11 of the most baffling archaeological finds of all time

Not long after the end of the last Ice Age, people started constructing t-shaped limestone pillars at Göbekli Tepe in present-day Turkey. There are over 20 enclosures at the site, some over 11,000 years old.

Some of the pillars are 18 feet tall and covered in carvings of animals. Klaus Schmidt, who excavated the site for over 20 years, thought humans would gather, work on the pillars, and hold feasts. Then they would bury their work with rocks and move on from the temple until the next gathering.

However, newer research suggests that Göbekli Tepe was also a domestic settlement where people lived for hundreds of years.

Who lived there, though — hunter-gatherer societies or Neolithic farmers — is an open question. Archaeologist Laura Dietrich thinks the residents were probably a combination of both. “Hunter-gatherer life doesn’t stop immediately because people start cultivating grain,” she told Archaeology Magazine in 2021.

Roughly 5,000 years ago, around the time Stonehenge was built, someone buried three children in what’s now East Yorkshire, England. They included a chalk ball and polished bone pin in the grave, as well as a sculpture known as the Burton Agnes drum.

The elaborately carved chalk sculpture wasn’t a musical instrument, according to archaeologists. Instead, it may have served as a protective talisman. It’s similar to the Folkton drums, three other decorated sculptures found in an ancient child’s grave in 1889.

The drums may help archaeologists understand more about the area’s Stonehenge-era culture.

“This is a truly remarkable discovery and is the most important piece of prehistoric art to be found in Britain in the last 100 years,” British Museum curator Neil Wilkin said in a statement in 2022.

For over 2,000 years, thousands of life-size terracotta soldiers and horses guarded the tomb of Qin Shi Huang near Xi’an in north-central China. Shortly after the first emperor’s death, a rebel army damaged some of the 8,000 soldiers, but then the figures remained untouched for millennia.

A farmer dug up the first in 1974, and its existence was a complete surprise.

The burial chamber remains untouched. Archaeologists are worried about damaging any treasurers inside, and the soil contains high levels of mercury. Qian said workers forged artificial rivers underground using mercury, but whether that’s true is just one of the many mysteries of the emperor’s tomb. Some experts hope robotic devices can one day enter without causing too much disruption.

In 2023, a group of amateur archaeologists were thrilled to find a dodecahedron in the remains of an ancient Roman villa 100 miles outside London.

Roughly the size of a softball and made of copper alloy, the 12-sided device has holes and knobs all over. It’s one of many that people have discovered across what was once the Roman Empire, from present-day France to Croatia to Great Britain.

Because they vary in size and location, including public baths and tombs, no one is quite sure what they were made for. People have suggested they might have been instruments for knitting, religious objects, or candle holders.

Whatever their purpose, the dodecahedrons would have been difficult to make. “They would have been expensive items,” Frances McIntosh, an archaeologist with English Heritage, previously told Business Insider, “likely bespoke commissions.”

Wooden tablets that no living person knows how to read have been found in Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. There are a couple dozen examples of rongorongo script, which is made up of glyphs or pictorial images.

The script doesn’t seem to resemble European writing, so it’s possible locals developed it before Dutch explorers arrived in 1722. Researchers dated one of the pieces of wood to between 1493 and 1509. The three other tablets come from the 18th and 19th centuries.

It’s possible someone carved glyphs into an older piece of wood around the same time. The 500-year-old wood adds to the writing’s mystery.

Testing the rest of the tablets could help determine the script’s age. “I actually believe that rongorongo is one of the very few independent inventions of writing in human history, like the writing of the Sumerians, the Egyptians, and the Chinese,” Rafal Wieczorek, a chemist at the University of Warsaw, told Live Science. “But belief is a different thing than hard data.”