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For Sale: Original Poetry by Bonnie and Clyde

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The outlaw lovers had some literary tendencies.

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Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow may be the United States’ most famous outlaw lovers. Together, they racked up a record of murders, thefts, and kidnappings from Texas to Missouri, Arkansas to Oklahoma. They were immortalized on screen by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, and in song by Beyoncé and Jay-Z.

So it’s easy for the couple’s literary achievements to fly under the radar. But in April, Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, will sell a notebook containing what appears to be original poetry written by Bonnie and Clyde.

The notebook, made of green leatherette, is a 1933 “Year Book”—essentially a daily planner for the year. The book’s original owner, apparently a serious or even professional golf player, seems to have tossed the book before the couple recovered it and converted it into a poetry workbook, a creative outlet for them to document and ruminate on their deeds. The poems have been held by the Barrow family since the couple’s deaths, and were consigned to Heritage by Clyde’s nephew.

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The longest poem—16 stanzas spread over the pages for March 17 through March 25—was long ago ripped out of the book, and has since sat in an envelope labeled “Bonnie & Clyde. Written by Bonnie.” Included in the auction alongside the notebook, the poem, known as “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde,” begins:

You’ve read the story of ‘Jesse James’,
Of how he lived and died.
If you’re still in need
Of something to read,
Here’s the story of ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’
Now ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ are the ‘Barrow Gang’,
I’m sure you all have read
How they ‘rob’ and ‘steal’,
And how those who ‘squeal’
Are usually found dying or dead.

A separate poem, attributed to Clyde, runs 13 stanzas over the pages dated from September 20 to September 23. The poem is a response to Bonnie’s, and suggests that Clyde was less comfortable with spelling than his partner. He writes:

Bonnie’s Just Written a poem
the Story of Bonnie & Clyde. So
I will try my hand at Poetry
With her riding by my side.

Later:

We donte want to hurt anney one
but we have to Steal to eat.
and if it’s a shoot out
to live that’s the way it
will have to bee.

Both poems indicate that the bandits understood the precarious nature of living on the run, with Bonnie writing that “they do not ignore / that death is the wages of sin.” Her poem concludes:

Some day they’ll go down together
they’ll bury them side by side
to few it’ll be grief
to the law a relief
but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.

Police officers from Louisiana and Texas shot and killed Bonnie and Clyde near Sailes, Louisiana, on May 23, 1934. This month, an original indictment of the couple issued in May 1934 was found in Tarrant County, Texas.


Meet the Man Behind Brooklyn's Pinball Speakeasy

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It's hidden in the back of a laundromat.

If you walk far enough down the narrow lane of washers and dryers at Sunshine Laundromat, you'll start to hear the dings and clicks of a different coin operated machine. A hidden entrance (the doors of a broken washer-dryer unit) at the back of the laundromat reveals a pinball speakeasy.

Located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Sunshine Laundromat is the brainchild of the coin-operated machine enthusiast and owner Peter Rose. The walls of the bar are lined with pinball machines that flash with high scores and hum with energy. Patrons of all ages come to play, from the league night regulars to school kids who need step stools to reach buttons.

At a quick glance you might not notice what appears to be the bar's second theme: dogs. Statues, paintings, photos and even mosaic table tops feature various and varied canines. But the true mascots of Sunshine Laundromat are Rose's two chocolate labs, who are featured on merchandise and can be seen resting by the folding station (just not in the bar).

Atlas Obscura sat down with Rose to seek answers to some Infrequently Asked Questions about Sunshine Laundromat. Are drunk people better at pinball or laundry? How do you curate your items in your vending machine? What's the most money you've ever held in quarters? To find out these answers and more, watch the video above.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to explore more Atlas Obscura videos.

For Rent: Indiana's Iconic, But Languishing, House of Tomorrow

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There's a catch: You have to be willing to restore the futuristic structure.

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In the newly designated Indiana Dunes National Park, the steel circular framework of a building covered in housewrap is sure to catch your eye. Known as the House of Tomorrow, this structure was once an iconic attempt at futuristic architecture, during a period when hope for a better tomorrow was all most Americans had. However, these days it’s just another dilapidated building. But not for long, if the nonprofit Indiana Landmarks has its way. The organization is offering a 50-year sublease to a skilled restorer who can bring the house back to life.

Designed by the architect George Fred Keck, the building was first displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934, also known as the Century of Progress Exposition. The house itself was complete with floor-to-ceiling glass walls and finished with amenities that were very technologically advanced for the time, including an iceless refrigerator, central air conditioning, the first General Electric dishwasher, a push-button garage door, and an airplane hangar. It was truly a modern marvel and, as noted in Chicago Magazine, a precursor to more famous glass houses by Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe.

After being viewed by nearly 39 million people in Chicago, the House of Tomorrow, along with several other futuristic dwellings from the fair, was shipped across Lake Michigan and stored along the Indiana sand dunes by Robert Bartlett, a Chicago developer who hoped to turn the homes into a trendy vacation spot. But it didn’t happen.

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There the buildings sat, fading from memory until 2000, when Indiana Landmarks began leasing them from the National Park Service, which acquired what was then Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore during the 1960s and 1970s. In turn, the nonprofit was able to sublease the homes to tenants willing to restore them to their original states. Now they are looking for someone to do the same with the House of Tomorrow.

Rebuilding a house that was once the poster child for innovation won’t be easy or cheap. Indiana Landmarks estimates the project will cost somewhere between $2.5 and $3 million to complete. For the 50-year sublease, the organization is searching for someone who has done this type of extensive restoration work in the past and has a strong desire to restore history. “It’s not just the matter of money,” says Todd Zeiger, director of Indiana Landmarks’s northern regional office. “It’s really somebody that has a passion for historical preservation and wants to have a very unique opportunity to restore a house that’s really a one-off.”

Whoever wins the sublease must commit to the home remaining a single-family dwelling, cannot sublease it, and must open the home to tours once a year, but Zeiger says that the new tenants can add their own stylings to fit their preferences. Indiana Landmarks is hoping restoration can begin as early as September.

All the other houses left at dunes—the Florida Tropical House, the Cypress Log Cabin, the Armco-Ferro House, and the Wieboldt-Rostone House—have been returned to their former glory. All that remains is the House of Tomorrow and someone willing to take on the challenge.

This Professor’s Hot Peppers Give New Jersey’s Immigrants a Taste of Home

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The Exotic Pepper Project helps local famers meet the diverse state's demand for heat.

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Albert Ayeni was disappointed. It was 1976, and he had just moved to the United States to pursue his PhD in agronomy at Cornell. Yet something was missing from his new country’s cuisine: “No hot pepper in the diet,” Ayeni says. In his native Nigeria, spice was so ubiquitous that “If you have not eaten a food that has pepper in it, you really haven’t eaten." In a country where spice isn't readily available, says Iyeni, “You don’t feel complete.”

Decades later, that feeling motivated Ayeni when he had the opportunity to lead an agricultural project as professor of plant biology at Rutgers University. Only one crop would do: hot peppers. Thus was born the Rutgers Exotic Pepper Project, which Ayeni and fellow Rutgers professors Tom Orton and Jim Simon founded in 2010. Working out of two substations of the university’s Agricultural Research and Extension Center, the projects’ researchers and student interns adapt hot pepper varieties not traditionally grown in New Jersey to the region’s climate, and develop new strains of their own.

The Rutgers program aims to meet the culinary needs of New Jersey’s diverse population—particularly its growing Asian-American and Latino communities—all while benefiting local farmers. In 2017, the group unveiled the pumpkin habanero, a squat orange variety with a “tangerine” taste and a mild burn of only 50,000 heat units on the Scoville scale, as compared to the roughly 300,000 heat units of the popular Scotch Bonnet. Created by planting African and South American habanero strains in the same field and allowing them to naturally crossbreed, the pumpkin habanero’s mild burn is a good start for people unused to heat, says Ayeni.

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But the Exotic Pepper Project, as one arm of the university's efforts to support the cultivation of so-called ethnic produce in the state, is particularly focused on the unmet needs of people like Ayeni, whose cuisines aren't traditionally represented in American supermarkets. In 2007, Ramu Govindasamy, Professor of Marketing in the Rutgers Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, helped kick off the project by surveying the produce preferences of the East Coast’s Puerto Rican, Mexican-American, Indian-American, and Chinese-American communities.

The survey revealed different demographics than when Ayeni first arrived in the United States, with an accompanying shift in taste. A majority of the respondents reported shopping for produce specific to their cuisines at both conventional grocery stores and ethnic specialty stores. Yet many were unable to find their preferred produce in conventional supermarkets, and didn’t have access to stores specializing in their cuisine. While access to fresh, quality fruits and vegetables was extremely important to them, respondents often found that conventional grocery stores lacked selection and specialty store offerings, though broad, weren’t necessarily better quality. Govindasamy’s report estimated that this hunger for produce represented a billion dollar market.

