ritual. The young man arrived holding a knife, which he dropped the moment he sat next to his future bride. She picked up the knife and put it in her pocket, and after the silent meal was over, the young man stood and left the room, as “the coffin slid along beside him and followed him out the door.” Soon, the young woman met the man and married him. One day, she showed him the knife. On seeing it, he flew into a rage and stabbed her in the throat and chest until she died.
Of course, this was a folk tale, likely designed to warn young women away from superstitious midnight rituals. The ones that end badly, says Frazier, seem to be warnings that “the use of magic in love affairs is unfair and doomed.” During actual dumb suppers, the only danger was interruption by neighborhood pranksters. According to Hand, the participants’ mothers encouraged boys to burst in, sometimes through the windows.
But the dumb supper, along with other Halloween love rituals, did address a deeply felt need. In a time when a young woman’s future depended on whom she married, discovering the man’s identity in advance was powerfully motivating. As the author of a dumb supper story from 1849 noted, “A young maiden will go through a great deal in order to get some kind of answer to a question that so deeply involves her happiness.”
Another, simpler Halloween love ritual was to simply look into a mirror while walking backwards. In a horror-movie fashion, this caused the face of one’s future husband to return one’s gaze. Such rituals weren’t necessarily tied to Halloween, either. According to folk belief, a young woman who observed an evening of silence and went to bed without dinner—on the night before the Feast of St. Agnes—would dream of her future husband. Another ritual called for eating a hollowed-out egg filled with salt, in hopes of inducing one’s future spouse—in a dream—to provide a cup of water. Nevertheless, writes Hand, dumb suppers usually were held at liminal times between the seasons: In California, New Year’s Eve was the day of choice, while in Maryland it was May Eve.
The appeal of the dumb supper was widespread and long-lasting. Hand collected 35 dumb supper accounts from the British Isles and 100 from the United States, some dating from as far back as the 17th century. He noted that in England and Scotland, young women focused on baking special “dumb cakes” for the midnight supper, while Americans emphasized the backwards meal and settings.
By the 1950s, though, dumb suppers had largely disappeared. In an investigation of Halloween’s romantic roots, journalist Niraj Chokshi points out that children had become the holiday’s main focus. Plus, women had won more control over their destinies, making marriage rituals less enticing.
But dumb suppers are still observed in one quarter: as a soulful ceremony for Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival of the dead and the start of winter. (Practicing witches and warlocks, a small but fast-growing spiritual group in the United States, often celebrate Samhain on or around the traditional date of October 31.) Taking place in such appropriate locales as Salem, Massachusetts, the age-old ritual of the dumb supper memorializes and honors the beloved dead. Participants eat meals, often containing the favorite foods of the departed, backwards, starting with dessert and ending with dinner rolls. Of course, the meals are conducted in unbroken silence.
How a New York town made its fictional identity a reality.
In 1820, Washington Irving invented a town. In his short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving described the title village as a peaceful hamlet near the shore of the Hudson River, some two miles from Tarrytown. There, he wrote, amid groves of walnut trees and star-speckled skies, residents happened to be prone to "trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air." The whole place was "enchanted."
Irving, a Hudson Valley boy, modeled his Sleepy Hollow on the village of North Tarrytown, which was home to many of the rubble stone-and-mortar haunts he describes in the story. The old Dutch church, which figures prominently in the tale, has been standing there since the late 1600s.
Irving’s tale earned passionate fans, and they showed up in North Tarrytown to see the sights, real and imagined. As early as 1900, one local writer noted that Irving's words were becoming a boon. "It seems safe to say that all other agencies together have not brought as many people into this region as the 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow' has," he reported.
The town has long been proud of its legacy—local fire engines have carried images of the Horseman on their doors for decades. But 20 years ago, local leaders decided to double down on spooky tourism by rebranding in the image Irving had conjured.
Following a popular vote, North Tarrytown was officially renamed Sleepy Hollow in 1996. Fittingly, the bell of the Dutch church pealed to commemorate the occasion.
If you visit Sleepy Hollow today, you probably won’t be chased through the dark woods by a beheaded Hessian soldier—but you’ll definitely see the Horseman. He’s everywhere, all year round, though never more so than the weeks around Halloween. In the video above, Atlas Obscura went to Sleepy Hollow to learn just how the town turned fiction into reality.
This month, 126 years after its founding, American retail giant Sears officially filed for bankruptcy.
