Archaeologists unearthed evidence of pig roasts and boozy gatherings at an 1870s British Columbia eatery.

Dawn Ainsley, staff archaeologist at Canada’s Gold-Rush-era Barkerville historic town and park, was overseeing the installation of a new sewer line in 2012 when diggers struck a different kind of gold: garbage. “Every time we hit a garbage dump we had to stop and monitor it,” says Ainsley of the dig. The site of a largely Chinese-Canadian mining town established in the 1860s, and now an open-air museum, Barkerville is full of meaningful trash, the result of generations of household waste tossed off back porches and into alleyways.

But this particular garbage pit—or midden, in archaeological speak—wasn’t just off any old porch. It was located between two historic restaurants, the now-defunct Doy Ying Low restaurant, established in the 1870s, and the Lung Duck Tong, established in the 1920s, which continues to serve as an eatery for visitors today. When Barkerville staff started digging through the find, they uncovered a unique record of the daily culinary life of the thousands of Chinese-Canadian prospectors who had left China for the promised “gold mountains” of Western Canada’s mining towns. Findings included evidence of a century-old pig roast, dominoes and drinking parties, and one very old, still-intact piece of canned meat similar to Spam.

This summer, as British Columbia’s physical-distancing guidelines permit, Ainsley will continue excavating these culinary finds with the help of Barkerville visitors, part of a community archaeology program dedicated to bringing the history of the region’s Chinese miners to life.

Barkerville lies in the Fraser River Valley of what is now British Columbia, at the intersection of ?Esdilagh, Lhtako, Nazko, Lhoosk’uz, Ulkatcho, Xatśūll, Simpcw, and Lheidli First Nations land. European and Asian people were few and far between at Barkerville until the 1850s, when the wave of prospectors that had first migrated to California began to shift north in response to rumors of “easy gold” along the Fraser. By the 1860s, Barkerville—named for an early English prospector, Billy Barker—developed into a bustling mining town, with a peak population of 5,600 residents, half of them Chinese Canadian.

Barkerville’s Chinese miners were mostly young men, who migrated to the Americas hoping to strike it rich and head back home. “They never intended to stay,” says Ainsely. Faced with racism from white prospectors, they relied on Chinese-immigrant benevolent societies for community support, and quickly established their own networks of commerce and trade. By 1861, writes Tzu-I Chung, a history curator at the Royal British Columbia Museum, Chinese prospectors had established businesses—including grocery stores, general stores, and even opium dens—all the way up the Fraser River, including at Barkerville. Prominent among these gathering spaces were small restaurants like the Doy Ying Low.

Findings at the Barkerville restaurant middens indicate a rich community life, where single men decompressed from the backbreaking labor of the gold fields through communal meals and celebratory occasions like pig roasts. Ainsley has found numerous ceramics that Phillip P. Choy, a historian of Chinese immigrant material culture, identifies as everyday “folk ware,” min yao. These would have been used for eating and storing staples such as soy sauce, rock sugar, thousand-year-old eggs, and preserved vegetables, or jah choy.

“In situations where only male workers were present, such as in work camps for mines and railroads, and in seasonal agricultural work, each worker had his own porcelain rice bowl,” writes Choy. The workers would have eaten Chenese staples, like the above preserved vegetables and eggs, as well as beef and pork, and packaged foods like tinned meat. In addition to cafes like the Doy Ying Low, many of the miners would also have grown their own vegetables in terraced gardens along the hillsides surrounding town.

The middens also reveal a lively social life. “They liked to drink a lot,” says Ainsley. There was likely little else to do for fun considering the gold fields’ monotonous labor and relative isolation. Bottles from the site are impressively diverse, and many are imported, including a wine called ng ka py, which came in a signature spouted ceramic bottle, Japanese cider, and Filippino beer, all from no later than 1910. Opium was a common recreational drug. “Opium dens were among the earliest businesses established in Barkerville,” writes Chung, with both Chinese and non-Chinese communities partaking. In the 1870s, according to Chung, a bustling local drug trade made opium British Columbia’s third most valuable export, after only coal and fur.

Around 1900, Barkerville’s boom went bust. With the gold fields empty, a mass exodus of miners left the area. Many remained in Canada, reuniting with their families and sowing the seeds of a vibrant Chinese-Canadian culture. Their culinary influence, too, continues to color rural Canada, where Chinese restaurants founded by pioneering immigrant families remain a vital fixture. Other miners returned to their families in China. The lucky made it home alive. The unlucky, who died in the gold fields, often had their remains shipped back by benevolent societies to their communities in China as a form of final farewell.

By 1928, Barkerville had already become a National Historic Site. It was further labeled a Provincial Heritage Site in 1958, when officials decided to reopen it as a living-history museum, a function it continues to serve today. Yet signs of the Chinese miners remain, both in today’s Chinese-Canadian communities and in the artifacts of daily life that Ainsley and her team continue to unearth. Ainsley’s rarest find, a Qing Dynasty coin dating back to 1644, is particularly evocative. Qing Dynasty coins were in circulation in China until 1900, and it’s easy to imagine why miners in rural Canada would have wanted to hold onto them. Even amid the hard work and constant disappointment of the gold fields, many prospectors never gave up hope that they would strike it rich, and bring wealth to their families back home.

Hackney has a more diverse population of trees than any borough in London.

The strawberry tree on Arbutus Street, in the London borough of Hackney, looks unremarkable for most of the year. Then, in the fall, bright-red fruits appear, dimpled and dangling in bunches inside a bushy canopy of glossy leaves and bell-shaped flowers. We don’t know who planted the tree and its sickly sister just along the sidewalk, but their location is apt. What better place than Arbutus Street, that person might have thought, for a tree whose scientific name is Arbutus unedo?

There are over 8 million trees in London, an urban forest that covers around 21 percent of the city. Hackney may be best known around the world for its hipsters and the restaurants and bars they frequent. But that’s not the borough’s only claim to fame. Thanks to a pioneering program of street-tree planting over the last 20 years, Hackney has a more diverse population of trees than any neighborhood in London. Paul Wood, the aptly named author of London’s Street Trees, estimates that the area boasts at least 350 species.

Heading west from Arbutus Street, the urban tree-seeker can take a leaf from Wood’s book and make a right on De Beauvoir Road. (Wood also leads street-tree tours, which are taking place virtually at the moment.) Outside number 66, you’ll find the unusually shaped leaves of the tulip tree, a species that’s been found in London for the last couple hundred years, if not longer. Its large, yellow-and-green flowers, which bloom in the summer, can be hard to spot on taller trees, but this one is small enough that it’s possible to make them out in the foliage.

Hackney hasn’t always been such a mecca for urban tree enthusiasts, recalls Wood, who lived here between 1999 and 2001. “It was a very different place. In subsequent decades, it's transformed,” he says. He credits the local government’s long-term environmental policies as a major factor in its turnaround. “First of all, they got the right people in to plant trees, and politically they were able to find a bit of budget and empower them to go ahead and really green up the borough.”

There are currently around 10,000 street trees in Hackney, with more on the way. Jon Burke, the local councillor responsible for energy, waste, transport, and the public realm, has a $4.9-million plan to plant an additional 5,000 street trees, plus 1,000 trees in Hackney parks, by 2022. “The main reason we're doing it, which is different from the historical approach, is to view trees as climate-mitigating measures, rather than just for their aesthetic purposes,” he says. Increased canopy cover means cooler streets—which will hopefully translate into fewer heat-related hospital admissions and lower demand for air conditioning.

Not that there’s anything wrong with valuing trees for their aesthetic purposes. On the contrary, a growing body of research suggests that proximity to trees can help mental and physical health. According to attention restoration theory, looking at trees “gives our stressed out, cognitively fatigued minds a break,” says Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild. Jones describes the positive impact of fractal and repeating shapes on the brain, as well as the calming effect of phytoncides, the chemical compounds released by trees.

“There was a tree on my street which I kind of fell in love with,” Jones says. “Then it was concealed with scaffolding, and it was at the time that I was in a recovery period from addiction and depression, and the concealing of the tree deepened my research journey and desire to find out what was going on. Why would this tree have such an impact on me?”

On Northchurch Road, not far from the lovely tulip tree on De Beauvoir, a majestic row of London plane trees recede into the distance. Planes are the archetypical London street tree, and they’re common in Hackney’s parks, but it’s rarer to find them on the streets here. These particular London planes have been recently pruned to keep them from growing so large as to damage a row of early-Victorian villas.

Managing prestigious mature trees like these comes at a considerable cost, says Wood, and not all municipalities are willing to pay. In the northern English city of Sheffield, for example, a private contractor working on behalf of the city began felling mature street trees as part of a scheme to ‘upgrade’ the streets, Wood says. While Sheffield had “what might be called very old-school politicians who viewed tree planting as a very middle-class pursuit,” Hackney “really saw the benefits of that, and could see that it was going to have great positive impacts on the health and well-being of the people that lived in the borough.”

It’s not just the local municipality that is investing in street trees. Increasing numbers of residents take the time to plant up the ground around tree trunks outside their homes. The tree pits close to the corner of Culford Road and Englefield Road, for example, have the feel of a wild meadow, while others in the area boast prim displays of bedding plants or herbs. Across the area, young street trees bear signs beseeching residents to use their old bath water to keep them watered. “It’s important that people learn to love their trees and take ownership of them,” says Burke.

A five-minute stroll to the northeast leads to the broad canopy of a sycamore tree, at the corner of Forest Road and Beechwood Road. Sycamores were probably introduced to Britain from Europe in the 1500s and have really made themselves at home. They’re so common as to be mundane, but this particular tree is special: When the high-rise apartment block on this corner was built a few years ago, this tree was protected, rather than being felled to make way for the construction works.

Finally, on the corner of Wilton Way, four young trees carry tags from the nurseries that grew them. These trees—a paperback maple, a spindle tree, a Cornelian cherry, and a wedding cake tree—were all planted last winter, among the first of the 5,000 new street trees that Councillor Burke is planning for the borough.

These four are all very small, and therefore very vulnerable. Paul Wood estimates that only 80 percent of newly planted street trees survive to maturity—the remaining 20 per cent lost to drought, vandalism, or traffic damage. They’ll need some love from locals to grow tall. But if you look after your street trees, your street trees will look after you.

At the time, unrest roiled Egypt and an empire rose in Rome.

Volcanoes are famous for their fireworks—sudden, spectacular eruptions, gushing fountains, landscape-eating flows of lava. But often the climatological consequences of these eruptions, especially the explosive ones, are even more impactful. Huge plumes of ash blot out the sun and eventually fall to cover the land, and in human history they’re often marked with crop failures, starvation, and gloom—as well as social upheaval.

Now an international team of archaeologists, volcanologists, hydrologists, and climate scientists is linking an ancient volcanic eruption with a pivotal time in Mediterranean history—around 43 B.C., the time of the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire, and a stretch of unrest in Cleopatra’s Egypt, kicked off by a year where the Nile didn’t flood and crops failed.

“We had a very well-dated ice core record that included volcanic sulfur, and we knew from ice cores way back that there was a major volcanic eruption at about this time,” says Joe McConnell, a snow hydrologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, and lead author of a new paper on the climatological effects of the eruption, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Things were already pretty sketchy, and then you have this big climate shock.”

As massive as Rome was at its height—from baths in Britain to sundials in Syria—its chemical footprint is much larger. Rome’s success can be measured in many scientific ways, including by its lead production, used for pipes, kitchens, and coinage. The archaeological record contains evidence of this, but so does the microscopic record, lead pollution that has been found in ice from the Swiss Alps to the sprawling ice sheet of Greenland.

McConnell’s team took ice, cored over 20 years ago in northern Greenland, and stored in Copenhagen, and flew it commercial to San Francisco, where it was fetched and driven to Reno, to be melted and analyzed. (“We didn’t want the ice to get stuck in customs and melt,” McConnell says of the decision to treat it as baggage.) The scientists were able to extract useful information about the climate at the time the ice was frozen.

