25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds Scientist Still Can't Explain

We know more about health conditions, mental illnesses, and science today than we did in the 19th century. Our first port of call when we see something we don't understand nowadays is to seek a rational explanation. In the 19th century, you'd be more inclined to put things you didn't understand down to witchcraft, so people felt like they needed to be protected against the dark arts. That's why objects like this existed, a so-called witch bottle, that was found during the demolition of an old pub in Northampton, England, in November 2019. The torpedo-shaped bottle, which was embedded in the building's chimney, contains fish hooks, shards of glass, human teeth, and a liquid that, so far, nobody has been able to identify. Like Santa Claus, witches were thought to gain entry to your property down the chimney, so a bottle like this was believed to be capable of stopping them in their path. The owners of this pub probably had more reason to worry than most. It was the birthplace of Angeline Tubbs, who would emigrate to the United States of America during her youth and become known as the Witch of Saratoga. For such a well-known and impressive historical site, it's a little surprising that we don't know more about the Gunung Kawai Temple complex in Tampa Kissering, Bali. Based on its appearance, it's thought to be a Hindu monument. But we don't know for sure who built the beautifully carved caves, when they did it, or why they did it. The most commonly believed version of events is that they were built for King Anak Wongsu of the Udayana dynasty, and used as tombs to house the remains of his favorite wives. There's an inscription on the wall of the north shrine that, when translated into English, reads, the king made a temple here. That's not the most helpful piece of information anyone could leave behind. The complex is made up of 10 hand-carved rock shrines, some of which are over 20 feet high. Scientists have difficulty when trying to accurately date caves and rocks, but they believe that Gunung Kawai was created somewhere between the 9th and 10th centuries. Some of the stones show signs of being artificially softened during the construction process using unknown technology. According to the traditions of Irish folklore, anyone who kisses the famous Blarney stone will be blessed with the gift of the gab, by which it's meant they will receive excellent verbal communication skills through which they'll be able to lead and persuade others. The story of the stone is so well known that even people who've never been to Ireland have heard of it. And yet nobody knows how the tradition began, or where the stone even came from. It's been set into the tower of Blarney Castle in Cork since 1446, but its history before that is shrouded in mystery. One version of events says that the stone was gifted by Robert the Bruce to Cormac McCarthy, the castle's builder, in 1314 in recognition of his military support and service, and that it was once part of the Scottish Stone of Scone, which was a stone plinth upon which Scottish kings and queens sat upon prior to their coronation. Another says that it was once Jacob's pillow, and that the prophet Jeremiah brought it to Ireland on his travels. A smaller number of people say that it's the biblical rock that gushed water when it was struck by Moses. There's no evidence that kissing it endows people with supernatural powers at all, but it doesn't hurt to try. There's a whole world below our feet that we never even think about. Most of our towns and cities have been built upon ruins of towns and cities that came before them, but sometimes we walk over things that are far more mysterious. Take the region of Dobergea, for example, an ancient territory that sits between modern Bulgaria and Romania. In 1916, archaeologists digging deep below the plateau of Lamanu made a strange discovery. Beneath the usual pottery and ceramic fragments, they appeared to have found painted walls and ancient Roman and Greek graffiti. The deeper they dug, the more astonishing the discoveries became, until they realized they'd unearthed a whole ancient tunnel network. The system of tunnels is almost a labyrinth, and it branches off into so many rooms and caverns that you could almost describe it as a series of bunkers. Even though it was totally unknown to the experts of the time, the paintings on the walls indicated that it was built over 2,000 years ago and had remained in use until at least the 10th century. The tunnels run on for over 12,000 feet, and yet chisel marks indicate that they were all dug by hand. This is an astonishing feat of labor, and yet we have no idea why it was done. When people mention ancient pyramids, they're usually talking about Egypt. Few people even realize that there are pyramids in other parts of the world, and even fewer know that there's one in Australia. The Gympie Pyramid was officially undiscovered until 1975, when it was noted by an archaeologist. Although it's clearly been standing outside Queensland for much longer than that, the locals had known about it for centuries but are unable to shed any light on its origins. The items and artifacts found in and around the pyramid add to the conundrum. There's a stone head carved in a similar style to those found on Easter Island, a stone ape which some historians believe represents the Egyptian god