The Past

Archaeologist Bernard Frischer spent decades uploading the ruins of the Eternal City to the cloud. Here’s what it looks like.

They have held our fascination ever since we first identified their remains.

Teller and Sagan debated fiercely over nuclear proliferation. But was the conflict as personal as it was intellectual for Teller?

When battles raged in ancient cities, their rocks blazed so brightly that they could be reoriented according to Earth’s magnetic field.

Along with obsidian that dazzled scientists in Canada.

Meet the people paid to rouse the workers of industrial Britain.

A sober look at a wild conspiracy theory that argues the Middle Ages never happened.

The Parthenon embodies the ideals of perfection Classical Greeks sought from architecture. The neighboring Erechtheion offers something else.

From Æthelred the Unready to Halfdan the Bad Entertainer, these strange epithets colored the legacy of four rather unlucky historical figures.

Today, the F-word is enjoying a renaissance the likes of which it hasn’t seen since, well, the Renaissance.

The volcano’s historic eruption preserved an ancient library, but rendered its content illegible. A public competition aims to change that.

Perhaps it’s not just an oddly shaped hill, after all.

Decades ago, a disaster left three million acres of land uninhabitable and killed between 85,600 and 240,000 people. Chernobyl? No. Banqiao dam in China.

A single knife is sometimes worth more than a thousand armies.

Long before the birth of Julius Caesar, the Roman Republic appointed all-powerful dictators to protect their state in times of crisis. They were remarkably self-restrained and obedient to the Roman Constitution.

But scientists have found it again.

Exile is a kind of death of who you once were.

An influential series of books argues that the history of the world is the history of generations. Is it right?

This necropsy represents an early entry in what would become a tradition of performing autopsies to consider an individual’s sanctity.

Gladiators fought in rounds, and there were referees to enforce rules. Only rarely were gladiators killed.

Various environmental phenomena can play tricks on our brain.

The clash of academic archaeology and what might be called folk archaeology comes into stark focus at Stonehenge.

Destruction of the Ukrainian dam unleashed a catastrophic flood—and surfaced centuries of cultural heritage. Now there’s a call not to rebuild it.

By the end, even his mom wanted him gone.

Bathtubs and toilets each got their own rooms until health professionals urged architects to put all the plumbing in one room.

Many countries’ histories are governed by the familiar demographic story of growth, industrialization, and decline. But not France.

These astounding inventions show that civilizations of the past were a lot more advanced than we might have thought.

“Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, and Knox the man who buys the beef.” Read the story of 19th-century Scotland’s corpse dealers.

Tikal, one of the biggest cities the Maya ever built, was home to a vast and flourishing society.

A woman’s name would undermine the credibility of the mission. Names of former Nazis, however, were no problem.