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That’s good news for New Jersey farmers. Pressed by developers and increasing real estate prices, many Garden State farmers are closing shop. Govindasamy sees New Jersey’s increasingly diverse residents and its struggling farmers as a match made in vegetable heaven. While high-volume farms may find more specialized crops less profitable than the culturally ubiquitous potato, tomato, and onion, Govindasamy says that high-value “ethnic” crops are perfect for New Jersey’s small- and medium-scale growers. Meanwhile, the communities Govindasamy's team surveyed shared a strong preference for locally grown food. Given this preference, New Jersey farmers have the opportunity to prosper by selling fruits and vegetables that the state's immigrant communities will value.

Ayeni's pepper experiments fit right into the ethnic produce project’s lineup, which combines crops new to the United States with favorites such as okra. Common to Asian, African, and American Southern cuisines, the vegetable, Ayeni says, is the first to sell out when Rutgers staff bring it to farmers’ markets. Ayeni is also enthusiastic about tigernuts, multitalented tubers long cultivated in Southern Europe, Asia, and Africa, but uncommon in American grocery stores. They’re delicious snacks, yield nutritious oil, and, says Ayeni, “make the bowel move very well.”

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Hot peppers continue to hold a special place in Ayeni’s heart, and in the Rutgers rotation. The Exotic Pepper Program is planning to unveil three more varieties at this year’s Rutgers Day, where the public can sample them and purchase seedlings to take home (Ayeni says they'll be hot). There are also plans to distribute the tangy pumpkin habanero’s seeds commercially. While market adoption of the peppers has been slow, Ayeni believes that with a little encouragement, the project can encourage consumers unused to spice to broaden their culinary horizons. “People are inquisitive,” he says.

Meanwhile, locally grown hot peppers promise to be a godsend for those disappointed by mainstream grocery stores. While the “spiciness” of Asian, Latin American, and African foods can be a loaded stereotype, for New Jerseyans like Ayeni, the Exotic Pepper Project’s produce tastes like home. Just as he craved his own cuisine as a newly arrived PhD student decades ago, says Ayeni, “They want to eat something they’re familiar with.”

At the Church of 8 Wheels, Roller-Skating Fans' Prayers Have Been Answered

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This former house of worship in San Francisco is now a hotspot for skaters of all ages.

At 4:45 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in early January 2019, a dozen kids, aged 10 to 17, congregate on the sidewalk outside a large church on the corner on San Francisco’s Fillmore and Fell Streets. As the minutes pass, more kids, some of them accompanied by their parents, stroll up and join the group. They laugh together and bounce on their heels in anticipation, taking frequent glances up the stairs, waiting for the front doors to push open and welcome them inside.

Finally, at 5 p.m. sharp, three bells sound from the tower, the doors open, and an African-American man, wearing a glittery, gold-and-white top-hat; a long, fur-lined robe; and fuzzy roller skates—like a superfly Willy Wonka—stands at the top of the landing, smiles, and invites everyone to come in, pick up their skates, and have fun.

This isn’t a sight you’d expect to find at most churches, but the Church of 8 Wheels isn’t your ordinary church. It isn’t, technically, even a church—at least not one with any particular tenet or dogma, other than the gospel of roller skating. In front of a neon-lit altar, a DJ plays disco, soul, and pop music, while skaters make their revolutions underneath disco balls, laser lights, ceiling frescos, and stained-glass windows of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

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At the center of it all is founder, impresario, emcee, and avowed “Godfather of Skate,” David G. Miles, Jr. For four decades, Miles has been an evangelist for roller skating in the Bay Area: promoting skating in schools, advocating for car-free spaces, and organizing charity skates (he has led skaters from San Francisco to Los Angeles 15 times for charitable causes). He’s also a fixture at Burning Man, where, for 19 years, he’s managed Black Rock Roller Disco, a full-size roller rink in the middle of the desert.

For Miles, roller skating isn’t a hobby, an idle curiosity, or something exclusive to children’s birthday parties. It’s a lifestyle, one with numerous social benefits.

“I want to make people look at skating as not just this fad that goes in and out,” Miles says. “I want people to take it seriously. It has serious implications, for transportation, health, and community.”

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Miles arrived in the city 40 years ago, in February 1979, “on a one-way bus ticket from Kansas City.” He was 22 years old. He quickly fell in with the local roller-skating community, becoming head of the Golden Gate Park Skate Patrol—a volunteer unit that enforced park rules and maintained safety—and the de facto leader of the Golden Gate Park Sunday sessions. Every Sunday for the past four decades, large crowds of roller skaters have descended on Golden Gate Park, skating and partying together underneath the open sky, with Miles’s mobile DJ unit providing music.

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But only five years ago Miles realized he wanted a place for people to skate during the rainy months. Roller rinks had been shuttering all across the country, and the Bay Area was not immune. The few surviving roller rinks were outside San Francisco’s prohibitively expensive real estate markets, in places such as San Ramon and Antioch, a 45- and 50-minute drive away, respectively.

A friend told Miles he knew of a church in the Fillmore District that had been sitting empty since 2004, now owned by a property management company. Miles made some inquiries and, after cleaning up the space and making some renovations, he began hosting weekly roller disco parties inside the nearly century-old Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

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Completed in 1898 by the renowned San Francisco architect Thomas John Welsh, Sacred Heart is a broad and imposing Romanesque building, with Tuscan columns and a lofty bell tower, looking out over the Western Addition and Hayes Valley. Over the decades, the church served the changing demographics of the neighborhood, starting at the turn of the 20th century with a congregation made up largely of Irish immigrants. In the 1930s and ‘40s, as tens of thousands of African Americans came to the city for work, largely concentrating in and around the Fillmore District, Sacred Heart soon had the distinction of being one of San Francisco’s only predominantly African-American Catholic parishes.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the parish became a center of social activism, under the brief, radical, and often controversial leadership of Father Eugene Boyle. An outspoken advocate of civil rights, fair housing, and the farm labor movement, Father Boyle opened Sacred Heart’s doors to Vietnam War protesters, labor activists, and the Black Panther Party, who held their free breakfast program for children in the parish’s basement.

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But though the building had survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, the church was issued a $8,000,000 seismic repair bill in 2004 that it now found itself unable to pay. Church and community members joined with landmark preservationists to raise $280,000 in a campaign to save the church, but with a declining number of parishioners, rising costs, and deteriorating infrastructure (a net had at one point hung over the pews to catch falling plaster from the ceiling), Sacred Heart held its final Mass on December 26, 2004.

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The building soon fell into neglect and disrepair. According to Miles, people broke into the building to use drugs in the basement. Many of the adornments, including the marble altar and some of the stained-glass windows, were removed and sold by a building owner. After changing ownership at least twice, the building was purchased by a San Francisco-based contractor, who’d intended to replace the church with residential units.

That’s when Miles stepped in. But he saw immediately that he had his work cut out for him. “This place was a wreck, man,” he says.

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Agreeing to a week-by-week trial run with the owner, Miles swept out the trash, ran out the drug users, pushed the church pews against the walls, and replaced the 3,800-square-foot tile floor with a polyurethane-coated wooden rink. He installed a disco ball, strobe lights, and a state-of-the-art sound system. After the success of the first couple of months, Miles signed an extended lease with the property owner in 2013, establishing a legitimate home for the newly christened Church of 8 Wheels.

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Every Friday at five p.m., the church opens for two hours to skaters of all ages, bringing kids and teens just out of school for the weekend. Two hours later, the doors close, then reopen at eight p.m. to skaters 21 and older, staying open until midnight. Saturday afternoons are available for instructors (or “apostles”) to give skating lessons; three to five p.m. is reserved for families; and the weekend ends with another adult skate session, from seven to 11 p.m. It costs 10 dollars to enter, and an additional five dollars to rent skates. The church is also available to rent for private events, or corporations looking for an unconventional party experience.

The only official employee is the operations manager Daniel Albert, who is himself a longtime skater. Teens volunteer at the rental booth in exchange for skating time, and Miles’s wife, Rose, collects money at the door. Rose and David met in May 1979, while the two were skating at Golden Gate Park. They have two daughters, one son, and one granddaughter, all of whom have taken up roller skating. Their son, David Miles III, is also the house DJ, and can be seen Fridays and Saturdays at the neon-lit DJ booth, playing crowd-favorites such as Michael Jackson and Prince.

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The popularity of the Church of 8 Wheels owes in large part to its novelty. But that novelty is also somewhat tinged with nostalgia for a bygone era. San Francisco, of course, is not the same city it once was. In the 1970s, San Francisco was synonymous with eccentricity, flamboyance, and free-spiritedness. But in the past two decades, as the tech industry has established its seemingly indomitable presence, contributing to skyrocketing living costs, many of the artists and other bohemians have been priced out of the city. Hayes Valley, home of Sacred Heart Church, was once a working-class and predominantly African-American neighborhood. Today it is known more for its chic fashion shops, upscale restaurants, and trendy boutiques. In 21st-century San Francisco, there are fewer and fewer places in the city to let your freak flag fly. That’s perhaps the biggest appeal of the Church of 8 Wheels. It not only provides a space to dress up, act weird, and be part of a community; it represents a time when these things were part of daily life.

