The mysterious phenomenon resembles green sand dunes in the sky.

On October 5, 2018, Minna Palmroth published Revontulibongarin opas, a guide to help anyone spot and identify auroras in Finland’s skies. The book is exhaustive, and profiles 30 distinct kinds of auroras, with photos taken by members of a local Facebook group of enthusiasts of the polar atmospheric phenomenon. On October 7, just two days after the guide was published, the Facebook group pinged Palmroth with an update: They were pretty sure they’d discovered an entirely new aurora.

“It was funny timing, but an incredible coincidence,” says Palmroth, who is a computational space physicist at the University of Helsinki. As it turns out, the group was right. The new aurora, nicknamed “the dunes,” is described in a new paper in the journal AGU Advances.

It all started five years ago, when Palmroth received a message to join the Facebook group Revontulikyttääjät, or Auroral Stalkers. “They sent me this very polite invitation,” she says. “Could you please join our group and answer our questions about auroras?” Palmroth obliged. Several years in, she noticed the same types of questions popped up, about when and where to spot certain auroras. Palmroth compiled a list of all the different types of auroras known to science and posed a challenge to the group, most of whom are photographers: to photograph every aurora they saw. The images began piling up, at much higher resolution than the kinds of photos scientists had traditionally taken, and Palmroth compiled them into the book. She imagined it in the style of a birdwatching guide for non-scientists, all for spotting glowing waves (most commonly but not exclusively green) in the night sky.

“Auroras are like fingerprints,” Palmroth says, adding that the form, orientation, and motion of each allow scientists to identify them. The lights are conjured by the solar wind, or charged particles flowing out from the Sun. When they collide with Earth’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere, the brilliantly colored lights can result.

“If you see a specific form in the sky, you can deduce what is happening further out in space,” she says. Most of the aurora snapshots in the Facebook group were easily categorizable, except for a strange, recurring form that appeared as a greenish, even pattern of waves. Most auroras appear like a bright arc of light smeared across the sky, but these waves extended outward from the aurora in finger-like rays. The citizen scientists coined the new lights “dunes,” as they almost resemble sand dunes in a lime-green desert. Palmroth set these mystery lights aside for future consideration. On October 7, Palmroth was sitting on the couch when she got the message that they had appeared again. “I told them to go immediately and take pictures,” she says, though she decided to stay on the couch. “I’m no photographer. I leave that to the experts.”

The last-minute expedition—several members of the Facebook group—took many digital photos of the strange formations from Laitila and Ruovesi, two towns in Finland. It provided enough consecutive images of the aurora for Palmroth’s team of researchers to successfully determine that it was actually a new form of the phenomenon.

The researchers traced the auroral dunes to the mesosphere, approximately 50 to 75 miles up. This slice of the sky is incredibly difficult to study, as it occurs too close to Earth for spacecraft and too high for balloons and radar. “We call it the 'ignorosphere,'” Palmroth says. Her team believes auroral dunes occur directly within this enigmatic zone, which makes them perhaps the most mysterious kind of aurora.

While most auroras seem to melt into the sky vertically, auroral dunes extend horizontally, an orientation never seen before. Palmroth believes the lights may be caused by mesospheric bores, a kind of atmospheric wave that is both rare and not well-studied—a suitably mysterious phenomenon for this part of the atmosphere. Palmroth likens the phenomenon to a tidal bore, a wave that occurs when the tide travels against the flow of a river. Mesospheric bores occur when an ascending atmospheric wave (often caused by a weather front or the airflow over mountains) becomes sandwiched and bent between two layers of the atmosphere. Once trapped, it propagates horizontally instead of vertically, and then becomes visible when bombarded by the solar wind from space.

Palmroth believes the dunes might represent a new link between space and the atmosphere, two regions largely treated as separate from one another. “There are only a handful of known interactions,” she says. But her team first needs to prove that their theory of dunes is correct, which will require measuring the phenomenon from directly above—with a spacecraft.

With this addition to the menagerie, according to Palmroth, all of the large, spectacular types of auroras have probably been identified and named, most decades ago. But she says she wouldn’t be surprised if new, smaller auroral forms are distinguished in the future as more and more citizen scientists with fancy cameras set out to capture the sky. “There is room for new discoveries in smaller-scale structures that can be depicted on a hobbyist camera,” she says. The Auroral Stalker Facebook group is open to anyone interested in discussing all things auroras—space weather, light forecasts, the best spots to view them and the right gear to bring. It’s the perfect place to learn more, but you’ll have to be able to read Finnish.

Just because they're huge and garish doesn't mean they're easy to find.

The Mount Kaputar pink slug is marvelously unsubtle. A screeching, fluorescent pink and up to eight inches long, it looks like an enormous tongue stained with Kool-Aid.

Despite its loud appearance, the slug typically leads a pretty chill life, marooned at least 3,280 feet up, on the remains of an ancient volcano near Narrabri in the Australian state of New South Wales. On misty nights or mornings, when it slides out from a rocky hideout or blanket of leaf litter to forage, the slug inches up rock faces or the trunks of snow gum trees or other eucalypts, hankering for lichen, algae, and fungi. Then, as day breaks, it usually disappears again to avoid finding itself in the beak of a laughing kookaburra or pied currawong. This penchant for retreat probably helped the flamboyant introvert survive when fires tore through parts of its habitat in Mount Kaputar National Park at the end of last year.

Across the country, scientists are still taking stock of the impact of the ongoing, devastating bushfires—which have burned tens of millions of acres—on animals. Certain species, including the platypus and the Mount Kaputar slug, pose particularly maddening challenges for study, because they can be elusive even under normal circumstances. Scientists aren’t entirely sure exactly how many of the slugs there were before the fires.

Researchers have fanned out to survey Mount Kaputar’s hot pink denizens several times over the past 13 years, but counts can vary widely depending on the weather. “Mollusks generally like it rather wet,” says Frank Köhler, a malacologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney.

“If you’re surveying on a wet afternoon, you might see 60,” says Isabel Hyman, the museum’s scientific officer of malacology. “On a dry night, you might see two.” In 2010, researchers tallied 63 slugs in 10 minutes on a spritzing November night. The very next evening, which was drier, they hardly spotted any. Anja Divljan, a technical officer in mammals at the Australian Museum, witnessed the slug’s vanishing act firsthand a few years ago, while surveying mammals such as kangaroos, greater gliders, and common ringtail possums. When the landscape was slick with rain, the slugs “were suddenly everywhere and very conspicuous,” Divljan writes in an email. “As the land dried, they disappeared back into their hiding spots.” And during droughts, it can be hard to gauge whether there are few slugs to be seen because the population has dipped, or they’re simply staying hidden in a blessedly humid cranny. Köhler and Hyman both suspect that somewhere around 10,000 pink slugs called the park home before the fire.

Between October and December 2019, fires burned more than 44,000 acres of land in the park, according to The Guardian—close to half of its total area. Still, the fire there appeared to be patchier and less intense than some of the other bushfires, and some of the slug’s habitat was relatively unscathed, while other areas were only lightly burned. “They were lucky in that way,” Hyman says.

Still, any fire on the mountain is a scary scenario for the survival of species endemic to the area, Hyman adds, and the slugs are thought to live nowhere else. When a species is confined to a single, small, isolated habitat, any disturbance there could wipe them off the face of the Earth. The Mount Kaputar pink slug is classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, an inventory of at-risk creatures around the world. The peak is home to a menagerie of other mollusks as well, including 18 species of native snails, according to a 2019 paper in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales. Of those, eight seem to have no other sliming grounds. On the basis of its slugs and snails, the state government designated the area an endangered ecological community in 2013, and called for plans to manage fire risks, road and path planning, and feral pigs and goats.

Slugs avoid fires the same way they avoid birds, Köhler says: They’re too slow to flee, so they hide. At their usual clip, the slugs travel maybe 20 to 40 feet an hour, according to the authors of the 2019 paper. They might be able to go a little faster to elude a predator, Köhler says, but probably not for long.

In this case, the slugs may already have been holed up. “Fires don’t just jump out of nothing,” Köhler says. The slugs are particularly vulnerable to the hot, dry conditions that set the stage for bushfires, since, unlike shell-hauling snails, they’re entirely exposed to the elements. In hot, dry periods, Köhler says, they’re not likely to be out and risking desiccation. They would seek out places such as the rotting trunks of fallen trees, Köhler says, and hunker down deep inside.

In the aftermath of the blaze, the park is closed to visitors, but staff have been roaming around and cleaning up. Already they’ve noticed the understory growing back in and leaves beginning to reappear—and, so far, they’ve made more than 60 sightings of the hot-pink residents, including live creatures and the distinctive, bauble-shaped trails they leave on tree trunks, writes Adam Fawcett, a New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife service project officer, in an email. Researchers don't yet have an estimate for how many slugs died or how the population is recovering, he writes; systematic surveys will take place between March and May, when temperatures are more slug-friendly.

Even with the fire behind them, the slugs aren’t in the clear—they still have to deal with feral pigs trampling their habitat, the beaky maws of predators, and a more existential woe that could simply squeeze them off the planet. The slugs have adapted to life in this “small landscape pocket which is surrounded by hotter, drier, lowlands,” Köhler says. As the climate changes, the little parcel of cool, moist land they call home could shrink and shrink until it disappears completely.

It's a matter of simple physics.

In some of the rural mountain villages of Vietnam, locals can lift remarkably heavy loads. Age is not a factor: It’s a common sight to see both younger people and some of the eldest members of these communities shouldering loads as heavy as they are.

The weight they carry is not through any feat of strength, or thanks to some high-tech apparatus. Rather, these villagers manage to bear their mighty loads using just a slender bamboo pole, which works far better than any nylon backpack.

Recently, a team of international researchers studied the heavy-lifting villagers, to see exactly what made the thin bamboo such a strong device.

“The use of bamboo poles is ... an important tool for farmers in [the] countryside and traveling salespeople in the city,” says Van Vinh Hac, a researcher at Thái Nguyên University of Medicine and Pharmacy and a co-author of the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. “Because the pole is made of very flexible bamboo, it makes the shoulder less uncomfortable and [the load feel] lighter.”

The practice is particularly popular among Vietnam’s Hmong, an ethnic minority spread across mountain villages in Southeast Asia. By counterbalancing two loads of material strung on bamboo, they maneuver manure across rice fields to fertilize their crop, or carry other goods across town. To an unfamiliar eye, it looks like a scale—an extremely loaded one.

“When you walk, you expend energy, and a large source of that energetic cost comes from when you take a step,” says Ryan Schroeder, a mechanical engineer at the University of Calgary and the study’s lead author. “You have a minor collision with the ground, and you have to push off the other foot to make up for that energy loss. Because the load [these villagers are carrying] is oscillating off the body [vertically], that means that it’s going to pull you down more at some points than others.”

The process is similar to the physics of a pogo stick—using the moments when you spring upward to move. “What you really want to do is arrange the oscillations such that it pulls more on your body when your foot is underneath your body,” says Schroeder. “That way your muscles don’t have to deal with it.”

Schroeder’s team had villagers walk sandbags of up to half their weight along a path 60 feet long. (Schroeder says one older test subject seemed offended to be asked to carry so little weight.) The experiment fit in with a separate pursuit of Schroeder’s—building a backpack that will push weight off the body and back on again, in order to reduce strain on the wearer.

The team saw that the villagers were offsetting their steps to correspond with the springy bamboo pole, whose bounce took the encumbering weight literally off of their shoulders as they walked. Often, villagers would alternate which shoulder carried the weight.

“They spin [the pole] around all the time, like a [Harlem] Globetrotter,” Schroeder says.

Despite the pole’s utility, and its ubiquity in the more bucolic stretches of Vietnam’s rolling mountains, some feel that it's under threat from increasing modernization. In cities like Hanoi, the use of bamboo poles by street vendors has been reduced as municipalities seek to reduce traffic congestion. The country’s pastoral places may not be far behind.

“[Vietnam’s] rural areas have undergone significant changes in light of rapid industrialization and modernization,” says Van Son Nguyen, a rector at Thái Nguyên University of Medicine and Pharmacy. “Nowadays, springy bamboo poles are rarely used in rural communities. Instead, other means of transport—such as carts, motorbikes, or vehicles—are commonly employed for load carriage.”

Whether new technology completely displaces the worked plant stems in Vietnamese villages remains to be seen. But for now, one thing is certain: Using bamboo poles beats getting a hernia. Maybe it’s time to jettison that backpack.

They’re fake, but they can be spectacular (and hazardous).

