73 Times Archaeologists Dug Up Something Truly Chilling

Not so much frightening. But for me one of the most haunting things I’ve seen is pictures of Titanic’s debris field and all the pairs of shoes, which provides evidence that a body lay there.

Evidence of a second extinction event level meteor impact.

It kind of means that extinction event meteors not only have happened, but are not all that rare of a thing when you take the age of the Earth into consideration.

The Aztec Skull wall:

Turns out the stories about mass sacrifices for the gods were not stories at all, despite what the deniers said. The Spaniards that documented that back in the day were not doing colonialist PR.

Maybe more sad than frightening, but the mummies of children sacrificed in capacocha ceremonies in Incan Peru. Kids between 5-15 d*****d, taken to the top of a mountain, and then either violently k****d or abandoned to succumb to the elements. Because of the environmental conditions on the mountaintops, some of the mummies are really well preserved, especially their posture—other than the clothes, they look just like kids that have curled up to take a nap.

Interestingly, since being sacrificed was something of an honor, the quality of life of the kids between being selected for sacrifice and actually being k****d was pretty high.

Pompeii - I was weirdly obsessed with the idea of time being frozen as a child.

I worked on a cemetery rescue dig in Coventry, UK where we excavated the skeleton of someone who had clearly woken up after burial, and died terrified. It’s engraved on the inside of my eyelids.

There was an ancient predecessor to the American Bison found frozen and perfectly preserved for tens of thousands of years. Naturally, the researchers took a piece of the flesh, cooked it, then ate it.

There is a hypothesized group of people called the sea peoples that may have raided and destroyed many villages. There were a LOT of towns near the Mediterranean sea in BCE that burned down. The origins of the Sea Peoples are undocumented but may have originated from a number of different locations, such as western Asia Minor, the Aegean, the Mediterranean islands, and Southern Europe. I only first heard about this mysterious group of people when i was a freshman in college.

The finding of bodies from mass executions.

Mayan temples where remnants of blood flowed down after a heart was taken out of the chest of someone who was sacrificed.

Not sure if this counts but the Dyatlov Pass Incident, hikers found with horrific injuries. Two found in there underwear, one was found without eyes or a tongue.

Hippo Skull. Shows that we suck at determining how something looked alive be that all dinosaurs looked a lot more fuller rather than all bony.

Catacombs under Paris.

The Antikythera mechanism. Imagine if that technology survived, and was advanced and built upon.

It's not exactly archaeological but it's somewhat adjacent. In my hometown area in Massachusetts there's a manmade reservoir called the Quabbin, several towns were eminent domained and forced to move to create a water supply for Boston. As part of the process they had to demolish houses and dig up graveyards. More than a few bodies had to be moved into new coffins and they discovered more than a few people had been mistakenly buried alive. How did they know? They found scratches on the lids of the coffins and lining material under their nails.

Microbes in the permafrost probably.

India's Lake of Skeletons has to rank up there...

Then infants that were burried wearing a slightly older toddler's skullcap as a hat.

Göbleki Tepe. That site has no reason to be there but it's existence has the potential to rewrite history as we know it.

Finding black plague bacteria in the dental pulp of plague victims.