Themes

Everyday life

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52 min: in total

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Çatalhöyük

7500–5700 BC

Catalhoyuk was a densely built Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia occupied from roughly 7500 to 5600 BC, notable for honeycomb-like mudbrick houses entered through their roofs and for eighteen successive layers of rebuilding uncovered by archaeologists. James Mellaart, who discovered the site in 1958, argued its clay figurines pointed to a mother-goddess religion and an egalitarian social structure, but later excavations led by Ian Hodder, examining thousands more figurines and other evidence, found little support for a dominant female deity and some evidence of growing inequality over time.

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Ellis Island

1892 to 1954

Ellis Island operated as an immigration station from 1892 to 1954, processing roughly twelve million immigrants across two distinct buildings, the first destroyed by a fire in 1897 that also burned all immigration records dating back to 1855. Its function shifted sharply after the Immigration Act of 1924 downgraded it from a primary inspection point to a detention facility, and even its own physical land remained under legal dispute until a 1998 Supreme Court case split jurisdiction between New York and New Jersey.

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Cahokia

Founded 1050

Beginning around 1050, a settlement across the Mississippi from present-day St Louis grew explosively into a city of thousands, its inhabitants moving millions of cubic feet of earth by hand to build over a hundred mounds. Because Cahokians left no written records, everything known about the city comes from excavation, radiocarbon dating and soil analysis rather than testimony, leaving population estimates and the causes of its abandonment by 1350 genuinely disputed among archaeologists. Long misattributed to a vanished non-Native civilisation, the site is now recognised as ancestral heritage by multiple Indigenous nations and holds UNESCO World Heritage status.

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Samurai

8th century – 1868

The samurai emerged gradually from the eighth century as landowning mounted warriors serving powerful families, formalised as a distinct hereditary class after the Genpei War in the twelfth century, and transitioned during the long Tokugawa peace from active fighters into administrators before the Meiji government dismantled their legal privileges from 1868 onward. Much of the popular idea of bushido as an ancient, unified samurai code in fact took its familiar shape only in Nitobe Inazo's 1899 book, published after the class it claimed to describe no longer legally existed.