From atop the jagged mountain, cars, people, and houses appear as tiny versions of themselves, the noise of their day to day activity muted so high in the air. Scrubby vegetation grows from cracks in the rock, soaking up the sun and rustling in the slight breeze. Birds caw as they alight at the top of a slope, observing the expanse below them.

The mountain is just another part of the topography to those that live near it, but it is not a natural part of the landscape. The mountain is completely artificial, a colossus formed not by eons of geologic change but the vigor of industrial concrete production. Artificial mountains have sprung up all over the world, the result of hellish manufacturing processes, piled construction and mining waste, or in some cases built deliberately to add a humongous new feature to the horizon.

The majority of the artificial mountains in the United States are the byproducts of cement and steel production, formed at the height of those industries between the late 1800s and mid-20th century. Cement, the binder that holds concrete aggregate together, is made by heating limestone and clay into a product called clinker, which is then ground with gypsum to make powdered cement. Though cement has been made in the U.S. as long as people have needed it, production really got underway in the 1920s, with 159 plants in 33 states operating by 1929. These mountains have long dotted industry-heavy areas of the United States and can be truly gargantuan in scope. Brown’s Dump in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, for example, was over 200 feet tall and covered the equivalent of 130 city blocks.

Despite their size, it’s almost impossible to know how many there are, as there was no concerted effort to keep track of them while they were being created, says Dr. Heather Brown, Director of Middle Tennessee State University’s School of Concrete and Construction Management. Dismantling those that do exist can be tremendously difficult and expensive, but there is potential money to be made from repurposing them.

“It’s easier to create new concrete than to crush it onsite,” she says. “But the material is still usable. It can be crushed, ground, or turned into powder.”

Other artificial mountains are formed from slag, the molten rock separated from iron ore during steel production. Slag is dumped in a waste pile, which hardens into concrete-like rock when cooled. Ron Baraff, Director of Historic Resources and Facilities with Rivers of Steel, an organization dedicated to preserving Pennsylvania’s industrial history, used to play on a former slag dump called Squirrel Hill when he was a kid, one of the numerous dump sites in the Pittsburgh area. The construction of a slag mountain could be a mesmerizing sight. From 1913 until the 1960s, residents of West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, parked their cars along an embankment to watch trains pulling enormous cars with massive cauldrons full of molten rock. In some cases dozens of cauldrons were emptied at once, pouring their molten rock down the side of the hill in eerily beautiful rivers. Observers said they looked like symmetrical rivers of fire and lit the sky red.

There is a darker side to this beauty, however. Environmental studies of the so-called Bairstow Mountain, a slag pile and industrial waste heap in Hammond, Indiana, revealed that runoff was deluging the Calumet aquifer with heavy metals and other hazardous compounds. In 2018, geese living on a golf course built on the same mountain began dying mysteriously, possibly after ingesting lead after part of the pile caught on fire and released the toxins inside.

Smaller-scale artificial mountains can be problematic as well. Outsider artist Leonard Knight built Salvation Mountain in Niland, California out of concrete, sand, and accumulated junk. He used so much salvaged paint to cover it with brightly colored religious messages that the county declared the site a “toxic nightmare” due to the amount of lead in the soil and considered dismantling the mountain and hauling it to a toxic waste dump.

Salvation Mountain collapsed under its own weight in 1988, demonstrating the concerns with another type of artificial mountain—those created from piling construction debris or mining waste.

Piles of the rock extracted during mining, also called spoil tips, can rise hundreds of feet into the air. Their loose composition can make them unstable and quite dangerous. In 1966, more than 115 children were killed when a mountain made from coal mining debris slid into a school in Wales. A similar disaster occurred in late 2015 when a steep mountain made from building construction leftovers in Shenzen, China collapsed, sent a landslide of mud and concrete onto the factories and neighborhoods below, and caused more than 85 people to go missing. In 2016, an artificial mountain built to extend an airport runway in Charleston, West Virginia collapsed and destroyed a church and a home.

The creation of new concrete mountains slowed to a stop as competition, new industry, and advancing technology effectively rendered massive steel mills obsolete by the 1980s. So what do you do with these leftover mountains?

Concrete producers have been reusing leftover concrete for as long as they’ve been making it, Baraff says. Leftovers can be crushed up and used for road bed substrate, components for more concrete, and even fish tank gravel. But recycling concrete can be quite costly, and some municipalities are reticent to re-use old concrete because of the testing required before it can be used in state projects.

Even so, many municipalities have been happy to keep the proceeds that come from putting the mountains to new use. This is what happened with Brown’s Dump in Pennsylvania. Part of it was quarried and used for building roads and bridges, while another part was crushed and reused in the construction of a mall on the same grounds in 1979.

Other communities have realized that the vast expanses of slag-covered land can be readily repurposed. Indiana’s Bairstow Mountain was covered and turned into a golf course and marshland, while an artificial mountain in Pittsburgh has been turned into a high-end housing development called Somerset at Frick Park.

Slag piles also have another valuable use. One company in Johnstown, Pennsylvania established itself by extracting ferromanganese from slag, an alloy used to harden steel. Given that ferromanganese is usually imported and can sell for hundreds of dollars a ton, one mountain recycler told Baraff that such a business is like “having a license to print money.”

Too much leftover concrete is of course costly to manufacturers, which is why many in the industry are trying to better estimate the amount of material required for a project or invest in a recycling process that separates mixed concrete into its constituents for reuse. Nevertheless, there have been some deliberate—and surprising—attempts to build new concrete mountains.

Some European architects made waves a few years ago with outlandish plans to boost tourism by building artificial mountains on the same scale as real mountains in relatively flat areas of Germany and the Netherlands. The conceptual drawings show comically large mountains shooting out of the flat landscape like something in a fantasy novel, covered in goats, luxury suites, ski facilities and other attractions. Cranes would build the mountains block by enormous block, then shave them into appropriately craggy shape.

On the slightly more practical side, researchers with the United States’ National Center for Atmospheric Research were given a $400,000 grant in 2016 to explore the idea of creating an enormous artificial mountain in the United Arab Emirates to bring more moisture to the increasingly populated and water-hungry desert city of Dubai. Mountains facilitate rain by forcing warm, moist air to rise and cool, creating clouds. Coupled with the UAE’s experiments in cloud-seeding through its UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science, a brand new mountain might make more rainfall possible.

These ideas are far off (if not completely implausible), and would require a tremendous amount of resources in a world already feeling the effects of humanity’s thirst for construction. Today, estimates hold that enough concrete is produced around the world in a single day to create the equivalent of China’s Three Gorges Dam, which, at 23 million square meters, is one of the biggest objects ever constructed.

And this isn’t even taking into account the buried concrete leftovers that are just as prevalent (if not more so) than concrete mountains. There are approximately 500,000 abandoned wells and mines in the United States, Dr. Brown says, many of which are filled with concrete and are even less accessible for reclamation or reuse than the aboveground piles.

“Construction waste is a hot-button issue,” she says, but “I don’t know if there will be an effort to catalog the [mountains or buried concrete waste], especially if they’ve been there for a while. Many are located near areas of industry, but many were also located in remote locations—out of sight, out of mind.”

Amish Acres featured a gigantic barn, buggy rides, and the longest-running Amish musical.

In 1962, Richard “Dick” Pletcher was a senior in college, working at his family’s furniture store in Nappanee, Indiana. Like his father before him, he had a dream: to preserve an Amish farm and open it to the public, to celebrate the small town’s rich Amish heritage. After graduation, Pletcher moved home and founded an arts and crafts festival that peddled Amish goods. “We sold hams and jams,” Pletcher says. “We even began giving buggy rides downtown.” In 1968, after seeing an Amish farm go up for auction, Pletcher seized the moment and followed his dream.

For 50 years, Amish Acres was one of the most famous tourist attractions in the area, and claims to be the only Amish farm listed in the National Register of Historic Places. But Pletcher, 78, is now ready to retire. Amish Acres closed on January 1 and will likely be divided into a number of smaller businesses, unless a high-roller with a penchant for Amish attractions snaps up the whole thing. The 28-acre property will be auctioned on February 5 by Schrader Real Estate and Auction Company, Inc.

Present-day Indiana was once the home of Native Americans such as the Potawatomi, but in the 19th century, the U.S. forcibly removed them to clear the way for white settlement. The town of Nappanee likely takes its name from an Algonquian word, possibly meaning “flour.” The farm that became Amish Acres was originally homesteaded by Moses Stahley, the son of one of the earliest Amish settlers in Indiana. In 1893, the family moved to Kansas after a windmill controversy divided the Nappanee Amish—conservative Amish rejected the use of modern windmills and manure spreaders, and moved West—and the farm passed into the hands of a cousin and a son-in-law. The farm fell into disrepair under its final homesteader, Manasses Kuhns, who finally sold to Pletcher in 1968.

Pletcher, his college friend Fred Simic, and Albert Kuhn, the son of Manassas, soon restored the farm to its original condition. “Albert had memories of how things looked when he was a kid, and he helped me through the whole process,” Pletcher says. “We got an entire crew of Amish carpenter farmers who helped us construct all of our original buildings.” Pletcher’s crew would spot old Amish structures around the town, buy them up, and rebuild them on Amish Acres. (Pletcher is not Amish, but says he is descended from Anabaptists, the Christian movement that spawned groups such as the Amish and Mennonites.)

The site opened in 1970, complete with a restaurant, buggy rides, and a musical theater inside a barn. Amish Acres initially offered free meals to all Old Order Amish people, but rolled back the policy when the restaurant proved too popular, according to the Amish Acres site. The theater, which seated 400, boasted an annual production of Plain and Fancy, a musical about Amish life, as well as a rotating repertoire of other shows. The historic log cabins, built in the mid-18th century, became home to a meat market and a soda and candy shop.

Amish Acres employed both Amish and non-Amish employees. One Amish employee quilted in the grossdaadi house, a smaller house traditionally reserved for the older generation. Amish Acres also played a rotating cast of three documentary films—The Genesis of the Amish, The Exodus of the Amish, and Amish Times are A Changin'—in the meeting house before the guided tour.

“Pletcher’s poured his life into it, and that’s what’s made it so special,” says Roger Diehm, the real estate agent selling Amish Acres. Diehm, who hails from the nearby city of Kendallville, first visited Amish Acres 20 years ago and kept returning. “I’ve seen Beauty and the Beast there, Annie, and, of course, Plain and Fancy,” Diehm says.

Amish Acres expanded over the years, sometimes by accident. In 1973, Kuhns rediscovered a root cellar that had collapsed. Pletcher and Kuhns restored the cellar, adding it to the historical tour of the farm. “We found all sorts of medicine bottles and glassware,” Pletcher says. “We thought we were real archaeologists.” During one festival on August 9, 1974, Pletcher rolled a TV into the gazebo so that attendees could watch President Richard Nixon resign the presidency.

Even though Pletcher is retiring, he has plans for yet another project. “I have no plans of sitting on a toadstool,” he says. He wants to help the Nappanee Public Library display a new collection of paintings from a female Mennonite artist. “She started painting in the ’40s, and you couldn’t tell her work apart from Grandma Moses’s.”

If you want to glimpse Amish Acres as it was in its heyday, there will be an open house on February 4 from 1-3 p.m, before the property goes to auction on February 5.

16,000 years later, they still contain traces of cooked meat and fish.

Siberia was probably not the ideal place to live during the late Ice Age. But new research indicates that those residents were perhaps toastier than we might think. As far back as 16,000 years ago, inhabitants of the perilously icy landscape had figured out how to cook meals in early “hot pots,” heat-resistant ceramics that preserved precious nutrients and warmth.

An international team of researchers, who published their findings in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, analyzed pieces of pottery discovered at various sites along the Russian side of the Amur River, which forms part of the border between Russia and China. Those pieces range in age from 16,000 to 12,000 years old, and were already known to be among the oldest pieces of pottery in the world. For this study, however, the researchers undertook new chemical analyses of the sherds, allowing them to advance more confident theories regarding the pottery's purpose.

At the University of York’s BioArCh Lab, in northern England, researchers extracted fats and lipids that provide new insight into the diets of Ice Age Siberian hunters. The pots from the Middle Amur River, they found, primarily cooked meaty meals, allowing that society to glean all-important bone grease and marrow from meat that might have otherwise been scarcely available. Meanwhile, some of the pottery found along the Lower Amur River—at sites associated specifically with the Osipovka culture—contained traces of cooked fish. (The researchers suspect that the fish was likely salmon.)

