Light, matter and a planet
The microwave background, Murchison and Earth introduce different scales of physical history. Notice the distinction between the age of a meteorite, the grains it contains and the date it reached Earth.
The collection
The Human Archives
Explore the artifacts, discoveries and ideas that shape our understanding of the world.
10 archives
100 artifacts
Origins
From ancient light and meteorite grains to footprints, creation images and Darwin’s branching sketch: different ways of investigating beginnings.
Duality
Paired forms, opposing forces and complementary descriptions, examined through religious images, living structures and physical experiments.
Nonduality
Connections between things often treated as separate, approached through cultural knowledge, mathematics, physics and contemplative traditions.
Life
Fossils, living forms and images of life, followed by the unresolved search for life beyond Earth.
Death
Extinction, preserved remains, burial and remembrance: what endings leave behind, and how people respond to mortality.
Energy
Sunlight, living systems, fire and nuclear technology, alongside cultural accounts that use a different language for vitality and transformation.
Time
Cycles, calendars and physical limits, with trees, diagrams and cultural works that make duration intelligible.
Causality
Causes, predictions and the limits of knowledge, explored through philosophical arguments, divination, mechanisms and physics.
Memory
Natural records, cultural memory and recording technologies: how traces endure, and how people learn to read them.
Consciousness
Ten ordinary words organise an enquiry into self, relationship, attention, action and memory. This is an experiential archive, not a sequence of historical objects.
Archive 001
Origins
From ancient light and meteorite grains to footprints, creation images and Darwin’s branching sketch: different ways of investigating beginnings.
Origins begins with the limits of what we can observe, then follows material traces towards human accounts of where we come from. A meteorite and a footprint preserve different kinds of evidence. A creation painting and a philosophical argument do something else: they show how people have tried to understand existence. The sequence brings these approaches into conversation without treating them as interchangeable explanations.
The collection
10 artifacts · Curated sequenceReading across the archive
Traces left by living bodies
Laetoli preserves impressions of walking; Cueva de las Manos preserves deliberately made hand images. Their comparison turns on what a surviving mark can establish—and what it cannot tell us about the person who made it.
Images, arguments and descent
The Ouroboros, The Creation of Adam, Descartes and Darwin offer contrasting forms of explanation. Read each in its own intellectual and cultural setting before comparing its account of beginnings.
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