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While the church fills a unique niche in the city, it is also unique among other roller rinks, due to the diversity of the skaters and the historic legacy of the building. And unlike conventional roller rinks, elaborate costumes are not just welcomed at the Church of 8 Wheels, but encouraged. “Roller rinks have rules: ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that,’” Miles says. “I don’t have that. My rule is, you can’t let what you do hurt others. And you need to let people be themselves. If you can do that, you can hang.”

The church has been visited by tourists, CEOs, and local politicians, and it received national attention in August 2015, when Caitlyn Jenner laced up a pair of skates for an episode of her show, I Am Cait. But for the most part the clientele consists of locals of all ages, ethnicities, and skill levels.

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During my first visit, to a Friday afternoon all-ages session, Miles was out on the rink, patiently helping kids who were struggling to stay upright. “Put your feet in a V and walk like a duck,” he tells them.

I returned the next night for the adult skate, and the vibe was more carnivalesque—and much more crowded. A line stretched out the door the entire night. Capacity is currently 149 (Miles says he is making renovations to accommodate 100 more), and it felt like we were pushing right up against that threshold. Skaters were shoulder to shoulder. There were at least two birthday parties. Many people had come dressed in glitter, wigs, and technicolor tights. It felt like being in the hottest nightclub in town, albeit one where people regularly fall on their butts.

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Though managing the Church of 8 Wheels now occupies much of his time, Miles feels as passionately about skating as he did the day he stepped off the bus in 1979 and laced up his first pair of skates.

“There’s a sense of freedom about it. It’s a very unique thing,” he says. “I just get a kick out of it. I love skating. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s inclusive. It’s a rainbow of people, from all walks of life. There’s nothing to prove. If you’re a great skater, that’s cool. But if you’re not, that’s cool too.”

What Poop Can Teach Us About an Ancient City's Downfall

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Cahokia's decline is at least partially a story of climate change.

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Never underestimate the power of poop. After more than 1,000 years, it can still have a lot to offer.

Just ask the authors of a new study, out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which discusses how fecal remains can teach us about the rise and fall of Cahokia, an ancient city less than 10 miles outside of present-day St. Louis, Missouri. According to UNESCO, Cahokia was “the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico.”

Previous excavations of houses in the area, said co-author Sissel Schroeder in a press release, had found that the city’s population began to grow around the year 600, peaking by 1100 with tens of thousands of residents. Things began to change around 1200, with the city emptying out by 1400. AJ White, lead author of the new study and a Ph.D. candidate in archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley, set out with his colleagues to fuse data from both the archaeological and environmental records, in hopes of clarifying what drove out Cahokia’s residents.

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Naturally, the researchers turned to poop. More of it was deposited, of course, when more people were living in the area—so, they wondered, would poop dating from the time of the downturn contain any clues as to what was going on then? To investigate, White and his colleagues examined two sediment cores taken from Cahokia’s Horseshoe Lake. (One was newly cored by White, the other by the environmental scientist Samuel Munoz in 2015.) These cores contain “fecal stanols,” traces of the human poop that drifted off from the land and into the lake. Researchers are able to date the cores because as they get newer, they appear higher up within the lake.

The team compared the levels of fecal stanols to those of other stanols that come from bacteria in the soil. They found that, the younger the sediments got, the heavier their oxygen concentrations—meaning that water was evaporating along with lighter forms of oxygen. In other words, there was probably less precipitation during Cahokia’s later years—when we know from excavations that fewer people were living there—thus impeding local agriculture and causing the population to thin out. The fall of Cahokia, it seems, is at least partially a story of climate change. It’s a tale that’s been told by other poops as well, such as those of Incan llamas in the Andes.

See a Dazzling, Exuberant Renaissance Calligraphy Guide

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A masterclass in script, illuminated with an array of curiosities.

Separated by nearly 30 years and more than 200 miles, two Renaissance men created what is perhaps the most impressive, unusual, inventive illuminated manuscript in the Western world. Full of swirling and knotted words, letters that spindle or drip and curl across the page, bite-begging fruit and bugs realistic enough to swat, Mira calligraphae monumenta is an astounding record of imagination and skill, in book form.

Georg Bocksay, then secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I in Vienna, composed the manuscript over the course of 1561 and 1562. Commissioned as a calligraphy manual, it was more like a catalogue of Bocksay’s unparalleled penmanship. A century before, the printing press had overtaken the handwritten manuscript, and transformed the trade skills of lettering and illumination into something more akin to art forms. Rather than instruction, the manuscript provides a bombastic display of Bocksay’s skill, and showcases the artisan talent that the emperor was able to attract. “It’s kind of in the stratosphere,” says Elizabeth Morrison, a specialist in Flemish illumination at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where the manuscript is housed.

Most of the actual text of Mira calligraphae monumenta is taken from the Bible—the “lorem ipsum" graphic filler used in those times. The dizzying circular text on a page featuring a pair of pears and a seashell is actually the Lord’s Prayer squeezed into an area the size of a quarter, dexterously rendered with a bird-quill pen and runny ink. Bocksay used the same tools as other scribes of his day, but he had the advantage of experience. Having been born into a noble family in Croatia, he learned to read and write at an early age. This allowed him to develop his calligraphic skill so much that he could support himself and his family on it. Even as handwritten books were going out of fashion, elites such as emperors still had the appetite—and budget—for them.

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It was common for a manuscript’s text and illuminations to be created by different artists. Bocksay had left room for illuminations around his pyrotechnic displays of penmanship. But the image of familiar flowers, delectable fruit, and animals from the Americas were not created during Bocksay’s life, but 15 years after his death. Their artist, Joris Hoefnagel, was hired by Emperor Rudolph II, Ferdinand’s grandson. Although the Flemish Hoefnagel never knew his Croatian counterpart Bocksay, he responded to the inscriptions with a matching degree of deftness and play. On a page where the text is adorned with curling shoots studded with black dots, Hoefnagel echoed the style with a drawing of pea pods. On another, trompe l'oeil ants crawl among the feathery, gilt tendrils of Bocksay’s work.

Some pages—unusually for this time period—had solid black backgrounds. For these, Boshkay used a resist technique, in which he lettered with a substance such as beeswax that would repel the black used to coat the rest of the page. Conservators have not yet identified the blacking substance, but it may have been ash.

On one of these black pages—there are six in the 184-page manuscript—Hoefnagel drew a sloth, an example of the New World life the emperor was attracted to. Rudolph II had moved from Vienna to seclusion in a castle in Prague. For his Kunst-und-Wunderkammer—a cabinet of curiosities and wonder—he sourced specimens that had never before seen in Europe. Accounting records of compensation doled out to survivors of attacks and families of fatalities confirm that he kept a live lion and tiger, who roamed around his castle.

Pages from Mira calligraphae monumenta are on view at the Getty Museum until April 7, 2019, and again from May through August. Atlas Obscura has a selection of pages from the manuscript.

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The Soviet Union Encouraged Children to Take Pictures, But Rarely Showed Them

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“Just as every forward-looking comrade must have a watch, so must he be able to handle a camera."

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In 1924, a small child named Volodia wobbled around Soviet Leningrad toting a large-format camera and documenting his world. At least, that is the story told in The Sparrow, a Leningrad-based children’s magazine, which ran at the time. The magazine’s short-lived “The Strolling Photographer” column followed Volodia’s adventures as he captured his city with a camera bigger than his head, received photographs from “friends” in Berlin and farther afield, and called for readers to submit photos of their own—none of which were ever published in the magazine.

The column was part of a broader Soviet “photographic literacy” project that encouraged child photographers in the 1920s and 1930s. Verbal literacy programs of the period had been highly successful, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Union’s first Commissar of Enlightenment, wanted to see more progress. “Just as every forward-looking comrade must have a watch, so must he be able to handle a camera,” Lunacharsky said in the inaugural issue of Sovetsko foto, the Soviet Union’s only specialized photography magazine, in 1926. Children’s photo groups, or fotokruzhok, sprung up around the nation, organized either by schools or by the children themselves. Children’s magazines and journals began featuring calls for children’s photography submissions and encouraged them to take part in magazine production as fotokory, or photo correspondents. The magazines also published technical instruction on do-it-yourself camera construction. But while images of these children abound, the results of their documentary efforts haven't seen the light of day.