The discovery of these fishy traces was crucial because it helped draw meaningful connections between different cultures. The same research team had also collected ancient pottery from islands that are now part of Japan, and chemical analysis of that pottery revealed an “identical scenario” to what had been found on the Lower Amur—namely, that the pottery had been used to cook fish during the same period. Taken together, the different sites provide evidence of a so-called “parallel process of innovation,” in which different cultures mirror each other’s progress despite never coming into contact. Given the age of the cooking vessels from all the sites, the researchers theorize that the early pottery of each developed in response to the extreme climatic conditions of the late Ice Age.

In a statement, Peter Jordan, an author of the study and an archaeologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, said that the findings “suggest that there was no single ‘origin point’ for the world’s oldest pottery.” That indicates, he continued, “‘parallel innovation’ during a period of major climatic uncertainty, with separate communities facing common threats and reaching similar technological solutions.” Sounds like something we could use a bit of today as well.

Pack your sunscreen, George Jetson.

Long before the Miami waterfront became a mainstay for beachgoers, festival attendees, and just about anyone seeking a little fun in the sun, it was simply stretches of white sand, punctuated by the occasional “house of refuge.” These structures—precursors to traditional lifeguarding stations—served Floridians at the turn of the 19th century, long before the establishment of the U.S. Coast Guard in 1915.

“Lacking the usual station crew of surfmen, keepers of houses of refuge were primarily responsible for providing shelter, food, and clothing to victims of shipwrecks,” writes Sandra Thurlow in US Life-Saving Service: Florida’s East Coast. “They were also required to help survivors find transportation to civilization.”

Since then, it’s fair to say that civilization has found its way to the shipwrecks. Today, development in Miami practically kisses the shoreline, and lifesavers, too, have upped their game. Lifeguard stations have long since replaced those historic houses of refuge, whose residents merely combed the beaches for the dead and near-dead, rather than actively braving the sea to save swimmers from drowning.

Just as lifeguards have doubled down on their duties, so too have Miami’s lifeguard stations. The change didn’t happen immediately—the beachfront had standard lifeguard towers for most of the 20th century—but in 1995, three years after Hurricane Andrew razed a number of those towers, the architecture firm William Lane designed some pretty eccentric replacements.

Equal parts futuristic and midcentury (modern), the lifeguard towers of Miami Beach—a Jetsons vacation destination if ever there was one—turn a requisite safety structure into vivid, fun fun fun geometries that make other lifeguard towers look plain, boxy, and boring.

Some of Miami Beach's stations have been sold before, and now two Super Bowl team-themed lifeguard towers are up for auction. But if you aren’t willing to part with a few thousand dollars—more if you count the movers; buyers also have to figure out how to get their purchase off the beach—plenty of stations remain for public view. And, of course, for safety.

Around 100 bird species have taken wing from the studio of New Delhi artist and conservationist Niharika Rajput.

In her modest studio in New Delhi, Niharika Rajput transforms simple materials like wire, epoxy, and paper into incredibly detailed sculptures that are exhibited or commissioned by wildlife organizations and art galleries around the world. Over the past five years, the Indian wildlife artist has built around a hundred species. In her creations, a hummingbird hovering in the air laps up nectar from a coneflower. Newborn bulbul chicks beg their mother for food. A male kingfisher offers fish to a female kingfisher, perched on a mossy piece of driftwood.

Rajput crafts both miniature and life-size models of birds. The miniatures usually come in the form of bird figurines mounted on a block, or hanging mobiles with wings outstretched in flight. For these, she uses epoxy to shape the bird’s body, paper cut-outs for the wings and tail, and wire for the legs and feet, all of which she coats with acrylic paint. These can take a few days to make.

The life-size sculptures, on the other hand, take weeks and even months to execute. Rajput starts by making an outline of the bird’s body from wire, stuffing the hollow with newspaper, and covering it in strips of paper for an even surface. Then she works on the talons, eyes, and beak with epoxy. Finally, in her most elaborate step, she cuts thousands of body, wing and tail feathers from pastel paper and glues them individually—a technique that demands precision, and has taken the artist years to perfect.

On Instagram, Rajput has earned 11,000 followers under her brand name, Paper Chirrups. She often speaks at bird festivals and schools, where she teaches children about birds in peril through the medium of art. The artist spoke with Atlas Obscura about her artistic process and sources of inspiration.

What’s a day in your life like?

When I wake up, I go for a walk. That is when I spot birds. Sometimes I carry my binoculars with me, sometimes my spectacles work just fine. After that, I sit down to work. I put on a documentary on birds. While it plays, I do my work. Every day there is a different step of the process that I am working on, but some of the steps are quite repetitive, like cutting the same feathers again and again.

When did you start making nature-inspired art?

When I was in college, I joined [the craft boutique] People Tree in New Delhi as an intern. I used to sketch and build a lot of 3D stuff with all kinds of materials—bamboo, rope, etc. That is where I got introduced to building very basic models of birds with epoxy. But I wanted to experiment and make it more realistic. Later, in 2015, when I saw a flock of red-billed blue magpies take off from a pine tree in Himachal Pradesh, I started building birds. I experimented with different materials and landed on the process that I follow now.

What was your first bird sculpture?

I built hen harriers for my 2016 campaign with Birders Against Wildlife Crime in the U.K. These were the first sculptures of the kind I make now. Before that, when I was experimenting, I made some other birds, such as the greater bird-of-paradise, superb bird-of-paradise, purple sunbird, splendid fairy-wren, and tufted coquette (a hummingbird).

When I was working on the birds-of-paradise, the body was made out of regular epoxy, but instead of using paper for the feathers, I used thread. I was trying to get that texture of the feathers, but it didn’t come out very well. The real look of the feathers came out in the hen harrier.

What’s been your most challenging, longest-running project?

The kingfisher sculpture took me three months. It was a personal project I had chosen for a wildlife art competition in London.

It was challenging because that piece is a narrative, showing an interaction between two birds, and it involves a perch for the bird. I had also built a fish in the beak of the bird—that was my first time making a fish. The kingfisher postures were very difficult, especially the one on the wood with its wings half-open, half-closed. It took a long time, and I did it very peacefully because I didn’t want to go wrong with it.

In terms of species, which has been the most challenging?

Owls are very challenging. Not because of their feathers or the painting part, but because of the shape of their head. It’s very different from the rest of the birds, and the beak is almost in the face.

How do you choose your subjects?

I don’t have a big studio, so at the moment I cannot build large birds. So I look at smaller species like hummingbirds, or build miniatures. That is one way. Another is when I am commissioned by an organization. For personal projects, I choose birds that have vibrant colors. I am a fan of passerine birds.

What role do you think artists play in wildlife conservation?

When I do my workshops with children in Ladakh and ask them about the types of animals found there, children give me answers like “elephants, tigers, and lions.” There are no elephants, tigers, and lions in Ladakh. That means they don’t know—we need to educate them. If the basics are not clear, how do you expect them to help in conserving species that are going extinct?

Any upcoming projects you are excited about?

I will probably be doing an exhibition on hummingbirds soon. I want to finish my series and make as many hummingbirds as possible. After the kingfisher, my piece on a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower was very challenging and I want to do more.

I think I am set for life. I have enough projects planned in my head. I want to cover birds from different regions of the Indian subcontinent. The ultimate aim is to cover all species of birds in the world, but I don’t think that’s going to be possible. People sometimes ask me, “Why don’t you work on other animals? Why birds?” I may try my hand on other wildlife, but I can’t move on from birds, because I can never be done.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

But once it's demined, it may be developed. Can one man's ecotourism plan protect it for the birds?

On a recent Sunday morning on Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Peninsula, Packiyanathan Rajkumar was standing on a swampy dirt road that cuts across the Thondamanaru Lagoon. He often visits this site to research the many bird species here. But they’re species he’s never fully studied—because wading into the water could end his life in a literal flash.

Every few minutes, after pulling up his black pant legs to slog through yet another enormous puddle, the ornithologist would stop, point, and say, “Look at this,” in awe of his surroundings. Mangroves grew tall and thick across a sheet of lightly rippling water. White cranes fluttered under a sky washed pale blue by the rising sun. Aside from the occasional buzz of a distant motorbike, everything was quiet.

This road once served as part of the border between the Sri Lankan military and separatists known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, with whom the government fought a ruthless civil war from 1983 to 2009. Both sides laid mines in the shallow lagoons of the country’s Northern Province, and though much of the terrain has been cleared, a large swath of the Thondamanaru Lagoon remains littered with explosives. For decades, few people have ventured here aside from a handful of fishermen who, in search of tilapia, drift onto the water in paddleboats.

“The fishermen said they’d take me, but my mother said no,” joked Packiyanathan, 36, one of the few scientists who studies Jaffna’s birds. Then his laughter faded into something grave. “Anything can happen at any time, you know.”

Landmines have long been a lurking danger to anyone whose life is tied to the north, but the immense threat that has largely kept people away from this lagoon has proven life-giving for year-round and migratory birds such as purple herons, painted storks, red-wattled lapwings, black-tailed godwits, whiskered terns, kingfishers, and well over 100 other species documented by Packiyanathan and other researchers.

According to Chaminda Wijesundara, a senior lecturer at the University of Peradeniya who has studied Thondamanaru’s birds alongside Packiyanathan, the absence of humans has turned this into a crucial wetland for migrants traveling along the Central Asian Flyway, one of the world’s major migratory bird routes. Some of the birds that stop here hail from as far away as northern Europe.

The Sri Lankan army and the demining organizations it has partnered with plan to clean up the Thondamanaru Lagoon as part of a broader effort to rid the country of explosives. Once the ordnance is gone, the lagoon could become valuable real estate for hotel developers looking to capitalize on the wilderness-in-your-backyard aesthetic that already defines several of the area’s resorts. That development would threaten one of the few migratory-bird habitats on the Central Asian Flyway that hasn’t already been mangled.

But Packiyanathan, who is associated with the University of Peradeniya's Postgraduate Institute of Science, hopes he can save it—with a different kind of tourism.

The Thondamanaru Lagoon flourished only because, for 26 years, the Jaffna Peninsula was plagued with violence. During that time, the single highway that connects the peninsula to the rest of Sri Lanka—the A9—became the cratered site of intense battles. Building materials couldn’t reach the city of Jaffna, and an economic embargo gave people here little incentive to invest in the peninsula’s future. Bombs shattered the city’s roads when the military attacked from the north. Homes were scorched to smoking husks. Some 100,000 people were killed, and even more Tamils from the north and east fled the country.

As the military’s grip on the city tightened, fighting shifted toward the peninsula’s lagoons. Troops made sure that few people got close to these wetlands, and the area remained off-limits to civilians for years after the war. Jaffna’s lagoons prospered during this time, and, according to Packiyanathan and Wijesundara, the area most rife with unexploded ordnance became the birds’ favorite spot. Today roughly 100 of the Thondamanaru Lagoon’s 19,000 acres (its size during the rainy season) is still a minefield.

As all of this was happening, the Central Asian Flyway was being degraded by a host of factors. Roads, buildings, pollution, saltwater intrusion, and increasingly erratic rainfall ruined similar bird habitats along the route.

“The remaining [habitats], they are of utmost importance to the migrants,” says Wijesundara. “All of the other habitats have been destroyed.”

For years the Thondamanaru Lagoon thrived because it was off-limits to most human intrusion. Now, as the mines are being removed and development is becoming a real possibility, the lagoon’s survival may depend on people seeing it as a resource that’s worth more if preserved than plundered.

Standing on a bridge overlooking the pastel blue mouth of the Thondamanaru Lagoon, Packiyanathan explained his plans to save and promote his favorite area of study. The mouth of the lagoon would be great for short boat tours, he said. Locals could be paid to guide tourists to flocks of birds on the wide open lagoon, under the bridge, and into the narrow channel that flows toward a strip of white sand, where that Sunday a group of kids was dashing back and forth before the Palk Strait. The former border road could be paved to support cars that would ferry visitors to birdwatch towers. Locals could also lead tours of the nearby sand dunes, or walk visitors through the mangroves.

“[Writing the governmental] proposal for me is easy—it’s just one hour of time,” Packiyanathan said. “But who will invest? Who will run the business?”

To preserve the lagoon, he needs locals and investors to see its preservation as a chance to make money. Right now, he said, “nobody knows about what birds are here.”

That may start to change as a result of the research he plans to publish—but perhaps not quickly enough to ward off development. Studying the Thondamanaru Lagoon can be a time-consuming endeavor, because it’s dangerous even in the areas that aren’t pocked with mines. Crocodiles have innumerable hiding spots in the mangroves. And an errant step could crack the crusty surface of the ground, which hardens during the March-to-August dry season, plunging Packiyanathan up to his hips in goop.

Plans are now in the works to build hotels and a cricket stadium on the nearby Jaffna Lagoon. As tourism grows in Jaffna, says Wijesundara, developers might cut through the mangroves of a freshly demined Thondamanaru Lagoon, paving roads that will bring people and all their attendant waste.

