Historical Artifacts We Still Can't Explain

A lot of artifacts, we understand. Things like swords and daggers, we know those were for stabbing and smiting of foes. Other things, though, are less clear, and we're left to try to guess just what was going on in the minds of our forebearers. There's just no accounting for some people, and when we have to look at their lives through the lens of time, it can make for some confusing discoveries. Here are historical artifacts we just have no clue about.

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi is home to plenty of weird wildlife, and it's also home to a series of megaliths that no one's been able to explain. Around 400 of them have been found so far, and we're not dismissing the idea that there's more. Some are only a few inches tall. Others tower 15 feet high, and a handful of them are distinctly human-shaped. Other megaliths are in the shape of basins, which might have been coffins, or ... honestly, no one has the foggiest idea, but they have found giant stone lids for some of them. There are some stone tables (or altars), but there's a distinct lack of any signs of the civilization that created these structures and statues. No tools, no burial grounds, no handprints left behind on stone walls ... nothing.

No one has even been able to tell when they were carved. They've certainly been there long enough that a mythology has grown up around them, and some locals claim that they're the remnants of criminals who were cursed to stand for an eternity. Other stories claim they were ancestor totems, used in some sort of ritual worship. While we're pretty sure they're not people that were turned to stone, there's something so undeniably creepy about these things that we're not going to rule out the possibility.

UNESCO officially calls the site "Precolumbian Chiefdom Settlements with Stone Spheres of the Diquis," but that sounds really boring, and we prefer "the place that has the really big balls." And the Costa Rica jungles have the biggest balls of all.

Scattered across four different sites, on what's called the Diquis Delta, are the remains of a civilization that date to between 500 and 1500 AD. In addition to the regular sort of archaeological remains — roads, burial grounds, and things of that sort — there's also around 300 stone spheres. They're close to perfectly shaped (better than we could do), and are all different sizes. Some could fit in your pocket, and others are estimated to weigh somewhere around 15 tons. For hundreds of years, the stone spheres were buried under dirt, mud and sediment, and that's kept them safe from all kinds of unsavory characters. That hasn't helped us figure out much about them, though, and we have no clue who made them, when they were made, or what they possibly could have been for.

There's no apparent rhyme or reason to the placement of the spheres, most of which are in residential locations. One of the sites has a set arranged in a linear pattern, another site has an abnormally large sphere, and a sadly large number have been looted, destroyed, or moved (and that means we don't even know how many there really were). They obviously can't be carbon-dated, but based on the layers of sediment they were buried in, it looks like someone was carving these things over a period of about 1,800 years. Astronomical calendar? Compasses? Lore says that the gods used them to control the weather, but maybe they were just a sort of divine bocce set. It's as good a guess as any.

Most of the Roman Dodecahedron are made from either bronze or stone, and all have 12 sides, a hollow center, and holes (of varying sizes) on each face. Some have knobs on each point, and more than a hundred have been found in France, Germany, and Switzerland. They've been dated to somewhere between the second and third centuries, and if that sounds familiar, you were paying attention in history class. That's when Rome ruled that part of the world, and that's why these artifacts are called what they are. It's definitely not because we've found art or literature talking about what they were used for, because when it comes to that sort of thing, there's almost nothing.

The only reference to the fancy d12 die are from Plutarch, and he wrote that it had something to do with the 12 signs of the zodiac. He was Greek, though, so that doesn't explain why there's only some features of the dodecahedrons — like the size of the holes and the knobs — that vary. At least we know they're not fakes, though, so that's something.

We also know there's such a wide range of suggested uses for the dodecahedrons, it's clear we're just guessing at this point. Some suggest it was used to measure the angle of sunlight and determine when crops should be planted, while others think they're decorative candlesticks, weather gauges, children's toys, or religious objects. It's even been suggested that, since many of them were found on Roman borderlands, they were some sort of key military device, and might have been used as survey instruments or range finders for ballistic weapons. One theory that has been debunked is that they were some sort of gambling tool, because they would be incredibly unfair and not at all random. Though, that might make them a gambling tool of a particular persuasion, come to think of it. We'd use it, and we wouldn't feel guilty about our winnings.

Judaculla Rock is named for the Cherokee legend that Judaculla, an ancient giant, was the one who left the markings on the boulder's surface. The tale says that he was jumping from mountain to mountain when he pressed his hand into the stone and left the imprint of his seven fingers, but aside from that, no one's really sure what the deal is about the North Carolina stone with the prehistoric petroglyphs.

Strangely, some of the best images we have of the rock come from the 1930s, when archaeologists filled in the carvings with chalk, to really show just where the markings were. In the decades since, weather has taken its toll on the soapstone boulder, and it's inevitable that at some point, the carvings are going to wear away completely. They've already been dated to be between 2,000 and 3,000 years old, and not only do we not know what the carvings mean, but we're not sure who made them, either. They're undeniably odd markings, and there's nothing that you can really look at and single out as, "Oh, that's a cat," or "Hey, that's a guy flipping off his neighbor." Even stranger, there's supposedly two other similar stones in the area, but no one can find them any more.

So, what gives? People have suggested that it's an ancient peace treaty, religious marker, or even something like the Rosetta Stone, giving us the key to unlocking other languages. Unfortunately, whatever it's unlocking has been so lost to time, we have no idea where to even start. Extra-unfortunately, this one might disappear before we figure out the secrets it holds.

