The city the lasers found under the jungle
From Southeast Asia·An enduring case
Airborne laser scanning over Angkor stripped away the canopy digitally and revealed a vast low-density urban sprawl around the temples, overturning estimates of the city's size built from a century of ground survey. The ruins had not changed. The instrument had, and the history followed it.
The concepts this raises
Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.
- EvidenceGrounds of Knowledge
- What is offered in support of a claim. Evidence is not the same as proof: it raises or lowers how likely a claim is, and its force depends on how it was gathered, what it was gathered for, and what else it is consistent with. Asking what would count as evidence against a claim is usually more revealing than listing evidence for it.
- InterpretationThe Knower's Lens
- The work of making something mean something. Data, texts, images and events do not announce their own significance; the categories a knower brings determine what is even available to be noticed, which is why disagreements about interpretation are rarely settled by looking harder.
Where it sits in the knowledge framework
- Methods and tools
- The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.
Areas of knowledge
Themes
The same ideas, somewhere else
Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.
- South Asia
The third umpire and the ball that never arrived
A batter is given not out. The fielding side reviews. On the big screen, a tracking system reconstructs the ball's flight, and then continues it past the point…
Enduring · The natural sciences · Mathematics
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Certainty
- Southeast Asia
The small skeleton that split palaeoanthropology
The metre-tall skeleton found on Flores in 2003 was declared a new human species by some researchers and a diseased modern human by others, with both camps…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Latin America
Drawings meant for no one on the ground
The Nazca lines have been read as astronomical calendars, ritual pathways, water markers and stranger things, with each era's favourite explanation tracking…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Africa
Truth commission, plural truths
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission explicitly distinguished kinds of truth, factual, personal, social, restorative, and accepted survivor…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Global
A museum for art with no artist
A museum devoted entirely to AI-generated art opened in Los Angeles in 2026, while courts have held that copyright protects works of human authorship, leaving…
Current · The arts
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- Africa
When a government doubted the virus
South Africa's government under Mbeki gave platform to AIDS-dissident scientists and delayed antiretroviral rollout, and later epidemiological studies…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility