Timbers from the wreck of a 17th-century Spanish galleon have been discovered on Oregon’s northern coast, state officials confirmed today.

The extraordinarily rare hull remains were removed from sea caves near Manzanita earlier this week in a risky emergency recovery mission involving archaeologists, law enforcement personnel, and search-and-rescue teams from multiple state and local agencies. © Provided by National Geographic

“I’m impressed and relieved,” says Scott Williams, an archaeologist with the Washington State Department of Transportation and president of the Maritime Archaeology Society (MAS), an all-volunteer group that spearheaded a 15-year search for the shipwreck. © Provided by National Geographic The rugged shoreline of Oregon’s north coast, strong swells, and treacherous storms all make for a landscape hostile to centuries of navigators.

The dozen timbers are believed to be pieces of the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon that was sailing from the Philippines to Mexico in 1693 when it veered off course and vanished, most likely wrecking on what’s now Oregon’s coast. Its cargo included costly Chinese silk, porcelain, and blocks of beeswax for making candles.

Santo Cristo de Burgos was a Manila galleon, a type of sturdy wooden vessel that plied an annual trade route between Spanish colonies in the Philippines and Mexico from 1565-1815, a period that marked the first era of global trade. The workhorse European ships were built in Asian ports by Asian craftspeople using Asian materials.

Despite their 250-year run—and the inevitable loss of wooden vessels crossing the hazardous Pacific—remarkably few Manila galleon shipwrecks have been found. Only three are known from the west coast of the Americas—with one each in Oregon, California, and Baja Mexico—and no surviving hull remains have been discovered until now.

Telltale signs of a sunken ship

 © Provided by National Geographic Captain Frankie Knight of Nehalem Bay Fire & Rescue drives a jetski while firefighter Levi Hill (left) and division chief Jesse Walsh secure a ship timber on the north coast near Manzanita, Oregon, in June 2022.

The Santo Cristo is better known along the Oregon coast as the legendary “Beeswax Wreck”—a moniker derived from distinctive blocks of beeswax that washed ashore for centuries and were traded by local Native American tribes and later Anglo-European settlers. Because honeybees are not native to the Americas—they were imported from Europe in the 17th century—Asian beeswax was a major import for Spain’s colonies, where beeswax candles were required for Catholic services. © Provided by National Geographic Mountain Region archaeologist Steve Jenevein and park resource program manager Chris Parkins of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, and Scott Williams, president of the Maritime Archaeological Society, wrap a timber in flotation devices before it’s brought to shore.

There were other clues that a shipwreck lay hidden somewhere offshore, from small bits of blue-and-white porcelain to large pieces of wood tossed up on the rocks or buried in the shifting sand. A section of the upper deck of a wooden ship was visible at the mouth of a river near Manzanita until about the 1920s. And oral histories from the area’s Indigenous tribes tell of a foreign ship that wrecked long ago, with a crew that came ashore and met varying fates.

The discovery of the galleon’s remains “confirms that our ancestral people knew what they were talking about,” says Robert Kentta, cultural resources director for the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz and a member of the Siletz Tribal Council. “They related oral histories in a way that just spoke the truth.”

As white settlers came to this dramatic, craggy coast, the Native American accounts became embroidered with increasingly fantastic tales of hidden riches. By the late 19th century, local legends of treasure and galleons—and the hunt for them—appeared regularly in the pages of Oregon newspapers. Those reports caught the attention of filmmaker Steven Spielberg and likely inspired his idea for the 1985 film The Goonies, a Gen-X cult tale of treasure-seeking kids and a mystery galleon on Oregon’s wild Pacific coast. © Provided by National Geographic Neahkahnie Mountain near Manzanita is called the “Mountain of 1,000 Holes” after more than a century of treasure-seekers dug without success for the riches rumored to be hidden within its slopes. Stories of shipwrecks and treasure play a prominent role in Oregonian coastal lore.

But for all the talk of treasure, there were two glaring questions: Where—and what—exactly was the Beeswax Wreck?

Secrets from a tsunami

 © Granger A German engraving from 1620 shows Spanish galleons in the Pacific port of Acapulco. The annual Manilla galleon trade between Philippines and Mexico between 1565 and 1815 marked the first era of truly global trade.

In the mid-2000s, a group of researchers and community members including Williams decided to answer that question, eventually forming the Maritime Archaeology Society (MAS). They studied thousands of pieces of Chinese porcelain collected by beachcombers over the years and determined they were from the Kangxi period (1661-1722).