The team found that volcanic eruptions occurred in 45 B.C. and 43 B.C., sandwiching the year of Julius Caesar’s assassination. The team also found tephra—rocky detritus spewed by volcanoes—that carries a geochemical fingerprint, which allowed them to home in on a culprit.

As it turned out, the volcano that caused all the ruckus was a massive one, a world away: Okmok, far into the North Pacific Ocean in the Aleutian Islands, nearly 6,000 miles from Rome. The impact of the eruption would have been huge to be felt in the Mediterranean, McConnell says—not exactly a “supervolcano,” but something along the lines of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which caused the “year without a summer” in Western Europe. Knowing the source of the spewage, the researchers were then able to estimate what impact the eruption would have had in Europe by tracking variation in its fallout.

“If you track the sulfur’s movement around the globe,” McConnell says, “you can map the climate impacts.”

The volcano dropped regional temperatures by 13 degrees Fahreinheit on average—enough to make a spring in New York feel like winter. It’s not hard to imagine what this would have meant for a human society—and how it might have permeated every aspect of that society, from the daily lives of its people to its governmental structure—despite the source being on the other side of the world.

“This is the second coldest year in the last 2,500 years—I mean, that’s not a small thing,” McConnell says. “And when you’re talking about an agrarian society that’s living close to the edge as it is, it had to have had a big impact.”

Can this age-old industry weather both COVID-19 and climate change?

Looking out on a clear, breezy day, and you’ll see them: white sails bellying against blue skies, wooden hulls cutting through choppy waters. Every year, between October and March, elegant sailboats ply the waters of the Fal estuary in Cornwall, on the United Kingdom’s southwest coast. But these boats aren’t out on the waves for pleasure. They’re harvesting oysters.

Ever since 1876, mechanical dredging on the Fal has been banned. Dredging, which involves towing a metal cage along the estuary bed to harvest the shellfish which grow there, must be done under the power of ‘sail or oar’; no motors may be used. The persistence of this rule has meant that the Fal oyster fleet is the last in Europe to fish solely under sail. Its inefficiency has effectively preserved the wild beds of the distinctively thin, flat European oyster, or ostrea edulis, known in the UK as “natives,” says Colin Trundle, principal scientific officer at Cornwall’s Inshore Fisheries & Conservation Authority, which regulates the Fal estuary. While natives are generally prized for their sweetness, the ones from the Fal are particularly renowned for their minerality, which lends them a distinctive flavor prized by shellfish lovers.

Two types of vessels dredge for oysters. The larger, gaff-rigged boats can use a motor to get out to the oyster beds, but must work under wind power once the dredge is down. Row boats—or punts, as they’re called locally—are able to access the shallower waters and smaller inlets. “It basically works by putting out an anchor and a hand-hauling winch,” explains Tim Vinnicombe, a fifth-generation oysterman who works a 150-year-old boat that he converted to an oyster dredger in the 1970s. Once anchor is dropped, oystermen drift the boat off to a distance before they put the dredge in the water and haul in the rope. The dredge, which is towed along behind the punt, fills up with shellfish. “It’s very basic, all done by hand,” Vinnicombe says. “It’s all hard work.”

Vinnicombe speaks with a thick Cornish accent, and occasional anachronisms lend his utterances a timelessness. At 64, he has seen plenty of change to the fishery. He sees the relationship between the fishermen and the oysters as symbiotic. Changes to the beds alter the fishermen’s fortunes, and vice-versa.

“The oyster fishery, in my experience, tends to go up and down,” he says. “You’ll have a good season and they’ll be quite prevalent.” But when oyster stocks fall below a certain point, fishermen start leaving to take on other jobs that make more money. “The die-hards will stay there, then suddenly the oysters will come back up again and people start going back to the fishery.”

But now, changes are underway which threaten the oysters and those who make their living off them. A century ago, 200 boats dredged the Fal. Today, only around 15 remain. The reasons are both gastronomic and ecological. Natives have fallen out of favor with diners, who now prefer the chubbier Pacific oyster, and Cornish waters are warming. On top of that, other species that eat natives are also becoming more common. “There’s a lot of gilthead bream here now in the estuaries,” says Jason Pascoe, another Fal oyster fisherman. “We never used to have them years ago, they’re just something that’s turned up. And they’re renowned for eating small oysters, small shellfish, and all that.”

Dredging for queen scallops (locally known as “queenies”) has proved lucrative for some fishermen and kept many others financially afloat, but as filter feeders, they too eat oyster larvae. Other factors stacked against the oysters include pollution and increasing numbers of pleasure boats on the estuary, whose hulls are treated with chemicals. Whether the oyster beds will renew naturally or need human assistance to avoid a permanent decline is a subject of bitter debate amongst the oystermen. Though numbers rebounded after a parasite almost completely wiped out stocks in the early 1980s, some argue the challenges faced today are even more grave, and that the fishery should close completely to allow stocks to replenish. Arguments are heated and tempers run high—no surprise, given that livelihoods are at stake.

For his part, Pascoe is all for giving the oysters a helping hand. During the summer months, the Fal fishery closes to let the oysters spawn. While the oystermen take up summer jobs (which may include hand-line fishing and trawling, or a trade like plastering or boat-building) the fertilized oyster larvae drift with the water column. Once they attach to a hard surface—usually other oyster shells—they become known as spat. These immature oysters then begin to grow.

But the survival rate for larvae is low. Just one in every half a million will survive in the wild, says Pascoe. Together with Chris Ranger, another oysterman, he decided to start a hatchery on the banks of the Fal. The idea is to protect larvae from predators and provide a good density of oyster shells for the spat. “In a hatchery, we should be able to bring it up to a 30 to 40 percent survival rate,” predicts Ranger, who is now in sole charge of the project and hopes to repopulate the fishery with natives.

The Fal hatchery began crowdfunding early this year and, despite the upheaval caused by the spread of COVID-19, reached its goal at Easter. But the UK-wide lockdown ushered in a period of radical uncertainty for fishermen all over the country.

With the closure of merchants, markets, and restaurants at home and abroad, the Fal’s fishermen saw their fortunes plummet. While the UK government has offered financial support packages, not all fishermen are eligible, nor does the money always cover overheads such as boat insurance, harbor charges, and equipment rental. Waiting for the funding to come through is a test of endurance. Fal fishermen who dredge in the winter and turn to other jobs in the summer are resilient, familiar with turning with the tides. “But it’s difficult for anyone to survive without income,” says Pascoe.

Now, many fishermen have turned to selling directly to the public. “Hats off to the guys for doing it,” says Trundle. “It’s a lot of work to do the fishing side of it and then to do the marketing side of it yourself once you’ve come back to shore.” The day I speak to Pascoe, he’s had a grant approved to fund the purchase of a van and an ice machine. He sounds optimistic. “People locally have said ‘Yes, definitely we’ll buy your fish from you,’” he says. He sees the van as a way of securing his livelihood in the short term, and further ahead. Whatever the future of the fishery, the change provoked by the pandemic has wrought possibly permanent change. “I think it’s going to take a long time for things to go back to normal,” he says.

A chronicle of lives lived from before the Civil War to today.

A funeral is, among many highly emotional things, an opportunity to consecrate someone’s life as historical fact, and to commit that truth to the public record. But what happens once those records—and the memories of those who witnessed those rites—are themselves lost within history?

A new initiative by the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) is attempting to address that problem. In May 2020, the DLG introduced a free digital archive of some 3,348 programs from funerals of Black Americans who died between 1886 and 2019. (The archive will continue to grow in years to come.) It is a compendium of photos, prayers, and guest signatures that span the pre–Civil War South to the present day. And it’s a “treasure trove” for genealogists, says Tammy Ozier, president of the Atlanta Chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), which contributed to the archive.

Even a cursory look through some of the programs reveals deep historical currents. Take, for example, Dr. J.W.E. Linder, who died in 1939 and whose memorial service was held in 1940. According to the program from the memorial service, Linder’s father was “Congressman George W. Linder, of the Georgia House of Representatives during the Reconstruction Period.” Just a generation or two removed from slavery, Dr. Linder had also been appointed, before his death, as “a goodwill envoy to the forthcoming pageant in Jackson, Miss., which commemorates ‘Seventy-five Years of Progress’ by the Negro,” according to the program from his memorial service.

Solomon William Walker, meanwhile, founded The Pilgrim Health and Life Insurance Company for Georgia’s underserved Black population. As a young man, according to the program from his 1954 funeral, Walker “grew tired of paying his insurance premiums into a white company in which his dollars were robbed of their power to employ colored men and women.” Walker’s funeral program also attests that “[h]is higher education was received in the great university of life, for he was the very embodiment of the quotation: ‘All life is a school, a preparation, a purpose; nor can we pass current in any higher college unless we are willing to undergo the tedium of education in this lower one.’” Speaking of education, the archive also includes the 1941 funeral program for Samuel Howard Archer, once president of Atlanta’s historically black Morehouse College.

Through the decades, unique features jump out. Derek Mosley, a contributor to the archive and an archivist at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, points to two programs that stand out to him as unique, from very different eras and for different reasons. First, Judge Austin Thomas Walden, the first Black municipal judge in Georgia since Reconstruction, had his benediction delivered in 1965 by Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. Second, a 2016 program from a triple funeral (for three people, including two children, killed in a car crash) is formatted as "A Passport to Heaven," rather than as a traditional service program. Mosley says he is not aware of any programs in the archive for people who were killed by racist violence, but he says that such violence likely wouldn’t be listed in the programs anyway. For many Black Americans, says Mosley, funerals “are celebrations of a life” and not strictly mournful, and “funeral programs tend to reflect that.”

Ozier, of the AAHGS, says that funeral programs can be very helpful to genealogists looking to complete family histories. Because programs typically name the deceased’s family members, researchers can use them to locate next of kin or descendants. She adds that the AAHGS regularly works with neglected Black American cemeteries, and that relatives traced from funeral programs can provide information about people buried in these cemeteries that may lack other records. She says that she’d like to see historic city directories digitized in a similar archival initiative, and both Ozier and Mosley agree that digitized archives of Black American church records would prove immensely useful to researchers.

But ultimately, says Ozier, the main takeaway from an archive like this is simple. “Everybody has a story,” she says. To her, as a researcher, even the quickest asides in family conversations have opened up questions, and taught her things she didn’t know. Funeral programs can tell some of those stories, but there’s no need to wait for them. “Talk to elders,” says Ozier. “Talk to your people, have family conversations, you might find a nugget or surprise in there.”

An old dump beneath the airport on Michigan's Mackinac Island was brimming with stories from summers past.

Mackinac Island—a little freckle between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas—is a great place to savor homemade fudge, slurp seafood chowder, or ride bikes along paths that hug the water. It’s not an ideal spot for archaeological artifacts to bed down. “Mackinac is a piece of limestone with a little soil on it,” says Lynn Evans, curator of archaeology at Mackinac State Historic Parks. “Not great for preservation.”

But many artifacts have managed to linger. The island is home to a few hundred year-round residents and thronged with visitors during the summer months. Many horses clomp around, too, lugging people and supplies because cars are banned. All of those human and equine citizens generate waste, and until the late-20th century, it was too arduous or expensive to haul those piles to the mainland. Instead, garbage and mountains of manure were buried in landfills around the island. As the population swelled, Evans says, the holes were dug farther and farther from the heart of the community. Mackinac was pocked with dumps, and Evans found that one, in particular, was still stuffed with antique trash and thus brimming with stories. She and her team have nearly finished a nine-year effort to catalogue their finds.

Based on old maps, Evans and others knew that a dump had once been dug underneath the present-day airport. It appeared on charts from 1902 and 1913, suggesting that it was in use until at least that point. The airport appeared in 1934 as little more than a grassy field where planes lifted off and landed. (It was paved in the 1960s, though there were some snafus with humps and sinkholes.) Evans and her colleagues figured that the landfill must have been closed up by the 1930s, but they didn’t know exactly when.