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“Our sample is skewed by what ends up in print and in instructions from adults,” says Katherine Reischl, author of the new book, Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors. Children’s photographs were more often hung on “wall newspapers” in schools and displayed in their clubs than they were published anywhere. Although there was a definite effort by Soviet authorities to put cameras in the hands of kids, the success of these programs is more difficult to track than the verbal literacy efforts. State censorship and technological limitations mean that very few photos taken by Soviet children soon after the revolution have survived, and those that remain are of poor quality due to material limitations of the time.

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While Lunacharsky was promoting creativity, “the camera presented a ‘bounded’ potential—one limited by the camera’s frames and technologically driven, which would have allied well with the big industrial pushes of the new Soviet state,” says Reischl. Children were indeed being publicly encouraged to document the truth of life around them, but their creativity was subject to official oversight. “In an ideologically charged and driven place like the Soviet Union, an image always has a ‘right’ reading—and what’s ‘right’ can shift very suddenly,” she adds. Meanwhile Volodia, the little flaneur-photographer in The Sparrow, made suspiciously un-childlike statements such as, “[The camera] reveals the truth … not something that the artist draws from his head.”

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Overall, the real lives of children in the early decades of the Soviet Union must not have been on-brand enough for promoting the communist project. “The Soviet authorities imagined a world that is the one we live in today, but instead of framing it in Instagram filters, it was through the lens of socialist realism," Rieschl says. “That was the filter they hoped to apply to the camera that was in the hands of every Soviet citizen.”


Czechia’s ‘Bone Church’ Is Getting a Good, Thorough Cleaning

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A team of experts will be restoring four decorative pyramids, made of human remains.

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In the city of Kutná Hora in Czechia, a 15th-century Gothic church is in desperate need of upkeep. But this isn’t your average restoration effort because the church in need is the Sedlec Ossuary, a structure decorated with tens of thousands of human bones.

The ossuary is one of the most visited places in Czechia, drawing in around up to half a million visitors annually. According to Reuters, the famed haunt is now undergoing a macabre makeover. Inside the ossuary rest four large pyramids composed entirely of bones. A team of restoration professionals is tasked with first disassembling the pyramids. The experts will then give the bones a thorough cleansing before reassembling the structures back to their ghoulish glory. The goal isn’t to just have a stack of good-looking bones, but to strengthen the integrity of the 600-year-old church, which serves as the final resting place of plague victims as well as casualties of the crusades.

During an outbreak of the plague during the 14th century, around 30,000 people were buried in the cemetery that sat next to what was then the Sedlec Abbey. In the century that followed, another 10,000 bodies were buried there following the holy wars between Roman Catholics and Hussites. The popular burial spot became so overran with corpses that caretakers were forced to exhume the bodies in the 16th century to create space.

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While the basic structure of the church has existed since the 15th century, it wasn’t until 1870 when the woodcarver František Rint began sculpting and bleaching the excess bones into their current artistic forms. Crosses were made from femurs, bones stretched across archways, and from the ceiling hung a chandelier rumored to be comprised of every bone in the human body.

To accurately rebuild the pyramids, the restoration team is utilizing photos, video-mapping, and computer models. The project is expected to take around two years to complete.

What Is an 'Ice Shove'?

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“This is an impressive display of the power of wind and water!”

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Until it melts, ice often stays put where it forms. Under certain conditions, though, it goes on an adventure, advancing over land. It might plod or rush over sand, grass, and asphalt, or even seem to leap from the water like sharp, shiny salmon.

That’s what happened in Fort Erie, Canada, last weekend, when hefty chunks of ice climbed partway up lampposts and tree trunks.

This phenomenon, sometimes called an “ice tsunami,” is also known as an “ice shove” or an "ice push." It happens when there's a perfect storm of factors, including fierce winds, loose ice, and a gently sloping shore, according to the European Geosciences Union.

That same day that ice roamed the streets of Fort Erie—which sits across from Buffalo, New York, on the shore of the Niagara River—blustery whiteout conditions led to collisions and road closures across portions of Ontario. The striking heaps of ice were reminders that the Great Lakes region sees some ferocious weather, which can sometimes turn lethal. The large freshwater lakes hide several thousand shipwrecks, including many that were lost to storms.

“I don’t think people take the Great Lakes seriously enough sometimes,” says Mark Robinson, a meteorologist with The Weather Network and a veteran storm-chaser, who reported from the scene. Robinson has trailed tornadoes and hurricanes, and an ice shove was on his bucket list of natural phenomena. He had a hunch that one might show up near Fort Erie, because the forecast had the wind ferrying ice floes toward the portion of Lake Erie at the mouth of the Niagara River. "I knew that the ice would jam up and be forced onshore as it moved into the river," Robinson says.

And that it did. Robinson and his crew measured average sustained winds around 60 miles per hour, and gusts above 81 miles per hour (sustained speeds topping 74 miles per hour are considered hurricane-strength). “I’ve never seen ice moving that fast,” Robinson says. “It was crazy fast.” In some footage, which he shared with Atlas Obscura (above), Robinson chants "Here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go," in enthusiastic awe as the ice sprawls on shore.

When it hopped onto land, it accumulated in unstable mountains. As these grew, Robinson and his crew measured the chunks with the tools they had handy, including their own hands and their microphones. The pieces were about 11 to 15 inches thick, and the piles were roughly 25 feet high.

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“This is an impressive display of the power of wind and water!” Robinson shouted from the shore, above the growling wind. The cameras kept rolling while he backed away from the next wave of ice, which caused a heap to tumble down onto the sidewalk and break for the trees. There was a roar as the wind heaved more ice onto the pile—and the reporter and camera crew marveled with a chorus of “wow.”

Robinson says that locals crowded around to stare, captivated by the ever-growing pile. “There was nothing you could do to stop it,” Robinson says. “All you could do was get out of its way.”

Austin Just Sent Its Favorite Queso Recipe to the Moon

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One small step for cheese, one giant leap for cheese, kinda.

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In the quest to communicate with life beyond our tiny blue planet, human beings have sent records of our most meaningful cultural expressions into space: Beethoven’s Fifth, a mother’s kiss, and now, queso. Thanks to Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, the recipe for this melty, cheesy, Tex-Mex classic is currently en route to the moon.

“We choose to send queso to the Moon—and maybe someday chips as well—not because these things are easy, but because they are hard,” said Adler, self-described “Mayor of All the Queso,” in a press release.

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Adler sent the recipe onboard a SpaceX Rocket, Falcon 9, which launched from Cape Canaveral on February 21 and is scheduled to land on the lunar surface by April 11. It was included alongside a “Lunar Library” that will be dropped with an Israeli lander, the first from that country. The Lunar Library consists of radiation-proof nickel disks, each only 40 microns thick, laser-etched with minuscule letters spelling out a library of human knowledge. The disks hold digital material as well. This Billion Year Archive is an initiative of the Arch Mission Foundation, which seeks to “continuously preserve and disseminate humanity’s most important knowledge across time and space.” The library contains the entirety of English Wikipedia and tens of thousands of books.

Accompanying this record of human achievement is a letter from Adler addressed to “Extraterrestrials! Or Martians. Or space beings. Or Future Humans from Mars.” In what may be the first interplanetary real estate pitch, Adler suggests extraterrestrials visit or move to Austin, and promises them free puppies and unlimited queso. “Have you heard of queso?” Adler asks. “Have you tried it? Do it. Do it now.” Addressing the obvious problem of where, precisely, aliens would encounter queso in a hostile lunar landscape, Adler encloses a queso recipe from Kerbey Lane, a popular Austin cafe whose previously secret recipe attracts fans from across the region.

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Kerbey Lane’s queso recipe isn’t the first record of culinary achievement sent into space. That honor goes to the photos of food included as part of the Golden Records, two gold-plated records containing a collection of music, sounds, and photos meant to communicate the soul of humanity to our interstellar neighbors. NASA sent the Golden Records, compiled by a team led by Carl Sagan, into space on Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977. While NASA originally designed the Voyagers to last five years and provide close-range observations of Jupiter and Saturn, they’re still sending data back to earth 41 years and 13 billion miles later.

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They’re also still bearing culinary gifts for any extraterrestrials that may cross their path, including an image of a woman eating grapes in the produce section of a supermarket, a child breastfeeding, and a triptych demonstrating human beings licking ice cream, eating toast, and drinking water. The last image has proven particularly controversial, with some human commentators fearing the photographic subject’s eccentric approach to eating toast has deterred friendly aliens from making contact.

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More poignantly, the Golden Record includes one of the most human sentiments of all: an invitation for the denizens of outer space to come and break bread with us. “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet?” the speaker asks in the South Min Chinese dialect. “Come visit us if you have time.”

While some fear extraterrestrials would rather eat us than eat with us—and while it’s admittedly doubtful that aliens who find these messages would understand them—the invitations are a gesture of interstellar peace. Our urge to share food with aliens is a foolish and beautiful act of hope: the hope that we are not alone, and that other life forms in this universe will appreciate a bowl of queso.

In 1930s Tunisia, French Doctors Feared a 'Tea Craze' Would Destroy Society

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It was seen as a threat to colonial rule.

