Stories
Letters, last words, shipwrecks, lost cities, and mysteries that stay open.
StoriesThirty-Eight People, Skulls Touched With Red: The Chimú Tomb That Looters Never ReachedAn untouched Chimú funerary platform at Chan Chan, at least 38 people, and skulls touched with red pigment — what an intact burial can tell us that a looted one cannot.
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StoriesSix Historical Mysteries Archivists Still Argue AboutSix unsolved historical mysteries: the Voynich Manuscript, the Amber Room, the Antikythera Mechanism, DB Cooper, Roanoke Colony, and the Tamam Shud case.
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StoriesThe Last Words They Meant, and the Ones They Were GivenEight famous deathbed lines, sorted into what was actually said, what was cleaned up later, and what was invented — with notes on how to tell the difference.
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StoriesFive Lost Cities and the People Who Found Them AgainHow the world rediscovered Pompeii, Machu Picchu, Troy, Angkor Wat, and Tikal — the history of each site's forgetting and the archaeologists who returned them to the record.
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StoriesThree Letters the Recipients Never OpenedThree letters from three different lives, all sealed, all undelivered, all eventually read a century later. And what the category of the unsent letter can tell us about any life.
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StoriesFive Forgotten Shipwrecks Worth RememberingFive devastating shipwrecks that killed more people than the Titanic but are almost forgotten: the Wilhelm Gustloff, Doña Paz, Kiangya, Le Joola, and Sultana.
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