Evans is often summoned for major construction efforts about Mackinac. “Sometimes we know what we’re going to find, sometimes we don’t,” she says. In 2011, before the airport runway was relocated and resurfaced, Evans lent her eyes and expertise to an excavation there. She was confident that they would find the landfill. “We were as sure as you can be about an archaeological site,” she says. But they weren’t sure what they might find inside.

Under the taxiways, she found a jumble of smashed glass, rusted metal, and hundreds of ceramic sherds, including storied smithereens that turned out to have come from the luxe Grand Hotel. At first, the trench looked a bit like the contents of a stomach: Some things had broken down beyond recognition, other bits hadn’t been so easily digested. “The first thing you look for is whole things—what’s something I recognize?” Evans says. “Patterns and labels and things, that’s what I’m looking for.” Rusty nails and jagged bits of tin cans aren’t as interesting or informative as glass bottles still embossed with the name of a long-shuttered local pharmacy or brewing company.

Evans found bottles from breweries nearby and down in Detroit, as well as one from Toledo and a few from much farther away, including a bottle that held French mineral water. Because the landfill was in operation at a time when gas lamps were being retired and electric bulbs were flickering to life, Evans’s team found both, MLive reported. Based on the apparent age of artifacts such as bottles of “near beer”—a malted beverage with little to no alcohol that was popular during Prohibition—Evans and company suspect that the landfill was capped in the 1920s.

Clad in steel-toed shoes, a hardhat, and heavy-duty gloves, Evans sifted through the debris by hand to pick out what she wanted to salvage. There were several hundred bits and pieces in all, and she chose to be choosy. “I didn’t want to be hauling a lot of trash I wasn’t going to be doing a lot with,” she says. She tucked all of those finds into paper bags labeled with the date, and then arranged the bags in boxes. Horses lugged the finds to the ferry back to the mainland, and the rest of the debris was reburied nearby, where it wouldn’t snarl airport operations.

The trash that made it back to the lab was cleaned, gingerly, with a bit of distilled water and a soft brush. “You try to clean it enough so you can identify it,” and also to halt decay or oxidation, Evans says. “If there’s potential for a residue that might tell you something, you don’t want to be messing with that.”

Garbage is a snapshot of what people chose to consume in a particular place and time, and archaeologists often lean on rusted, smashed-up odds and ends to narrate stories about how people lived. Along the remains of old Route 66 that slice through Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, for example, archaeologists have combed through mounds of trash that built up 10 to 15 feet from the road—roughly the distance that someone could lob a bottle out of the window of a zipping car. This boundary earned the name the “throw zone,” and its cracked contents revealed travelers' preferred brands of soda and beer.

Eventually, Evans hopes to install an exhibition in the airport terminal about the recently uncovered finds. There, travelers preparing to soar above the clouds will also have a chance to think about the things that once sat under the soil, suspended in time.

Maintaining an aging offshore platform is no easy task.

At 6:00 a.m. on a cold day in March 2019, a lone figure can be seen on the pier in Harwich, on the coast of Essex, England, in the deep blue of the early morning light. The man in his late 50s wears a taxi driver hat and blue mechanic’s jumpsuit over jeans and a sweater. He takes a puff from a vape pen and blows a substantial cloud into the air as he makes a pile of boxes and bags at the top of a set of stairs that lead straight into the water alongside one of the piers. The man is Joe Hamill, and the pile of luggage is a fortnight’s worth of victuals and clothes for his stay on the Principality of Sealand—the world’s best-known micronation, a naval fort in the North Sea comprised of two large concrete towers that support a metal superstructure. Along with a man named Mike Barrington, Hamill is one of Sealand’s two caretakers, and the pair alternate two-week stints on Sealand as their full-time jobs.

Sealand was established as a manmade state-let—officially unrecognized the world over—in 1967 by Paddy Roy Bates, World War II veteran, raconteur, and pirate radio broadcaster. Today the Bates family pays Hamill and Barrington to keep watch on the fort and attend to its multitude of repairs and chores; the family also covers the costs of supplies and equipment—it takes a surprising amount to maintain what some might consider an outsized hobby. The caretakers have developed a personal relationship with the micronation, and their schedules, well-being, and livelihoods revolve around their duty to the fort.

The night before his shift starts, Hamill drives 150 miles from Basingstoke to Harwich and typically stays in a rented room above a pub. The seaside town full of row houses, stone streets, and ancient churches is juxtaposed with the ports of Felixstowe just across the harbor, which boasts the largest container shipping hub in the United Kingdom. With the enormous cranes and shipping facilities surrounding the bay, the area looks like a historical reenactment surrounded by cyborgs.

Hamill piles his bags on the pier in anticipation of hitching a ride on a small fishing vessel. Looking across the water to the next dock, he hails Dan Griffin, a Harwich fisherman, crabber, and lobsterman in his 30s with a friendly face and equally pleasant demeanor. Griffin and another fisherman, Pecker, are going to pull in that week’s haul a few miles beyond Sealand, and will drop Hammill off on their way out. They rush off a few hundred feet down the pier to fire up a rickety fishing boat and putter over to Hamill’s cargo. The three men make quick work of piling the 15 bags and boxes atop the wooden covering on the boat’s engine.

The boat putters out, steadily leaving behind the enormous erector set cranes of the port. The destination is a little less than seven miles from the shore, but it will take approximately an hour and twenty minutes to get there.

The trio shoots the shit and jokes around as they go. Griffin and Pecker are among the last human beings Hamill will see for at least two weeks. The only other craft on the water is a speedboat that zips by, ferrying a pilot from shore to one of the half-dozen container ships moored in the distance. While the pilots of those massive ships no doubt possess tremendous skill, it takes a specialist to navigate them into Felixstowe’s narrow docks. On the way, Griffin flips a ten pence coin into the sea.

“It’s a bit of superstition—you give something back to the sea that’s given you so much,” he explains.

He leaves the boat on autopilot as he attends to the various chores involved in pulling in the lobster pots, while Hamill starts unfurling a large nylon construction tote that can hold a ton of rubble. He piles his bags and boxes into it, and joins the handles together with a heavy metal clasp that will be attached to a hook at the end of the winch that will take everything—Hamill included—from the surface of the water up to Sealand.

The principality is visible in the distance the whole way. It looks at the same time tiny and gigantic—a vulnerable speck in the vast sea, but its legs seem to extend surprisingly high out of the water. Hamill eyes it with an inscrutable glance and exhales a blast of vapor that smells like Crunch Berries cereal.

The offshore installation that would become the Principality of Sealand began as a naval fort in the North Sea, built to shoot down incoming Nazi bombers: two large, cylindrical concrete towers with a metal platform on top, 60 feet above the water. After the war, the four naval forts erected on this part of the coast were more or less abandoned until the early 1960s, when an enterprising group of DJs took them over to use as offshore pirate radio stations. The BBC was Britain’s only licensed broadcaster at the time, and wouldn’t play the pop music youngsters were eager to hear. Bates, who had his hands in a number of offbeat businesses, took over the one known as Fort Roughs and started Radio Essex, helping usher in a colorful time in broadcasting history, as rival radio stations battled each other and the British government for space on the airwaves.

Bates was known as a “hard bastard of the North Sea,” and he and his early crew were known to defend their fort with fists—and firebombs if need be. The pirate radio era came to an end when the BBC agreed to start playing more rock ‘n’ roll, but Bates knew a good thing when he had it, especially since the fort was in international waters. He christened Fort Roughs “The Principality of Sealand” and declared it to be its own country on September 2, 1967. He had big plans, and statehood could only give the experiment a dose of legitimacy.

A constitution, stamps, passports, and a national anthem followed, with Bates, his wife Joan, and kids Penny and Michael as the first Sealanders. Michael dropped out of school at age 14 to assist, which entailed more fights against would-be invaders and the British government. Documents in the National Archives show official exasperation (and even a bit of humor) when it came to the Sealand situation, as its extraterritorial location meant it was unclear what authority the United Kingdom had over it. Indeed, a technical ruling in 1968 affirmed that British law did not apply on the fort. This, coupled with a few other rulings throughout the years (and a visit from a German diplomat), added further credence to the Sealand’s claims of sovereignty. Today the fort is kitted out with living quarters, a full kitchen, and even a chapel.

Since then, Sealand has been host to an incredible series of escapades, from hostage situations to experiments with offshore data storage to attempts to register ships to the fort. (This excerpt describes the fallout that came from a gang of international scam artists bootlegging Sealand passports.) Maintaining the fort has sometimes been a tremendous financial hardship for the Bates family, but it has also been a way for them to bond with each other and their supporters. Paddy Roy Bates died in 2012, but Michael is still Prince Regent, and his sons now oversee day-to-day operations. Anyone can support the effort by buying official Sealandic titles, and today the fort is able to pay for itself, including the full-time salaries of Hamill and Barrington.

Hamill basically fell into his strange job by mistake, but it was just what he needed. He had worked in the insurance industry for 20 years but was increasingly feeling oppressed by the banal rigors of the nine-to-five lifestyle. A long-term relationship fell apart, leaving him so fed up with humanity that he wouldn’t have minded leaving society entirely. He was in a pub one evening when a friend asked him if he was interested in a weekend’s work doing security out at sea. Sure, he said, what’s the gig? It was running security for the Red Bull skateboarding expo out on Sealand in 2008. Hamill had never heard of the micronation, but the price was right and he agreed. A few days later, he met the boat at the pier in Harwich.

Hamill’s mouth fell open when saw the bosun’s chair being lowered down on the winch for the first time. “I could see it in the distance and I said, ‘Do I get strapped into that?’” he says. The skateboarders went right up to the lip on the edge of the fort—stunts that made Joe’s stomach drop. “I couldn’t even look at them,” he laughs. “I was on that platform acting as security and I was the most frightened person aboard.” It turned out that the next caretaker the Bateses had lined up didn’t have a car and couldn’t transport his stuff to the pier. So Hamill was offered the job.

The first week out on the fort was cold, and the isolation was intense—almost too much for someone who had little experience at sea. But the odd charm of Sealand grew on him, as did the opportunity to have some time to himself. Hamill is now in the middle of his 11th year on the job. He acknowledges the routine isn’t for everybody. “People close to me will say I’m not the same person I used to be,” he says. “Before I’d go out there, I’d go quiet, I wouldn’t speak to anyone, get very serious. My dear old mother would say, ‘You’ve got to get another job. I’m really worried.’ But [the quiet] would only last the night before. Look at me now—I’m fine, and in a way, I’m sort of looking forward to it. Get Mike [Barrington] off, get some stuff done … do whatever I do.”

A few cups of tea after they leave Harwich, Sealand looms enormously out of the water, a black silhouette against gray skies and gray water. Bits of rebar are visible around the towers, and nubs of metal I-beams stick out of the south tower, where a helicopter landing pad was once attached. Barrington waves from 60 feet up, as a generator fires up and hums loudly in the morning quiet. A hook is lowered from a winch above as the boat draws alongside, and Griffin does a delicate dance of angling the back of the boat under the winch—an impressive maritime parallel park.

Barrington later says that Griffin’s skills are unparalleled when it comes to deftly maneuvering around the legs of the fort. The outgoing tide is complicated by the pillars, which makes navigation around the fort fairly dangerous, even for skilled pilots.

“Oh, no, I’ve never been up there,” Griffin says, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t catch me on that chair.”

Hamill’s supplies, slung in the construction bag, go up first. Eventually Barrington pulls a rope that guides the arm of the winch over the solid ground, and the load is gently set down. He then attaches the bosun’s chair to the winch and lowers it back down toward the boat, which by this time has done another lap around the fort and is getting into position again. Hamill quickly hops onto the chair and Barrington waves to the boat as the winch pulls him up. The efficiency of their work is on display, with the boat taking off before Joe is even 10 feet in the air. Hardly more than a minute later, he hops out onto Sealand.