The Chinese ceramics and Asian beeswax blocks with Spanish markings led them to conclude that the Beeswax Wreck had to be one of two Manila galleons that went missing between roughly 1650 and 1750: the Santo Cristo de Burgos, which was lost in 1693, or the San Francisco Xavier, which disappeared in 1705. © Provided by National Geographic Local commercial fisherman and beachcomber Craig Andes looks for fragments of Chinese porcelain along the Oregon coast in May 2021.

At first, the archaeologists suspected that the Beeswax Wreck was the 1705 San Francisco Xavier—and with good reason. In 1700, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck the West Coast, trigging an enormous tsunami. If the Santo Cristo had wrecked in the area, they reasoned, the tsunami that swept the coast just a few years later would have destroyed anything that was left. © Provided by National Geographic A galleon timber is wedged between rocks on the Oregon coast. Manilla galleons were enormous cargo vessels—roughly 150 feet long and a third as broad—ideal for maximizing the amount of goods that could be transported for sale across the Pacific.

Then a geological study revealed something surprising: The area near the Nehalem River where beeswax, porcelain, and pieces of a wooden ship had been found was under and within—not above—the sediment layer left by the estimated 25-foot-high wave that struck the coast. This meant that the mystery shipwreck must have already been there when the tsunami hit in 1700. But was it the Santo Cristo de Burgos? 

A catalog of Spanish ships published in the 1930s—a source still widely consulted by archaeologists—claimed that, according to Spanish records, the Santo Cristo burned somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. But the volunteer group raised money to fund research in Spain’s exhaustive naval archives, which eventually told a different tale: Despite a multi-year search by the Spanish crown, Santo Cristo de Burgos had simply vanished.  © Provided by National Geographic The sun rises on a June morning on Oregon’s Pacific Coast. While the timber discovery has confirmed these are the likely remains of the Santo Cristo de Burgos, archaeologists will continue to search for other parts of the wreck that may remain offshore.

MAS researchers were then fairly confident that the Beeswax Wreck and the Santo Cristo de Burgos were one and the same vessel. But identifying the shipwreck’s whereabouts would prove even more challenging. For the all-volunteer MAS, it meant diving and surveying in their free time in difficult conditions that could change in an instant.

By 2019, their remote-sensing tools had detected a few objects off the coast near Manzanita that might be the remains of a wooden ship—or just an odd boulder on the seafloor. Yet despite the absence of conclusive evidence, the wreck of the Santo Cristo had to be somewhere offshore, they reasoned, for it had sent a steady stream of beeswax and porcelain ashore for generations of beachcombers to discover and ponder.

Growing up Goonies

Craig Andes is one of those beachcombers, a commercial fisherman who belonged to a “Goonies gang” of kids who grew up exploring the coast, inspired by tales of treasure and the Beeswax Wreck. He began sharing his knowledge of the area’s artifacts with MAS after reading about their hunt for the same fated vessel.

That information included the presence of bits of wood in sea caves that Andes first spotted in 2013. He kept a watchful eye on them and strongly believed they were ship timbers. He also grew concerned that the smaller pieces were at risk of being washed away. So in 2020 he contacted the MAS and urged them to test a sample of the wood. (Related: How do we find shipwrecks, and who owns them?)

“I was convinced it was driftwood,” MAS president Williams recalls. “To think that 300-year-old ship timbers could survive the Oregon coast was just crazy.”

A lab analysis revealed that the timbers were hewn from Anacardiaceae, a species of tropical hardwood found in Asia. Radiocarbon dating indicated that the tree was felled around 1650. Both facts lined up squarely with the composition and age of the Santo Cristo.

During the summer of 2020, MAS archaeologists investigated the caves—reachable only by water or a perilous scramble over rocks at extremely low tides—and determined that the timbers were a “secondary deposit,” meaning they were not part of a shipwreck site but had been washed into the cave, possibly by the 1700 tsunami.

The archaeologists also agreed that the timbers were at risk of being swept out to sea, but extracting them from the sea cave would be complicated and dangerous. They would have only about 90 minutes to document and remove the timbers before the tide would rise and trap them. Since the recovery could be safely done only by an expert team during an unusually low tide, they enlisted SEARCH Inc., a cultural resource management firm, to coordinate the mission. The project would be funded in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society.

A dangerous recovery

After a year of delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and unpredictable weather, a few dozen people assembled at sunrise this week on an empty beach to recover the remains of the Santo Cristo de Burgos. Personnel from the Tillamook and Clatsop Counties Sheriff’s Offices joined archaeologists from Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, MAS, and SEARCH Inc., in the risky scramble to the sea cave. Rescue swimmers from the Nehalem Valley Fire Department circled on jet skis, while ropes teams monitored the operation from the cliffs above.