We don't pretend to be archaeologists (though we do love pretending to be Indiana Jones). We do like to think we have a pretty good grasp on some historical concepts, like what storage jars are for. We have it on good authority that most jars are used for keeping things safe, dry, organized, or simply located in a single, easily accessible place. Also, they usually don't have holes because spills suck. So when the Museum of Ontario Archaeology pieced together the shattered fragments of a 1,800-year-old Roman jar and found that it was full of holes, they were at a loss to describe what the point of the artifact was.

It's the only one of its kind, and it's called the Holey Jar, because geddit? We're not sure what it's for — we're not even sure where it's from, because it hit the museum as a part of a collection assembled in the 1950s by a British archaeologist. This guy had rescued the pieces from one of the craters that pockmarked London during the bombings of World War II ... maybe. It might be Roman, it might be from Iraq, it might be from the Moon — it might even be from the ancient city of Ur. Who knows!

Some of the theories prove just how weird humans have always been. One suggestion is that it was used for keeping snakes, a standard animal in various religions. Another suggestion isn't just that it was a Roman snack jar — it was a Roman snack jar that once held tasty, tasty treats made of a dormouse stuffed with pork, then roasted or boiled. Yum(?)! Disturbingly, that theory might not hold water because they'd found dormouse jars elsewhere, and they usually had little ramps to lure the poor rodents inside. We said people are weird, and we meant it.

Archaeology is a lot of guesswork, and they're still trying to guess who was really the first to make the trip across the Atlantic to the New World. (Sorry, Columbus, we all know it wasn't you. Nice PR, though.) In 1957, an amateur archaeologist found a small coin in what he thought was a purely Native American site at Naskeag Point in Maine. No biggie, right?

Then in 1974, experts visiting the Maine State Museum announced that it was a Norse coin, and it took another four years to date the coin to between 1065 and 1080. The site itself was dated to just after that — when the coin would have logically been in circulation — but the question of just how it ended up in Maine has been hugely debated. Some people insist it's proof of Norse contact with Maine, but since it's the only Norse artifact that's been found, others say it's a hoax. Still others suggest it might have been carried there as a part of some 12th-century trade network. The coin has a mark that's led some to suggest it had been made into a pendant, and was brought to the New World that way, and there's something oddly comforting about the idea that even hundreds of years ago, we were picking up souvenirs, turning them into jewelry, and then losing them.

The eerily named Starving of Saqqara is a 2-foot-tall limestone statue that now belongs to the Concordia University in Montreal. It came to the university from a collection of Mediterranean antiquities, and even though there's no shortage of experts that have been consulted, no one has the faintest idea where the statue came from or what it's supposed to be. Saqqara is the name of an ancient Egyptian burial ground, but no one knows just how the statue came by that name or if the two are really related.

Even stranger, a mysterious script was etched into the statute, and no one's been able to even come close to identifying that, either. If it's a fake, someone went to a lot of trouble to fake something that's not recognizable as anything of importance, and if it's not fake? We have a lot to learn.

We were once told that archaeology was a lot of really boring stuff that's nothing like you see in the movies. Supposedly, there's a lot of careful research but definitely no treasure maps with spots marked by an X. We were lied to.

The Copper Scroll is an honest-to-gosh treasure map. It was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it tells the story of exactly how to find major ancient treasures ... sort of. According to the text, 64 treasure hoards were scattered across Jerusalem and the Judean desert, and they were used to hide the most valuable treasure in the world from invaders. That treasure wasn't just religious artifacts but a huge amount of gold, silver, and coins, too. No one's really sure just how much we're talking here — the weights and measurements the scroll uses haven't been successfully translated — but archaeologists are pretty sure it's what people call "a lot."

The pieces of archaic text that have been translated give rather precise directions. The problem is that the directions are a little too precise and refer to things like water tanks, reservoirs, and underground passages. We have no way of tracing those references now. Some think the whole thing is fiction anyway, but another school of thought says the Copper Scroll was a record of the actions of a religious sect of people living in the city of Qumran, who were responsible for safekeeping Jewish treasure. We've seen Indiana Jones, and we're pretty sure it's the second theory. It has to be.

In 1986, construction workers near Chengdu uncovered something bizarre: an ancient cache of artifacts that included animal bones and elephant tusks, along with around 200 jade figures, massive bronze artworks, and a life-size statue. Most of the artifacts seemed to have been damaged, dumped into the massive pits, and buried. Further investigation dated them to around 1200 BC and discovered that they were cast with technology that wasn't thought to even exist at the time.

No one's sure how they were made — no forges or foundries were ever found, no tools were uncovered, and in fact, until the discovery, it was thought that Chinese civilization was busy growing up elsewhere. No one knows why the figures were broken and buried, and even though traces of similar artwork and aesthetics were found at the nearby Jinsha, dating to about 500 years after the burial of the Sanxingdui treasure horde, no one's quite sure exactly what the story is.

The pieces have a sort of unearthly, supernatural look to them, with their exaggerated features and almost wing-like ears. Ancient aliens, maybe, or maybe it's just proof that there's a huge amount we don't know about our own collective history. We're not necessarily betting people, but we'd love to know the odds on aliens if you've got 'em.