The work on the fort is never done. “It’s a constant battle—it’s like having a boat. The rust comes and you have to stay on top of it,” Liam Bates, one of Michael’s sons, says later. To that end, piles of steel plates line the deck and oxygen tanks line the perimeter, all for the ongoing project of re-steeling the deck. Miscellaneous tools sit in piles with no discernible organization.

Inside, the kettle is already boiling on the country’s gas stove. Griffin and Pecker will be out collecting their marine bounty for approximately four hours, leaving the two caretakers some time to discuss the upcoming work. They drink scalding hot tea as they go over Barrington’s handwritten list of projects and Hamill’s to-do list for the coming two weeks. The kitchen table doubles as Sealand’s customs office, as it is where Barrington tends to stamp passports with the simple Sealand stamp. A guest book with entries dating back almost 15 years is an unofficial register of visitors.

It is approximately 40 degrees Fahrenheit and windy, with not a hint of sun, and one can see one’s breath in every room of the principality. But Barrington, 64, is comfortable in jeans and a short-sleeve polo. He has been working on the fort for even longer than Hamill, first coming on board in the late 1980s. He was the perfect man for the job—content being away from society and a jack-of-all-trades: mechanic, truck driver, builder, and rabble-rouser with a distaste authority and a penchant for antagonizing the police for fun. Importantly, he cut his teeth with professional rogues by working on the boat of one of Roy Bates’s pirate radio competitors in the 1970s.

Barrington’s engineering knowledge has been critical to keeping Sealand standing. Approximately 99 percent of the nation’s power comes from wind and solar—the only such nation that can boast these numbers, Liam points out—and the systems were designed and built by Barrington. (In addition to the environmental benefits, it saves a lot of money on diesel.) Mike got thrown out of a hardware superstore for climbing a ladder to get part numbers on a turbine they had for sale; he called the parts maker himself and ordered what he needed to build his own turbines that could sustain conditions on Sealand. The first floor down on the south leg houses the inverters for the wind turbines, which then stores the generated power in a bank of high-quality car batteries arranged in rows on the floor. One of the original World War II–era diesel generators is still in good working order as a backup to the backup generator. The micronation has also been outfitted with LED lights. “You underestimate the impact that has had, because now that means you can have lights on all the time out there,” says James Bates, Michael’s other son.

Detritus from countless other projects sits on deck and in the workspaces of both towers. The server racks from its time as an offshore data haven are still assembled on the second subfloor of the south tower: a museum of turn-of-the-millennium tech. The floor below the server room is lined almost all the way around with tables, which hold all of the technical manuals from the various pieces of machinery in use on Sealand. There are also great stacks of back issues of at least four different amateur radio magazines. Sealand is, in essence, a big clubhouse where Barrington can build and experiment to his heart’s delight. He has brewed beer, read dozens of technical journals, spent “millions” of hours playing darts, and devotes a lot of his time to fixing equipment and inventing things.

“Everything is done in the most cack-handed long way so you don’t get bored. If you’re bored, get a hammer and chisel and start chiseling something or do the washing up,” he says. “Getting a 45-gallon oil drum, filling it up with oxygen and acetylene, and putting a detonator in there—that’s what I call fun.” (He eventually stopped with the explosions after he came close to blowing himself up.)

He regularly buys spools of discontinued wallpaper from thrift stores to add a sense of comfort, and has brought framed pictures and paintings, one by one, to add some color to Sealand’s walls. He even put together a chapel, with an altar and books and reliquaries from many faiths. “It’s all bits and pieces that have gradually come together that makes it inhabitable,” he says. “It’s quite homey.”

Barrington put a lot of care into the design of his north tower bedroom, which is one of three partitioned rooms there but easily the nicest of the bunch. With dark carpets and muted lighting, it looks a lot like a quality hotel room. There are a few other rooms on Sealand to house guests, in addition to an abundance of mattresses in plastic bags stashed for the crews that occasionally come and pitch in en masse. Barrington says his engagement with the fort keeps him physically and mentally active. “When I look at some of the old farts in my village, I think, ‘What, you’re old men!’ I’m just going off and doing stuff and they’re just sitting there in their slippers,” he says.

Barrington’s dedication to the project stems from a deep friendship with Roy Bates, who was both a kindred spirit and mentor. The two bonded over the honest hard work of putting Sealand together, the kind of people who could work all day together, barely speaking, and then agree that it had been a really great day. Barrington sometimes refers to Roy as “Uncle.” This isn’t to say that the pair’s outsized personalities didn’t clash. They had one huge blowout—Barrington can’t even remember what it was over—that escalated to the point that they were both wielding shotguns and yelling at each other from opposite ends of the hallway up top.

“I’ll blow your bollocks off !” Roy yelled. “I’ll blow your brains out!” Mike screamed.

Bollocks and brains intact, Barrington quit Sealand for a while, but he couldn’t stay away. Later in their lives the Bateses paid off his mortgage in gratitude for the time, years earlier, when he had refinanced his old house to help keep Sealand going. Barrington says he promised Roy he would look after the fort. “Roy was a lovely man, but he was a hard man,” Barrington says.

Hamill and Barrington have different management styles aboard the fort, and each generally spends a day or two undoing the other’s organizational foibles and getting things back the way he likes them. Both prefer to be alone, and butt heads when they have to work together. “We’re like chalk and cheese,” Hamill says.

While Barrington holds Sealandic law as the genuine law of the fort when one is aboard—talk of executing invaders was bandied about with apparent seriousness, and he refused to stamp some passports because the passports were out of date—Hamill has no interest in existential politics. “If you think it is [a state], it is, if you think it’s not, it’s not,” he says. “Leave it to official bodies to decide. That’s not what I’m there for.” He has, in fact, only met Michael Bates a handful of times. Both caretakers have the freedom and wherewithal to sculpt the experience the way they see fit.

Still, the prospect of staying on the fort in the middle of winter never gets any easier. It’s like wintertime camping indoors, Hamill says, with cold so fierce that it keeps coats of paint from drying. (Barrington says his personal secret weapon is an electric blanket.) And Hamill’s observations from the fort confirm something quite worrisome on a large scale. Overall, the weather has gotten more unpredictable since he’s has been aboard, with hot and cold snaps all year—a change that he attributes to global warming. This unpredictability has wreaked havoc on his social life, as he has had to miss holidays because the seas were too rough to get him off the fort in time. The longest he’s stayed on the fort at a stretch is over four weeks, and by that point he was worried that even he was succumbing to fort madness. “That’s horrible, that’s really quite horrible,” he says.

Hamill, now safely aboard, is eager to begin his shift. Barrington radios Griffin and Pecker, who say that their boat will arrive within half an hour. They will take him back to Harwich and his waiting car (which hopefully hasn’t been towed) and the 120-year-old home he is renovating. Though he didn’t do it this time, Barrington sometimes takes a few liters of Sealand rainwater home—he says it is especially good in his whiskey.

The fishing boat putters up soon enough, and a few surprisingly clear shouts later, Barrington’s small duffel goes down, followed by him in the bosun’s chair. He waves as the boat slowly motors away. Hamill soon disappears from the edge, a nation to himself.

Business is booming for farmers who plant on man-made islands.

In the south of Mexico City, about 100 miles of murky canals wind their way through the Xochimilco neighborhood. Here, the urban sprawl of one of the world’s densest cities yields to a lake region where indigenous farmers have been cultivating a unique system of floating gardens since pre-colonial times. Called chinampas, these floating gardens were built by the Aztecs to feed a growing population.

Xochimilco became one of the city’s main sources of food, but rapid urbanization in the 1900s meant less land available for farming. In 1985, when an earthquake struck Mexico City, many chinampas were abandoned as people who had lost their homes built shanty towns. Today, only an estimated 20 percent of the approximately 5,000 acres of chinampas are in use, and only 3 percent are used for farming.

But since the COVID-19 pandemic hit Mexico, interrupting the industrial food supply in important ways, small farmers have increased production and rehabilitated abandoned chinampas to fill the demand for fresh, local food.

“We’re talking about something that’s 1,000 years old. We have to preserve this,” says Raúl Mondragón on a Zoom call from his home in Mexico City. Mondragón has been recuperating chinampas since 2016, when he founded Colectivo Ahuejote. Now the virus is revealing the strength of this model in the midst of a crisis.

The revival of chinampa farming is due, in part, to pandemic-related problems at Mexico City’s main market, La Central de Abastos, the largest of its kind in Latin America. Some warehouses have closed, truck traffic has been limited, and people have been getting sick with the virus. The supply chain of producers from around the country has also had to contend with road closures that limited deliveries to the capital and raised prices.

While the market is an enclosed and often crowded environment, small farmers can deliver their crops to the consumer directly, using a model similar to Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs). At a time when people are worried about the risk of shopping at a crowded market or grocery store, buying directly from a chinampero at an outdoor pick-up point in their neighborhood is one way of limiting exposure.

Quarantine has also given many Mexicans more time to cook, Mondragón points out, and they are taking a greater interest in where their food comes from. He cites a friend who now not only knows what a leek is but also how to cook it. His “very capitalistic” sister has started compulsively composting.

Mondragón grew up in Xochimilco, eating produce from the chinampas that his family bought at a local market. Now he works on the 1,500-square-meter chinampa that Colectivo Ahuejote uses for growing crops, teaching, and experimenting with new techniques. The collective operates as an NGO to develop cooperation among farmers, and they’ve also started a for-profit business to sell produce. Their goal is to rehabilitate abandoned chinampas to promote sustainable agriculture and the country’s agricultural heritage.

The pandemic halted the collective’s workshops and trainings, but the commercial side of the business has been flourishing. Between February and May, small farmers who are part of the collective have increased sales by 100 to 120 percent, according to Mondragón. Networks that have been years in the making are now becoming a bigger part of the city’s food supply.

This is a welcome change for farmers who have other jobs to support themselves. Chinampero Pedro Capultitla used to have two or three extra jobs, but he was able to quit one recently to spend more time farming.

The word chinampa comes from the Nahuatl chinámitl, meaning a hedge or fence made out of reeds. Mud from the bottom of the canal as well as lake vegetation are piled into this fencing until they reach the surface, creating a fertile and well-irrigated place for crops to grow. These favorable conditions make the chinampas one of the most productive types of agriculture in the world, enabling as many as seven harvests per year. A variety of produce flourishes here: greens, herbs, flowers, fruits, and milpa—a combination of corn, beans, and squash also grown by Native American farmers in the United States, who call this collection the three sisters.

Chinampero Pedro Méndez Rosas has been farming his whole life, and in that time, he’s seen generations of farmers leave to find work in the city. “They go in search of more money, or a more elegant life,” he says on a phone call after a day spent mostly harvesting squash. “But I’ve always preferred to be in the field.”

Méndez Rosas farms the same chinampas as his father and grandfather, and he eats the food he grows there, only buying products like grains and meat. He started helping out when he was five or six, and “really working” when he was 13. This October, he’ll turn 50.

Since COVID-19, Méndez Rosas has seen the demand for leafy greens go up. As the orders he normally fills from restaurants and chefs have been put on hold, he is now primarily selling products to individuals and families. The quick changes to business can be challenging, but Méndez Rosas has never been in it for the money.

“Being a chinampero is a vocation,” Méndez Rosas says. “For me, it’s a way of life. It’s a way of hanging onto our traditions and our culture.”

These floating gardens have been feeding the city for a millennium, in times of sickness and in times of health, and this pandemic has made it clear that they are poised to keep sustaining the city in the future. Traditions continue quietly; a seed buried in fertile ground, small certainties against the future. For his part, Pedro Méndez Rosas prepares, again, to plant.

When conditions are right, the waters of Congaree National Park can look like bright scoops pooling on a sidewalk.

With its sometimes-swampy landscape stippled with soaring cypresses, Congaree National Park in central South Carolina looks like a prehistoric diorama. And occasionally it also resembles a Lisa Frank folder come to life. When conditions are right, standing water appears orangey, blue, and pinky-red—hues usually reserved for garish school supplies or swirls of melted sherbert on a hot day.

