Menu
Idea

artifacts

144
Filter by:

Filter by published date

Person holding tree marked with carvings of various symbols, made by Basque herders.

Arborglyphs – Basque Immigrant Sheepherders Left Their Marks on Aspen Trees in the American West

Herders carved names, slogans, nude silhouettes and more into the trees around them. Now, researchers rush to find the arborglyphs before they disappear.
by John Bieter, Cheryl Oestreicher, Iñaki Arrieta Baro via The Conversation on June 20, 2024
Four typewriters including the Nazi-built Urania model.

Why the World of Typewriter Collectors Splits Down the Middle When These Machines Come Up for Sale

In this new hobby, I found so many stories.
by Mark Lawrence Schrad via Slate on March 16, 2024
Wendell Yellow Bull

A Prominent Museum Obtained Items From a Massacre of Native Americans in 1895. The Survivors’ Descendants Want Them Back.

A 1990 law was meant to “expeditiously return” such items to Native Americans, but descendants are still waiting.
by Nicole Santa Cruz via ProPublica on October 20, 2023
Drawing of Anthea Hartig with insurrectionist memorabilia behind her

Insurrectionabilia at the Smithsonian

In 2026, we will celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial, and also the fifth anniversary of the January 6th uprising.
by Bruce Handy via The New Yorker on August 21, 2023
3 of the Tanesar goddesses placed in a wooden crate lined with police tape.

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities stolen from a temple in northwestern India can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking.
by Elizabeth Kadetsky via The American Scholar on March 2, 2023
Photograph of President Ulysses S. Grant's memorial flower arrangements.

President Grant’s Memorial Flowers Have Survived for 136 Years

They’ve just been sitting in the dining room all this time.
by Jessica Andreone via Atlas Obscura on January 6, 2022
Aged photograph of Chinese laborers working on the railroad.

Artifacts Used by Chinese Transcontinental Railroad Workers Found in Utah

Researchers discovered the remains of a mid-19th century house, a centuries-old Chinese coin and other traces of the short-lived town of Terrace.
by Livia Gershon via Smithsonian on October 26, 2021
A man holds an axe head between his fingers

After Defeating Hernando de Soto, the Chickasaw Took his Stuff and Remade It

The site offers rare evidence of interactions between de Soto and Indigenous people.
by Kiona N. Smith via Ars Technica on July 14, 2021
Cartoon drawing of footprints in sand

Will the Mass Robbery of Native American Graves Ever End?

For centuries, everyone from archaeologists to amateurs pillaged artifacts — and human remains. Now, the FBI is cracking down on those who continue to dig.
by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson via Washington Post Magazine on July 8, 2021
Still from upcoming short film “Write No History” by Black Quantum Futurism, 2021.

Project: Time Capsule

Time capsules unearthed at affordable housing sites offer alternative, lost, and otherwise obscured histories.
by Camae Ayewa, Rasheedah Phillips via E-Flux on June 14, 2021
An embroidered sack that says "My great grandmother Rose, mother of Ashley gave her this sack when, she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina, it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Rose's hair. Told her it be filled with my Love always, she never saw her again, Ashley is my grandmother, Ruth Middleton 1921

To Find the History of African American Women, Look to Their Handiwork

Our foremothers wove spiritual beliefs, cultural values, and historical knowledge into their flax, wool, silk, and cotton webs.
by Tiya Miles via The Atlantic on June 8, 2021
Destruction from the Tulsa Race Massacre, 1921.

Reflections on the Artifacts Left Behind From the Tulsa Race Massacre

Objects and documents, says the Smithsonian historian Paul Gardullo, offer a profound opportunity for reckoning with a past that still lingers.
by Paul Gardullo via Smithsonian on May 24, 2021
Scott Jordan in his apartment.

The Artifact Artist

New York’s 300-year-old trash becomes treasure in the hands of an urban archaeologist.
by Russ Kendall via Aeon on April 5, 2021
Book entitled: This Little Book Contains Every Reason Why Women Should Not Vote, 1917

Why Women Should Not Vote (1917)

A humorous 1917 blank notebook invites consideration of the fight for women’s suffrage in the USA.
by Melissa McCarthy via The Public Domain Review on October 27, 2020

Treasure Fever

The discovery of a lost shipwreck has pitted treasure hunters and archaeologists against each other, raising questions about who should control sunken riches.
by Jill Neimark via Hakai on January 14, 2020

Letters of the Damned: Exorcising the Curse of the Petrified Forest

Letters come in each year with pilfered stones from the national park, hoping to break the senders' curse.
by Hunter Oatman-Stanford via Collectors Weekly on July 29, 2019
Neil Armstrong and the American flag on the moon.