But Jaffna tourism is minuscule compared with that in much of Sri Lanka, a nation that generates around five percent of its economy from the industry and was Lonely Planet’s top 2019 destination. This gives conservationists a chance to build ecotourism into a visitor’s experience of the north. Right now, ecotourism on the peninsula has “maybe 0.1 percent market share, but it has a huge potential in [the] future,” says Sriskantharajah Karthigan, of the Northern Province Tourism Association.

Hotels would need to facilitate that type of tourism by connecting visitors with local guides, and providing binoculars to people who didn’t come to watch whistling ducks and water kites all week but could make a day of it.

Ecotourism would also have to sustain itself during the majority of each year when migratory birds are elsewhere, says Piratheepa Vipulan, an environmental scientist and senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna. Delft Island—a short boat ride from the peninsula—has wild horses that tourists might want to see on a day trip, and boat tours could extend from the lagoon to different parts of the coast.

As Packiyanathan walked along the edge of the minefield, he stopped talking about investors and tourists. He pulled his phone from his pocket and held it up every minute or so, sometimes snapping a photo, sometimes recording sound or video. He wasn’t capturing anything in particular. But in a sense that was the point. The beauty and importance of the place are self-evident. He just wants others to see what he sees.

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Experts are flashing a warning for the future.

When fireflies fill the night air, they can look almost like suspended, molten gold. “They spark wonder in people,” Sara Lewis, a biologist at Tufts University, recently told The Guardian. “When you are in your backyard or park, you notice them and are amazed.”

In a new paper in the journal BioScience, however, Lewis reports that we’re probably not so good for the glowing beetles. Along with an international team of 11 collaborators, Lewis sounded an alarm on behalf of the 2,000 firefly species worldwide, suggesting that even as people bask in their enchanting light, we are also imperiling their survival.

Though insects are all around us—entomologists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have estimated that there are roughly 200 million insects for each person on the planet—it can be hard to figure out exactly what’s up with our little flying or scuttling neighbors. Millions of species have yet to be described. Many known ones are small and short-lived, and they can be difficult to survey or monitor, partly because tracking or tagging them is finicky, frustrating work.

Fireflies present their own challenges: Many are active at night, when humans are typically snoozing, and details are especially hard to see. Unlike moths, fireflies don’t flock to light traps that scientists set out to study them, and unlike butterflies, “you can’t just walk around and count them,” writes Avalon Owens, a graduate student in biology at Tufts, and one of the study coauthors, in an email. It can be hard to identify a species without dissecting it, and to differentiate a single, busy beetle from a group of them. “If you’re standing there in the dark, it can be hard to tell if you are seeing one firefly flash a bunch,” Owens writes, “or a bunch of fireflies each only flashing once in awhile.”

Some surveys in Malaysia have revealed a decline in the mangrove-loving Pteroptyx tener firefly, and Lewis and her collaborators have heard troubling anecdotes about other species taking hits. But across species, firefly population data is pretty sparse.

To get a better handle on how fireflies are faring across the planet, in January 2019, the study authors—all of whom are affiliated with the Firefly Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission—sent an email survey to 350 people through the Fireflyers International Network, a research and advocacy group that includes ecologists, taxonomists, conservationists, and other experts. Respondents were asked to rank and describe various threats that they perceived to fireflies in their region, including habitat loss, invasive species, light pollution, and the drought, sea-level rise, higher temperatures, and flooding associated with climate change.

After tossing out the responses that didn’t rank all of the threats, the authors were left with 49 surveys. By pairing those with recent research on these various threats, they outlined some of the factors most likely to be putting fireflies at risk.

The biggest perceived threat appeared to be habitat loss, trailed closely by light pollution. Many species struggle when lands are splintered or eaten up by housing or roads. Respondents also lamented agricultural intensification in Italy, and the uptick in pesticides and fertilizer that came with it. In Mediterranean Spain, some species floundered when abandoned orchards no longer teemed with the snails that they feast on. Japan’s firefly havens, satoyama—traditional, managed landscapes with ponds, rice paddies, and forest-flanked fields—haven’t been as plentiful as people continue to stream out of rural areas, the authors write.

Many fireflies that like it dark, and depend on inky skies to swap courtship signals, may struggle to carry out their flirtations in the artificial light of billboards, homes, or even flashlights and cameras. Tourism can also be a drag, the authors add—especially when motorboats erode the riverbanks where larvae cluster, or travelers inadvertently trample the flightless females of species that stay close to the ground.

Still, this is a relatively early warning, not a clanging death knell. The “survey results should be interpreted with caution,” the authors note, “because they reflect only expert opinion concerning perceived threats to firefly species persistence.” But if we want to keep being mesmerized by fireflies’ golden glow, from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to Kampung Kuantan, Malaysia, more monitoring data is needed. Long-term surveys would be especially helpful, Owens says.

“We also need to know how fireflies move,” she writes. “When they disappear from a habitat, are they gone forever, or have they simply moved elsewhere? Just knowing more about which species of fireflies are where right now would be a huge help. It’s actually crazy how little we know about these amazing insects.”

Weeksville residents set a precedent of self-determination that is still visible at Brooklyn restaurants.

Sometimes, we can only understand history from above. That, anyway, seemed to be the outlook of historian James Hurley and pilot Joseph Hays when, in 1968, they flew a plane over Brooklyn. They were looking for the remnants of a village founded 130 years earlier, the free Black community of Weeksville.

Established by abolitionists and Black landowners in the 1830s, with a peak population of 500 residents, Weeksville was one of the largest free African-American communities of the 1800s. It was founded just a few years after New York State abolished slavery, in 1827, and named after an early Black landowner, James Weeks. Weeksville residents ran their own schools and printed their own newspaper, The Freedman’s Torchlight; with a 93 percent literacy rate, they were more educated than white Americans of the time.

Residents also built their own economy, practicing self-determination through food. According to Judith Wellman’s Brooklyn’s Promised Land, in 1850, 9.5 percent of Weeksville residents were property owners, double the rate of greater Brooklyn’s population. Many of these holdings included small farms, where locals raised hogs and grew potatoes, corn, vegetables, and melons, some of which they likely sold in the bustling markets of far-off Manhattan. Residents supplemented their diets with foraged nuts and berries, and supplies from local grocery stores, several of which were black-owned.

While Weeksville thrived, it couldn’t resist the exploding city. By the 1930s, an influx of European immigrants and Brooklyn’s expanding city grid swallowed up the village like an urban Atlantis. So, 30 years later, Hays and Hurley took wing. Soaring over the sprawling city, they spotted a historic blip in the grid of brick and asphalt: four structures from the original Weeksville. Constructed between 1840 and 1880 as one- and two-story homes, they had originally faced Hunterfly Road, a Native American trail converted into a village lane. Archaeologists and activists immediately set to work excavating the structures, which they dubbed the Hunterfly Road Houses.

If you walk down Bergen Street in Central Brooklyn today, some 15-20 blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, you can still see them: a row of colonial-style wooden structures, washed white and tan. Nestled among a bodega, a brick public-housing unit, and the monumental, glass-and-metal Weeksville Heritage Center, which was built in the early 2000s to preserve the village’s history, the houses seem like a poignant anachronism.

In some ways, they are. Fuelled by industrial employment, black property ownership in Central Brooklyn increased throughout the 1900s. But in the past few years, rates of home and business ownership among black Brooklynites have actually declined. The 2008 financial crisis, predatory real-estate practices, such as deed fraud, and the influx of richer, white and other non-black newcomers have contributed to the displacement of many black residents. That includes people who have owned property since Weeksville’s heyday.

In the midst of these shifts, the Weeksville Heritage Center has remained a hub of Black cultural life. Now, in keeping with Weeksville’s legacy of culinary self-determination, Heritage Center staff have turned their attention toward Central Brooklyn’s contemporary food scene. As part of a project called “Meals as Collective Memory,” Weeksville staff and consultants, including project co-creator Maya Meredith, have interviewed dozens of local Black restaurant owners, with the aim of creating a “living archive” of food in a changing Brooklyn. The idea is that local, black-owned restaurants are the heirs of Weeksville’s legacy, and their efforts deserve documentation and support.

Underlying the restaurateurs' experiences are the seismic changes wrought by gentrification. Over the past decade, an influx of capital into nearby neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights has led to an explosion of restaurant openings. The trend is so pronounced that The New York Times has used the number of new restaurants as a metric of gentrification. Many of these establishments are white-owned and frequented by newcomers. But many are created by and for Black Brooklynites, presenting a possible alternative to the erasure of local culture that often accompanies gentrification. To promote their efforts, Weeksville has hosted workshops for aspiring entrepreneurs and published a “Brooklyn guide of Black-owned eats.”

The featured restaurants encompass the vast diversity of Black cuisine in Central Brooklyn, charting decades of migration, aspiration, and struggle for cultural and economic ownership. Their influences range from the Great Migration to Caribbean immigration; from the Nation of Islam to Instagram. But, says Obden Mondésir, Oral History Project Manager at the Weeksville Heritage Center, the black-owned restaurants featured in the project share a legacy that stretches back to Weeksville itself: the pursuit of economic and culinary self-determination.

On a chilly January afternoon, mist drips from the windows of Brooklyn Tea, one of the restaurants featured in the Weeksville project. The small Bedford-Stuyvesant café is full of tea-sipping visitors deep in conversation; notices about an upcoming hip hop and jazz music club and a South African tea tasting are listed on the wall. In the past few years, gleaming new cafés have sprung up in Bed-Stuy as quick and thick as kudzu. “There weren’t coffee shops in this area before, just because that wasn’t a thing that middle-class Black families did,” says Mondésir. But cafés have become so common in neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy that their minimalist aesthetics and six-dollar lattes are a gentrification cliché.

Unlike many cafés in the area, however, Brooklyn Tea is Black-owned. That often surprises first-time visitors, says Alfonso Wright, who, along with Jamila McGill, founded the business in 2019. Black-owned tea shops are rare; Wright can only think of one other in the city. But tea, which originated in China, and spread through centuries of often-brutal British colonialism, is a global beverage. “No matter what country you go to, there’s either a tea shop or a café,” Wright says. His love of tea began in his Jamaican-American household, where, at three years old, he learned to prepare the beverage for his mother. It’s part of a tradition that emerged from the Caribbean’s mixed indigenous, African, South Asian, and British colonial roots.

Cheryl Smith, another restaurateur featured in the Weeksville project, drew on family roots and Brooklyn’s culinary diversity to craft the menu of her Prospect Heights restaurant, Cheryl’s Global Soul. Smith grew up in a Jamaican-American family, on her mother’s cooking and fresh produce from the family’s Connecticut backyard. “I remember going out with a salt shaker and eating her cucumbers and tomatoes,” Smith says. When she came to Brooklyn, the diversity of people and flavors “just felt right.” She drew on her culinary training and the creativity of home cooks around her to craft a style of cuisine she calls “global soul.”

In May 2019, Smith drew on this dual love of home cooking and mid-Atlantic produce to recreate a turn-of-the-century Weeksville menu for a community dinner at the Heritage Center. Weeksville residents, she says, would have grown backyard vegetables just like her mother, eating the plump, juicy summer produce and canning the rest for winter. “It was more like hearth cooking,” she says. Smith’s Weeksville menu included black eyed peas, cornbread, cabbage slaw, and tomato salad.

By documenting the connections between past and present, Weeksville staff hope to preserve the “collective memory” of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Of course, restaurateurs in contemporary Central Brooklyn face different challenges than Weeksville residents. Rather than growing produce for their own consumption or to hawk at markets in Manhattan, they sell cuisine in mixed communities, including to higher-income, non-black newcomers. The oral histories curated by Mondésir include mixed opinions about gentrification. Some restaurateurs appreciate the influx of new potential customers. Others worry that by catering to a higher-income clientele, they are contributing to the problem of displacement.

For Mondésir, the debate is best captured in an unlikely medium: Instagram. Establishments in Brooklyn’s gentrified neighborhoods tend to have an aesthetic of generic hipness, including Edison lights, exposed brick, and coffee machines ornate as steam engines. For some restaurateurs, an Instagram-friendly look helps ensure much-needed, community-generated buzz. “It’s democratic,” said Wright in an interview with Mondésir. But a sleek aesthetic can also indicate the commodification of local foods to the exclusion of the people who created them. After all, most working-class Brooklynites can hardly afford rent, let alone a $25 brunch. And a neighborhood of $25 brunches can quickly become too expensive for longtime establishments.