The sheen comes from oil, but isn’t the product of a spill or other industrial mess-up. Rather, the “oil-slick sheen” comes from Taxodium—the genus of water-loving conifers in the cypress family—which produce massive quantities of resin and oils, says Az Klymiuk, collections manager of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago. The iridescence comes from oils freed up through decay, they say, that then float and coat the surface.

Dave Stahle, a geoscientist at the University of Arkansas who studies cypresses, suspects that both bald cypresses and their cousins, pond cypresses, could contribute to a colorful effect like this. And since cypresses aren’t the only oily trees around, they might not be alone in flinging a rainbow across the water. “I believe that other conifers might be able to cause similar effects in other ecosystems,” Stahle adds. “Just a hunch.”

At Congaree, the rainbow only dazzles when several conditions cooperate. Light must rake just so, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The colors are easiest to spot when the trees’ shadows creep across the water. The hues are also most likely to appear following a spate of dry days, because raindrops pummel the surface and stir up the water. “Mixing would perturb the effect,” says Stahle.

Days of calm weather are also key for developing anoxic zones, says Klymiuk. Certain bacteria thrive in extreme environments, such as where oxygen is scarce or temperatures are high—just look at the thermophilic residents of Yellowstone National Park, which paint the landscape vivid colors.

At Congaree, “I would venture that these rainbow patterns result mostly from differential distribution of metal ions,” Klymiuk says. That distribution of metal ions depends on the hydrology of the system and the sediments in it: In a relatively small area like this one, they say, the colors are driven by whether the water and the sediments beneath it are oxygenated, how much carbon is available, and what else is keeping bacteria busy. The reddish splotches, for instance, are likely evidence of iron-oxidizing bacteria, Klymiuk adds.

If you’re lucky enough to chance upon the tapestry of colors, take care to not disturb them—and, obviously, don’t try to slurp them up.

Turns out they're useful if you want to slurp up your food.

The naming of many saber-toothed species—the most famous being the genus Smilodon, or the saber-toothed cat—sounds like a bit of a macabre joke. The pearly grins of these prehistoric predators might have been the last sight of any creatures that got close enough to appreciate them.

But not all saber-toothed things were aggressively predatory. Some, like the marsupial Thylacosmilus atrox, may have occupied a different niche. As a new study published in the journal PeerJ reports, the pouched, cat-resembling creature may have been more of a scavenger, carefully slicing already-dead carcasses a few million years ago with its ferocious-looking dentition. But it wasn’t the eponymous canine teeth that led to this conclusion—it was what the animal was missing.

Perhaps the most famous of the saber-tooths is Smilodon fatalis, an apex predator during the Pleistocene, that has very little relation with the marsupial Thylacosmilus (or with modern cats, for that matter), despite their outward similarities. When Thylacosmilus was first excavated in northern Argentina in 1933, the scythe-like fangs led many to believe it had a similar feeding style to other saber-toothed Ice Age predators. But taking another look at Thylacosmilus fossils housed at Chicago’s Field Museum, and comparing them with the skulls and jaws of other mammalian carnivores past and present, told a different story. A team led by Christine Janis, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, compared Thylacosmilus’s dental hardware and skeletal structure with that of Smilodon. A key difference was visible right up front.

“For me the strangest thing is the lack of incisors,” in Thylacosmilus, Janis writes via email, referring to the front teeth that many predators use for slicing food, “especially when saber-tooths [like Smilodon] have huge, protruding ones that they would need to get meat off the bone when hampered by those big canines.”

Thylacosmilus and Smilodon are an example of convergent evolution—when two or more branches of the tree of life get the same idea, separately. Think of bats and birds, or dolphins and sharks. In this case, though the creatures lived in different epochs, both developed huge canine teeth. Smilodon apparently used them for slicing and stabbing prey, though just how is still a matter of scientific debate. Thylacosmilus, on the other hand, appears to have used them as fine carving knives, like the one you might use to get around the bonier bits of a Thanksgiving turkey.

“We see this in animals that engage in slurping,” says Larisa DeSantis, a paleontologist on the team from Vanderbilt University who specializes in dental microwear, or the study of the microscopic topography of teeth. “The idea is that it was cutting up the carcass and basically slurping the insides out.”

At a time when South America was still an island, Thylacosmilus did not occupy Smilodon’s apex niche. Large “terror birds,” which could grow taller than a person, with a two-foot long skull that was mostly beak, may have been the dominant carnivores. Thylacosmilus appears to have filled a unique ecological niche, one that even modern scavengers, such as the relatively indiscriminate, bone-chomping hyena, don’t quite fit: a scavenger that was careful with its food, targeting the softest tissues, such as internal organs rather than muscle or bone.

“A specialized ‘gut chomper’ diet is not seen in living mammalian predators, and so remains difficult to definitively show for Thylacosmilus, short of a time machine,” says Jack Tseng, a paleontologist at the University of California’s Museum of Paleontology, who is unaffiliated with the recent study, via email. “I think they've demonstrated at the very least that the conventional interpretation of Thylacosmilus as a saber-tooth cat–like predator ought to go extinct.”

Comparison of the two kinds of saber-tooths is a great lesson in evolution, and a reminder that it can take many paths. “Thylacosmilus is more similar to possums or kangaroos [than saber-tooth cats],” DeSantis says, “and we are more similar to saber-tooth cats, than these animals were to each other.” Chew on that.

A server squeegees the window, too.

Chef Marc Lepine describes Atelier Restaurant in Ottawa, Canada, as a high-end minimalist nook specializing in molecular gastronomy. Since 2008, the restaurant has thrived on Lepine’s signature 12-course blind tasting menu.

Pre-pandemic, the grey exterior of the narrow, brick building that houses Atelier provided no hint of the colorful bite plates served inside. Fantastical dishes reminiscent of snow globes, flower arrangements, garlands, and fashion accessories arrived one after the other, each equal parts abstract art and food.

When COVID-19 restrictions forced Atelier to close in March, Lepine had to find a way to pay the bills. But the two-time winner of the Canadian Culinary Championships, who was named Canada’s most innovative chef in 2018, couldn’t see his tasting menu translating to takeout. “Also, we never like to do what everyone else is doing,” Lepine says.

His former pastry chef suggested a solution. “Pick up a course, drive around the block, get your next course, and do it again.” The idea of a recurrent drive-through appealed to Lepine—Atelier could adhere to social-distancing regulations while staying true to the tasting-menu format.

His staff was enthusiastic. In early May, they got to work, compressing 12 courses into five and selling limited tickets at $100 per person, 10 vehicles per service, weekends only. Atelier has sold out every dinner since launching.

“We tried to incorporate the theme of driving,” says Lepine. Providing what he calls above and beyond service, pastry-chef-turned-carhop Justin Tse delivers dessert, then squeegees the windshield. Lepine slips a keepsake menu in the form of a parking ticket beneath the wiper.

Kristen and Jon Hamilton are loyal Atelier customers who love this new twist. “What a fun idea to drive-up, get your course with an incredible description from a knowledgeable server of what you will be eating, where the ingredients came from, and why they chose the drink pairing. As always, it’s edgy, creative, different, and delicious, even in take-out containers.”

“It’s an outing,” Lepine says. “People are bringing their own tables with tablecloth, candles, and flowers. They set up in the parking lot beside us. They say things like, ‘This is our first date night in three months.’ For one couple, it was supposed to be their wedding day. The bride-to-be said it turned out to be even better.”

add collage of dishes?

Families are coming out as well. After Bronwyn Lambert’s sister raved about the experience, they planned a family outing. Lambert booked tickets for herself and her two kids twice inside a month. Lambert’s sister, mother, and nephew joined them. The three generations pulled their cars together so the kids could tailgate on blankets in the back.

“My son is very much a foodie,” Lambert says, “but my daughter’s favorite food is Kraft Dinner.” Although they’d never experienced molecular gastronomy before, the kids devoured every course ... almost. Both tucked into the tuna tataki. When carrot soup arrived in the form of an icy globe, Lambert’s son said it was the coolest thing he’d ever experienced, but her daughter proclaimed it too weird. Quoting her, Lambert says, “It’s not ice cream. How can it be frozen?”

Atelier’s drive-through is a big hit, but its fate depends on the coronavirus. The Province of Ontario determines when it’s safe for restaurants to reopen their dining rooms. When that happens, Lepine will end his weekend drive-through service, window washing and all.

Natural landscapes are seeing huge amounts of microplastics tumbling from the sky.

The Grand Canyon is vast and magnificently unsubtle: The 277-mile gash has long humbled visitors with its sheer rock walls and the river ribboning below. The landscape is also cloaked with something much, much smaller, but just as humbling. A team of researchers has found that the Grand Canyon—along with 10 other protected patches of the United States—is lousy with microplastics.

Plastics more famously menace the watery parts of the world. In the oceans, ghostly plastic bags ensnare corals and little chunks swirl in small eddies and much wider gyres, and pieces of all sizes wash up on beaches en masse. Microplastics, among the tiniest of bits, routinely tumble through sewers, and slough off of bobbing garbage or fishing nets. They’re even embedded in ocean-floor sediment. But they’re pretty much everywhere, even on land. Writing in Science, a team of researchers led by Janice Brahney, a biogeochemist at Utah State University, recently reported that microplastics can drift far and wide in the air and drop from the sky. The researchers found that more than 1,000 tons of microplastics—the equivalent of somewhere between 120 million and 300 million plastic bottles—fall across 11 protected areas in the American West each year, including such prized natural areas as the Craters of the Moon in Idaho, Joshua Tree in California, and Canyonlands in Utah.

Lightweight things have a habit of not staying put. Bacteria travel from ocean to desert in fog droplets, wind lofts millions of tons of Saharan dust and sand all the way across the Atlantic. Many microplastics are less dense than dust particles, meaning that they’re even easier to fling into the air. Given enough altitude, they can travel great distances, which seem to be influenced by broad-scale atmospheric patterns, such as the polar jet stream. Brahney and her collaborators argue that microplastics might make cross-continental treks—epic journeys that are “reminiscent of the global dust cycle, but distinctly human in origin.”

Brahney didn’t set out to study microplastics. She was intrigued first by dust, and how its composition varies across space and time. She placed samples under a microscope, expecting to see lots of different things—some minerals, mangled bits of insects. She found those, but also spotted a blue microbead and a bit of pink fiber. She panicked a little. “My initial reaction was, ‘Oh no, I contaminated my sample with my clothing,’” she says. “I kept trying to think of how that might have happened, and I kept looking, and I said, ‘Oh, they’re in every color, and all different kinds of fibers and particles—there’s no way this came from me.’” She looked at one sample, then another and another, and the bright evidence kept mounting. “It’s in every sample,” she says. “It’s everywhere.”

To estimate how much of this material falls over natural landscapes each year, the researchers collected samples during both wet and dry periods. They found that microplastics more often seem to drop during dry conditions, and particularly in the winter. Most of the microplastic snow was made up of fibers from clothing (and possibly outdoor gear). The team also found some microbeads that were too small to have come from cosmetic products, and may have originated as acrylic paint.

It’s hard to pinpoint precisely where these microplastics came from—Brahney points out that it’s not feasible to, say, tag a fiber the way an entomologist might tag an insect—but the team is working on models that might help them guess. Also, the full picture of precisely how microplastics affect people, animals, and ecosystems also continues to develop. In the meantime, Chelsea Rochman and Timothy Hoellein, microplastics researchers at the University of Toronto and Loyola University Chicago who were not involved in the study, contend that more researchers should follow Brahney’s team’s lead and “think big about small particles, so as to contribute to our understanding of the global microplastic cycle.”

Plastics are produced in incredible quantities each year—but even if manufacturing ground to an immediate halt, the microplastics fallout wouldn’t vanish. “What we’re looking at across the landscape isn’t what was produced this year,” Brahney says. “It’s from decades of mismanaged waste. It’s from all the waste that’s already out there.” It takes time for fibers to shed from clothes and degrade under ultraviolet radiation, or for a water bottle by the side of the road to turn brittle and start shedding airborne flecks. “We’re going to have this problem for some time to come just because of our historical behavior,” Brahney says, “never mind what we do from this day forward.”

