At Tlachtga, the Hill of Ward in County Meath, excavators uncovered overlapping enclosures, animal-bone deposits, human remains, hearths, possible metalworking evidence, medieval activity, and the burial of a child in an enclosure ditch. The hill is associated in later Irish tradition with the fires of Samhain, but its excavated evidence spans many centuries and several distinct monuments.

This episode follows the published excavation record from Tlachtga alongside the seasonal-sun observation at Tara’s Mound of the Hostages. It separates trench evidence, radiocarbon results, later literary testimony, and museum-recorded Halloween customs to ask a difficult question: can any excavated phase at these hills be securely connected to the Samhain fire tradition?

The evidence includes ancient monuments, burials, burned deposits, a documented autumn sunrise observation, and later folklore records. It also includes major chronological gaps between prehistoric construction, early medieval activity, seventeenth-century testimony, and recent Halloween customs. The final judgment remains open.

This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication.

#ForbiddenArchaeology #Samhain #Tlachtga #HillOfWard #MoundOfTheHostages

YES OR NO: Does current evidence securely connect Tlachtga to an ancient Samhain fire rite??????

Lovelock Cave above Nevada’s Humboldt Sink entered the archaeological record after commercial guano mining disturbed part of an extraordinarily rich Indigenous deposit. Beginning in 1912, Llewellyn L. Loud, and later Loud with Mark R. Harrington, documented basketry, nets, sandals, cordage, tools, food remains, burials, and remarkable duck decoys made for wetland hunting.

The cave later became associated with claims of red-haired giants and Northern Paiute conflict traditions. This episode follows the surviving excavation plan, numbered lots, the 1929 monograph, museum catalog records, radiocarbon determinations, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s 1883 text, and later cultural-history documentation to distinguish what each source actually says.

What can a disturbed but extraordinary archaeological site establish about Indigenous life in the Great Basin? And does its documented history substantiate the giant-remains claim?

This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication.

#ForbiddenArchaeology #LovelockCave #NorthernPaiuteHistory #SaidukaSaiDukaATraditions #BatGuano

YES OR NO: Does the documented Lovelock Cave record verify giant human remains??????

Beneath the desert at Saqqara, near Memphis, underground galleries hold immense stone coffers long associated with the burials of sacred Apis bulls. Auguste Mariette entered the Greater Underground in November 1851 after tracing a buried avenue of sphinxes toward the lost Serapeum. He recorded twenty-four coffers there: twenty-two of granite and two of compact limestone. Their scale, hard stone, heavy lids, and carefully worked surfaces have made them central to claims that ancient Egypt possessed an unrecognized manufacturing technology.

The strongest alternative interpretation comes from tool-and-die maker Christopher Dunn, who argues that reported flatness, squareness, and parallelism on some coffers indicate advanced machining beyond the usual account of ancient stoneworking. The strongest conventional interpretation is that the galleries formed part of a long-lived funerary complex for Apis bulls associated with Ptah at Memphis, supported by stelae, royal inscriptions, gallery phases, funerary finds, and the broader history of the cult.

But the record is incomplete. Mariette found a site already disturbed in antiquity, his original excavation journal is reported lost, and no independently published surface-metrology survey has confirmed or rejected Dunn’s measurements across the coffers. The religious purpose of the Serapeum is strongly supported. The exact methods used to make, move, and lower every massive coffer remain less fully documented.

This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication.

#ForbiddenArchaeology #SerapeumOfSaqqara #ApisBullSarcophagi #AugusteMariette #Saqqara

YES OR NO: Do the Serapeum coffers challenge the accepted account of ancient Egyptian engineering???????