Abu’s Bakery in Bedford-Stuyvesant is one eatery that has stayed put. It’s occupied a small storefront on Fulton Street, owned by the At-Taqwa Mosque, for 20 years. On a cold Monday afternoon, gusts of icy air stab through the sugar-scented shop as visitors enter from the mosque next door. Idris Conry, the bakery’s founder, greets them.

Conry was born in 1952, on Greene Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He opened the Bakery, which is now owned by his son, in 2000. As a teenager, one of the first things he baked was an apple cake recipe included in the program of the 1974 Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match. “Apple cake à la Ali,” Conry says with a smile.

Today, Abu’s Bakery is famous for another Nation of Islam creation: the navy bean pie. Custardy on the bottom with a burnt-sugar top, the bean pie emerged from the Nation of Islam’s drive to craft a Black cuisine that wasn’t associated with the American South and slavery. It’s been dubbed the only Muslim food invented in the United States. For years, bowtie-clad Nation members hawked bean pies on the street in Brooklyn and Harlem.

Now, Abu’s is one of the last and best to carry the pie. A neighborhood institution, it’s been featured everywhere from The New York Times to Slate. But early on, says Conry, he found himself falling behind on rent. The bakery survived those lean periods in part because the mosque, which Conry has attended for decades, was their landlord. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have made it this far,” says Conry.

Conry’s relationship with the mosque demonstrates something that Weeksville residents already knew: Property is power. Weeksville’s story began in 1832, when William Thomas, a black chimney sweep, purchased 30 acres of land in the rolling hills of what is now Crown Heights. While 27 percent of today’s black New York households own property, this remains well below the rate of white families. Meanwhile, gentrification continues to dispossess many property-owning black Brooklynites. In this context, community support can mean the difference between a business thriving and closing up shop. Mondésir says that, like Conry, several of the restaurant owners he interviewed were able to start businesses because they had a personal connection to a landlord.

We tend to think of self-determination as the right to not be tethered to others. But the stories of restaurateurs in the project, and that of Weeksville itself, show us that self-determination can also come from interdependence, from community, from what theorists of gentrification, including Weeksville staff, call “the cultural right to stay put.” Historians rediscovered Weeksville from the air. But the village’s legacy is best seen on the ground. Nearly 200 years after Weeksville residents planted their first seeds, their vision of a Black community built by and for its people has stayed rooted in Brooklyn soil.

Once a symbol of power, it's now considered a dying art.

In the unassuming Bangkok condo that serves as Wan Hertz’s classroom, one wall is devoted to her certificates. Some are her credentials as a legitimately trained fruit carver; others are government endorsements attesting to her skills. And a handful are awards from global competitions, placing her in the top tier of fruit carvers in the world.

“Anyone can be good at this, as long as you have perseverance,” says Hertz, who is helping Oklahoma couple Shevaun and Terrance Williams coax petals out of a stubborn carrot. All the same, she says, “the best carvers in the world are Thai.”

Out of the many culinary stars spawned by social media—pastry chefs towering over edible replicas of city landscapes, fresh-faced vegan chefs preaching the joys of clean living—fruit carvers may have had the most to gain. Their work, birthed over hours or even days, hunched over alone and in obscurity, can now literally blossom under the watchful eye of the camera, revealing itself via video or snapshots on Facebook and Instagram. Today, fruit carvers can be stars like Massimo De Vita, with thousands of followers and his own television show.

In Thailand, the art of fruit carving, or kae sa lak polamai, was once showcased at every major event and banquet. Whereas Chinese carvers specialized in shaping human figures or animals and the Japanese preferred patterns, Thais excelled in floral motifs. Every main dish at a Thai restaurant with fine dining pretensions was accompanied by fruit or vegetables carved into flowers or leaves, and the artists themselves were featured in dining rooms, displaying their craft to the masses.

Today, it is considered a dying art. At the same time, Thailand’s long history of fruit carving is being shunted to the background as international news stories trumpet the craft as a rising trend in the West.

“There is no child who wants to do this,” says chef Supapit Opatvisan. A Thai culinary instructor at Le Cordon Bleu Dusit in Bangkok, he counts himself as having been one of those children, forced to learn fruit carving at school because the flower arrangement class was full.

Learning to artfully carve fruits and vegetables is a traditional skill for Thai chefs, but there’s a catch. “You see the results slowly,” explains Opatvisan. “You discover you are good at it in six months, maybe a year.”

“If you don’t know fruit carving, you can still be a Thai chef,” he continues. “But if you do know it, it makes you that much better than the average chef.”

In the early 20th century, the very best Thai chefs worked at the royal court. Strict rules governed the appearance of royal dishes, where food was expected to satisfy three precepts: aharn pak, aharn tha, and aharn jai, or food for the mouth, eyes, and spirit.

“When you serve food to the royal family, the food must be delicious, but also very beautiful,” says Sidhorn Sangdhanoo, a Thai language professor whose mother worked in the royal kitchens in the beginning of the 20th century. A red curry needed to include green eggplants; a green curry had to hold accents of red. Once a week, a nam prik, or chili relish dip, was served with herbs and painstakingly carved vegetables. When the king was especially pleased with a dish, he placed four baht (about $20 today) on the tray as a reward to the cook.

“When we praised mother for a very good dish, she would always reply, ‘Give me four baht,’” says the 86-year-old with a laugh.

Not surprisingly, the ritual of dining in the royal court contributed to the aura of prestige that surrounded the Thai throne. Every household in the palace—headed by a different wife—vied for the honor of having the best table or excelling at a particular domestic art.

Of course, fruit carving was one of those arts. It’s said to have originated in the Sukhothai era (1238-1438), when a concubine decorated a floating lantern with flower and bird shapes carved from fruit. Such was the importance of fruit carving that a famous legend tells of a king discovering that his long-lost mother worked in the kitchen, after she carved his life story onto the side of a green melon and served it to him as a soup bowl.

“Fruit carving shows refinement,” says Tom Vitayakul, owner of the upscale Bangkok restaurant Ruen Urai. “There are some things that Thai people love. We love details.”

But fruit carving was only one of the food-related signifiers wielded by the palace to display the power of the monarch, says Sirichalerm Svasti, who grew up in the palace as a child.

Svasti—better known as the TV cooking personality Chef McDang—says that royal kitchen rules were myriad: no bones, pits or seeds; no extremes in flavor; only prime, seasonal ingredients. Diners were served Russian-style, with servers bringing trays to the table from which people could help themselves. Food was already cut into bite-sized pieces, so there were no knives in the table setting, even when Western food was on the menu.

The monarch, seated at the middle of the table, had his own set of cutlery and dishes that no one else could ever use; his own food was served wrapped in muslin and closed with a wax seal. The seal could only be broken by his taster, who had to test his food for poison; as a result, the monarch’s food was always lukewarm at most. When he finished, everyone else had to be finished too.

Naturally, every dish was garnished with beautifully carved fruits and vegetables. “There are 30 servants in the kitchen. They need something to do!” jokes Svasti. But “you don’t eat that, okay?” he says. “It’s a decoration. Don’t be an idiot.”

Although Thai fruit carving is taught in schools and considered a cherished part of national culture, there are fewer and fewer places for carvers to display their craft. Hertz used to carve fruit for a host of hotel kitchens, from the Mandarin Oriental to the Marriott Riverside. Fruit carving at hotels has since gone by the wayside, replaced by a focus on spas. Today, she runs the Siam Carving Academy out of her home.

There is less of a focus on fruit and vegetable carving in fine Thai restaurants as well. “We used to do more of it,” Ruen Urai’s Vitayaku admits. “I see it as fuddy-duddy and old-fashioned. It is also a waste. You throw it away after two days.”

Still, the Khon Kaen-bred Hertz, who has been carving since she was seven, continues to compete internationally. In her opinion, the most difficult mediums are taros and turnips, as they’re too brittle for rough handling. It takes her 15 minutes to carve a rose from a tomato, and an hour for a melon. Although some carvers boast a whole arsenal of carving tools, Hertz only uses her meed keed, a flexible blade extracted from a hacksaw.

Winning competitions usually only results in a little money and a certificate. “But those certificates help when you are applying for your next job,” Hertz says.

At the same time, the spirit of fruit carving lingers on in a younger generation. Subphachittra Dinakara Sukarawan, third-generation owner of the ML Puang Dinakara cooking school, presents a modern, more glamorous image of a Thai fruit carver through her social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram.

Sukarawan sees the internet as a boon to fruit carving, both in Thailand and abroad. “Today we have open sources of information and knowledge available to those who are interested in fruit carving, such as YouTube,” she says. “This is totally different from back when all of this knowledge was only conveyed to certain groups, within family members or the palace.”

Even “when someone learns to carve an exquisite motif on a guava,” she says, that means this most traditional of Thai arts has a chance to spread and live on.

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Restorers discovered the centuries-old bees' nests while preparing for a visit from the Pope.

More than a century ago, when Panama was still a part of Colombia and surrounded by a mosaic of tropical forest, Panama City had just one cathedral. The Catedral Basílica Santa María la Antigua, built in just 108 years—a blink of an eye, parochially speaking—isn’t baroque, but the altar is beautiful and ornate. In addition to the people assembled in the pews, the priests there had another, hidden audience: clusters of orchid bees with electric green faces that had made their cellular homes in the crevices of the altarpiece, buzzing softly and, one might assume, soaking in the word of God.

Whether the priests thought anything of them is something we’ll never know, but the bees vanished in 1875, when restoration workers, repairing damage from an 1870 fire, covered their cells in gold leaf. The bees, entombed in gold and later mummified, stayed hidden in the cathedral until 2018, when a new set of restoration workers unearthed their cells while cleaning the columns of the altarpiece, also known as the reredos. “I’ve been working on restoration for 20 years, and many, many things have passed me by,” says restorer Sofia Lobo, who was the first to discover the bee cells. “Never in my life have I seen anything like this.” Lobo, who works for Dalmática Conservação e Restauro, an art restoration service in Portugal, is coauthor on a paper on the bees published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.

“Our cathedral is quite poor, by cathedral standards,” says Wendy Tribaldos, a museologist and journalist who worked as a chronicler for the cathedral’s restoration. “But it was originally a hut.” In 1510, the Spanish colonists, in their hot, cruel pursuit of gold, defeated the indigenous leader Cémaco and conquered his town, according to an entry by Inga Töller in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. They renamed it Santa María La Antigua, and two years later Pope Adrian VI authorized its first cathedral in a mud hut with a thatched roof that had belonged to Cémaco himself. In 1524, the cathedral moved to Panama City, where it stayed until Welsh privateer Henry Morgan razed the city. Panamanians rebuilt their capital nearby, and in 1688 construction began on the Catedral Basílica Santa María la Antigua as we know it today.

Since its consecration in 1796, the cathedral has undergone a number of renovations, some for the better and some decidedly for the worse. Part of the cathedral’s facade fell in a 19th-century earthquake and wasn’t repaired until 2004, using four different types of stones in different colors. “Too many for my taste,” restorer Antonio Sanchez Barriga Fernandez says in a documentary Tribaldos made about the cathedral. In 1875, five years after the cathedral was damaged in a fire, the church replaced its brick floor for a cheaper option. “The authorities decided to place this concrete floor that I personally call ‘the parking space,’” Ricardo Gago, president of the Comité Amigos Casco Antiguo, which is devoted to restoring old Catholic churches, says in the documentary.

The cathedral languished in relative disrepair until news came of an important visitor—perhaps the most important visitor, short of, God—Pope Francis, who planned a visit to Panama in 2018. “We had to restore the cathedral to restore the pope,” Lobo says. Thus began the years-long cleanup and restoration process of transforming a building in disrepair into something worthy of His Holiness. “Before the restoration started, the church had broken windows, so pigeons made their nests inside the cathedral,” Tribaldos says. “But there was a resident cat, so at least there were no rodents.”

To prepare for Pope Francis, Lobo was tasked with restoring the reredos, an ornamental altar backdrop more than 20 feet tall. She inspected the altarpiece, which had been carved out of slabs of mahogany, on a needle-like ladder. From this uneasy perch she reattached paintings that had fallen to pieces, cleaned with brushes and solvents, and applied gold leaf to areas where it flaked off. The process took four months, during which Lobo realized that some knobs or protuberances in the design weren’t mahogany at all. “We didn’t even see the cells at the first moment, because it was covered in gold,” she says. “But when we saw the nests from behind, we knew it was something natural, something made from some kind of bug.”

