20 Ancient Objects Archaeologists Still Can’t Explain

In 1936, archaeologists excavating near Baghdad, Iraq, found clay jars dating to the Parthian or Sasanian period (roughly 250 BCE to 650 CE). The vessels are roughly 13 centimeters high and contain a rolled copper cylinder surrounding an iron rod. Pour vinegar or wine into a modern replica of one of these jars, and you get nearly a volt, giving the artifacts their moniker. However, there is no evidence of wires or electroplated objects from this culture, and scholars believe the jars were originally used to store scrolls, which have since disintegrated.

Made by Gallo-Roman craftsmen throughout Britain, Gaul, and Germany from the 2nd to the 4th centuries CE, each of these dodecahedrons is a hollow cast bronze object with 12 pentagonal faces, a hole of a different size in each face, and small knobs at each corner. More than 110 have been discovered, but none was found in Rome or Greece. Nothing written or drawn by the Romans refers to these items. Experimenters have even managed to knit wool glove fingers using one. Others have proposed they were surveying tools, used to gauge pipes or for ritual purposes.

In about 200 BCE, an Egyptian sculptor fashioned a sycamore-wood model of a falcon with flat, fixed wings and a vertical tail fin. It was placed as a grave gift in the tomb of Pa-di-Imen, an official at Saqqara, Egypt. In 1969, it was claimed that this was a model of an ancient glider. But wind tunnel experiments showed it to be too nose-heavy and to lack a horizontal tailplane to enable it to glide. Similar bird models have been found mounted on sacred boats in temple carvings from Karnak.

Sculpted around 30,000 years ago near Willendorf in Austria by hunters and gatherers, the small, faceless female figurine, nicknamed the “Venus of Willendorf,” was colored in red ocher. Scans of the statue show that the limestone from which it was made came from a site more than 400 kilometers away in northern Italy, evidence that Ice Age humans were traveling, or trading, over vast distances. What the statue represents, perhaps as a fertility icon, a self-portrait, or a gift exchanged between groups, remains unclear.

Between roughly 500 and 1000 CE, Colombian goldsmiths of the Quimbaya culture cast small gold-copper pendants that were buried as grave goods for Quimbaya’s elite class. The small figures feature triangular wings, a central vertical fin, and animal heads. When some researchers claimed these were model jets, they based their “flight tests” on replicas with extra jet engines and landing gear not present on the original artifacts. Archaeologists instead interpret the objects as stylized representations of fish, birds, or insects.

The Phaistos Disc, a two-sided object dating from 1700 to 1600 BCE, comes from Crete, where Minoan craftsmen made the fired clay piece by stamping both sides with the 241 symbols using pre-made stamps, rather than engraving each symbol separately. It is in a script that matches no known language, and no other copy has ever been found. Numerous non-professionals have attempted to translate it into everything from a hymn to a game board, but no translation has achieved any professional consensus.

Made in southern Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, and found at Tell al-‘Ubaid in 1919, terracotta figurines found at the site are dated from approximately 5200 to 4000 BCE. They are about hand-sized, with slender bodies, elongated heads, and wide eyes. Female examples frequently show them breastfeeding infants. Modern fringe theorists refer to them as extraterrestrial “lizard people,” but archaeologists interpret them as stylized representations of artificially induced skull deformations practiced on infants, a practice well documented in the ancient Near East, or as ritual masks worn by the living.

During the Jomon period, from around 14,000 to 300 BCE, the hunter-gatherer cultures of Japan produced some 18,000 earthenware figurines known as dogū, featuring cord-marked decoration and oversized “goggle” eyes called shakōki-dogū. Most of the figures appear to have been intentionally broken and buried in communal pits. While some fringe theories have proposed that the eyes resemble spacesuits used by ancient astronauts, archaeologists believe they may represent either traditional snow goggles worn to avoid snow-blindness or ceremonial masks. They suggest that the dogū were used as a type of healing effigy, meant to absorb the illness before being smashed.

In the first century CE, throughout the Roman Empire, Pompeii included, people used coin-sized bronze tokens stamped with sexual images on one face and Roman numerals on the other. We have no surviving Roman laws or texts that tell us what they were for. The name “spintria” is not actually Roman either. 17th-century scholars came up with it, taking the word from the historian Suetonius, who applied it to male prostitutes. There are various theories, as they could have been used as a kind of locker token for bathhouses, tokens for games, or perhaps as privately commissioned satirical pieces, but we don’t know.

Between c. 3000 and c. 2500 BCE, the inhabitants of northeast Scotland made over 420 hand-sized stone spheres studded with knobs and often decorated with spirals. Almost no spheres exhibit evidence of impact damage, chipping, or abrasion on their surfaces that might have resulted from a role as weapons or hammers. It has been suggested that they were used to make a kind of “ball bearing” to facilitate the rolling of megaliths, but this would seem to be unlikely as there is too much variation in size for them to roll in unison. They are probably prestige items or ritual objects.