A photography project is capturing the age-old ingenuity of fruit farmers.

A few years ago, photographer Sophia Massarella asked the librarian at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to pull Hesperides from the stacks, on a whim. The 17th-century treatise on citrus sounded intriguing, since beyond knowing she loved eating acidic lemons and oranges, she didn’t know much else about the fruits.

When the hefty volume reached her table, she was blown away by Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s masterpiece. Massarella leafed through the Jesuit scholar-turned-botanist’s intricate illustrations of citrus varieties she’d never seen before, blueprints for citrus orchards, and even his drawings of farming tools. By the time she left the museum that day, she was hooked.

“It sent me into a citrus frenzy,” she recalls. “People see it as something very readily available—you go to the grocery store and see a lemon or lime—but you don’t actually ever think about where they come from, the history behind it, the many varieties.”

For nearly a millennium, most of Europe had just one citrus variety and it was barely edible: the thick-skinned citron. With a bumpy rind and almost no juice, Europeans ignored its small interior segments in favor of a candied version of its peel. Still, it grew all over the Italian peninsula, and other citrus fruits eventually followed. By the time Ferrari wrote his book, the sunny Mediterranean region was full of citrus in all sizes, flavors, and colors.

Ferrari sent a questionnaire to citrus growers all over Italy, asking them for fruit names, about the appearance and cultivation of their trees, and how they used the harvested crop. Eager farmers sent him detailed letters back, which formed the basis for Hesperides, or The Cultivation and Use of Golden Apples (1646)—one of the first taxonomic studies of citrus.

Seeing a first-edition volume of the book inspired Massarella to embark on her own 21st-century version of Ferrari’s quest, calling and emailing small-scale citrus farmers all over Italy to learn about their centuries-old agricultural methods, some of which even predate Hesperides. “I just started going on this goose hunt of citrus farms,” she says of the photography project she’s launched to document these Italian traditions, which she calls the Citrus Archive.

Massarella finds small farms using older ways of growing citrus, and has visited nearly 20 to date. During the winter, she flies from her London flat to southern Italy to see blood oranges, oranges, and bergamots. In the summertime, she photographs lemons in Amalfi or Lake Garda. Early fall is when rabbis descend on Calabria to harvest perfectly shaped citrons for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (a sight Massarella is still hoping to be allowed to photograph someday).

One of her first visits was to Limonaia la Malora, a father-and-son farm with a restored lemon house (limonaia) along the northern Italian Lake Garda, where hundreds of orchards once flourished. Since northern Italy’s colder climate isn’t citrus-friendly, Franciscan monks started building lemon houses in the 14th century to shelter the trees during winter.

Permanent stone walls and columns surrounding the orchard are outfitted with a wooden slat roof and walls during the colder months, shielding the trees from wind and cold. Gaps between slats are carefully plugged up with hay, in a process called stupinatura, and terracotta pots filled with water are placed throughout the limonaia as thermometers. If ice forms on the water, Giuseppe and Fabio Gandossi—the duo behind Limonaia la Malora—know it’s too cold and light a controlled bonfire near the limonaia to warm the trees.

Massarella visited the farm when Fabio was dismantling the limonaia for the summer. “Everything is done by hand, completely, as it was in the 15th century,” she says. “There’s absolutely no machinery, and it takes almost 14 days to uncover and cover back up every time.” Once all the planks are detached, they’re put in a special casello—a custom shed where the building materials and tools are stored until they’re used in the winter.

The process is labor-intensive, a reason the Gandossis have one of the last functioning lemon farms on the lake. “Which is quite sad because the Lake Garda lemons are really interesting. They’re quite a bit more bitter, but they’ve got a really wonderful taste,” Massarella says. “You can’t really find Lake Garda lemons anywhere anymore.”

Another type of lemon house is used in the warmer south, in Sorrento, even though it’s easier to grow lemons there. Chestnut wood is hand-chiseled into posts that are tied together as mats, and laid over the trees as wintertime roofing. Massarella visited Il Giardino di Vigliano, a farm still using these pagliarelle, and the one family that still makes them.

“There’s one farm that uses a little bit of the pagliarelle, but it’s on one small section of the farm as a nostalgic thing,” explains Massarella. Most farms have switched to plastic netting, which is cheap but not as charming. “[Pagliarelle are] really expensive and they’re wood, and every 10 to 15 years they need to replace them.” Some restaurants and hotels still order the mats as decor, but farms can’t afford the added cost.

Meanwhile, on the Amalfi Coast, a century-old pulley system at the family-run Aceto farm has survived because it saves costs—in this case, of labor. Lemon trees grow there on dramatically steep cliffs (their roots actually preventing erosion by holding rock together), but harvesting the fruits involves carrying containers weighing around 120 pounds down plunging paths to a paved road.

At the Aceto family’s sixth-generation farm, lemon-laden crates are loaded onto a cable-mounted rack that carries them down. “At the top of the farm they’ll put the basket on a little pulley system which brings it down about halfway, and then they’ll need to carry it either on their shoulders or on mules down to ground level,” describes Massarella. “It’s not really used anywhere else but the Amalfi Coast.”

The steepness of Amalfi, famous for its fragrant sfusato Amalfitano lemons used for everything from flavoring fish to making limoncello, has made it impossible to adopt modern techniques. “They can’t expand or mechanize their cultivation or harvesting systems in these places, so they encapsulate traditions and ways of life that haven’t changed much over the centuries,” says Helena Attlee, author of The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit. “When a small, traditional citrus farm goes, it takes a whole raft of skills with it, and a way of life that can never be repeated.”

That’s what inspired Massarella to start the Citrus Archive in the first place, and as she visits more farms, the fragility of Italian citrus-growing traditions becomes clearer. Modern farms can mass-produce citrus, and sell for cheap. “The majority of people would rather pay a little bit less because they don’t really know where it’s coming from,” she says of supermarket citrus. “They don’t know the history of it, and to most people a lemon is a lemon.”

She hopes that the Citrus Archive helps change that, by making people aware of the history of citrus culture before these techniques disappear. When she’s done with her tour of citrus farms across Italy, she hopes to turn her project into a book, inspired by the sumptuous Ferrari volume she saw at the museum. She sees it as a continuation of Hesperides, “in the sense that it’s today’s techniques,” she says. But she’ll illustrate the richness of Italy’s citrus tradition with photographs, instead of copper plate etchings.

Climate change is shrinking Alpine glaciers. The tourism industry has a stake in keeping them around.

What do you do when your 200-acre glacier—a “Giant of the Alps”—begins to melt from climate change? For a ski resort in Italy, the answer is simple: Put a tarp on it.

Sitting on an Alp called Presanella in the northern part of the country, the Presena Glacier is home to a lucrative ski tourism industry. The Pontedilegno Tonale resort operates ski lifts on the glacier, inviting visitors to ride cable cars up the mountain and warm up in glamorous huts “equipped with all comforts,” including a Finnish sauna and a lava stone Jacuzzi pool.

But rising temperatures put this all at risk. The region is warming fast, endangering Pontedilegno Tonale’s ski business and nearby mountain communities that depend on tourism. Since 1993, the Presena Glacier has lost one-third of its volume, and the region is warming faster than the rest of the world. A report last year from the European Geosciences Union predicted that 90 percent of the Alps’ present-day glacier volume could be gone by the year 2100.

To slow the melt, Pontedilegno Tonale embarked on what it calls a conservation project: Each summer, from June to September, it spreads massive “geotextile tarpaulins” over the the glacier’s surface. In recent weeks, a crew from the company Carosello-Tonale began laying big white tarps that reflect sunlight and keep the underlying snow and ice cool.

Workers spread strips of tarp by hand, rolling each $450, 231-by-15-foot section down the slopes. After sewing the strips together, they place bags of sand on top of the tarps to prevent them from blowing away. The whole process takes six weeks to complete, and removing the tarps in preparation for ski season takes another month and a half.

When it comes to climate change, ski resorts throughout the Alps have been feeling the heat more than other regions. A 2014 report found that the Austrian Alps had already warmed by almost 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, compared to a worldwide average of 1.5 degrees F. Toasty winter temperatures of 50 degrees are now commonly observed in the Italian Dolomites, where skiers glide down the slopes wearing T-shirts and no gloves. In the French ski town of Chamonix, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, snow accumulation has been cut in half over the past four decades, and the melting Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice) glacier threatens to disrupt what was once the world’s longest ski run.

Overall, reduced snowfall and a receding snow line (the lowest point at which snow lasts year-round) have helped to shorten the Alps’ average ski season by more than a month since 1960. As a result, according to a report in the Guardian, more than 200 ski resorts have shuttered. Those that remain, like Pontedilegno Tonale with its huge tarps, have had to take action to protect their slopes.

In France, the Val d’Isère makes its own snow. Using 650 powerful cannons, it blasts fresh powder onto the mountain, producing up to 282,000 cubic feet every hour. Other resorts, like the French Courchevel, opt for “snow farming,” taking snow from the coldest months of January or February and stashing it away under several inches of wood chips. The wood chips preserve the snow, which resort managers then unearth and spread back over the mountain when it’s time to begin the ski season—kind of like recycling, but for snow. The Swiss resort of Davos says it can retain up to 80 percent of the snow it covers by using this method.

Franco del Pero, one of the leaders of the project to slow the Presena Glacier’s melting, told Agence France-Presse the tarps are working. “When we remove them in September and we see that they did their job, we feel proud,” he said.

But it’s hard not to feel somber about the lengths resort owners have gone to cling to the melting snow and ice. A snowy winter, expansive ice sheets—these things used to be a given. Now, skiers worry they could be disappearing for good. According to the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Switzerland, even a global temperature rise limited to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit would cause a 30 percent loss in Alpine snow cover by the end of the century.

A giant circle of pits is the largest Neolithic site found in Britain to date.

There’s enough old stuff in England that many things get overlooked. Take the several white spots in Stonehenge’s old parking lot. Drivers there had long treated them as traffic markers, when in fact they actually marked the locations where Mesolithic wood posts once stood, thousands of years before the region’s main attraction rose from the Salisbury Plain, some 5,000 years old itself.

Now, another monumental site has been discovered in the area, and though it's much, much bigger than Stonehenge, it's easy to see why it's been missed for so long. The newly found site, contemporaneous with Stonehenge, is a vast arc of pits, which archaeologists believe represents a significant development in their understanding of the inhabitants of early Britain.

“When we started the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project, we started to look in between the monuments [we knew about],” says Vincent Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford and lead author of a recent study describing the newly-discovered site, published in the journal Internet Archaeology. “The Neolithic period was a time of monumentalization of ritual sites. It was happening all over the country. This dwarfs the lot of them.”

Stonehenge is notorious for its scale, with its trilithons (the Jenga-block constructions of two upright stones with a large stone lying flat across the top) clocking in at over 20 feet, and a total site diameter of nearly 100 feet. The newly found pits—20 have been found so far, and there are likely more—are about two miles from Stonehenge, near the town of Durrington, and are about 16 feet deep. The pits form an arc with a diameter of over a mile, with a gap on its western side—like a giant crescent moon partially encircling the site of Durrington Walls, another “superhenge” enclosure. It brings to mind a giant eye, with Durrington Walls, itself 1,600 feet across, as the pupil. The complex is just a couple of miles from Stonehenge.

It’s clear that across Salisbury and beyond, such sites were an inescapable part of Neolithic life. They were used by people across the island, likely for ritual purposes (though Durrington Walls also hosted a village at some point). The Wilsford Shaft, a 90-foot hole just southwest of Stonehenge and excavated in the mid-1960s, turned up a number of ancient objects at the bottom. Gaffney’s team found bone and struck flint at the bottom of the holes near Durrington.