The structure resembled bark-like clusters of cells, more like coral than a honeycomb. The shape confounded Lobo. “Mostly you find things made by rats or bugs, or even nests from normal bees that use wax,” she says, “but not like this.” Lobo removed a cell and showed it to a fellow restorer for his input. “He told me he’d seen something like this from butterflies in Jamaica,” she says. “It didn’t sound like it was possible, but he has almost 70 years of experience, so maybe he was right.”

Lobo then showed the cell to Tribaldos, who showed pictures of them to entomologist Annette Aiello at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama City. Aiello recognized that the cells came from bees, not butterflies, and gave them to her colleagues Bill Wcislo and David Roubik, the latter of whom happens to specialize in bees. Wcislo and Roubik easily identified the cells as homes built by mysterious, rarely seen female orchid bees of the species Eufriesea surinamensis. “In my house, my grandfather had bees, so I was used to seeing bees doing their thing,” Lobo says. “But I didn’t imagine that this was a thing that a bee could do.”

Historically speaking, honeybees might have made more logical church-goers, as their industrious nature and sweet honey are revered at length in scripture. The orchid bee, on the other hand, looks a little divine itself: an otherworldly metallic, auroral sheen on its face, foil-like tongue nearly as long as their body, and fringed back legs the color of the sun. Male orchid bees are relatively easy to spot around the orchids they frequent, but females are far more reclusive. They build nests out of mud, bark, and resin that are hard to spot in their native forest habitat. “There have been no detailed studies of female nesting biology,” Paola Galgani-Barraza, a researcher at STRI, writes in an email. Female orchid bees collect pollen and nectar from many flowers, making it tough to pick out a specific place to go looking for them. This study represents a “distinct trove of information,” Kate Ihle, a molecular biologist at the USDA honeybee lab who was not involved with the research, writes in an email.

After Lobo collected every inexpertly gilded cell from the reredos—more than 120 clusters in six aggregations—Galgani-Barraza and STRI pollen expert Enrique Moreno analyzed preserved pollen grains inside each cell. The result was a kaleidoscopic survey of the biodiversity of 19th-century Panama City, with pollen from 48 species of plants, more than twice the plant species known to be frequented by a related species of orchid bee in modern Brazil, according to the paper. The bees also visited species that thrive in sunlight, such as spiral gingers, and plants in the genus Costus, as well as canopy trees that are usually only found in mature forests, such as the shaving brush tree, in the genus Pseudobombax, Galgani-Barraza says. The bees even visited a rare species of mangrove, Pelliciera rhizophorate, or the tea mangrove, which is now extremely rare in central Panama. As the researchers write, the bees “were catholic in their flower preferences.”

“It is also interesting in showing that these bees can and did coexist with humans, when the land-use change that humans were causing is not too extreme,” Berry Brosi, a biologist at Emory University who was not involved with the study, writes in an email. Brosi notes that orchid bees are relatively sensitive to changes in land use. According to the USDA’s Ihle, a study comparing a current population of E. surinamensis could offer insight into how human development has influenced the bees’ dietary preferences.

While the century-old pollen fascinated researchers at the lab, Lobo was transfixed by the bees themselves: dessicated in their gilded cells. “Bill [Wcislo] told us that it was possible that some of the cells contained mummified bees,” Lobo says. She cut open the first cell and found two unlucky females, their emerald green faces faded to brown.“We were very, very lucky to find these two.”

Once the bees had been removed, Lobo continued her restoration of the altar, and had a far less intriguing, far more common encounter. “There was a termite infestation in the altar,” Tribaldos says, adding that Lobo had to replace a significant percentage of the work with new wood that had yet to be touched by termites.

The one question remains on every researcher’s mind—why the restorers decided to gild the bee cells—may never be answered. Lobo suspects they might not have seen them, since the cells were tucked away in the crevices and scrolls of the columns. “People can’t see it from the ground,” Lobo says. “I think the restorer’s thought, ‘Oh, this must be a little piece of wood attached to the altar.’” Galgani-Barraza speculates that it might have simply been easier to cover the cells than to remove them. As further illustration of the overall low quality of the 1875 restoration, Tribaldos cites red, green, and gold glitter that had been plastered on the reredos. “How can you put glitter on an altar!’ she says. Today, the mahogany beneath the oxidized glitter has been revealed again.

On January 26, 2018, Pope Francis smeared chrism over the restored altar, officially reconsecrating the cathedral. None of the researchers know if Francis had been informed of the ornate crypts of orchid bees that once adorned the columns behind him. “The Pope came to Panama on a big encounter, and had plenty of things to talk about,” Lobo says. “I don’t think they stopped to talk about the bees.”

In his speech in the basilica, Francis spoke on the weariness of hope, asking those gathered to “not allow ourselves to be robbed of the beauty we have inherited from our ancestors,” according to The Tablet. “It no longer belongs only to the past, but it is a thing of beauty for the present. That is how the Lord works.”

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The impact is not just economic, but cultural and recreational, too.

On January 20, 2020, Ted Valentiner and the other organizers of annual World Invitational Skijoring Championship in Whitefish, Montana, stood in a snow-covered field just outside of town. They had gathered to make a fateful decision about the upcoming event, scheduled to take place a few days later—a decision they hoped they would never have to make. They were thinking about canceling the whole thing.

“We agonized over the decision for hours and when you finally do decide to cancel, you always second guess yourself,” says Valentiner, a Whitefish resident who is on the event’s volunteer board. “It’s a big disappointment.”

Skijoring combines skiing with horseback riding. In its simplest form, the sport features a horse dragging a skier, and this event puts them together on an obstacle course of jumps, gates, and hanging rings that the skiers are supposed to grab as they speed by. Each run through the course is timed and, if a skier misses a jump or a ring, a few seconds are added on.

Skijoring, which means “ski driving” in Norwegian, dates back centuries and originated—like a number of winter sports—as a way to get from one place to another. In the early 20th century, competitive skijoring spread across Europe and North America; it was even included as an exhibition sport at the 1928 Winter Olympic Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Since the 1960s, skijoring has been the marquee event of Whitefish’s annual Winter Carnival celebration. In the early years, it was held downtown, but the carnival’s insurance provider put the kibosh on that in the 1970s after one of the competitors nearly skijored through a plate glass window. About 20 years ago, a group of riders and skiers got together to revive the event—at the edge of town, where Valentiner and the others had gathered. In 2020, more than 80 teams—a horse, rider, and skier—were signed up to compete.

There was plenty of snow in the field on January 20, but everyone was worried about an incoming warm front. Skijoring requires a lot of deep, fresh powder. It had never been a problem before, not in a place that can get more than 65 inches every winter and four times as much on the mountain that looms over the town. In the end, that warm front did what even insurance reps couldn’t do—put an end to the skijoring championship, at least this year. It was a hard decision, but the right one, since much of the snow melted a few days later.

Unfortunately, the Whitefish event isn’t the only skijoring competition that had to be canceled this winter. A mild season led to the cancellation of a half-dozen more in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado over the last few weeks.

Warm winters can disrupt everything from water supplies to fruit crops, and they have a negative impact on cold-season sports, and the economies and communities that rely on them. According to a 2019 report from Climate Central, a nonprofit science and communications organization that focuses on climate change, nearly 24 million Americans participate in winter sports, contributing roughly $11.3 billion to the economy. The report goes on to state that if climate continues to change as it is projected to, winters will get shorter and drier. In Colorado, where snow sports support more than 43,000 jobs, there was an average of 170 days with below-freezing temperatures every year between 1981 and 2010. If warming trends continue, that could drop to just 144 days per year between 2040 and 2059—a major blow to one of the state’s key industries.

The impact is being noticed on ice, too. In 2012, two geographers at Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University, Colin Robertson and Robert McLeman, decided to start tracking the number of days it was cold enough to skate on outdoor ice rinks in their area, including both homemade, backyard rinks and municipal ones. The scientists set up a website called Rink Watch with the hope that a few people might be able to help them out with data. Eight years later, they’ve received reports from more than 1,500 users from across North America. “We initially hoped that a few people would participate and it grew a lot faster than we ever anticipated,” Robertson says.

On the site, citizen participants can log if they can skate on their rinks and the quality of the ice: hard and fast or soft and slow. In 2015, using the data that they had gathered, the Rink Watch crew released a report that suggested the number of days cold enough for skating in Quebec and Ontario would drop by 34 percent this century. Robertson says while it may still be possible to set up a backyard rink—usually by laying out a plastic liner, flooding it, and hoping it freezes overnight before adding another layer—in the coming decades, the ability to actually use it will become much more unpredictable. The biggest enemy of the rink, backyard or public, he says, is just like the one that claimed the skijoring events hundreds of miles away: the sudden warm spell.

“Ice rinks are important to cities and small towns, it’s part of Canada’s cultural fabric,” Robertson says, adding that he hopes he can soon teach his three-year-old daughter how to skate. He adds that what he likes most about the Rink Watch project is that it helps show the general public how the climate is changing—and how that change will affect their lives and culture. “The classic image of climate change is the polar bear standing on a melting iceberg, but most people can’t relate to that,” he says. “But they can relate to skating on an outdoor ice rink.”

It’s unlikely the joy of the backyard rink or the spectacle of skijoring will go extinct soon, but it’s easy to see how warming winters are going to be an obstacle to these and other winter sports and pastimes in the near future. Enough days without good ice, and it might not be worth it to set up that rink. Enough cancelled community winter sports events, and cities and towns may decide to do something else entirely.

Despite the challenges, however, Valentiner isn’t throwing in the towel. He says it takes months to organize the skijoring competition in Whitefish, including lining up sponsors and vendors. One day last year, he put more than 300 miles on his truck driving around northwest Montana trying to get people to sponsor the event. It will take more than a few warm, dry, frustrating winters to derail his love for the sport and the community that turns out for it.

“The weather is constantly a concern, it’s always in the back of your mind when you start planning,” he says. “But when you do get that good snow year, it’s just a joy to put the event on.”

It’s hard to think straight when your brain is asymmetric.

Over 5,000 years ago in what is today Slovakia, a Neolithic community erected a new building. It wasn’t the first “longhouse” in Vráble, an early town comprising about 100 buildings in all. But like those that came before it, the new construction sat a little leeward. So did the one after that. And the one after that. Over time, the entire village slowly turned counterclockwise—and the Stone Age inhabitants of Slovakia likely had no idea it was happening.

They weren't alone. “We find [these longhouses] from the Paris Basin to Ukraine,” says Nils Müller-Scheeßel, an archaeologist at Kiel University and lead author of a recent paper, published last month in the journal PLOS One. “And what we find archaeologically is almost indistinguishably similar. They basically use the same building technique.”

These buildings were put up roughly once every 30 or 40 years, and each time the skew was counterclockwise—a pattern that occurred consistently over the course of 300 years.

Almost imperceptible today, and certainly invisible to the naked Neolithic eye, the curious rotation of the houses can be attributed to an esoteric glitch in the brain—a psychological process called pseudoneglect.

The sides of our brains have different responsibilities: The left hemisphere, for example, is in charge of producing speech, just as the right manages spatial attention. And those splits can sometimes manifest themselves in our interactions with the material world.

A portmanteau of “neglect,” pseudoneglect is a natural psychological phenomenon that causes individuals to pay more attention to the left side of their world. It has been observed in species other than humans, and in humans has been shown to affect senses other than sight, such as hearing. But it is most obviously apparent visually, and in the way that individuals will give weight to the left side of their field of view.

“It refers to a surplus of attention that is deployed into the left hemispace,” says Mark McCourt, a psychologist at North Dakota State University who is unaffiliated with the recent paper. “The commonly held idea is that it is a byproduct—an epiphenomenon—of the fact that the right hemisphere is specialized for the deployment of spatial attention.”

Twenty years ago, McCourt asked some test subjects to do a number of laboratory tests, all which split a line down the middle. (Some of the tests involved physical things like paper or a rod, others a cursor on a computer screen.) Few subjects split the line just so; most got it a little wrong, loitering on either side of the line’s true center. The majority of subjects erred to the left—a corroboration, McCourt says, of pseudoneglect’s imperceptible lefty bias in our brains.

Now, Müller-Scheeßel is arguing that the same process is responsible for the subtle rotation of Slovakia’s Neolithic towns. His hope is that his new research will prove the existence of the phenomenon on a larger, more manifest scale than McCourt’s experiment did.

In the Early Neolithic, much of Europe was dominated by the Corded Ware Culture, so named for the population’s proclivity for making and using banded ceramics, which litter the sites of their settlements across the continent. These sites are also known for their longhouses, which have a particularly significant presence in southwestern Slovakia.

Though the buildings are long gone, Müller-Scheeßel’s team was able to use magnetic surveys to detect the parallel lines of timbers on which the houses were constructed. Despite the size of the settlements and the ample room the various communities had to work with, their urban planning—likely done by mere eyeballing—was pretty consistent.