In 1929, a Chinese farmer digging in Guanghan unearthed a pit full of artifacts, created between 1200 and 1000 BCE, from the ancient Shu Kingdom. There were bronze trees, some almost four meters high with small birds resting on them, and giant masks with cylindrical, bulging eyes. They had been deliberately broken, burned, and buried as gifts. As the Shu Kingdom didn’t leave behind any writing and isn’t included in China’s “official” histories, we can only guess that the trees represented a connection between heaven and earth and that the masks were depictions of ancestors or rulers.

A piece of beaten bronze, created over two millennia ago by Celtic metalsmiths, was found in the River Thames at Battersea, London, in 1857. It features swirling repoussé designs and dots of red glass enamel but is too thin and lacks any of the weapon marks, such as dents and rivet holes, to have served any purpose in battle. Experts believe it was offered up to the river gods, or displayed in processions as a mark of high rank.

René Neuville, a French prehistorian, identified a tiny piece of calcite sculpture in 1933, inside the Ain Sakhri caves, near modern-day Bethlehem. Carved by Natufian hunter-gatherer-farmers about 9000 BCE, this sculpture is only 10.2 centimeters long. From one angle, we see two faceless bodies facing each other in an embrace. Viewed from another angle, we can see the same shapes as male and female genitalia. The figures came from an ordinary cave home, not a temple or a ceremonial burial site. This ambiguity allows for several possible explanations: a gift between lovers, a protective symbol for the household, or even a votive offering.

The British Egyptologist Walter Bryan Emery unearthed a mysterious stone disc in the tomb of Prince Sabu, a high Egyptian official, at Saqqara, circa 3000 BCE. Made of metasiltstone, a delicate layered rock, the circular object has a thickened central hub and three slender extensions that curve toward the center. The internet insists the disc is a component of a water pump or a turbine, but metasiltstone would shatter if rotated at high speeds. Most Egyptologists therefore argue it was an unusual ritual cup, possibly for burning incense or holding a lamp.

From around 5500 to 3000 BCE, forebears of the Tongva and Acjachemen peoples in the vicinity of Orange County and the Los Angeles Basin produced more than 500 cogged stone discs, carved with deep notches around their circumference so that they look like today’s gear wheels. Many were buried in caches or graves, and none exhibit any evidence of axle wear. The discs are carved from basalt, granite, or soft limestone, and none show the axle wear a gear would require, ruling out any mechanical application. Some archaeologists have suggested the discs may have functioned as ritual objects, dice-like counters, or even as effigies representing slices of local cactus.

In Britain, Ireland, and France, Late Iron Age Celtic elites produced about 25 sets of large bronze spoons, from around 100 BCE to 100 CE. They were always made as pairs, one having a small hole in it, close to the edge of the bowl; the other was divided into four sections by crossed lines on its surface. Since the bowls are wide and shallow, these aren’t very useful as eating utensils. Archaeologists tend to think that they were used for divination, by dripping some sort of liquid through the hole and then reading the pattern of drops on the four-part spoon, but ritual pouring or mixing remain possible too.

In 1829, peat-cutters unearthed a 1.2-meter bronze shaft in Dunaverney Bog, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Around 1050 to 900 BCE, elite Irish metalsmiths cast the shaft and ended it in hooks decorated with bronze waterbirds: two swans and three cygnets facing two ravens. It was long believed to be a fork used to extract cooked meat from large boiling cauldrons, but the well-preserved, delicate figures suggest otherwise. This object was placed whole into the bog as a votive offering, leading archaeologists to believe it is likely a ceremonial staff held by a chief.

Sometime between 2400 and 1800 BCE, Irish goldsmiths of the Early Bronze Age hammered more than 30 paper-thin discs out of native gold. They etched geometric crosses and concentric circles onto each, and then punched two small holes for attachment. The discs, sometimes called “gold sun discs,” have been confused with early Christian crosses, but the cross motif actually represents the four directions or cosmic cycles. It predates Christianity in Ireland by some 2,000 years. It’s not known if they were sewn to clothes or mounted for display.

In caves across France, Spain, and central Europe, cave dwellers of the Upper Paleolithic culture of hunter-gatherers ground segments of reindeer antler into long, smooth objects from about 35,000 to 12,000 years ago. They bored a hole through the middle and scratched them with images of horses, mammoths, and other ice-age creatures. In the early 1800s, scholars thought they were batons of authority used by tribal chiefs. But the inside walls of the holes were worn down as if they had been pulled repeatedly by rope or leather straps. Today’s researchers are more likely to believe these mysterious objects were used as levers to straighten bent wooden spears.

Between circa 250 and 900 CE, elite flintknappers working across the Maya Lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico carved chert, chalcedony, and obsidian into jagged human faces, scorpions, and multiple-headed deities such as K’awiil. Some examples reach more than 30 centimeters in length, meticulously pressure-flaked to the brink of breakage, then entombed in ritual caches within temple platforms. Although they resemble blades, their fine appendages would render them unsuitable for battle. What purpose they served, whether as scepter finials, votive offerings for temple dedications, or ceremonial implements used in ritual bloodletting, remains unclear.

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