The gourd-and-twine device, created 1,200 to 1,400 years ago, remains tantalizingly functional—and too fragile to test out. “This is unique,” NMAI curator Ramiro Matos, an anthropologist and ...

Discovered in 1972 beneath what is now a Lloyds Bank branch in York, England, this 1,200-year-old excrement has become one of ...