Tabla de contenidos para January / February 2025 en Smithsonian Magazine

TAMARA THOMSEN was 24 feet underwater when she spotted it: the decaying end of a dugout canoe, a great white oak carved some 1,200 years ago. It was jutting out of a sandy ridge in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota—a body of water skirting Madison, the state capital—and she knew it was a remarkable find. “What I did not understand was the breadth of the discovery.” Thomsen was diving that summer day in 2021 as a private citizen, chasing fish and collecting trash. More often, you’ll find the maritime archaeologist in the Great Lakes, surveying deep-water sites for the Wisconsin Historical Society. Lake Mendota had not been on the archaeologist’s radar, and she certainly wasn’t hunting for dugout canoes. Thomsen usually looks for shipwrecks, like 19th-century freighters. It might seem remarkable that she…

It was after midnight in Quito when Stella de la Torre came for me, waiting under a streetlamp next to the black minivan that would ferry us to the Amazon, to see the smallest monkey in the world. I bundled in, and we departed, driving through empty streets and pitted roads until the blackness around us began to soften. The world’s smallest monkey is called the pygmy marmoset, and it is, predictably, very tiny, just a little scoop of fur. It likes to eat the sticky resin found in tree bark, known as gum, and is therefore called a gummivore. Captured pygmy marmosets can cling onto the finger of a person the way a koala might hang on a tree. I had never seen one before, and the notion of…

The route that runs straight through Darien, Georgia, and cuts across the marshes, rivers and creeks along coastal McIntosh County leads to a historic site: Butler Island, a once vast antebellum plantation. Drivers unfamiliar with this stretch of U.S. Highway 17 likely pay little attention to the remains of a 75-foot brick chimney that powered the old rice mill or the huge kiln nearby, both planted in the lush landscape of palmetto trees and marsh grass. The 1,500-acre tidewater plantation was originally purchased in 1793 by Major Pierce Butler, a signer of the United States Constitution whose grandsons—Pierce Mease Butler and John Mease Butler—inherited the property and the people enslaved there. Relying on agricultural knowledge passed down to them by their ancestors who honed their techniques in West Africa’s rice-growing…

Across 1 Faneuil ___, noted debate site 5 Chemical element that’s second-to-last alphabetically 9 Political ruling group in Argentina’s history 10 A ways away 11 Wheeled hospital transport 12 Greek letter “I” 13 Prefix meaning “against” 14 Medium for some old computer games 15 Product born from a new way to emulsify leftover cheese and whey 18 Opposite of WNW 19 Printer paper size: Abbr. 20 ___ tai (cocktail) 23 Like the pygmy marmoset among all monkeys 25 Fly swatter sounds 28 Partner of oohs 29 Prestigious award for Octavia E. Butler 30 Home of the Bay of Skaill and Water of the Wicks 32 Actor Baldwin 33 “___ me!” (“Alas!”) 34 Serious-looking part of a Mamuthone costume 35 What hawksbill sea turtles do on beaches Down 1 Move quickly…

FRANCE HAS LONG derived a portion of its national pride from its culinary sophistication, but during the late 19th century—a time of war and social upheaval, as well as the cultural flowering of the Belle Époque—the issue of food could sometimes be fraught. Aristocrats feasted while peasants toiled and poor Parisians starved, and new delicacies like the banana debuted against a backdrop of imperialist adventures. To artists like Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin, all of it was also rich fodder for a new approach to painting, showcased in the play of light over a silver pitcher or the slimy floors of a bustling fish market. “This is as much a social history as it is the story of food,” says Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Art Museum in…

IN 1901, the Canadian mariner John Voss set sail from British Columbia in a modified dugout canoe. He was headed for Australia, seeking adventure—and the world record for smallest vessel to circumnavigate the globe. Voss had found a sponsor and first mate in the thrill-seeking Canadian journalist Norman Luxton. Deciding a typical sealing schooner would be “too easy,” Voss purchased an Indigenous whaling canoe carved by the Nuu-chah-nulth people on Vancouver Island, a 38-foot-long hollowed-out cedar trunk nicknamed the Tilikum, a Chinook word evoking community. He outfitted it with sails and decking, and on May 21, 1901, Voss and Luxton set out for the South Pacific. Their only map was a one-sheet chart of the Pacific, and they had no proper chronometer. Voss couldn’t even swim. It took 58 claustrophobic…