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In 1927, at a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in Paris, a French-trained Tunisian doctor, Béchir Dinguizli, sounded the alarm about a “new social scourge” spreading like an “oil stain” across Tunisia. It had “entered our morals with lightning speed,” he warned, and if not stopped by French authorities, it had the power to paralyze Tunisian society.

The alarming threat? Drinking tea.

Tea had been introduced to Tunisia, a French colony since 1881, relatively recently. Although practically unknown before World War I, tea imports nevertheless shot up from 100,000 kilos in 1917 to 1,100,000 in 1926. The catalyst appears to have been the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912, which sent an influx of tea-drinking refugees from Tripolitania (modern-day Libya) into Tunisia.

The rapid spread of tea became a topic of discussion during several meetings of the Great Council of Tunisia in 1925 and 1926. Among these French administrators, there was real fear that the colonized population was turning into tea addicts, with medical, social, and economic consequences for France’s mission civilisatrice.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, numerous French authors (and one Tunisian) urged the French government to take action against tea, claiming that Tunisian men, women, and children were drinking it all day without moderation or restraint. The journal Colonial Annals summarized these fears in 1930, asserting, “The harm that [tea] causes is especially visible in the [Tunisian] countryside, where it weakens the race, which is literally intoxicated and morally and physically diminished.”

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French publications named this phenomenon “teaism,” a medical diagnosis that had already been established in the 19th century, and ascribed it, somewhat bizarrely, both to an innate lack of self-control in all (uneducated) Tunisians, and to them preparing the “wrong” kind of tea in the “wrong” way. In 1941, the French doctor Edmond Sergent described in several scientific articles how Tunisians, instead of adding fresh tea leaves to already boiling water, added used leaves to the water as it boiled, creating a harmful, tar-like drink. Sergent also argued that Tunisians’ black tea was more dangerous than Moroccan green tea, which explained why cases of teaism were rare in Morocco, despite Morocco’s tea consumption being much higher.

According to Dinguizli, teaism was an addiction comparable to alcoholism, a form of chronic poisoning with nervous tremors, amnesia, palpitations, blurred vision, serious disturbances of the nervous and circulatory system, a general weakening of the body, and even a marked decrease in birth rates. Later authors delineated additional mental consequences, such as hallucinations, delusions, and even psychoses.

However, an altruistic, medical concern for Tunisians does not fully explain the colonial fascination with teaism. Instead, settlers were motivated by social fears and economic concerns.

The perceived social consequences of teaism were founded in the belief that tea addicts would do almost anything to satisfy their habit. According to Sergent, the whole salary of many Tunisian workers went “to the buying of tea and sugar.” When their money ran out, Tunisian teaists sold their last possessions, stole from employers, friends, and family, and, in Dinguizli’s words, lost their “usually docile character.” This alarmed the French, as those succumbing to the “vice of tea” were understood to be potential criminals. There were even court cases where the legal responsibility of Tunisians who had committed murder and manslaughter under the influence of tea was argued. The French doctor Henri-Paul-Joseph Renaud wrote in 1928 of discussions at the Society for Medical Sciences in Tunis about the case of a 22-year-old Tunisian who had committed “parricide during a hallucinatory attack,” due to his daily consumption of 75 to 100 grams of tea.

By the 1940s, a variety of publications had ceased to view teaism as an exclusively Tunisian problem, as diagnoses cropped up elsewhere in the Maghreb, such as, in 1948, the psychiatrist Charles Bardenat offhandedly ascribing an act of conjugal manslaughter committed in Algeria to the overconsumption of coffee and tea.

Meanwhile, the economic consequences of teaism were linked to fears of a lack of labor—a serious financial concern for French colonizers and upper-class Tunisians. Worrying stories spread about Tunisians too exhausted to work after nights of drinking tea, chatting, and gambling. In an article published in 1928, the pro-colonial politician Mario Roustan, a “director of public hygiene,” claimed that “from morning to evening, all day and for a large part of the night, [rural Tunisian men] are squatting around a tea kettle, drinking and doing nothing.” Tellingly, not a single case of a French settler in Tunisia being diagnosed with teaism can be found in the French publications.

These medical, social, and economic consequences were discussed at length in France as a potential threat to French settlement. The first of many articles about this “new intoxication” was published on the front page of the French newspaper, Le Matin. It appeared the day after Dinguizli’s paper, which was ominously titled “‘Teaism,’ A Personal and Social Danger.” In Tunisia, French administrators tried banning illegal coffeehouses, which served tea, and increasing customs duties on tea. There were also calls for posters and educational films on the dangers of tea and how to prepare it correctly, for creating a state monopoly on tea, and even a law restricting tea sales to pharmacies upon presentation of a prescription. But nothing helped.

In my postdoctoral research on teaism, Dinguizli was the sole Tunisian voice I uncovered among the publications dealing with the dangers of drinking tea from the 1920s to 1950s, and I could not find records of Tunisians’ responding to the medical diagnosis. This points to the lack of interest among colonial administrators in the view of the population they believed they were civilizing. Within the medical field, it’s possible Tunisian voices were similarly ignored, but the prominence of Dinguizli’s report suggests that theorizing on teaism simply held little interest for Tunisians, a somewhat reasonable silence when one considers that, despite decades of French concern, teaism is not an actual malady. Tea neither produced hallucinations nor induced crime, and it did not “corrupt” Tunisians. They simply enjoyed a new drink that French authors objected to.

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So why did French doctors and officials fret over teaism for so long? Their concern appears less baffling in light of tea’s reception in other countries. When tea first reached England in the 17th and 18th centuries, writers described it as un-British, “unmanly,” and altogether dangerous. Food or drink that is new, popular, and foreign regularly provokes misgivings and wild concern. Across Europe, there were initially comparable doubts about coffee—a foreign substance spreading unnaturally fast that was believed to endanger health and cause addiction. Even chocolate, once the drink of choice at rowdy British clubs, inspired similar concern.

Seeing so many Tunisians drink tea also hit a nationalist nerve for the French, who viewed tea as a British drink and its popularity as proof of British influence. In an 1887 book, for example, a French traveller in Morocco who is constantly offered tea laments, “Looks like the English have been there! Heaven confound them!” The French viewed coffee, which was produced in their colonies of Martinique and La Réunion, as the drink of the Enlightenment and reason. But, as a 1928 magazine article dramatically put it, in Tunisia, “Tea has killed the divine ‘cavoua [coffee].’”

To see Tunisians enjoying this unfavored drink fed French fears. The sight of Tunisians sitting and chatting over tea fueled settler prejudices about Tunisians as lazy and immoderate—nearly all descriptions of teaism focused on the economic consequences. But as a ruling minority, they particularly feared attacks, revolt, and any sign of the population losing their supposed “docility.” In a 1928 article, for example, Renaud, wrote, “Settlers [and] Muslims of the enlightened class sounded the alarm, denounced the rise of attacks on goods and people, and asked the Government to carefully lead the fight against the increase in tea consumption.”

In 1956, Tunisia gained independence, following years of violence and negotiations. At that point, teaism declined as a medical diagnosis (though, surprisingly, not entirely). The irony of teaism is that the only real epidemic was the diagnosis of teaism itself. Today, tea is practically Tunisia’s national drink.

Please Stop Stuffing Yorkshire Pudding Down the Drain

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A bunch of them clogged a sewer in England, like little fatbergs made from flour and eggs.

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When technicians working with Anglian Water reported to the site of a recent sewer blockage in the town of Ipswich, in Suffolk, England, they knew that something had stoppered the flow of water and caused it to pool in the street. They just didn't know what.

Regardless, they probably girded themselves for something weird: In the past, they had hauled all sorts of culprits from the pipes. The vast majority of these have been wet wipes, which have a nasty habit of nourishing fatbergs, those gloopy subterranean behemoths that cause trouble in cities around the world. Wet wipes contribute to 80 percent of the 40,000 blockages that Anglian Water has to combat each year, according to Nicola Harvey, a spokesperson for the utility company. So, it’s likely that the technicians dispatched to unclog the pipes were recalling things they’d fished out in the past—cutlery, cell phones, children’s toys, fake teeth. This time, though, the offender was one they hadn’t seen before: a bunch of Yorkshire puddings.

The savory baked goods belong on the table, and then in bellies—not heaped down the drain in all their fluffy, golden-brown glory. Yet there they were. Because the puddings are so common in England—and since they had held up pretty well—“they would have been easily recognizable,” Harvey says. They still looked quite a bit like puddings, just soggy and much less appetizing.

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Harvey’s not quite sure exactly how many puddings were down there, but confirms that it was “quite a lot”—enough to lead the utility to suspect that they had been dumped by a restaurant, as opposed to an individual family that had forsaken their leftovers. After the technicians removed them by hand (their standard practice for unblocking these types of clogs, Harvey says), they tossed the puddings away.