Thoth, and a carving of a crocodile. Sadly, the site isn't what it used to be. It was heavily looted during the 1970s and damaged in the process. The damage means that we might never get to the bottom of the mystery about who built it. Could it have been a lost tribe of ancient Egyptians? A group of seafaring Polynesian settlers? Could there be any truth to the idea that it was actually built in the 19th century by Italian wine growers? None of the stories seem particularly plausible, but nobody has a better explanation. You have to fight through tropical forests to get to the site of the Gedi ruins on the Kenyan coast close to Malindi, but it's a journey worth undertaking. The ancient town is totally abandoned and appears to have existed in isolation even when it was occupied. Whoever these isolated people were, they must have been extremely advanced for their time. Despite most of the ruins indicating a 13th century origin, there's evidence of houses built from coral brick, the remains of a stunning palace, an irrigation system that would have provided running water and even flushing toilets. The presence of a mosque indicates that this was an Islamic settlement, and the fact that Chinese vases and Venetian glass have been found at the site suggests that while the people who lived here isolated themselves from the rest of Kenya, they traveled extensively overseas. Some people believe that Africa was a primitive place prior to colonialism. Sites like this prove that idea to be nonsense. While we can admire the relative sophistication of these 13th century townspeople, we'll never find out what happened to them or where they went when they left their town behind. Staying in Africa for a moment, we find the site of the sacred grove of Osun Asagbo in Nigeria. This is one of the few ancient sites built by the Yoruba people still standing, and the last one dedicated to the worship of their fertility goddess. According to their beliefs, Osun was a goddess who had a fight with the wife of Sango, the god of thunder and lightning, and transformed into a river after the fight was over. Her spirit is still believed to exist in the river that passes through the grove. The entire site is covered with carvings and sculptures of humans and humanoid figures, although some of the carvings have decidedly non-human features, and the matter of who or what they're supposed to represent is a matter of some debate. It's known that women used to come to bathe in the river in the belief that it would make them more fertile, but we're at a loss to explain why they thought that doing so under the gaze of these bizarre figures would help them. Returning to England, the small town of Royston in Hertfordshire is home to a human-made cave that's full of carvings and paintings, many of which are yet to be deciphered, and the origin of which cannot be determined. Some people even say that the cave and its carvings were created by members of the Knights Templar, a story that's gained more attention ever since Dan Brown wrote the Da Vinci Code. The cave was found by accident in 1742 when workmen were attempting to build a but struck a heavy stone when they dug into the ground. When they excavated the stone, they found it was blocking the entrance to a 16-foot-deep shaft, and at the bottom of the shaft was the cave. The workmen couldn't comprehend what they were looking at, but when experts arrived at the site of the 18-foot-tall cave, they noted its similarity to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Dating the creation of the cave is difficult, but most archaeologists agree that it was finished somewhere between the 13th and 16th centuries. The 16th century would rule out the Knights Templar, but if it was closer to the 13th, then it could be possible. Mysteriously, along with the carvings of knights in suits of armor and Christian symbols, there's also a sheila negig, a pagan symbol representing fertility. Stone temples and stone circles are nothing unusual in Europe, and Stonehenge in England is the best known of them. But the mystery of the Sandbyborg Ring Fort in Sweden is a little darker than the tale of Stonehenge. The Iron Age site is one of the many interesting ancient ruins of the island of Åland, but it stands out from the rest because of the brutal massacre that occurred there around 1500 years ago. A mass grave was found in 2010, and it's thought to contain the remains of every single person who lived at the fort at the time it was attacked toward the end of the 5th century. This was the time of Europe's Great Migration period, coinciding with the fall of the Roman Empire in the west of the continent. The presence of Roman coins, arrowheads, and glass at the site suggest that the Romans might have been the victims of the assault rather than the perpetrators, but nobody knows for sure. Even the residents of Åland don't have the full story, although they tell their children to be wary of the fort because something terrible happened there and the ground is believed to be haunted. The Himalayas are considered by thousands of people to be a spiritual place and an area of divine mystery. Adding to the sense of mystery, they're also the home of the Himalayan Towers, also known as the Star-Shaped Towers because of their strange architectural style. Standing over 100 feet tall, legend has it that these towers cannot be knocked over, not even by the earthquakes that have struck the