Apollo 11 Capsule Foil and Memories of Plucking NASA’s Moonmen From the Sea

A recollection of a NASA employee's experiences with Apollo 11 and 12.
by David Porter II, Lisa Hix via Collectors Weekly on July 12, 2019
Lin Taiyi takes dictation from her father, Dr. Lin Yutang, on a typewriter he invented.

Lost and Found: The Unexpected Journey of the MingKwai Typewriter

Its ingenious design inspired generations of language-processing technology, but only one prototype was made and had long been assumed lost.
by Yangyang Chen via Made In China Journal on May 2, 2025
National Public Housing Museum

At the National Public Housing Museum, an Embattled Idea Finds a Home

Chicago’s latest museum looks to change the narrative around the federally supported housing projects that US cities turned their backs on decades ago.
by Zach Mortice via CityLab on April 25, 2025
Map of Boston in 1776.

Terrains of Independence

Why was Boston and Massachusetts the site of so much early Revolutionary activity?
by Garrett Dash Nelson, Katy Lasdow via Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center on April 2, 2025
The ruins of Ft. Ticonderoga, and a note left in a knapsack a soldier carried in battle there.

A Knapsack’s Worth of Courage

Now, and for some years to come, we will need a lot less Paul Weiss, and a lot more Benjamin Warner.
by Eliot A. Cohen via The Atlantic on March 31, 2025
A drawing of a scuba diver holding a flare, exploring the wreck of a slave ship underwater.

Dredging Up the Ghostly Secrets of Slave Ships

A global network of maritime archeologists is excavating slave shipwrecks—and reconnecting Black communities to the deep.
by Julian Lucas via The New Yorker on February 24, 2025
A 1,200-year-old dugout canoe in Lake Mendota, Wisconsin.

Archaeologists Are Finding Dugout Canoes in the American Midwest as Old as Egypt's Great Pyramids

Tamara Thomsen discovered a 1,200-year-old dugout canoe in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota in 2021, spurring efforts to catalog historic canoes statewide.
by Jacqueline Kehoe via Smithsonian on December 26, 2024
Phil Little Thunder, a great-great-grandchild of the Lakota chief whose village was attacked in 1855.

How Recovering the History of a Little-Known Lakota Massacre Could Heal Generational Pain

The unraveling of this long-buried atrocity is forging a path toward reconciliation.
by Tim Madigan via Smithsonian on October 22, 2024
The first British gravestone in the American colonies, a slab of black limestone with an engraving of a knight.

America’s Oldest Surviving Tombstone Probably Came From Belgium

How researchers analyzed limestone to determine the age and origins of the grave maker, which marked the final resting place of a prominent Jamestown colonist.
by Sarah Kuta via Smithsonian on September 25, 2024
Summer Interns, posting with the casing of a B-61 bomb in 1982.

Pantex Employee Photos, 1980s

Team photographs at a nuclear weapons factory offer a glimpse into the mundanity and materiality of the bomb.
by Alex Wellerstein via Doomsday Machines on August 13, 2024
Karl Stoltzfus in front of the first Air Force One.

One Man’s Quest to Restore the First-Ever Air Force One

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s plane is starting to look like itself again.
by Eric J. Wallace via Atlas Obscura on August 1, 2024
Edward Allan Poe.

In Search of the Rarest Book in American Literature: Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane

If ever a book ought not to be judged by its cover, Edgar Allan Poe’s debut collection, "Tamerlane and Other Poems," is that book.
by Bradford Morrow via Literary Hub on June 25, 2024
Liberty holding an American flag with "For the Union" written on it.

Capturing the Civil War

The images, diaries, and ephemera in Grand Valley State University’s Civil War and Slavery Collection reveal the cold realities of Abraham Lincoln’s world.
by Susanna Ashton via JSTOR Daily on May 23, 2024
Horseshoe crab remains on the beach on Parsons Island.

Ancient Chesapeake Site Challenges Timeline of Humans in the Americas

An island eroding into the bay offers tantalizing clues about when and how humans first made their way into North America.
by Carolyn Y. Johnson via Washington Post on May 19, 2024
View More
30 of
144

Filter Results:

Suggested Filters:

Idea

Person

brought to you by
© Bunk History