The Yenikapi area of Istanbul is a rich site for shipwrecks; at least 37 ancient ships have been uncovered and explored in the past decade. Recently, archaeologists unearthed an astonishing artifact: a 1,200 year old wooden object that is being called a Byzantine iPad. It is close to the size of a modern iPad, but much thicker. 

The object consists of five stacked rectangular panels, each with a frame and covered with wax. The wax was used to write down notes, some of which can still be seen on the ancient panels. The bottom panel slides open to reveal a small chamber with carved-out spaces. The spaces hold weights which would have been used as an assay balance.

Because the tool was found on a merchant ship, the archaeologists postulate that it was used to determine the weight and value of various metals. Each panel has holes drilled in one side, indicating that the stack of panels was once held together with leather straps. The device is small enough that it could have easily been carried around by the ship’s captain. Who knows what other ancient treasures will be found in the Theodosius Port with its many excavations?

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Ten thousand years from now, archaeologists will stumble upon one of the most baffling sights they have ever seen. They will uncover a small cache of impossibly advanced fossils – fossils that could not possibly be what they appear to be.

The objects appear similar to the robotic animals of the archaeologists’ day, but they clearly predate the contemporary iterations of these creatures. Is it possible that robots evolved into sentient, reproductive beings far earlier than the history books taught them?

The fossils are actually the work of artist Chase Black. He calls them Creatures of the Mechazoic Era, and they are meant to look like found relics of an imagined past. Or should that be an imagined future?

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Cesspits – those ancient toilets/garbage dumps where the lowest-ranking archaeologists get to spend their time digging – are not typically the site of many cool historic discoveries. But that’s exactly where five fascinating 18th century telescopes were found in Amsterdam. The scopes are so interesting partly because they are made of bone – cattle metatarsal bones, to be exact. While four of the dual-lens scopes are made of a single bone, the fifth is made of two parts held together with a screw thread.

The scopes would have been luxury items when they were constructed, likely used to look at faraway items on land or at sea – or even to take in stage shows or operas. All five of the objects were excavated at different times over the last 40 years, but it wasn’t clear at first just what they were. They looked like simple pieces of bone, but upon further inspection they turned out to be far more interesting. Researchers aren’t sure why the telescopes would have been thrown into toilets, but they figure that either they broke and their wealthy owners simply threw them away…or even sadder, they may have been dropped and their owners didn’t want to reach into the toilet to retrieve them. Kind of like the 18th century version of the toilet-phone.

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After death, soft tissue tends to decompose pretty quickly. The brain is soft tissue, so unless the tissue is mummified or preserved in some other way it doesn’t typically last long after death. That’s why this brain, exhumed from a grave in northwestern France in 1998, is so remarkable. The 18-month-old child it once belonged to died somewhere between 1250 and 1275 C.E., yet it is amazingly well preserved – so well preserved, in fact, that it contains remnants of neurons. The the circumstances surrounding the child’s death and the reason the brain is so well preserved are shrouded in mystery; CT and MRI scans didn’t bear out the initial theory that the child died from a cerebral hemorrhage, and the brain is this body’s only surviving soft tissue.

The child was laid to rest in a wood coffin, with its head wrapped in leather and placed on a pillow. The approximate date of death was determined by using tree-ring dating to determine the date the coffin was made. The child’s age was determined by its teeth. Beyond that, the details of the brain’s life and death seem murky. But since the brain is still one of the best-preserved medieval brains ever found, the University of Zurich team that’s examining it is very excited. Because of its good condition, the team have been able to perform far more tests on it than other specimens of similar age. Tissue samples showed grey matter and white matter (above, left) and pyramidal cells, which are a type of neuron (above, right). The very fact of the brain’s survival has led to new understanding of soft tissue decomposition. The complete study findings will be published in April 2010 in the journal NeuroImage.

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Some of the greatest mysteries are those that surround ancient gadgets. Because of their antiquity, we may never truly know how they were built or what their purpose was. Such is the case with the Baghdad Battery, a device unearthed in Khujut Rabu, just outside of Baghdad, in 1936. It consisted of a small clay jar containing an iron rod suspended inside of  a copper cylinder. The copper cylinder was soldered shut and sealed with asphalt. Wilhelm Konig, a German archaeologist working at the National Museum of Iraq, examined the device two years after its discovery and came to the conclusion that it was an ancient battery.

Indeed, when replicas were built they were able to generate small amounts of electricity. But if the device was a battery, it would pre-date other batteries by at least a thousand years. And what, exactly, would an ancient civilization have use batteries for? For many years, experts contended that the Baghdad Battery would have been used to electroplate thin layers of gold onto silver items. That theory has fallen out of favor due to lack of evidence.

In fact, many archaeologists now believe that the Baghdad Battery had no electrical purpose at all. The usability of the ancient batteries has been proven in various scientific and entertainment arenas, but so far all that can be said is that it was possible to produce electricity with these primitive cells. Whether they were ever used for that purpose – and what, exactly, they may have powered – may never be known. Like the Antikythera Mechanism and so many other ancient gadgets, its function may be forever lost to time.

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