The first time Salvatore Gungui transformed into a Mamuthone, he was 14 years old. He pulled on the traditional leather-soled shepherd’s boots, velvet pants and jacket and wrapped himself in a heavy cloak. Across his chest, he strapped a cluster of bells that weighed more than 60 pounds. He felt a strange mix of emotions as he paraded through the streets, a somber mask covering his face. “There was my grandpa, and my mama and papa, and also my uncle, and they were so proud,” recalls Gungui, more than four decades later. And yet, he adds, “It was a horrible day. I was tired and scared because it was such a long parade. I remember my feeling was, ‘I can’t do it anymore. I can’t, I can’t.’ But I carried on.”…

The former Navy School of Mechanics, in Buenos Aires, sits on a leafy campus of whitewashed buildings and grassy plazas running alongside the Avenida del Libertador, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. On a recent Tuesday morning, I passed through the front gate and walked up the steps of a neo-Classical structure adorned with four Doric columns. The elegant facade belied its notorious history: The building served as the primary secret detention center for the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. María Belén Ghiso, a young guide, greeted me at reception and led me down a narrow flight of stairs into a basement with scuffed yellow walls. “This is where they tortured people,” she told me. In the 1970s, the space was divided into…

IN EARLY 2020, Daniel Bachman stood at the edge of a creek in Falmouth, Virginia, recording the sounds of the insects chittering and buzzing around him. He had come to the creek for the history it held. Nearby, slate-colored markers identified the site as the area where an English naval officer had kidnapped Pocahontas in 1613. The markers flanked a section of U.S. Route 1 still named at the time for Jefferson Davis, the lone president of the Confederate States of America. Bachman, then 30 years old, had already won national acclaim, and toured throughout the United States and Europe, with a sprawling collection of vernacular guitar music, spread across more than a dozen releases. Fans in the music press had likened him to the legendary John Fahey, known as…

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER didn’t like to wait for inspiration. In fact, the celebrated science fiction author denounced the idea of waiting for one’s muse. “Habit is more dependable,” she advised. The storyteller’s prolificacy is testament to her diligent, lifelong writing habit. Over her 35-year career, Butler used the fantastical narratives of science fiction to explore the complexities and cruelties of survival. Among other things, by placing Black people at the center of her stories, she boldly defied the ways of her beloved but often-conservative genre. “I wrote myself in,” she once said. Her tales of power-hungry telepaths and erotic alien encounters are now canonical, in science fiction and beyond. The prescience of her “Parable” books, which feature environmental disasters and a leader who wants to “make America great again,” has…

One ordinary day in the spring of 2003, Carole Hoey was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when a sound, or rather a sudden absence of sound, caused her to glance out the window. She had lived here, on the land between the lochs, for six years, and she had become used to the view, Orkney’s everyday miracle: the hills of Hoy, the waters of Stenness and Harray, and, just up the road, the Ring of Brodgar—Scotland’s biggest stone circle. What snagged her attention was the realization that she could no longer hear the tractor. It had been passing up and down, plowing a field belonging to her neighbors, preparing for the sowing of wildflowers in ground that, for years, had been given over to barley. Hoey didn’t yet know…

HAWKSBILL SEA TURTLES HAPPILY FLAP through the world’s tropical oceans with bellies full of glass-like fragments. Researchers examining the turtles’ digestive tracts would be wise to take care not to slice their hands on shards of the mineral silica that form the skeletons of sea sponges, a mainstay of the hawksbills’ diet. “Few other organisms will eat these sponges,” says José Urteaga, an expert in sea turtle conservation and the director of marine partnerships at Wild Earth Allies, a wildlife conservation group. Named for their bird-like beaks, adult hawksbills can munch an average of around 1,200 pounds of sponges a year. Plucking sponges from the reef prevents the glassy invertebrates from overpopulating and creates gaps in the reef where young corals can attach and grow. “Hawksbills are like the gardeners…