Any pediatrician has seen it: a baby who spends so many hours lying on their back that one side of the head ends up flat. The condition is called deformational plagiocephaly, from the Greek plagios (“slanted”) and kephalé (“head”). It comes from steady outside pressure on a skull that is still soft, not from a […]

On the slope below the cemetery of Sant’Elpidio a Mare, in Italy’s Le Marche region, recent heavy rains loosened the hillside enough to expose something no one was looking for: a rounded ceramic vessel, decoration still visible, sitting almost intact in the displaced earth. It looked, at first, like debris. It turned out to be […]