region over the centuries. Their construction style is inconsistent with the surrounding area and there are puzzlingly few mentions of them in ancient Chinese and Himalayan texts. Attempts to perform carbon dating on them have provided inconsistent results with estimates of their age ranging between 500 and 1,800 years. As they're often found in the center of ancient villages, one theory is that they were built by the families who ruled those villages as a demonstration of their wealth and power. That might be a possible motivation, but it doesn't explain how people might have gone about building a complex, star-shaped, 100-foot-tall tower 1,800 years ago. The shape of the giant Norias of Hama is familiar. Perhaps you think that they might be enormous ferris wheels or perhaps watermill wheels from a 16th or 17th-century mill. You'd be half-right with the latter theory because they are water wheels, but they were never attached to a mill, and they're far older than 400 years. They're closer to 2,500 years old. Found in the Hama region of Syria, there are 17 of the wheels in total, although some of them are in better condition than others due to damage suffered during the recent armed conflict in the area. The first mention of their existence comes from a mosaic in the nearby city of Apamea, which contains a depiction of one of the wheels. Amazingly, the mosaic was created in the year 469 BCE. Presuming the dating of the mosaic is correct, that means that the ancient people of Syria had a sophisticated irrigation system supplying water into Hama during a time when many other people around the world were still cupping water up with their hands to drink it. It's an astonishing degree of sophistication, and we don't know who to credit with the design. Our next mysterious site is known by many names, including Zoratskar and Karahanj. However, it's better known by its nickname, which is the Armenian Stonehenge. In truth, though, it doesn't look much like Stonehenge. In form and appearance, Karahanj and Sisian is a ring shaped arrangement of menhirs with holes drilled into them. Archaeologists and historians have speculated that this may have been a prehistoric astronomical observatory, but that's little more than a best guess. Far more evidence would be required to support such an assertion. There are 223 standing stones at the site, which are thought to have been erected in either the Iron Age or the Middle Bronze Age several thousand years ago. While the observatory theory is the most popular among experts, there's a less well-regarded theory that Karahanj is actually all that remains of the walls of an ancient Armenian city that once existed here. There's no sign of an ancient settlement in the surrounding area, though, so that seems to be a flight of fantasy. Whoever created the Armenian Stonehenge chose a stunning hilltop setting for their work, but we might never understand why they did it. The ancient Mayan city of Nikstanchich is more than 2,500 years old. When seen from above, it looks like a crocodile. The biggest question about Nikstanchich is whether the resemblance to a crocodile was intentional or accidental. If it's the former, it'd involve an extraordinary degree of planning and organization to create an effect that couldn't be seen from ground level. It's not like the Mayans had planes so nobody could get high enough into the air to appreciate the crocodile design. Nikstanchich is on the edge of a Lake Petnica in what's now the Peten Department of Guatemala. During its peak years, it could have been the largest settlement in the region. Even if the crocodile's shape is a coincidence or an accident, the city is still notable for its unusual grid design. It was planned in a way that's not entirely dissimilar to a modern city, including designated areas for social interaction. According to Mayan mythology, the Earth was created when a crocodile named Itzamqab'ayn was slain by the gods who made the surface of the planet out of its skin. It's possible that the shape of the city is a reference to that. Incredible ancient artifacts are found so often in Scotland that archaeologists in the country have started nominating Artifacts of the Week to highlight the most spectacular finds. Recently, the Artifact of the Week was a mysterious wooden object that was pulled out of the Black Lock of Merton. Experts believe it to be around 2,500 years old. Ongoing excavations at the site have revealed the presence of an Iron Age settlement. Most of the artifacts that have been found there are typical of their era, but mystery surrounds the function of this unusual object. The spindle-turned-artifact was found beneath the floor of a house within the settlement and has only survived for such a long time because the waterlogged conditions of the lock have preserved it. The ancient Romans described the people who lived in this part of Scotland as barbarians, but could barbarians have crafted something as accomplished as this? The holes in its surface don't go all the way through the wood, so it's likely it was designed to be attached to something else. Perhaps it's a chair leg. On the other hand, maybe it's a musical instrument. We really have no idea. Looking to museums for stunning ancient artifacts feels a little bit like cheating, but we'll make an exception for this next artifact. It's called a duho, and despite its rustic appearance, it would have been used as a makeshift throne