“[They] could [have built] their houses in every direction,” Müller-Scheeßel says. “But there’s a certain tendency for alignment.”

Neolithic house rotation is evident in other sites across Europe, and a number of theories have been put forth about why the Corded Ware Culture’s longhouses were oriented the way they were. Some argue that they were built at angles that would best withstand the wind. Others think that celestial bodies like the sun played a role. Still others suggest that longhouses were oriented toward each community’s ancestral homeland.

The matter is far from settled, but pseudoneglect could have played a role regardless of the primary reason for how the sites were laid out.

“It is very possible that the first house on [a] newly settled site was oriented according to the sun, and the others were aligned according to [that first house],” says Václav Vondrovský, an archaeologist at the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic who, last year, wrote a study proposing that the longhouses’ positioning was based on a solar alignment. “I don't see the ‘sun theory’ and [the] ‘pseudoneglect effect’ [as being] in contradiction.”

What is certain, according to the recent magnetic surveys and earlier research, is that the Neolithic buildings at Vráble and elsewhere in Europe were built asymmetrically, and that their rotation was always counterclockwise. Müller-Scheeßel speculates that the advent of survey and construction tools would have put an end to those rotations. (Five-thousand years after the Vráble’s Neolithic heyday, the Greek dioptra and the Roman groma were used to measure right angles in construction, which hadn't previously been possible.) Now, instruments like theodolites help surveyors get the angles they need with laser precision, and keep new buildings in line with older ones.

Pseudoneglect could also be connected to the environment of a given population. Recent research in Namibia showed that when rural populations moved to urban settings, they developed a greater left-leaning bias in their perception than they’d previously had.

Of course, those are modern populations. These are Neolithic ones. Which makes it a difficult thing to test. Studies of past groups force us to look at what they left behind. Without any ancient brains to study, it’s hard to say whether pseudoneglect operated the same way then as it does today.

“We can’t know how Neolithic brains differed from our own,” says McCourt. “It’s puzzling.”

There’s an old brainy joke about left-handed people being the only ones in their right minds. The rotating constructions of five millennia ago are a good way to remember that at the end of the day, we all bear left.

As developers build artificial islands to attract tourists, they're also uprooting trees from nearby atolls.

From above, Kaashidhoo, a coral island southwest of India and Sri Lanka, looks like a yin-yang symbol—two curves, one dark and one light, fitting into each other like kidney beans. In this case, the dark half is a tropical forest, including plenty of coconut trees, and the light half is the brilliant turquoise of a lagoon.

Kaashidhoo is one of the largest of the 1,192 islands that make up the Maldives archipelago, but unlike many other islands, it does not teem with sunbathing Europeans. Its broad dirt roads are often deserted, flanked by pink Maldivian roses, mango-orange impatiens, and papaya and banana plants. The main occupation of the islanders is cultivating coconut and other tropical produce that can be sold in Malé, the Maldivian capital.

But lately, the local economy has been thrown out of balance. Crater-like holes have begun to appear across the island, some filled with dry leaves and others left as barren pits. These bald patches are the places where mature coconut trees used to stand tall. In the last year, Kaashidhoo farmers have sold hundreds of trees to new luxury resorts on nearby artificial islands.

While some locals are grateful for the newfound income—$20 to $100 for each tree—others worry that beach erosion has intensified since the trees started getting uprooted. They see this as a fragile ecosystem threatened by the proliferation of luxury resorts. “It’s a huge issue,” says Ibrahim Naeem, Director General of the Maldives Environmental Protection Agency. “Importing coconut palm trees is prohibited in the Maldives, so they have to rely on residential islands.”

There are already 144 three- to five-star resorts in different parts of the Maldives, and the national tourism ministry has leased 115 uninhabited islands and lagoons to private investors, for the sole purpose of tourism. Many resorts are being built on artificial islands, which are constructed with large machines that reclaim land by sucking sand from the bottom of lagoons.

“These new islands have been coming up from nothing,” Naeem says. “Once these islands’ reclamation work is completed, the developers look for greenery.” The man-made patches of land are typically decorated with coconut palm trees and other coastal vegetation, which are transported from over a dozen local islands, including Kaashidhoo.

Since last year, several locals and activists have taken to social media with the hashtag #mvtreegrab, to express their anger against what they call “ecocide.” They say it is impacting the resilience of residential islands. Jeelan Jameel, a Kaashidhoo resident, says that since contractors began uprooting trees in 2018, many things around the island have changed. A wide road was constructed from the beach to the location from where coconut trees were being uprooted.

“At first, many of them were happy with the extra income and some signs of development,” Jameel says. Locals are generally pro-development, she says, because they’re reluctant to move to Malé to look for jobs. In fact, the Maldivian government promised to develop local tourism in Kaashidhoo that would provide them with better employment opportunities.

Yet as the year went by, and more coconut trees disappeared, Jameel says that many locals grew concerned. Coral islands like Kaashidhoo are highly dynamic, constantly adjusting and dancing to the idiosyncrasies of wind, tides, and relentless waves. “Everyone has observed far more erosion around the beaches. That’s what we end up talking about most of the time,” Jameel says. In response, she joined a non-governmental organization called Young Leaders, to spread awareness about environmental issues on the island.

Sonu Shivdasani, the CEO and founder of Soneva, a chain of luxury resorts in the Maldives, acknowledged in an email that the widespread uprooting of trees has caused problems, and that the practice should be better regulated. “When this has happened, this has been detrimental to the local islands,” writes Shivdasani. “That said, the Maldives is a fast-developing nation, and there is a growing need for land that trees currently exist on, whether it is for more housing, schools, and other public buildings, or even airports. In such instances, it is better that the trees are transplanted.”

Emboodhoo lagoon, close to Malé, is one of the sites where uprooted palm trees end up. A Thai company called Singha Estate is developing a multimillion-dollar resort project, Crossroads, that has been advertised as “deeply sustainable” and spans three artificial islands in the lagoon, in collaboration with Hilton and Hard Rock Hotels. Previously, this area was just a massive lagoon that fishermen and seasoned scuba divers visited regularly.

But today, after a few years of heavy construction and dredging work, the lagoon is home to artificial islands and their brand-new villas, interspersed with plenty of imported greenery. It has become private property that locals are strongly discouraged from visiting. (The developers of Crossroads did not respond to requests for comment.)

“If the resort developers had planned ahead, nurseries could have been set up to grow coconut trees and other vegetation,” says Ibrahim Mohamed, deputy director-general of the Environmental Protection Agency. “But they can’t wait for four to five years for the trees to grow and want to open their resorts within one year.”

Maeed Zahir, advocacy director at the Malé-based NGO EcoCare, says that there’s still not enough oversight from the government. “The problem is, the trees are usually uprooted in the middle of the night with excavators,” Zahir says. As a result, the environment ministry “rarely finds out that their regulations are being violated.” Zahir tipped off the E.P.A. of one such violation in Laamu Atoll, and the contractor was made to replant all the trees that were uprooted without a permit.

There is some tentative good news for environmentalists. This year, Ali Waheed, the minister of tourism, announced that resort development projects on 70 of the 115 lagoons or islands have been discontinued. Still, trees continue to be sold for the landscaping of upcoming resorts. In 2019, the national E.P.A. issued permits to 19 islands for vegetation removal, and 2,706 trees were sold to resort developers.

For now, the Maldives E.P.A. office in Malé continues to receive complaints from concerned citizens. They say that due to a lack of resources and manpower, they can't monitor all islands where trees are being uprooted, and they worry about the consequences. “If this goes on, ultimately, the whole system will fail,” says Ibrahim Naeem, the E.P.A. official. “Tourists won’t be as interested in traveling to the Maldives to see artificial islands. They can enjoy that in Dubai.”

"Bogus Cinderellas" can come from micronations, outer space, or parallel dimensions.

The postage stamp looks like a postage stamp is supposed to look: white, perforated edges, and part of a circular cancellation mark in the corner. It also has the country and postage clearly printed, though its depiction of the pirate Blackbeard during an attack might be more dramatic than most philatelic subjects. But it’s not a postage stamp, not really, because its country of origin is Sealand—a metal platform about the size of a tennis court, off the English coast. Sealand is one of the quirky, strangely numerous states known as “micronations,” or self-proclaimed polities with no legal recognition. Some of them, to simulate legitimacy or at least make a little money, have issued their own flags, passports, coins, and yes, postage stamps.

Laura Steward, curator of public art at the University of Chicago, who organized an exhibition of stamps from micronations and other dubiously defined places, believes that these tiny squares are more than a toss-off: They’re art, proof of imagination, and rather sophisticated bids for public recognition. “A postage stamp is a small but mighty symbolic emissary from one particular nation to the rest of the world,” Steward writes in text accompanying the exhibit. “A functioning postal service, made visible in stamps, is an unmistakable expression of national legitimacy…. As a result, the postage stamp is an excellent vehicle for spurious, tenuous, or completely fictitious states to declare their existence.”

Steward, who’s a stamp collector herself, refers to these types of stamps as “Bogus Cinderellas.” They are “bogus” because they don’t represent officially recognized entities, and “Cinderellas” because they are stepchildren to genuine postage. “Most serious stamp collectors consider them illegitimate despite their extraordinary ability to conjure an entire nation on a tiny piece of paper,” Steward wrote. Some collectors are fascinated by them nonetheless, and so micronations (and other not-quite-places) keep putting them out. The Republic of Molossia issued some as recently as 2019.

Atlas Obscura spoke with Steward about the wonders of discovering and collecting stamps from these rather curious, suspect places.

What was your first encounter with tanglible “proof” of a micronation?

I was working on an exhibition of unusual forms of currencies in support of a scientific conference, and came across Sealand’s currency, and then Sealand itself.

Why would a micronation go through the trouble of making stamps if they're no good for postage?

Stamps are routinely used to reify state power. If your state’s existence is rather tenuous, making a stamp is a gesture of legitimacy and seriousness. It is an opportunity to visualize your state’s identity and share that with others.

Tell us about your favorite bogus Cinderella.

My favorite stamps are from Heliotown, which is more like an art project than a micronation. It is easiest to think of Heliotown as a parallel reality, and there are two “portals” to it in Santa Fe, New Mexico—one downtown, one at the Santa Fe Institute, the independent research institute that created it.

What's the micronation stamp with the most interesting story?

I’m drawn to Celestia, the Nation of Celestial Space. James Thomas Mangan, founder of Celestia, registered the acquisition of “outer space” with the Recorder of Deeds and Titles in Cook County, Illinois, on January 1, 1949. Magnan laid claim to outer space to prevent any one country from establishing hegemony there. Later in 1949, he banned all atmospheric nuclear tests, and notified the United Nations of his decision.

What’s the allure of these stamps for collectors?

For me, the appeal of the stamps is their ability to stand for the political culture of an entire nation in just one square inch. And I love to think about micronations—the boldness of the project, the many decisions that must be made to invent an entire nation and culture out of nothing. And to then express such a vast project in such a tiny form is something I find enchanting to think about it. I love the handmade qualities of many stamps, which show us the character of their makers.

The 19th-century lithographs document a unique biodiversity that’s slipping away.

When John Gould and his wife, the artist Elizabeth Gould, first set foot in Australia, in 1838, they were ready to start something new. John Gould had spent the previous year helping Charles Darwin with his revolutionary work on evolution in the Galápagos Islands, off the coast of South America, naming and classifying Darwin’s finches and correcting the more famous naturalist on multiple counts of avian misidentification.

In Australia, the Goulds were to study, write about, incidentally eat, and lavishly illustrate birds. But on seeing the eclectic array of mammalian life on the continent, the couple couldn’t help themselves. They produced a three-volume work, Mammals of Australia, with lithographs by H.C. Richter, according to The Public Domain Review. Reminiscent of John James Audubon’s work, the Gould’s efforts put evolutionary theory to paper, with vivid depictions of life’s diverse manifestations.

“If the Birds of Australia had not received that degree of attention from the scientific ornithologist which their interested demanded,” Gould writes in the preface to his corpus on Australian mammals, “I can assert, without fear of contradiction, that its highly curious and interesting Mammals had been still less investigated.”

Despite the extreme diversity of creatures that inhabit Australia’s harsh environs, life on the continent is more fragile than meets the eye. From the bush to the Outback, Australia has always been home to a slew of bizarre creatures: During the last Ice Age, Mini Cooper–size marsupials clambered up trees to snack; today, large pink slugs thrive on one of the continent’s volcanoes.