There’s still plenty of debate about what is truly safe to flush down the drain, and which wipes, if any, belong there. New York City's new anti-fatberg campaign asks residents to flush only the "four P's"—poop, pee, puke, and toilet paper—while other cities entertain a slightly broader view. In January 2019, in an effort to fight fatbergs, Anglian Water teamed up with other providers and the group Water U.K. on the “Fine to Flush” campaign, which awards seals of approval to any wipes that pass a test in a simulated toilet and sewer environment. To be deemed flushable, wipes will need to travel through pipes without staying lodged, be able to break apart if they snag, and disintegrate enough that all of the soggy mass can pass through a sieve with 0.98-inch (or 25 millimeter) openings, among other requirements.

Suffice to say, Yorkshire puddings aren't getting that seal. "We're sure even our friends at @YorkshireWater wouldn't welcome this sight!" Anglian Water quipped on Twitter.

Bake the puddings, eat the puddings, love the puddings—but please don’t flush them.

Found: A Giant Sloth Tooth in a 200-Foot-Deep Sinkhole

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The bone helps to explain how the creature stuck around for more than 10,000 years.

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It’s fitting that a sloth would stay in place for 27,000 years. A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has located the remains of a giant sloth—which could have stood up to 13 feet tall—in a sinkhole in central Belize, and has used them to piece together aspects of the mega-sloth’s prehistoric lifeworld. They report their findings today in the journal Science Advances.

The team unearthed the remains—comprising a humerus, a femur, and a particularly massive tooth that is nearly four inches long and more than an inch wide—back in 2014, while trying to find Maya artifacts in the deep pool. One possible explanation for how the giant sloth fell about 70 feet into the sinkhole is that it was looking for water, at the time much scarcer in the region than it is today. During the Last Glacial Maximum, when earth’s glaciers were last at their thickest and sea levels at their lowest, those icy masses had stowed away much of the water that would have previously been available to the sloth and others, possibly leading it to look down the hole from which it never emerged.

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The sloth tooth immediately offered the researchers their share of obstacles. First—unlike the teeth of other extinct giant mammals, such as mammoths—giant sloth teeth do not have enamel, the hard dental coating that can often teach researchers about an organism’s diet. Second, a good deal of the tooth had been fossilized, meaning that some of its original tissue and bone had been replaced with minerals.

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To determine which parts of the tooth were still open to analysis, the team used “cathodoluminescence microscopy” to set the minerals aglow and isolate the surviving tissue. The lead author Jean Larmon was then able to analyze some 20 samples of orthodentin, the main substance in teeth. The samples illustrated more than a year of dental growth, and showcased the sloth’s impressive ability to adapt to seasonal and dietary changes. “What this study really tells us,” Larmon writes in an email, “is that these sloths were surviving in rather extreme seasonality in the Late Pleistocene, with just a three-month rainy season and a nine-month dry season, and that they were able to shift their diet with this seasonality” between the different kinds of plants available at different times.

“That means that they were pretty adaptable,” writes Larmon, which helps to explain how they were likely around for more than 10,000 years, and that their eventual extinction probably had to do with more than just climate-related stressors. Don’t mistake a sloth’s laziness for weakness; these guys can hold their own.

Secrets of One of the Earliest Terrestrial Globes

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The Hunt-Lenox Globe is significant in so many ways.

The Hunt-Lenox Globe is one of the earliest terrestrial globes known to man. It was likely created between 1505 and 1510 in France or Italy, according to Michael Inman, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the New York Public Library. Among geographers, the Hunt-Lenox is especially known as the earliest known depiction of the Americas. South America and parts of Central America are etched into the globe, though the landmass cuts off at where present-day Panama is located. The islands of present-day Cuba and Hispaniola are also depicted.

Some smaller details on the globe include caravels (a style of ship contemporary with Columbus’s exploration of the New World) and sea monsters thought to be dreamt up by the unknown artist. Perhaps the most memorable detail, however, is the Latin phrase “HC SVNT DRACONES,” placed in the region of present-day Southeast Asia. Translated to English, the phrase means “here lie dragons” or “here be dragons.” Inman says that many later maps or globes that were designed to appear as if they were from this period often include this Latin phrase, which derives solely from the Hunt-Lenox Globe. This object is unique because it "speaks to Europeans' knowledge of the world just shortly after the time of Columbus's initial voyage," says Inman.

In the video above, Atlas Obscura gets a close-up look at the Hunt-Lenox Globe, which is part of the New York Public Library’s collection at its Bryant Park location.


Where Did All the Refugees From Vesuvius End Up?

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Their quest for new lives wouldn't have been that different than that of refugees today.

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Over the course of three days in A.D. 79, the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were covered by hot ash, pumice, and molten rock from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Archaeologists have accounted for some 2,000 inhabitants of those cities from voids in the ash, but their combined population at the time was around 15,000 people. So where did everyone else go?

That question has been on the mind of Steven Tuck, a classicist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, since it was posed by a teacher in his undergraduate days around three decades ago. After years of sleuthing, he thinks he has an answer, which will be published in the journal Analecta Romana Instituti Danici this spring. Tuck asserts that refugees two millennia ago made decisions very similar to ones people make today regarding where to go after a disaster strikes, and that modern governments could stand to learn a thing or two from how the Romans dealt with the Vesuvius crisis.

“In the lives of these people, the Roman government seems to have mattered,” he says. The government played a major role in expanding and supporting the communities of Cumae, Naples, Ostia, and Puteoli on the northern peripheries of the eruption—cities that took in volcano refugees.

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Tuck traced the movement of survivors from Pompeii, who would have departed as the volcano grew more active before the cataclysm, through language, culture, and family names. Like refugees today, people generally chose to resettle where they already had family and economic ties. In some cases, this made it difficult to determine where they ended up.

“Think in modern terms of moving in with your in-laws after a disaster. (yay?) Those people I could find. Those who moved into their parents' basement (or the Roman equivalent) are invisible in the record,” Tuck explains over email. Tuck tracked shifts in surnames specifically—and such changes would be visible only when people moved in with relatives or acquaintances with a different name. And many residents of Pompeii had connections in other places because of wealth and landholdings, or because they knew people who had resettled after another recent disaster, a devastating earthquake in A.D. 62.

The act of fleeing and surviving such devastation certainly would have bonded refugees who traveled north. Sometimes it even led to marriages. One example of such a wedding had been found in Naples, where a grave for Calidia Nominata was prepared by her husband, L. Vettius Sabinus. Both of their names are associated with Pompeii, and the evidence was further cemented by an inscription on her gravestone in Oscan, the native language of Pompeii: It read HAVE, or “welcome.” The city had been ruled by Rome for over 160 years, but the inscription “really speaks to the strength of their local culture, that this is [the language] they’re continuing to use,” says Tuck.

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As he was imagining who actually made it out as disaster loomed, Tuck says, “My initial thought was, a bunch of rich guys handed their keys to their slaves and said: ‘Watch out, I’ll be back!’ [but] that doesn’t seem to be the case.” Instead, evidence such as family tombs and financial records show that many of the people who made their way from Pompeii were women, slaves, and freed slaves.

New architectural projects in the refuge cities from the period also show that the Roman state took care of many of these refugees following the disaster. While the government wasn’t actively shepherding people to safety—there would have been little time for such a concerted response then—they did raise money and infrastructure wherever refugees followed their hearts (and wallets) to new lives.

The 1970s Movement to Reclaim Pretzels for God

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"Pretzels for God" even took as its patron the first Native American saint.

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In 1974, Maureen McCauley, a devout Jesuit and former circus performer, addressed the assembly at the 34th Annual Convention of the National Pretzel Bakers Institute. “God has been cast aside. The old immorality is now the new morality,” she told the gathered “pretzel men.”

In her speech, McCauley argued that America needed a potent religious symbol, something to rally Christians to rediscover prayer and penance. America, she believed, was in desperate need of the pretzel.

Only a year before, McCauley had launched Pretzels for God (PFG) from St. Francis Xavier Parish in Phoenix, Arizona. Under the impression that the pretzel had Christian origins, she and other members made the baked good the centerpiece in a movement to restore faith and commitment to God. They offered family-friendly activities and pretzel ceremonies, all under the auspices of a spiritual patron who would go on to be canonized as the first Native American saint.

With ancient origins in the Gaulish region of Europe that once spanned numerous modern-day nations, the pretzel is now firmly rooted in the baking traditions of German-speaking areas. From Bavaria’s lye pretzels to the Rhineland’s pudding pretzels, the baked good became a common everyday snack, as well as a festival food eaten during carnivals and on religious holidays such as Easter, Palm Sunday, and Lent.

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According to the PFG, their movement was busily restoring the pretzel to its rightful place in the history of early Christianity. The food, many Christians believed, was not just rife with symbolism but had actually originated at the hands of a monk in a southern French monastery in 610 C.E. As legend has it, the long-ago monk folded leftover strips of dough to resemble arms crossed in prayer, and left three holes to represent the Holy Trinity. He then handed out to his creation to his pupils as a reward for learning their prayers.

