The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/category/features/undercovering-the-past)
A new exhibit at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library explores thousands of years of practices in divination and prediction, from oracle bones to horoscope apps – and even includes demonstrations of the spider divination carried out by the Mambila people of Cameroon and Nigeria.
A cloak of thousands of scarlet ibis feathers, sacred to the Indigenous Tupinambá people of Brazil, has been in Danish hands since the 1600s. Now it has finally been returned to Brazil in the midst of an ongoing dispute over Indigenous rights in the country.
In Peru’s Virú Valley, the remains of pre-Incan water cult may rewrite human history in the region while also highlighting the critical importance of water for our survival and the urgent need for preservation efforts to protect invaluable cultural heritage.
The Antikythera Mechanism, initially dismissed as shipwreck debris, is now celebrated as an ancient analog computer. Recent studies challenge its function, suggesting it measured a lunar, not solar, year.
A new study uses skeletal trauma, grave goods, runestones, and infrastructure to argue that Viking Age Denmark and Norway had markedly different relationships to interpersonal violence.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization has recognized the Appian Way as a World Heritage site. The Appian Way, sometimes called Europe’s first expressway, was a major strategic and commercial route for the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, and houses many sites sacred to Roman deities along its path.
