Today, archaeologists have amazing  ways of bringing the past back to life.

They can unearth prehistoric settlements, chemically analyze objects,  recover lost texts, and more. And yet … some ancient artifacts  are still a complete mystery.

We don’t know what they are or how they were used. These things could unlock  the secrets of our ancestors and the lives they lived … if we could just figure them out. So today, we’re going to explore  five mysterious artifacts that have archaeologists stumped, and what they could reveal about the past. [intro song] Some 15,000 years ago, a mountainside  collapsed outside what’s now Geneva, creating a pile of giant boulders  at the foot of the mountain.

And for centuries, different waves of  ancient people sheltered beneath them. In the early 1800s, long  after those people were gone, it became a popular spot for local  archaeologists to poke around. They discovered all sorts of artifacts like vases, animal bones,  and some primitive tools.

And then one day, in 1833,  one of these archaeologists came across something unusual  that he couldn’t identify. It was a long object made of a reindeer  antler, with a hole carved into one end. Then other archaeologists began to find them, too, Over the next couple centuries, these  mysterious objects, called perforated batons, turned up all over Europe.

Scientists have collected  more than 400 of them so far. They’re mostly made of some kind of antler, they have at least one hole in them, and  they often have some kind of engraving. Some of the oldest ones are  likely more than 35,000 years old, so the fact that so many remain  suggests they were popular.

Clearly, this was a major piece of  technology for our prehistoric ancestors. But despite how many of them we have, there’s not a really good consensus  on what they were actually for. Some researchers think they were some  kind of ancient weapon, like a harpoon.

Others think they might  have been religious objects, or leather-working tools, or even  prehistoric dildos. Yeah, really. And the truth is, there may  not be one single answer.

In 2015, researchers discovered an  intriguing baton in a cave in Germany. It was about the length of a chef’s knife, carved out of mammoth ivory,  and was about 35,000 years old. But it was the six spiral-shaped grooves carved around each of its four holes that  really caught researchers’ attention.

When they looked at the  grooves under a microscope, they were full of plant matter. That led them to suspect that this  baton had once been used to make rope, by feeding strands of plant matter through  the holes and braiding them together. They even tried it out with  a replica of the baton, and it worked pretty well.

But many other batons only have  one hole and are ornately carved, meaning they wouldn’t have been  especially practical for making rope. So even this rope-making idea,  like the batons, has a few holes. And these perforated batons aren’t the only mysterious ancient  objects turning up in Europe.

Over in Scotland, some construction workers digging a drainage ditch around 1860  discovered a Neolithic carved stone ball. Carved stone balls like this one had been  turning up all around Scotland for decades, but no one knew what they were, who had made them, or even how old they were. They came in different forms, but overall, these were typically palm-sized  balls made out of stone.

They often had knobs or discs on the outside and patterns of lines carved into them. This particular ball, named the Towie  ball after the place where it was found, was incredibly intricate, and it  had been extremely well preserved. It had four knobs, with swirling  lines engraved into them.

In the 1870s, these markings caught  the eye of a British archaeologist, who noticed that they were incredibly similar  to the markings on ancient tombs in Ireland. He suggested that both were old  enough to be considered prehistoric. And he was right!

Modern radiocarbon dating places these balls in the Neolithic Period, between 2800 and 2500 BCE. But no modern technology has been able  to answer the most pressing question of what they actually are. Today, more than 500 of these balls  have turned up across Scotland, and once again, researchers have come up with all sorts of ideas about what they might be.

Some think they were weapons, either  tied to string and used like bolas, or mounted on sticks and used as mace heads. Since the late Neolithic was a pretty  violent time, it seems possible, at least. But other researchers think it’s more likely  that these were more like status symbols.

After all, they seem too intricate  to be purely utilitarian. Another idea is that they  were used as mnemonic devices to help people recall oral histories, with different parts of the ball representing  different parts of their history. Again, it’s a shot in the dark,  but there are people today who use objects as memory aids when  telling oral stories, so it’s possible.

It’s a fairly common storytelling  practice in some Indigenous cultures, l ike the Australian Aboriginals. Either way, getting to the bottom of this question could almost certainly give us a window  into how these Neolithic people lived and structured their societies. But until archaeologists crack this  one, the ball’s in their court.

Not all big mysteries are buried underground. Some of the most perplexing artifacts  are just sitting out in plain sight. That’s the case over in Laos, where a huge network of large stone  jars are scattered across the landscape, covering an area about half  the size of New Jersey.

The jars are impossible to miss. They vary in size, but many of  them are as tall as a human, or at least, a 5 foot 2 inch human. The average height in the area Some are bigger.

And there’s a reason for that. Many of these large stone  jars contain human remains. Technically most of the remains were cremated, so the jars didn’t need to  be person-sized, but still.