Since pretzels are made with a simple recipe of flour, water and salt, European Christians in the Middle Ages ate them during the 40-day fast period of Lent when eggs and dairy were forbidden, writes Greg Dues in Catholic Customs and Traditions. During this period, the pretzel also began showing up in medieval religious art and prayer books, including an 11th-century depiction of the Last Supper and the 12th-century encyclopedia Hortus Deliciarum, compiled by the German nun Herrad of Landsberg.

But the PFG movement came at a time when the Catholic Church was at a crossroads. Profound changes in the Church, including the celebration of mass in vernacular languages instead of Latin, coincided with a growing trend towards secularism in American society. Congregants began leaving in ever greater numbers, with 7.5 million members no longer identifying with the Catholic Church in 1975. Many who remained faced a sense of insecurity about the institution and its role in their spiritual future.

Pretzels for God was a reaction against this mounting disillusionment, one that looked to a simple, tasty foodstuff to reinvigorate the faith of both young and old. The pretzel, claimed McCauley, would “be effective in helping put America in order.” For spiritual guidance, the PFG tapped Kateri Tekakwitha, a Catholic historical figure, as their pretzel patron. Tekakwitha had no relationship to the pretzel; it’s debatable whether the baked good had even reached the shores of the Americas by the time of her death in 1680.

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Born in 1656 to an Algonquin mother and Mohawk father in what is now Auriesville, New York, Tekakwitha was among the first documented Native Americans to convert to Christianity. But while the PFG identified “the Lily of the Mohawks” as “a model of true peace in the world,” the choice to make her the patron of pretzels likely had less to do with the pretzel’s spiritual promise than it did with McCauley’s belief that her prayers to Tekakwitha had cured her young son’s severe hearing loss.

The association proved timely. Although the process for her beatification began in 1932, it wasn’t until 1980 when this major step towards sainthood was finally proclaimed by Pope John Paul II, just a few years after the heydey of Pretzels for God. (Five years later, McCauley even met the Pope in Rome and urged him to canonize Tekakwitha, giving him a taped performance of her traveling Kateri Tekakwitha-themed puppet show.)

With Tekakwitha watching over them, Pretzels for God propagated the Christian symbolism of the pretzel, emphasizing its value as a symbolic food to be eaten during Lent. They formed committees, posted articles in the bulletin of every diocese, and thoroughly courted the media. Groups organized pretzel bake sales and pretzel necklace workshops, after which believers would wear them as a symbol their faith. They pushed the pretzel as a Lenten food, and devised a “Ceremony of the Pretzel,” complete with a “pretzel prayer” for Ash Wednesday.

But the meaning of the pretzel hadn’t always been Christian. Food historian William Woys Weaver, who has heavily researched the baked good, says the pretzel’s Christian origins are fabricated. “There is no documentation whatsoever for the invention in 610 of the pretzel by a monk,” he says. The pretzel’s origins actually predate Christianity by hundreds of years. Their twisty shape is a symbol of Sirona, the Gaulish goddess of spring and the sacrificial rites associated with the harvest. While the PFG saw the Holy Trinity in the holes of the pretzel, Weaver says the pretzel’s form is “a votive symbol of a triplicate noose, the type used to hang three people at once, since three deaths were considered more potent than one.”

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Despite the medieval reinterpretation of a pagan symbol into a Lenten one, the pretzel’s origin story was actually devised much later, according to Weaver. “This monk myth emerged during Prohibition to deflect the negative association of pretzels with beer, saloons and bars, since it was a free snack given out to entice customers to buy beer or hard liquor,” he says. Though it’s unclear who originated the monk myth in the 1920s, Weaver notes that the National Pretzel Bakers Institute heavily promoted it during the mid-20th century, circulating the legend as fact in their magazine The Pretzel Baker and on television spots “complete with little statues of a monk.”

Though McCauley saw her beloved Kateri Tekakwitha canonized as the first Native American saint in 2012, the PFG was somewhat less successful. Just as suddenly as it had arrived on the scene, showing up in local news coverage from Minnesota to Pennsylvania, the PFG seemed to fade away. It’s survived today only by the Ash Wednesday Pretzel Prayer, that begins “We beg you, O Lord, to bless these breads which are to remind us that Lent is a sacred season of penance and prayer.

The Hidden History of the Nutmeg Island That Was Traded for Manhattan

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Dutch colonists committed genocide to secure a spice monopoly. But there's more to the story.

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Most people know Indonesia’s Banda Islands—if they know of them at all—for one historical Snapple fact: In 1677, the Dutch traded Manhattan to the British for their claim on just one of them, a barely one-square-mile spec of land. They did so because these 11 obscure islands on the southeastern edge of modern Indonesia were, until several centuries ago, ostensibly the world’s sole source of nutmeg, which was then one of the most valuable commodities in Western Europe, largely thanks to its purported power to cure anything from gas to the bubonic plague.

For the Dutch, securing a nutmeg monopoly was worth giving up Manhattan. The tradeoff was likely a no-brainer, given the lengths they’d already gone to corner the market. In 1621, Dutch East India company officials committed genocide against the uncooperative local Bandanese people, and enslaved those who survived, just to remove one obstacle to their monopolistic dreams.

Manhattan soon developed into a cosmopolitan trade center. The Bandas, meanwhile, turned into a single-purpose, slave-driven plantation economy. As transatlantic trade and American commerce boomed, so did Manhattan. As nutmeg’s value eventually collapsed, so did the Bandas’ economy.

The simple story of the islands and their people—thrust onto the world stage because they sat on a valuable natural resource, then wholly eradicated by the unstoppable force of European colonization—is a staple of Did You Know articles on Manhattan and nutmeg. For economists, it is a potent economic parable. For food historians, a dash of flavor. Even full-fledged historians often neglect the region. When they do speak to its history, notes Timo Kaartinen, a Finnish academic whose work touches on the Bandas, they “tend to focus on the competition between different European powers.”

But this simple version of the story gets quite a bit wrong, and the full account is astounding. Rather than simply sitting on a precious resource, the Bandanese were expert traders who cornered the nutmeg market. After the Europeans’ arrival, they repelled and vexed these intruders for over a century. Even after a brutal and openly genocidal campaign laid them low, they did not vanish from history, but slipped to the peripheries of Dutch control to run new trading operations and organize a bit of nutmeg smuggling. Their regional trade dominance outlasted the colonial nutmeg craze. At least two Bandanese villages survive to this day, carrying on old traditions on the nearby Kei Islands.

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Although European explorers thought of them as such, the islands were never, strictly, the world’s sole source of nutmeg. Many variants of nutmeg grow wild, or were historically cultivated, from India to Papua. Roy Ellen, a British anthropologist, tells me that early trade in nutmeg “was probably not the Bandanese nutmeg, which is the round nutmeg” we know best today, “but the long nutmeg, which was being imported from Papua and also grown in other parts” of the Moluccas, the wider “spice island” region in which the Bandas sit.

According to Ellen’s research, starting at least around the time of Christ, the Bandas acted as a vital entrepot for trade in bird of paradise plumes and other luxuries from Papua to China and ports in between. The Bandanese were master navigators, whose knowledge of the paths to, and ties with locals in, the nodes at the ends of this network made them wealthy. By the time the Europeans arrived, they lived in autonomous villages, each run by by Orang Kaya, a Malay word meaning “rich men,” which competed with each other, often in federations, for trade power.

It seems that sometime in the early centuries of the second millennium, the Bandanese began actively cultivating nutmeg. Either due to the quality of their product (Bandanese nutmeg is now the standard for flavor and potency) or clever economic maneuvering, they quickly became the key port for the nutmeg trade, frequented by Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and (by the 15th century) Arabo-Persian merchants, whose accounts inspired European dreams of the spice islands. The Bandanese sent their own trade ships as far afield as Malacca.

In the 1510s, the Portuguese became the first Europeans to arrive in the region. But these would-be colonizers struggled to muscle their way into the trade system. The Bandanese responded to their attempts at trade meddling with hostility so fierce that this first wave of Europeans essentially gave up on the Bandas within a few decades.

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The Dutch showed up in the region in 1599, ready to use greater force to coerce the Bandanese to trade solely with them. And they did compel a few Orang Kaya to do so. But as soon as their war-ready boats left the harbors, locals seem to have gone back to business as usual. Much to the consternation of the Dutch, they also struck deals with the English, who first arrived in 1603, using them to balance against Amsterdam’s aggression. When a Dutch official showed up in 1609 with 1,000 soldiers and Japanese mercenaries, irate at local Orang Kaya for supposedly breaking their monopoly deals, the Bandanese tricked him into leaving most of his weapons and troops on a beach and walking inland to meet them. Then they massacred this force to send a message, fully initiating a somewhat piecemeal and on-and-off series of open conflicts with the Dutch.