for a king or queen while holding court away from their palace. The duho in the Met Museum in New York is an especially fine example of its type. It comes with carefully incised geometric designs that mimic the shape of a hammock. Several small human heads have been carved into the sides of the throne. They're thought to be the artist's interpretation of zemis, mystical creatures that live inside the wood. The duho was found in the Luccaean archipelago, meaning that it was most likely a product of the Taino civilization that once existed in Turks and Caicos. It's fairly easy for scientists to determine a date for wooden artifacts, so we can say with confidence that this throne was carved somewhere between the years 1413 and 1450-55. That tells us when and where it came from, but unfortunately we know virtually nothing about the culture that created it. Many of the greatest ancient artifacts and structures of South America are credited to the ingenuity of the Inca, even though we can't always say for sure that it was the Inca who created them. A classic example of that is the famous 12-angled stone in the palace of the archbishop in Cusco, Peru. The precision-engineered stone is a carved green diorite and appears in the Lienzo Petrio wall. The inward-leaning wall once encircled the palace of Hatan Rumiyat, but the palace has long since been destroyed. Even if the 12-angled stone weren't part of the wall, it'd still be considered a feat of architectural brilliance because it was created without any mortar or binding agents. Each stone was cut to the perfect shape to interlock with the stones around it, and we have no idea how. The quality of the work is so perfect that even now, so many centuries after it was built, there isn't a hole anywhere. The stones are fit so tightly that even a single sheet of paper is too thick to pass between them. Almost every stone in the wall is an incredible piece of work, but the 12-angled stone is the wall's crowning glory. Is three-whale rock in Bangkok, Thailand the way it is because it was created and sculpted by nature? Or was it carved by humans? Historians believe it would have been too difficult for people to cut rocks like this in ancient times, but the rocks resemble whales so closely that it's tough to believe it happened by chance. The whole shape of the rocks is best viewed from above, where they resemble whales swimming among the surrounding forest trees. There are distinct heads, bodies, and tails in all three cases. Scientists tend to believe that the boulders have been polished and shaped over millions of years by wind and rain, but that explanation does not satisfy everyone. We'd expect to find similar shapes created by nature everywhere in the world if that were the case, but we don't. Three-whales rock is a one-of-a-kind location. Experts may disagree over whether they're a result of nature or nurture, but we can all agree that they're a stunning sight to behold. Returning to the topic of the ancient inhabitants of South America, scientists found themselves scratching their heads when the site of an enormous mass human sacrifice was found close to a pre-Inca pyramid in the northernmost reaches of Peru. The sacrifice involved multiple decapitations and appears to have been celebrated with a lot of beer drinking. The first bodies were found in a 50-foot by 50-foot pit close to the Huaca Las Ventanas pyramid in August 2011, and more were found in the months that followed. Archaeologists believe that the pyramid was built by the Labayeque people, sometimes known as the Sican, who ruled this part of Peru's northern coast between the 10th and 13th centuries. More than 100 bodies were found in the pits in total, all of whom were buried naked. Historians say that the people who were sacrificed here were probably willing victims from local communities who were happy to die as part of a ritual because they believed death was necessary for new life to emerge. They may even have partaken in the beer drinking before they quite literally lost their heads. There's an ancient Greco-Roman cave temple in Hierapolis, Turkey, that was as popular with tourists 2,000 years ago as it is today. The story that drew the ancient tourists to the temple is that it was built atop a hill, and the hill was said to be a doorway to the underworld. The ancient residents of Hierapolis had good reasons to believe that there was something strange about the site. When animals approached the gates of the temple, they either dropped dead or became seriously ill. Because of this, the cave was nicknamed Plutonium, in honor of Pluto, the god of the underworld. It was said that Pluto himself reached out to claim the lives of the animals who got too close. Humans were curiously unaffected. In 2018, scientists finally discovered the reason for the cave's unusual properties. It sits above a fissure deep below the ground, and the fissure emits a deadly stream of carbon dioxide. CO2 levels at the mouth of the cave are at a dangerous 53%, and within its deepest reaches that figure goes as high as 91%. The human priests inside the temple wouldn't have been immune to this, so it's likely that they simply knew not to venture too far inside. There are many places in the world where finding a fossil of an ancient whale wouldn't be considered unusual. The Atacama Desert in Chile is not one of those places. Which is why this November 2011 discovery is such a head-scratcher. It