But all life is susceptible to the upheavals of climate change, which has recently sparked bushfires that have obliterated animal life and habitats. Though charismatic creatures like the thylacine were eradicated by humans last century, other marsupials—and the larger category of Australian mammals—have persisted.

At least until now. The fires in the southeast of the continent have pushed many of those animals closer to the brink of extinction. (Gould called Australia the “great country of these pouched mammals,” speaking to the continent’s bevy of marsupials, which are otherwise sparsely represented on Earth.)

These 19th-century illustrations of Australian mammalian life offer a melancholic glimpse into the continent’s biodiversity as it was seen back then: replete with perplexing creatures with bizarre anatomies—inexplicable leaves on the evolutionary tree. Seen in 2020, these lithographs strike an eerie chord, envisioning life in a moment and environment now long gone—thanks to us.

The Gunditjmara have been building an eel-farming system at the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape for more than 6,000 years.

In Victoria, Australia, an ancient labyrinth of waterways snakes across a once-volcanic landscape. This is the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, a vast aquacultural system the Gunditjmara Aboriginal people, who still call this country home, began constructing 6,600 years ago. Parts of the system are still in use today.

Ask locals about Budj Bim, and you’ll invariably be directed to Uncle Denis Rose. A Gunditjmara elder, Rose, who has lived here most of his life, cares for the complex as Project Manager of the Budj Bim Sustainable Development Project. His knowledge of this country and its history has earned him the honorific “Uncle,” a term of respect for Aboriginal elders. Bring up the title, however, and he’ll demur. “I don’t refer to myself as that, no,” Rose says. “I’m in a little bit of denial about my age.”

Recently, Rose’s expertise has been in even greater demand. Since December 2019, massive wildfires have devastated Australia, killing dozens of humans and an estimated billion other animals. But in Gunditjmara country, the wildfires have left an unexpected gift. They’ve uncovered stunning and previously unknown sections of the 24,500-acre complex, including an 82-foot channel that was obscured by thick brush. The find reinforces our understanding of the vast scale and sophistication of the system, which UNESCO designated a World Heritage Site in 2019 after decades of Gunditjmara struggle to reclaim their land and culture."

The aquaculture system was born in a fiery act of creation. Around 30,000 years ago, the Budj Bim volcano began coating the country in streams of lava. Gunditjmara ancestors understood the explosions as the work of an Ancestral Being they called Budj Bim, who transformed himself into the landscape through lava flows. Eventually, volcanic activity slowed, and the hot basalt rock cooled into a foundation for vibrant wetlands, including present-day Lake Condah.

Around 6,600 years ago, Gundijtmara began transforming the landscape. They used heat to forge channels from the basalt, structuring the wetlands into a perfect habitat for short-finned eels called kooyang. Year-round eel populations and an elaborate system of traps allowed the Gunditjmara to settle and build stone houses. In all, Gunditjmara people constructed around 70 individual aquaculture systems, including channels up to 1,000 feet long.

The Gunditjmara managed the surrounding country through cultural burning, a system of low-intensity, intentional fires that Aboriginal Australians across the continent have used to regulate their ecosystems for millennia. Similar to Native American uses of flame in the American West, these periodic burns create ideal habitats for the prey that humans like to hunt, and eliminate the dry brush that fuels more destructive, lightning-sparked fires

Budj Bim remained a center of Gunditjmara life for thousands of years. Then came Europeans. The British first spotted Australia in 1770, but they didn’t reach Budj Bim until 1841, when government official George Augustus Robinson arrived in southwest Victoria on an exploratory expedition. Artwork from that time reveal a brushless landscape shaped by cultural burning. Descriptions reveal European racism. Robinson described the aquaculture system as “resembling the work of civilized man,” but noted, with evident shock, that “on inspection I found [it] to be the work of the Aboriginal natives.”

Robinson’s find was, to say the least, inconvenient for the British, who had based their claim over Australia on the doctrine of terra nullis. Ancient Romans had invented the concept, which means “land belonging to nobody,” to justify their own imperial takeover of lands they said weren’t in productive use. When the British first reached Australia, they claimed the continent was “a tract of territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or settled law.” Faced with the inconvenient fact of Aboriginal ingenuity, the British ignored it and stole their land.

British and, later, Australian officials forbade cultural burning and drained many of the swamplands around Budj Bim. Settler violence and European diseases devastated Gunitjmara populations. While Gunditjmara people fought back, they were eventually pushed onto a number of church missions in the area, where colonizers undertook a genocidal project of cultural erasure.

“We were actively discouraged from our traditional practices,” Rose says. While much of the area around Budj Bim was made a national park in 1960, the lack of Gunditjmara control of their land caused much of the aquacultural system to fall into disuse. At the same time, the lack of cultural burning led to overgrowth that hid sections which have only now been uncovered.

But Gunditjmara people managed to sustain their culture, thanks to the resilience of community elders like the late Aunty Connie Hart. Hart grew up on a mission in the 1930s, where she’d watch elders weave baskets of dry grass. Although she was forbidden from learning the practice, she watched and memorized their technique. When Hart returned to Gunditjmara country after a few decades in Melbourne, she started teaching traditional basket weaving. For Rose, the anecdote represents the resilience of a people determined to hold onto their values despite almost two centuries of colonial violence. "While there was a concerted effort not to pass those things on, they still did.”

In the past several decades, the Gunditjmara have reclaimed their land and aquaculture. Beginning in the 1980s, a series of court cases recognized the legitimacy of Aboriginal claims, and in 2007, the Australian government fully recognized Gunditjmara land rights. Today, Gunditjmara people have native title, or traditional ownership rights, over 540 square miles of traditional land, and co-manage Budj Bim National Park with the Australian Government. This includes the sprawling Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, which is managed by the Gunditj Mirring and Winda-Mara Aboriginal Corporations. Gunditjmara rangers are now focused on rehabilitating the damaged wetlands and reinstating traditional fishing practices by teaching young people to catch eels with woven grass baskets.

While the recent fires have devastated some communities, rangers say they’ve helped renew the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape. Here, the blaze was relatively slow-moving, low, and “cool,” largely sparing treetops while clearing underbrush. The fires revealed swathes of the aquaculture system that even Rose, who estimates he’d visited the areas around these sites at least 20 times a year, never noticed.

“It’s been absolutely fantastic,” says Leigh Boyer, a Gunditjmara ranger with the Winda-Marra Aboriginal Corporation, who coordinates tours of Budj Bim. Archaeologists and rangers are planning a survey of the newly uncovered sites, including an assessment of any potential burn damage. The assessment may lead archaeologists to adjust their assessment of ancient Gunditjmaran population size, which has been historically underestimated.

The new find could also be good news for tourism. Gundijmara rangers are eager to welcome visitors—within limits. “The protection of our cultural heritage is our main priority,” says Boyer. He believes tourism can be both profitable and sustainable, and hopes visitors gain an appreciation for Gunditjmara heritage while economically empowering the community. Visitors can view the site, including eel traps and ancient stone houses, through ranger-led tours. They are not, however, permitted access to the oldest part of the aquaculture system. “It’s too precious,” Boyer says.

Going forward, both Rose and Boyer say rangers’ first goal is to ensure the health of their country. They’re experimenting with reinstating cultural burning, which requires particular care in a rocky landscape. “It’s all a bit of a learning process,” says Rose. But for Gunditjmara rangers, these efforts are more than worth it.

“There’s something about this place that keeps on drawing me back,” says Boyer, who has lived on Gunditjmara country for most of his life. The country’s history is the Gunditjmara’s history; its life extends deeper in time and meaning than even a UNESCO World Heritage designation can capture. Rose says it simply: “I started my journey here, and I’ll finish it here.”

An art museum found a very old toilet—right under where its new bathroom was being built.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, London was not a pleasant place to poop. The city was bustling with people and light on sewers, which means it was just teeming with excrement. Many, many residents had no choice but to squat over communal cesspits—deep openings in the ground often covered with wood planks cut with butt-sized holes. When the pits reached capacity, people either closed them up and dug fresh ones or called for a “gong farmer,” a poor sod who scooped them out and carted the mess away, often to the nearby Thames or Fleet River, waterways that often seemed to be more waste than water. In the sorry Fleet, the 16th-century poet Ben Jonson once wrote, “arses were heard to croak, instead of frogs.”

Most of London’s stinking cesspits have thankfully disappeared, but one recently resurfaced near the Thames. It was buried beneath present-day Somerset House, a sprawling neoclassical complex that contains the Courtauld Gallery, renowned for its collection of Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings. And no one was more surprised to find it there than the people who know the place best.

Archaeologists regularly find old surprises waiting when new roads go down or new buildings go up—even in the densest, most developed urban areas. In some places, the input of archaeologists is mandated by law, to ensure that the march of progress doesn't destroy significant historical artifacts. When these experts start poking around, they’re sometimes surprised by what they find—maybe the remains of a vast kiln, maybe a 2,000-year-old Native American site, maybe a bomb from World War II.

The Courtauld Gallery is undergoing extensive renovations in preparation for a reopening in 2021. Before crews broke ground, researchers dug into the history of the site to get a handle on what they might encounter. “We had no idea,” says Stephanie Hall, the Courtauld’s project director overseeing the revamp.

The gallery sits along the Strand—a busy, bus-choked thoroughfare lined with glitzy hotels, theaters, churches, and plenty of eateries. The team knew that back in the 16th century, the area was home to handsome mansions that abutted the Thames. Somerset House stands on the old footprint of the Bishop of Chester's Inn, a cushy London lodging, Hall says, but researchers don’t know much about that long-gone building. (It was eventually replaced by a Tudor-era dwelling, where Elizabeth I lived before her reign as queen. That structure was demolished, and the current building was completed in 1801.) The neighborhood is depicted in a sketch from the 1540s, but it’s not entirely clear which building is which. Based on their research, the team thought they might encounter bits of a Tudor-era wall. “We didn’t expect to come across anything other than that,” Hall says.

In October 2019, crews came across the remains of a stone structure—but it didn’t look quite like Hall, a medievalist, thought it would. It looked to be deep, and it was flanked by a smattering of Saxon-era refuse pits, which held things such as bone combs used to brush out lice. “We said, ‘Just keep going,’” Hall recalls.

As they kept digging, specialists from Museum of London Archaeology found that the chalk blocks did not make up a wall, but lined a pit 15 feet deep. The team initially thought they had struck part of a bell tower from an old priory. “We looked through old plans and were trying to work out what structure it could have been,” Hall says. They realized it wasn’t holy ground, exactly: “It’s just an old toilet.”

Hall and the rest of the crew were fascinated. The archaeologists spent about a month in the muck, and the deeper they went, the slicker and smellier it got. The mud was vaguely greenish: “I think the word ‘slime’ has been bandied about,” Hall says. The feces itself had returned to earth, but it was still foul, “like a big gaping maw that emitted a slightly fetid breath.”

The scientists found that the structure had walls up to three feet thick and a gravel base. A latrine was built in one corner in the 18th century, after the rest of the pit had been filled in, meaning that, from the Saxon era to the 18th century, people had been pooping on the same site for hundreds of years.

Such old pits—any old toilets, really—are rich grounds for archaeologists. Latrines can hold clues to historic diets and health, including seeds and very old parasite eggs. They also serve as time capsules, since they were sometimes used as local trash dumps. A cesspit was “a convenient place to discard unwanted or broken objects,” Museum of London Archaeology senior archaeologist Antonietta Lerz told The Guardian—and if anything accidentally fell in, well, no one was climbing down to retrieve it.

The team found roughly 100 objects dating from the 14th to 16th centuries, including an iron boot spur, a condiment dish and a bone-handled fork they believe was once used to spear sweetmeats, and a delicate, gold-plated ring with a stone that might be a garnet. They found some grislier things, too—a crushed horse head, the entire skeleton of a little dog. The researchers suspect that the rest of the horse may have been carved up for meat and that the dog either tumbled in or was tossed in after death, Hall says.

Now empty, the pit will be stuffed with polystyrene, to make it possible for researchers to have another look in the future. (Conservators are moving away from the practice of putting a pane of glass over old sites to make them visible to visitors, Hall says, because the glass can trap moisture that can fuel bacterial growth.) Later on, Hall says, if researchers want to revisit the pit, “they can take up the floor and re-excavate it.”

In the meantime, the Courtauld is satisfying public curiosity with an interactive 3-D model of the cesspit. Come 2021, some of the cleaned-up artifacts will be on view in the new galleries, and anyone who feels the call of nature while there might feel a connection with the people who had the same urge hundreds of years ago: The gallery’s new bathroom, just like its last one, will be right on top of the hole. It’s all pure coincidence, but Hall is gleeful about it. It has a kind of poetry, she says. “It just feels right.”