Unsolved Histories

• History
• Primary Education
• Age 11

Learning Objectives

1.  Explain how limited or questionable evidence

poses challenges for archaeologists.

When archaeologists study artifacts, they draw conclusions about history. Sometimes the history of an era or a place isn't entirely known. There just isn’t enough evidence, yet, to fill in a whole story. Archaeologists learn more as new discoveries are made. In this way, history is a little like a mystery in which the searchers look for clues and put them together to come up with an answer or conclusion.

Myths

Have you ever heard of any myths in our community? What are some of them that you know or have heard about?

Goat foot wan

Yeti

Bigfoot

Archaeologists don’t have all the answers, and sometimes the answers they do have turn out to be wrong.

Unsolved histories go beyond just a few confusing artifacts. Scientists are still trying to solve centuries-old murder mysteries, such as: Who killed the Iron Age European bog people and tossed them into bogs? And why?

What happened to the Anasazi people of the southwestern United States, who carved pueblos (villages) out of cliffs and then suddenly abandoned them?

Archaeologists know everything.

1. True
2. False

The biggest mysteries of history raise questions about whole continents. For example, who was the first European explorer to set foot on American soil? It definitely was not Christopher Columbus, no matter what archaeologists used to think and history used to teach.

Christopher Columbus was the first to set foot on American soil.

1. True
2. False

Anasazi

Hundreds of Anasazi lived in Chaco Canyon (now New Mexico) around 1,200 years ago.  The cliffs protected them from enemies, wind, rain, and other forces of nature. 

We can see by their network of roads that they traded with other cultures, but we don’t know why the Anasazi disappeared. Was it because of a drought? Did an enemy drive them away? Or was it something else?

What are some of the theories about why the Anasazi left their homes in Chaco Canyon?

1. drought
2. enemies attacking
4. All of the above

Prehistoric peoples came to America about 15,000 years ago.

They left a skimpy but very real trail of artifacts behind. The first Europeans known to arrive were Vikings, who beat Columbus by 500 years. Archaeologists found clear evidence of this from a Viking village in Canada.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Looking for his goat, a boy walked into a cave and found the 2, 000 year old religious Dead Sea Scrolls hidden in clay jars. They tell the story of the Jewish people under Roman rule in the 1st century.

What did the boy find in the cave ?

1. Dogs
2. caves
3. scrolls
4. all of the above

How did people in 3100 BCE move megaliths (giant stones) to Stonehenge in England? It’s one of history’s most celebrated mysteries, because of the site’s popularity. Archaeologists determined in 2015 that many of the stones were taken from quarries in Wales, about 180 miles away!

Stonehenge was used for burials starting around 2500 BCE. As new burials were made at the site, others were rearranged, and new megaliths were added. The site is designed to showcase astronomical events, so it may have been used as an observatory.

www.channelone.com

The name Piltdown Man has almost come to mean “hoax.” From 1912 to 1954, top scientists believed the Piltdown Man skull showed evidence of a previously unknown hominin from human prehistory.

 Piltdown Man appeared to have the jaw of an ape and the braincase of a modern human. The hoaxer who created this phony skull was never caught.

Piltdown man was a hoax.

1. True
2. False

When mysteries can’t be solved easily some people start to reach for far-out answers, as in outer space. For example, some people say that aliens created Stonehenge, the pyramids, and this huge petroglyph (rock drawing) in Colorado. 

But there’s no good evidence to support these spacey ideas. Most archaeologists will tell you that ancient earthlings had enough know-how to create these amazing things.