This Bandanese-European conflict finally boiled over in 1621, after the Dutch forced the English to functionally abandoned their claims in the islands. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the man in charge of Dutch East India Company operations in the region, decided to test out his theory that the nutmeg trade would be easier to control if the Dutch could clear out the Bandanese and replace them with Company-linked settlers. He found a pretext to attack Banda Besar, the largest island and a hotbed of resistance, with 1,600 Dutch troops, 80 Japanese mercenaries, and some regional slaves, the largest force (to our historical sources’ knowledge) ever seen in the region. Despite fierce resistance, they swarmed the island, cut deals with local defenders-turned-defectors, and took it within days. In response to subsequent guerilla strikes, Coen’s Japanese mercenaries beheaded and quartered 48 Orang Kaya who came to his stronghold to surrender, and displayed their body parts on bamboo sticks. His troops then scourged the islands, burning villages and enslaving almost 800 people, who were mostly sent to Batavia, a trade center on Java. Many Bandanese reportedly jumped off cliffs rather than surrender.

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By the end of this Banda Besar campaign, Dutch records indicate that—out of a pre-conflict population of about 15,000 in the year 1500—only 1,000 to 2,000 Bandanese remained across all 11 islands.

“There was moral outrage over the massacre of the Bandanese already in the 17th century,” says Kaartinen, even from Dutch officials. But this outrage was relatively muted, especially given commercial interests. Coen didn’t even receive a real censure. The Dutch divided the Bandas into 68 plantations, and intrigued over the region with the English for decades.

The Bandanese weren’t washed away into the tides of history, though. A number of them had, according their own stories, migrated in the 1500s to nearby islands to run their trade networks. Survivors in the jungles of the Bandas waited until Coen left, then slipped away in hidden canoes to join these communities. Months later, a fleet of canoes, reportedly led by Orang Kaya stationed in one of these communities, showed up to evacuate more of them.

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While the Dutch slowly claimed rule over the islands where the Bandanese fled, they did not take direct control of them all until the 1880s. This left the Bandanese free to help operate the trade in staple foods that even the Dutch plantations depended on, and to open profitable new trade in edible birds’ nests, sea slugs, and shark fins, to name a few items. They even helped run non-Banda (long) nutmeg cultivation, trade, and smuggling in the region, despite Dutch efforts to root these operations out. Even after the Dutch took total control in the region, Bandanese trade networks remained vital to their local economies well into the 20th century. To this day, some people who claim Bandanese descent are still reportedly accorded a high social status in the region thanks to their historical role as high-powered, economically vital traders.

“We don’t know how many actually settled in these places,” says Roy Ellen. Many pre- and post-1621 settlers likely assimilated into local cultures. A few families in some of these islands still claim Bandanese heritage, but that doesn’t give us much of a sense of their original population. On Kei Besar, though, the biggest island in the Kei chain, just under 5,000 people in two villages, Elat and Eli, some of the best ports in the region, still speak the Bandanese Turwandan language, practice Bandanese Islam, make Bandanese pottery (a unique, valued trade good until well into the 1990s), trade along Bandanese networks, sing Bandanese songs, and sail regularly to the Bandas to affirm their heritage and perform rites.

“When the Bandanese speak of colonial events” today, says Kaartinen, “they refuse to be cast as victims or refugees.”

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Even in the Bandas, the Bandanese story did not end in 1621. The Dutch brought in slaves to work their plantations. But they were forced to lean on Bandanese slaves, as experts and educators in nutmeg cultivation. While the Bandanese slave population dwindled, they left traces of their culture in the slave population and later indentured servants and migrant workers. Research by the Australian anthropologist Phillip Winn shows that most of the more than 18,000 people in the Bandas today acknowledge that they come from many different lands, but still believe that they are legitimately Bandanese. They perform rituals that they believe have roots in ancient Bandanese practices to affirm that identity, and speak of pre-colonial Bandanese history as their own.

In 1982, locals in the Bandas also took over the state-owned nutmeg growing enterprise, which still made up a major part of the local economy. They split the groves equally among local families, building collectives that buy from harvesters, then sell nutmeg on to external interests. This, speculates American anthropologist Amy Jordan, seems like a return to pre-colonial cultivation. If so, it is a compelling coda to an incredible history of ingenuity and resistance.

Found: The Oldest Tattoo Needles in Western North America

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They could sharpen our understanding of Pueblo prehistory.

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Sometimes, hoarding pays off. That’s one of the lessons in the discovery of western North America’s oldest known tattooing instrument, recently identified after spending more than 40 years in storage.

Andrew Gillreath-Brown, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington State University, was taking a routine inventory of stowed archaeological items in July 2017 when he found the tiny tool: a 3.5-inch-long skunkbush handle with two sharp, thin cactus spines extending from the top, each dipped in black ink. Those ink stains stood out to Gillreath-Brown, himself a tattoo aficionado, and he conducted a series of experiments to confirm whether this was indeed a tattoo implement and to assess how old it was. He and his co-authors published their findings today in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Before Gillreath-Brown located this particular item, the oldest identified tattooing tools from the region were dated to sometime between the years 1100 and 1280, in present-day Arizona and New Mexico. So the “new” tool, which was found in 1972 in what is now southeastern Utah, pushes the archaeological record back by more than 1,000 years, and confirms that the Ancestral Pueblo people practiced tattooing during the Basketmaker II period. “Tattooing by prehistoric people in the Southwest is not talked about much because there has not ever been any direct evidence to substantiate it,” said Gillreath-Brown in a press release. That all changes now.

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To confirm that the tool was, indeed, used for tattooing, Gillreath-Brown analyzed the tips using an electron microscope and techniques involving X-ray fluorescence and energy dispersive ray spectroscopy. The tests indicated the likely presence of carbon, which is often seen in tattoo ink. But just to cover all his bases, Gillreath-Brown even took a replica of the instrument and used it to tattoo pig skin.

The Ancestral Pueblo people lived in areas now including parts of the Four Corners states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. Their descendants live today in tribes such as the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and Laguna. The early periods of Pueblo history are divided into different “Basketmaker” eras because archaeologists commonly uncover impressive baskets and other woven items at Pueblo sites. Gillreath-Brown says he is hopeful that the finding could have broader implications for future sociological studies of the ancient Pueblo people, who may have used tattoos to differentiate between tribes as humans became more sedentary and different tribes began living among one another.

The Fall of Angkor Was More Than a Century in The Making

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New research suggests that the city’s demise wasn’t related to a sudden catastrophe, but rather, a choice.

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One of history’s most perplexing mysteries has been what caused the collapse of Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire, during the 15th century. For decades, researchers have pointed to the abrupt abandonment of the city in 1431 as a sign that a sudden catastrophe had taken place. However, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, the fall of Angkor was much more gradual.

A popular theory about the cause of Angkor’s collapse centers around invading armies from the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya. It’s believed that once the city was sacked, the remaining power structure relocated the kingdom to Phnom Penh, the present-day capital of Cambodia. But this new research suggests another narrative: The abandonment of the city wasn’t the result of a sudden calamity. In fact, it started almost a century earlier when the urban elite, fed up with the agrarian lifestyle and hoping to pursue more commercial opportunities, began to leave the city.

“We have discovered that land-use in the center of Angkor began to decline about 100 years before the traditional date for the abandonment of the city, suggesting that the demise of the city was slow and protracted rather than abrupt and catastrophic,” says Dan Penny, an associate professor from the University of Sydney's School of Geosciences and the lead author of the study, via email. “This forces us to reconsider the reasons why the city was abandoned.”

One of the primary reasons that the demise of Angkor has been such a perplexing puzzle is that the Khmer left no written records, and the accounts that do exist were recorded centuries later. “This forces us to use other techniques to discover what happened to the city and its people,” says Penny.

To conduct its research, the team tested various core samples taken from a moat near the city’s walled citadel, known as Angkor Thom. By studying these samples, which contained pollen, charcoal, and other agricultural materials, scientists can get a glimpse of what was being grown and maintained in Angkor over centuries.

Core samples from the early 14th century showed a massive decrease in pollen and charcoal deposits, and showed little evidence of soil erosion, all pointing to a decrease in farming practices. The findings also suggest that toward the end of the century, the moat itself was no longer being maintained and was covered in a layer of thick vegetation.

Penny believes one reason for these failures in maintenance and the decrease in farming practices was that the prospects of international trade lured Angkor’s inhabitants elsewhere. Settlements closer to the Mekong and Tonle Sap River began to form and provided the Khmer elite with easier access to the South China Sea. “These so-called ‘middle period’ settlements were more exposed to and able to exploit opportunities associated with burgeoning international trade networks,” says Penny. These new settlements were also far from the ongoing territorial disputes with neighboring kingdoms taking place in and around Angkor. Over time, the city simply fell apart.

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