seems that around two million years ago, a large congregation of whales gathered around South America's Pacific Coast, all died at the same time in mysterious circumstances. Scientists have proposed that they might have beached themselves after becoming lost and disoriented, or may have found themselves trapped after a landslide. Whatever the reason, they died just a few feet away from each other, and then rose to the surface as geological forces drove the shallow seabed upwards, and the land became one of the driest places on Earth. These whales are huge. Some of them are bigger than buses. There are more than 75 of them at the site, including 20 complete skeletons. Groups of whale fossils have been discovered in the past in both Egypt and Peru, but never in such good condition. It's been hypothesized that the whales were a family group, but we'll probably never know why so many of them were swimming together. We have another fossil discovery up next, but this time we're going to the United Kingdom to take a look at it. It's a mysterious and thus far unexplained fossil that was found close to a quarry in County Durham, England in mid-2010. From what's left of the animal, we can determine that it was probably a snake-like marine creature. It was discovered by chance by a father and son out for a walk. Scientists in the country say that nothing like it has ever been found in the British Isles before, but they point out that this entire area was covered by a large body of water called the Zechtstein Sea some 250 million years ago. That probably tells us how long ago the creature died, but doesn't get us any closer to working out what it was. It's possible that it was a snake capable of living underwater, but we can't rule out the possibility that it was an enormous eel. Experts from the country's Natural History Museum were summoned to the site to investigate the discovery, but they couldn't come up with any definitive answers either. Our ancient ancestors were big fans of creating monuments from standing stones. They did it all over the world, and we may never know why they did it or why so many apparently separate cultures all had the same idea at roughly the same time. Stonehenge in is one of the best-known sites like this, but Columseal Megalith Park in Bangor, Pennsylvania is also worthy of note. For as long as anybody who lives in the area can remember, the stones at Columseal have been said to possess healing qualities. However, all is not as it seems at this site. Columseal is not truly ancient at all. It was built by Bill Cohea during the 1970s after he returned from Scotland, where he'd been deeply inspired by standing in a stone circle on the island of Iona. The site at Iona is a genuine ancient Celtic creation, whereas Columseal can best be described as a tribute. There are 90 stone structures at Columseal today, many of which have dramatic names like Glen of the Temple or Thor's Gate. The park's operators claim that the stones have been imported from Scotland and that their healing powers are genuine, but there's little reason to believe that to be true. Is the Globestone of La Manz actually a globe? There's a lot of controversy about this artifact, so let's take a closer look. If we take the tale of its discovery at face value, it was found in the mountain range of La Manz, sometimes called La Maña in Ecuador in 1984 by a team of scientists led by Alice Sotomayor. It's not exactly globe-shaped, far from it in fact, but Alice and her colleagues looked at the markings on the stone and decided that they look like a map of the world and its continents. Apparently when they look at these white lines, they see Greece, India, the Persian Gulf and the Apennine Peninsula. They also thought they could see Japan, and next to Japan, an unidentified landmass. To some people, mostly fringe theorists, the landmass is Mu, a mythical land that was lost beneath the waves like the Japanese answer to Atlantis. Obviously there are problems with these theories, East Asia and America don't appear on the map, and given that the stone was found in Ecuador, it seems odd that this alleged ancient mapmaker wouldn't include their native continent in their work. There's obviously something drawn on this stone, but it probably isn't a map of the world. Inscriptions on tombs, temples and other ancient Egyptian monuments frequently speak of a pharaoh's might, a god's divinity or a glorious achievement by the Egyptian people. However, there are certain exceptions. The Famine Stele is a long-form hieroglyphic text etched onto the side of a rock on Sahel Island near Aswan. The stele's name comes from the account of a devastating drought that plagued Egypt during the time of the pharaoh Djoser, who reigned 2600 years ago. The famine was long and terrible, lasting seven years. What's strange is that the inscription doesn't appear to have been written until the Ptolemaic era, 300 years after Djoser's death. Historians are baffled as to why such a long inscription was carved so long after the drought, unless it was to discredit one of Djoser's descendants who may have had their eyes on the throne. It could also have had religious undertones. Because the god Khnum is credited with eventually relieving the famine, Khnum's worshippers may have been attempting to gain power and influence among the Ptolemaic dynasty's tumultuous religious picture. It's unlikely that we'll ever know for sure.