“The ritual and the everyday isn’t separated in this society as it is with us,” Gaffney says. “You can’t just dig down [90 feet] down, find [offerings] at the bottom, and say it’s not ritual. These things are just too wacky.”

Both the newly discovered enclosure of holes and Stonehenge are in close proximity to the River Avon, which Gaffney says may help explain the clipped shape of the new site—with the circle stopping at the river, or at least where the river flowed thousands of years ago.

“Durrington Walls and Stonehenge are very connected monuments, and the Avon is the connection,” Gaffney says. “This is why visitors to Stonehenge should turn their back on it [and look toward the river]. That’s how you understand Stonehenge.”

The new pits were found using magnetometry, which senses variation in the soil. Using a fleet of tractors tugging magnetometers, the international European team mapped the pastures that a number of henges, walls, barrows, enclosures, and curses (plural of cursus, a long, trench-like Neolithic construction) call home.

“The pits are filled with a huge volume of soil,” Gaffney says, “that’s set against the chalk, which is relatively inert magnetically. It shows up as a massive positive in an otherwise inert background.”

The ring of holes extends pretty uniformly from the circle of Durrington Walls at the center, suggesting that the makers had paced it off. Some of them on one side, however, trace the outer rim of a site that predates both them and Stonehenge by about a millennium, called the Larkhill Causewayed Enclosure. This further suggests that builders of these monuments used far older ones as guides and benchmarks—even if it got them a little off track.

“At some point they realized, ‘We’re going too far,’” Gaffney says, “and by the time they’re done they’re back on track. I’ve never seen something like that in early British prehistory. It shows you that the counting isn’t the important thing, it’s the connection with the causewayed enclosure.”

Though the ancient populations that built the earlier enclosure and the later henges and pits were separated by a millennium, they show how the population was aware of its past, and how that past helped to define what they did in their own time. It’s a stunning reflection of spiritual continuity and the centrality of these earthworks to their lives.

And today the land is still filled with their works—and just as many unanswered questions.

A team of divers and archaeologists discovered the 19th-century fragrance in a shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda.

After an intense storm pummeled Bermuda in February 2011, the island’s custodian of historic wrecks Philippe Max Rouja went to do a coastal survey and spotted a partially exposed bow of a boat. The bow belonged to the Civil War blockade runner Mary Celestia, which was en route to North Carolina’s Confederate forces when it sank in 1864. The Mary Celestia is far from alone: Bermuda’s treacherous underwater reefs sank many a ship. In fact, over 300 vessels are buried around the island, each with its own history and artifacts. But this isn’t the story of the wreck itself—this is a story about a whiff of lost perfume history hiding within.

After a week of examining the wreck, a team of divers and archaeologists found a number of artifacts, including shoes, wine, and two small bottles of perfume. The items were packed together, leading the team to think they may have been gifts. Save for some mineral deposits that had formed on them, the bottles appeared to be intact. One still contained a small air bubble inside, which otherwise would have been forced out by seawater. Etched on the glass were the names “Piesse and Lubin London.”

Rouja brought the bottles to Isabelle Ramsay-Brackstone, the owner of a local boutique perfume store called Lili Bermuda. Ramsay-Brackstone immediately knew they were a rare find. “In the 1800s, London was a center of the perfume industry and Piesse and Lubin was the name of a prominent perfume house on Bond Street,” she says. “It was a perfume that Queen Victoria would have worn.” Ramsay-Brackstone, who also forges her own scents, was inspired and wondered if she could recreate the fragrance 150 years later.

According to Bermuda’s law all artifacts recovered from the sea become property of the government, joining the collection at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute. Ramsay-Brackstone obtained permission to temporarily keep the bottles as she pursued her recreation. She took her finds to New Jersey, where her friend and fellow perfumer Jean Claude Delville worked for Drom Fragrances. Drom is a large international company, which had the equipment necessary to perform gas chromatography, abbreviated GC. GC is capable of reverse-engineering a chemical formula by reading the molecular composition of a scent and spitting out the names of the associated chemical compounds. “It is somewhat similar to reading DNA,” Ramsay-Brackstone explains, except not as complex.

After carefully scraping the mineral deposits off the bottles and opening them, Ramsay-Brackstone and Delville savored the scents. One bottle gave of a whiff of a rotten smell. Unfortunately, some seawater had seeped in and spoiled the fragrance. But the other specimen survived intact after 150 years underwater. According to the duo, it smelled of orange, bergamot, and grapefruit with a faint aroma of flowers and sandalwood. There were also some musky “animal notes,” such as civet or ambergris, which were derived from animal glands in the 19^th century. Unlike most modern fragrances that differentiate scents into “female” (floras or fruity notes) and “male” (woody notes), the old perfume contained both. At the time, perfumers didn’t yet make gender distinctions.

Once they had taken a whiff of the fragrance, Ramsay-Brackstone and Delville dipped a blotter stick in the liquid and placed it in the chromatograph. Not long after, the machine completed the molecular reading and generated a printout: a list of hydrocarbons, acids, and other chemicals. But while the molecular readings were easy to obtain, translating these chemicals into the associated aromatic compounds was a lot trickier.

Ramsay-Brackstone and Delville tried to search the annals of perfume for fragrances created by Piesse and Lubin co-owner Septimus Piesse. Piesse was a chemist and a perfumer who also wrote books about creating scents, but many of his records were lost. He was, however, well known for producing a very popular fragrance called Bouquet Opoponax, so the two perfumers decided the mysterious substance in the recovered bottle was likely a precursor to that product. Alas, they still didn't find the list of ingredients he used for Bouquet Opoponax.

So Ramsay-Brackstone and Delville resorted to their own olfactory senses. After a lot sniffing and guessing, the duo settled on a few key ingredients, including orange flower, roses, sandalwood, and vanilla. “We used the chromatograph and my nose to do the reconstitution,” says Delville, adding that he and Ramsay-Blackstone tried very hard to achieve the perfume’s exact aroma. “We didn’t want to recreate just a modern version of the fragrance. We wanted to stay true to the original scent.”

Achieving this precision isn’t an easy feat, says Christina Agapakis, creative director of the synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks. Agapakis previously worked on recreating the smells of extinct flowers. “Especially when you are looking at older perfumes with natural ingredients made from plants or animals, even if you do an analyses with GC, there are hundreds of molecules that can be present in very low quantities, but have a very big impact on a smell,” she says. “So it can be quite difficult to go from a CG trace to recreating a smell.”

To complicate matters further, the two perfumers had to find modern alternatives to civet and ambergris, animal-sourced ingredients that would be considered unethical today. “Ambergris comes from sperm whales,” says Ramsay-Brackstone. “It’s something they spit out like cats do with their fur balls, so it floats in the ocean until it washes out on the beach.” Therefore, it can sometimes be found naturally and without any harm caused to the animal, but even so, it can’t make a reliable and consistent ingredient. “In the old days people would gather it and use it, but in 2020 no one does it,” Ramsay-Blackstone adds.

In lieu of those controversial ingredients, the pair turned to man-made musk molecules, which today are engineered in labs safety and reliably. “I found a very specific synthetic musk called exaltone,” says Delville. “It gives the final polish and beauty to the scent.”

Beyond finding modern-day alternatives to 19^th-century scents, the team also had to use different solvents. Those used by Piesse 150 years ago were skin irritants, but back then, that was of little concern since people in the 1800s didn't wear perfume on their skin. They splashed it on their capes and scarves to protect themselves from the stench of London’s filthy streets, Ramsay-Brackstone says.

Once they settled on the ingredients, the two perfumers still had to figure out their exact proportions by trial and error. That took about 110 iterations and several months, Delville recalls. He kept mixing the ingredients in different amounts and letting them age for several weeks, after which he would send promising samples to Ramsay-Blackstone, who had since returned home.

Finally, when they got close to what they presumed was the original formula, Delville flew to Bermuda. The local scents naturally present in the air—sea, salt, and sand—and even the altitude can affect how a smell is perceived, he explains. “You have to do the final touches at the location where you will launch your fragrance,” he says. “We both agreed on what needed to be done—we had to increase the level of orange flower and sandalwood.”

The two perfumers named their creation Mary Celestia. Naming the perfume after a ship that restocked Confederate forces wasn’t meant to commemorate the blockade runner or any historical figures, Ramsay-Brackstone says. She believes that the bottle was originally intended as a gift, and she wanted to honor that long-gone relationship. “Perfume, even 150 years ago, was meant to be an intimate gift between two people who had profound feelings for each other,” she adds.

Ramsay-Brackstone issued a limited edition of the restored scent in September 2014—a century and a half after the ship’s demise. That run included 1,854 bottles, a reference to the year the ship sank. She donated some of the proceeds to the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, also known as PADI, an organization that teaches young Bermudians how to dive, an important skill at on the island. “This perfume waited for 150 years to be worn,” Ramsay-Brackstone says. “We were really excited to bring it to the people.”

Recreating the perfume was quite the olfactory accomplishment, Agapakis says. Oftentimes, when scents are recreated based off the gas chromatograph analyses, they come out flat, missing a certain element of complexity.

But that’s not what happened with this particular revival. The fragrance was multifaceted, and consumers responded enthusiastically to its electric array of aromatic components. The limited edition quickly ran out and customers wanted more. Today, Mary Celestia is sold at Lili Bermuda and online for $130. It also comes in a travel size at $35.

As the perfume aged it became richer, akin to a good wine. “The older it gets, the more of its personality comes out,” says Delville, who since started his own company, The Society of Scent. “What Piesse did a century and a half ago was magic, which we are enjoying today.”

The third episode of TED’s Pindrop podcast was 66 million years in the making.

Mantua Township is like a lot of South Jersey—15,000 people, the look of sleepy crossroads village combined with the chain stores and restaurants of a typical American suburb. One seemingly unremarkable spot in Mantua Township is a Lowe’s hardware store on Woodbury Glassboro Road. But it hides something extraordinary. Out back, there’s a an old quarry that's now a giant mud pit. Descending into it, every step takes you back in time 400,000 years. All around are the lines in rock, called striations, that mark phases in geologic history. And among them, tons of fossils have been found. Despite appearances, it’s not unusual for the area. About 12 miles to the north, in Haddonfield, some farmers dug up the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton in 1858, a duck-billed dinosaur named Hadrosaurus. A few minutes away in what is now Ceres Park, the first fossils of a meat-eating dinosaur called Dryptosaurus were found back in 1866.

On this spot, 66 million years ago, everything was under about 70 feet of water. Swimming around the site of the Lowe’s were mosasaurs—dragon-like marine reptiles as long as a school bus, with paddles for limbs and a six-foot jaw. There were also crocodiles and turtles, and scores of smaller species.

That’s where Rowan University paleontologist and geologist Ken Lacovara comes in. Lacovara, who grew up about an hour away from Mantua Township, was behind the 2005 discovery in Argentina of Dreadnoughtus (Latin for “fears nothing”), one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered. Lacovara first learned about the site behind the Lowe’s from a friend in 2003. So he started bringing his students there to practice excavating. It was a great site for that, but it also held a surprise—a layer with fossils that were still articulated, suggesting that the creatures in that layer had died suddenly, all at once, and settled to the bottom. Lacovara suspects that the layer could come from the moment, a little more than 66 million years ago, when an asteroid or comet struck the Earth, setting off a cascade that helped wipe out the dinosaurs and many other species. Evidence of that moment has long eluded paleontologists, and has not been without controversy.

Lacovara and his team were faced with a lot of research and testing. Might they have an unprecedented window into the moment of mass extinction? Can they see whether dinosaurs truly went out with a bang or a whimper?

But just as he was getting excited about the site’s potential, he learned that it was about to be turned into an apartment complex. So he turned to Michelle Bruner, the Leslie Knope of South Jersey, an enthusiastic government worker who cares deeply about her township. She jumped in on the race to save the site by setting up community dig days that anyone could attend. People soon began traveling from all over the world to dig for fossils behind the hardware store. It grew so popular that their vision expanded, and now all that work is coming to fruition: In three years, thanks to a recent big donation, they hope to open the Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park: a beautiful, world-class 45,000-square-foot natural history museum. They now expect thousands more to visit, and support finding a potential answer to one of the biggest questions in paleontology.

