Archaeologie
6 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- A coin in a grave doesn't give you a year, only a boundary.
Historians often date not with a point but with two limits. Terminus post quem: if a grave holds a coin from 312, it …
- How a roof beam reveals the year it was felled.
Trees add one ring per year, wide in good years, narrow in dry ones. The pattern works like a barcode for a region. …
- How archaeologists tell a bone's age.
Living things constantly take in the radioactive carbon isotope C-14. At death the supply stops, and C-14 decays with a …
- Pompeii probably did not die in August.
The 24 August date comes from a Pliny letter printed in 1508 after 1,400 years of hand-copying. Excavated autumn fruit …
- The Terracotta Army was brightly coloured until we dug it up.
On 29 March 1974 farmers digging a well near Xi'an hit the figures – over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots and hundreds of …
- Why the past seems to consist entirely of stone palaces.
What you know of an era is what survived: stone churches rather than wooden huts, letters of the literate rather than …