Skeptophilia

I've written here before about the monumental difficulty of translating written text when you (1) don't know what the character-to-s...

I'm always fascinated by a good mystery, and that's definitely the appropriate category for an artifact called the Phaistos Disk . F...

Despite the fact that she's been dead for over four hundred years, Mary, Queen of Scots remains a controversial and divisive figure amo...

My fascination with languages goes back a very long way.  I was raised bilingual -- French was my mother's first language, and all of he...

When I was a teenager, I was fascinated with the Mayans.  The history and culture -- what we knew of it at the time -- was fascinating enoug...

When a region is conquered, one of the first things the conquerors usually do is to suppress (or explicitly outlaw) indigenous languages. On...

One of the most curious relics of the past, and one which is a persistent mystery, is the quipu  (also spelled khipu ) of Andean South Ameri...

I'm curious about where the human drive to solve puzzles comes from. It's a cool thing, don't get me wrong.  But you have to w...

Being a linguistics geek, I've written before on some of the greatest "mystery languages" -- including Linear B (a Cretan scr...