And even though records of these jars go all the way back to at  least the late 19th century, so far, no one knows who made  them, or why… or even when. The first person to seriously  try solving this puzzle was a French archaeologist back in the 1930s. She spent four years studying  the jars at 21 different sites, which were full of intriguing artifacts.

The area surrounding the jars was dotted with beads, tools, knives, and jewelry. At five of the sites, the archaeologist  also found stone grave markers. Then she found what she took to be a key clue.

One field of jars surrounded a  grotto, and its blackened walls, along with two chimney holes, suggested that this had once  been used as a crematorium. Putting these pieces together, the archaeologist concluded that  the jars were funerary urns. Which seems a little obvious,  given the human remains.

But not all researchers agree that  this was the jars’ original purpose. They’ve had a hard time pinning down  exactly when these jars were made, partly because the go-to  method of radiocarbon dating depends on there being some carbon to date. Carbon is found in organic material, and this site simply didn’t have  much original organic material left.

But some researchers did eventually  date some charcoal at different sites, and the dates were all over the place, everywhere from before 2000 BCE to 1200 CE. These scientists concluded that the jars had been used and reused by multiple  groups of people at different times, and that they’d been around well before  this was ever used as a burial site. According to local lore, the jars  were used to store rice whiskey during the celebration of a huge  military victory by an ancient king.

Which may be true. But so far, no one has been able  to figure out their original use. And unfortunately, the area  isn’t easy to study anymore, because it’s covered with unexploded  mines from the Vietnam War.

But uncovering the ways these jars were used, by different people at different times, could tell us a lot about the cultures of  people who lived here throughout the past. So researchers haven’t given up. One of the big challenges of archaeology is piecing together the  cultures of ancient people.

You have to take a collection  of random surviving artifacts and use them to understand a way of life. And that process isn’t always straightforward, which we can see in this next entry. In 1962, a mineral collector in South Africa came across a site containing  seven heads made of terracotta.

They were decorated similarly, with bands of clay scored with lines around the neck, and narrow  strips forming the eyes, nose, and mouth. They also had crystals of the mineral specularite sprinkled onto raised parts like the eyebrows, which would have made them sparkle in the light. And it was clear that they had  been buried very deliberately, in a site specifically carved out for them, suggesting that they were really important to the people they belonged to.

But that’s about as much as  researchers could say for sure. So far, no one knows what  the heads were actually for. They wouldn’t have worked well as literal masks because they’re too small and fragile.

The leading hypothesis is that  they were propped up on posts and used in something like initiation  ceremonies or annual festivals, then stored underground for safety. Fragments of similar heads have also been  found in other parts of South Africa, so if they were used for ceremonies, we can gather that a widespread  society like this one still shared important cultural  touchstones over long distances. But that’s about all we can say.

These objects are still just objects, and the culture that produced  them remains underground. One of the fascinating things about  all these old artifacts is that, even though they’re mysteries, where we find them can still tell us  something about how cultures spread, and how far the influence of  different societies reached. Some of the most widespread mysterious objects are a series of strange dodecahedrons  dating back to the Roman Empire.

As far as anyone can tell, the first one  turned up just north of London in 1739. A local historian reported  the discovery of a small, twelve-sided object that was  hollow and made of bronze. Since then, more than 100  of them have been discovered in the western part of the former Roman Empire, everywhere from the U.

K. to Hungary. Most of them date back to between  the 2nd and 4th centuries CE, and they’ve turned up at military camps,  public baths, riverbeds, you name it. But none of those context clues have  helped us figure out what they are.

But, There’s no shortage of ideas. One hypothesis draws on the fact that the  different faces have different-sized holes, and suggests that it was a kind of surveying tool, used for measuring distances. In theory, by looking through the  holes at a kind of measuring stick, you might be able to gauge something’s size or how   far away it is based on how much of  the measuring stick fit in the hole.

But this wouldn’t have been an  especially practical tactic, especially compared to the methods  Romans already had for measuring things, like measuring tapes and poles. So maybe they were just toys  or decorations or something. One suggestion is that it could  have been used to hold candles.

But there’s also a pretty compelling argument  that they held specific religious appeal, given that they’re primarily found  in places where Celtic people lived, and absent in the places where the  people were known to be Christians. We really don’t know. If we ever crack the code, maybe it will tell  us something about the scientific knowledge or technical know-how of the people who used it.

But, even without an answer, the discoveries of these  dodecahedrons still show us that there was a shared culture running through  all these different parts of the Roman Empire. And as with all things, there may  be more than one side to the story. Like, say, twelve?

The thing about these objects is  that we’ll always want to know more about the story behind them. We’re human. But even if we never do figure them out, they still offer us a unique portal into the past.

They show us what sort of handiwork people were capable of at different times in history, and what resources they had to work with. They can also hint at what  kind of social structures must have existed for some of these  items to be made in large numbers. And they can help us piece together the ancient  networks that once connected far-off places.

Not bad for artifacts that  remain a complete mystery! [ OUTRO ]