Before the super-sized department store chain began dominating suburban landscapes and fluorescent malls across the country, it existed solely as a mail-order catalogue that initially specialized in jewelry and watches, but quickly grew to include almost everything in the universe. In 1895, only three years after first incorporating as a business, the catalogue boasted 532 pages. Among the things for sale in this encyclopedia of goods were bicycles, groceries, sewing machines, medicinal cocaine, and electric radiators. But perhaps the most surprising product in this groundbreaking “Consumers’ Bible” was a practical but rather morbid one: affordable tombstones.
In 1906, the mega-company published a specialized “Tombstones and Monuments” mailer, advertising it as a “Catalogue of Memorial Art in Granite and Marble.” Sears’ prices, which beat out traditional funeral parlors’ significantly, allowed consumers to participate in the elite practice of custom-ordering grave markers. In a section titled “Direct from Quarry to Cemetery,” the catalogue promised “Prices within the reach of your pocketbook and in designs heretofore possible only to the wealthy.” With the caveat that these memorializing stones be paid in full in advance of being shipped, families could purchase a “White Granite Marker” for as low as $8.60 or a sweet heart-shaped monument starting at $4.20. Obvious inflation aside, this was a bargain!
For those with a larger commemorative budget, imposing headstones like “A Royal Sarcophagus in the Best Dark Barre Granite” were offered in five different sizes, the smallest costing $113.87. All the lettering was done in-house for the customer, with characters one inch or under costing only 12 cents. Keeping it short made for a steal.
Design options were as numerous as the range of prices offered, depending on the level of detail or text requested. Sears’ granite was touted as coming “from the best quarry in the Barre Mountains of Vermont,” and the Dark Veined and White Rutland Italian Marble was illustrated as having “the best developed strata and veins of the Rutland district in Vermont.” To further drive the point home, in case customers were more concerned with stone quality than a recent death in the family, Sears generously offered to mail “a small sample piece of polished Best Barre Granite” for a mere 75 cents. Now that’s customer service. For the more distraught and distracted, pre-selected epitaphs, described within as “memorial verses,” were listed in the back of the 149-page publication. A price list, unsurprisingly, accompanied the mournful messaging. “Gone, but not forgotten,” a gentle send-off, would be engraved for 47 cents; “Budded on earth to bloom in Heaven,” was a 70-cent phrase.
The advertising and marketing team behind Sears was on point, which is no doubt a major reason for their success; within the first few pages of the catalogue, tombstone testimonials abounded. The bereaved reported how pleased they were to find a company willing to make death a little easier. Mrs. Arabella G. Clarke of Pike, New Hampshire wrote, “Dear Sirs:—The tombstone I received from you is set in Haverhill Cemetery, and I drove out to see it today. I wish to express to you how completely surprised I was with it. It seemed to far surpass your description of it. Did not expect so elegant a stone for the money.” But wait, there’s more! “There are many costly stones in the cemetery, but saw none I should prefer to the one ordered from you.”
In 1993, Sears terminated its catalogues altogether. Bargain headstones—and all their other offerings—haven’t been available by mail-order order since. Today, we take a moment to mourn the tombstone catalogue, along with Sears itself.
These samples of lunar soil are very expensive, too.
Maybe you missed your chance, a few weeks back, to bid on a 12-pound assortment of interlocking lunar meteorites that rained down in Northwest Africa in 2017. These fragments—dubbed NWA 11789 and “Buagaba”—are significantly larger than most other meteorites that crash to Earth, which typically fall somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5 pounds. Maybe you didn’t have a place to proudly display a dozen pounds of extraordinary rock—or maybe you couldn’t rustle up enough change to outbid the winning $612,500 offer.
If you’re short on space but big on enthusiasm for extraterrestrial geology, you’ve got another chance to bring some home. Three little lunar samples will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s on November 29, in an auction dedicated to space exploration.
The trio of tiny rocks was collected by the unmanned Soviet craft Luna-16 in 1970. It landed on the Mare Fecunditatis, dug 13 inches into the ground, and carried a core sample 238,900 miles back to Earth.
The little chunks of basalt and regolith sit together under glass inside a metal block. An adjustable lens magnifies the view—which is helpful, because the rocks range from one to two square millimeters. An inscription reads, in Russian, “ЧАСТИЦЫ ГРУНТА ЛУНЫ-16” (or, “soil particles from Luna-16”).
These last went up for sale in 1993, sold by Nina Ivanova Koroleva, the widow of Sergei Korolev, former director of the Soviet space program. An American collector snatched them up for $442,500, and they’ve been in a private collection ever since. Sotheby’s expects them to go for between $700,000 and $1 million this time around.
It’s pretty unusual to have a chance to snag a piece of the Moon, large or small. The out-of-this-world price tag will certainly limit the number of people who can bid. If the asking price for these slivers of the Moon is too steep, you can always step outside at night and look up at the whole thing.