To hear from Lacovara and Bruner, listen to Pindrop, a podcast produced by TED and hosted by Saleem Reshamwala that travels around the world in search of surprising and imaginative ideas. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

The creatures are ready for their close-ups—in the name of getting a better handle on biodiversity in the bustling city.

Lisa Gonzalez is the kind of photographer who knows how to make her subjects look good. It involves a bit of fussing and preening, maybe some artful arranging of limbs. When her sitters look a little shriveled, she rehydrates them; when they’re unkempt, she grooms them. Gonzalez’s task is complicated by the fact that some of her subjects are smaller than a grain of rice. Sometimes she has to use a brush with a single bristle.

Gonzalez is an assistant collections manager of entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and a member of the team that is inventorying the insect population of the Los Angeles Basin, then viewing and photographing them under high magnification. In this era of social distancing, the museum has debuted a digital exhibition, Spiky, Hairy, Shiny: Insects of L.A., which introduces Angelenos to some of their small, winged neighbors in nearly surreal detail.

The museum has been conducting this census for several years as part of its BioSCAN project, which is investigating the biodiversity of the second-largest city in the United States. Historically, entomologists have flocked to forests or meadows, skipping sidewalks or apartment buildings, but this research team believes it’s crucial to compile baseline data about what’s living in the city, too. So far, the project team has identified 800 insect species, 47 of which had never been recorded before.

The beetles, flies, and other creatures that eventually wound up beneath Gonzalez’s microscope had no inkling of what was in store for them when they unwittingly entered what are known as malaise traps—tent-like structures with a hole at the top. There’s no bait inside. Instead, insects gravitate in and up toward the light, and then tumble into a bottle containing alcohol. Researchers retrieved the samples, brought them back to the museum, added fresh ethanol, and enlisted volunteers and work-study students to help sort the specimens, using forceps or pipettes to group flies in one jar, for instance, and butterflies in another. They caught so many that would it would be impossible to study them all.

The museum’s experts (and colleagues at other institutions) swooped in to sort the insects further, hopefully zeroing in to the species level, either by sight or molecular analysis. It’s a tricky task to parse itty bitty morphological markers that differentiate one species from another (say, the shape of male genitalia or tiny bristles on the body). There may also be considerable variation within a single species, Gonzalez adds. That’s where genetic analysis can come in handy. “Sequencing them is basically dead easy,” says Brian Brown, curator of entomology at the museum and a project collaborator. “It’s just chemistry.” Lastly, Gonzalez and company photographed them with a Keyence microscope. “This system was originally designed to inspect semiconductors,” Brown says. “We decided to start using it for insect photography because it produces such high-resolution images.”

Over the several phases of the project, the BioSCAN team has installed 80 of their traps in various backyard settings—from dense to more wide-open—across the Los Angeles Basin. The team noticed that patterns emerge in terms of which insects show up where. Flower-feeders, such as bees and butterflies, tend to wander far and wide in pursuit of an appealing bloom, while some very teeny flies seem to stay much more local, in particular pockets. Overall, Brown says, the team found that biodiversity is correlated with drier conditions. “We tell people, ‘If you want to increase biodiversity in L.A., lighten up on water,’” he says.

Some of the insects they’ve collected are longtime residents of the city—leafcutter bees, for instance, have prehistoric bonafides; fossilized family members were entombed in the La Brea tar pits tens of thousands of years ago. Other species’ persistence depends on where their fellow residents have or haven’t been squeezed out. The eucharitid wasp, which looks like an onyx-colored reindeer with shiny crocodile skin, can only thrive where native carpenter ants hold on. (In the winter, female wasps drop their eggs on rhododendron and willow buds, and foraging ants later carry the larvae along.) “In Los Angeles, most native ants have been outcompeted by Argentine ants, so most of those wasps are relegated to the periphery of the city,” Brown says. The mantisfly, which has eyes like creamy pearls, was also among the least common in their samples. The team only collected one.

The portraits feel a little glamorous, partly because the details leap out of the images. Some look furry as a golden retriever puppy, and others seem to be decked out in patent leather or velour. The images are a reminder to anyone wandering Los Angeles that the sky and ground are teeming with little bits of wonder, and that their backyards may be full of creatures that aren’t yet known to science. “People potentially have new species living in their neighborhoods,” Gonzalez says. And if these insects are any indication, they might be pretty photogenic.

Letters and trinkets show off the personal sides of Einstein, Hawking, and Schrödinger.

There’s a tendency to think of scientists as emotionally distant—two left brains for the price of a right. Ironically, the more iconic the scientist, the more we ought to know about them, the more that image tends to calcify: Think of it as the Genius Industry™.

A forthcoming online sale by Christie’s auction house, however, offers a slew of items that show off famous scientists’ more personal sides. Though the sale, called “Eureka! Scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century,” is full of patents, proofs, and papers, you’re just as likely to find intimate exchanges, inside jokes, and political musings. Bidding is live, and will wrap up on July 16, 2020.

Albert Einstein, as ever, provides a good place to start. One striking lot is a letter the physicist wrote, in 1929, to Herman Bernstein, who had chaired the Einstein Jubilee Committee and thrown the scientist’s 50th birthday party, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Though Christie’s says that Einstein was “arguably the most famous individual in the world” at that time, it’s not clear whether he enjoyed that status. “I have to admit to you frankly,” he wrote, “that ... I do not consider such an extreme cult of personality to be a good thing.” He described himself as an “unworthy person” for such a grand celebration. The letter also provides some insight into Einstein’s political activity, with the scientist suggesting that his celebrity status had been helpful in promoting the cause of Zionism.

In a more intimate Einstein letter, written a few years later in 1932, he wrote to his son Eduard, hoping to comfort him in the midst of treatment for schizophrenia. Einstein wrote of a friend who had suffered from depression, but had emerged “in cheerful spirits and the best of health.” Somewhat cheekily, the famous scientist also told Eduard not to worry about the contents of his father’s will: “I will never mention them again,” he wrote. The letter takes on an extra poignance in the context of Einstein’s biography. Though he mentioned his upcoming five-month appointment at Princeton, he didn’t know at the time that he’d be leaving Germany for good. Hitler took power the following year, and Einstein never saw Eduard again.

Politics and the course of history, in fact, loom large over the collection of items offered in the sale. In a 1927 letter, Erwin Schrödinger—he of simultaneously living-and-dead cat fame—digresses from scientific matters to throw some shade at Mussolini. Explaining why he declined an invitation to Italy’s Lake Como, Schrödinger wrote, “One would certainly hear things that one would not like. I do not like to assist people,” he added, “in celebrating their great men.” To Schrödinger, the loquacious Mussolini’s appeal could best be summarized by the medieval German poet Walther von der Vogelweide: “We prize poetry,” he quoted, “even if it is only mediocre.”

The auction also shows off Stephen Hawking’s sense of humor, something that’s charmed us since Hawking threw a cocktail party for time travelers. (He was the only one who showed up.) Up for auction is the original artwork of a 1988 Bloom County comic strip, inscribed to Hawking by the author and artist Berkeley Breathed. In the strip, the child-genius character Oliver Wendell Jones leaves a message for Hawking: “Say, dude, if you hadn’t mistakenly squared that fourth integer, you would’ve realized that black holes could never emit radiation.” Hawking, apparently, was a fan.

And according to the physicist himself, he gained no shortage of fans from his appearances on The Simpsons: four episodes in total, which apparently led some to believe that he was a fictional character created by the show. Hawking felt, as Christie’s puts it, that The Simpsons was “the best thing on American television,” and he held on to his own personal figurine from the show. It comes straight from Hawking’s personal estate. At press time, bidding exceeded $1,000.

All told, there’s a lot in the auction to make one laugh or maybe just reflect, but there’s at least one bit of genuine scientific instruction as well. In a 1921 letter to another Herr Einstein, Albert thanked his smoking companion for sharing an “elegant little pipe,” and advanced yet another theory. “One must cultivate the little vices,” he wrote, “so as not to give space to the big ones.”

The bookwheel helps readers browse eight texts at once. The only problem? It weighs 600 pounds.

Agostino Ramelli, the 16th-century Italian military engineer, designed many contraptions for the changing Renaissance landscape, including cranes, grain mills, and water pumps. But his most compelling apparatus was one meant to nurture the mind: a revolving wooden wheel with angled shelves, which allowed users to read multiple books at one time. "This is a beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout,” Ramelli wrote in Le diverse et artificiose machine, his illustrated magnum opus of mechanical solutions. “Moveover, it has another fine convenience in that it occupies very little space in the place where it is set.”

Ramelli never ended up building this device, but the bookwheel has long intrigued those who study the history of the book—and in 2018, a group of undergraduate engineering students at the Rochester Institute of Technology set out to build two. They began by diligently studying the Italian engineer’s illustration, then procured historically accurate materials, such as European beech and white oak. With the help of modern power tools and processes, such as computer modeling and CNC routing, they brought it to life. “Cutting the gears by hand would have taken a considerate amount of time,” says RIT graduate Ian Kurtz. “The actual construction may not have been worth the time with 16th-century techniques … I think Agostino was more so showing his understanding of how gear systems worked.”

Today, one wheel resides at the Melbert B. Cary Jr. Graphic Arts Collection at RIT’s Wallace Library, and the other at the University of Rochester’s Rossell Hope Robbins Library. Each weighs about 600 pounds and has room for eight books; users can take a seat and spin the wooden cases, which are carefully weighted to avoid unintended movements. It’s also worth getting close to observe the core mechanism: a complex, epicyclic gearing system that consists of outer gears rotating around a central gear, much like planets moving around the sun.

Ramelli’s design likely inspired similar wheels that were built in the 17th and 18th centuries, several of which still exist, but it was probably more complicated than it needed to be. “There are simpler objects you could build that would accomplish mostly the same goals,” says Matt Nygren, another former student who built the wheels. “This is more extravagant than it is entirely practical.” A more efficient bookwheel, he adds, would be one structured like a Ferris wheel, with hanging, weighted cradles rather than shelves that move along a gear system.

Simpler bookwheels did precede Ramelli’s rotating lectern. Readers in the late Medieval Period could sit by a book carousel, which rotated open books along a horizontal plane, like a Lazy Susan, and didn’t require side supports. Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Collection, suspects that the Italian engineer was trying to improve this design and cater to an increasing need to cross-reference books, which were often large and heavy. “Through the 16th century, books are beginning to talk to each other a lot more—one might reference another—so a bookwheel could have been convenient,” he says. “Some scholars say it’s the beginning of the idea of hypertext, the idea that a reader can sit in one spot and have access to multiple texts at once.” (That concept is all too familiar today, in the age of hyperlinks, search engines, and browser tabs.)

The Cary Collection’s wheel can be used for individual reading research, but it is also often used as a teaching tool. At RIT, Juilee Decker, an associate professor of museum studies, has had her classes design visitor experiences around the bookwheel. Students have created videos, games, and instructional material about the device, along the way developing skills related to digital content curation and audience engagement. Museums have also expressed interest in the wheel: In Russia, the Museum of Languages of the World built its own version according to the RIT team’s plans, which are published online. The University of the Pacific in California has also expressed interest in acquiring one.

Bibliophiles, particularly those who can relate to tsundoku—the Japanese term describing the habit of acquiring books without reading them—might want to own Ramelli’s bookwheel, too. But while Kurtz and Nygren acknowledge that the apparatus is historically significant, they both believe it doesn’t serve much of a practical purpose, from an engineering perspective. “I dont think it's something you should buy and try and keep in your living room—nowadays there are better tools for the job,” Nygren says. “But it’s certainly an eye-catching thing, and one of the fanciest ways I can think of for storing books.”