The timbers were recovered safely and intact, and the team felt a palpable sense of relief. “It was amazing to pull off such a complex operation, made entirely possible by teamwork, cooperation, and exceptional professionalism by all involved,” says Jim Delgado, the project’s principal archaeological investigator and senior vice president at SEARCH Inc.

Andes watched the activity from the beach, marveling at the complex choreography. Nearly a decade had passed since he spotted the timbers, and as the first, and largest, piece was towed ashore, he ran his hand fondly along the glistening surface, pointing to a large spike hole. “Looks like there’s still metal in there,” he observed.

The timbers are now at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, where they’ll be carefully documented and conserved. Each timber will be scanned in detail, and the scans will be shared with Manila galleon experts around the world to better understand how the extraordinary ships were built.

But the small collection of unassuming wood is not just a source of information about Manila galleons, says Delgado. “These timbers are also the physical evidence for the stories that have been known and passed down through generations.”

Chris Havel, spokesperson for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, says the agency is looking forward to learning what researchers discover about the recovered timbers, “so we can share that news with the people who visit our parks.” But he also cautions people not to risk their lives attempting to visit the now-empty sea caves.

“Visitors should respect any signs or warnings you may see, and refrain from searching for artifacts or taking anything away from our parks other than the memories of a fun, safe visit.”

The source of the beeswax and porcelain that still washes up along the coast remains somewhere offshore, and MAS will continue its underwater hunt for more remains of the Santo Cristo de Burgos.

 Meanwhile, Williams urges local community members to keep their eyes out for any “smoking gun” that could confirm the identity of Oregon’s fabled galleon, such as a coin, or any item that bears a date or name.

“Somebody could have it in the attic or their basement,” he says. Or a lucky beachcomber might turn up a decisive bit of evidence after a big storm—”if someone just looks down in the right place.”

A team of researchers from Poland, the U.S. and Peru has found evidence that suggests Inca children selected for sacrifice were given drugs to keep them calm prior to their deaths.

In their paper published in Journal of Archaeological Science, the group describes their analysis of hair and fingernail samples from two small Incan children who had been sacrificed on Peru’s Ampato volcano.

Prior research has shown that human sacrifice was a common practice in Incan society—called capacocha, it was conducted by priests as a means of controlling the population.

Ceremonies involving sacrifice were typically held to celebrate major events, such as the birth of a royal son, or a battle victory. Those selected for sacrifice were typically young women and children. In this new effort, the researchers studied hair and nail samples that had been left behind by two sacrificial Incan children (aged 6 or 7 years old), approximately 500 years ago.

In studying, the samples, the researchers found small amounts of cocaine and also two compounds found in a flowering vine known to be used to make ayahuasca—a hallucinogen. The two compounds, known as harmaline and harmine are monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

The researchers note that they did not find evidence of DMT, however, which is another major ingredient in ayahuasca.

It was not clear if its absence was intentional or was merely an accident. Regardless, its absence meant that the drugs given to the children would not have resulted in hallucinations, instead, they would have simply calmed them, making things easier for those tasked with sacrificing them.

The researchers note that the children would have known what was going to happen to them, weeks in advance; thus, they would very likely not have gone along willingly with a sacrifice.

Giving them drugs to calm them down would have allowed for forcing them to march to their death without them putting up a fuss. People chosen for sacrifice came from all across the empire, which would have meant a long journey prior to being killed during a sacrificial ritual. The researchers note that giving the victims calming drugs appeared to work—Spanish colonizers wrote of witnessing Incan sacrificial rituals where the victims

Today, Frankenstein, or rather Frankenstein’s Monster, is a staple of Halloween and the spooky world, and just about everyone can recognize the re-imagined large green ghoul with bolts poking out the side of his neck.

While that’s been the case for quite some time now, rewind a little over 200 years to 1818, and you’ll find that the first readers of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” weren’t too enthused with the then-controversial novel, according to The Portalist.

The author herself must have seen this reaction coming, as she published it anonymously, and it remained so for the first five years of the book’s life.

Mary Shelley is now one of the most famous writers to have ever lived. However, outside of her writing, she led a life filled with a unique set of events, from tragedy to forbidden love to some very macabre events.

In some ways, Shelley’s life is as one might expect for the writer of a sci-fi-horror novel. In other ways, her life seems like yet another story that pulls readers in and leaves them with a bit of disbelief and thought-provoking images.

A part of Shelley’s life that has become quite a popular story among her fans is the story of how — especially where — she lost her virginity. What might seem a strange discussion surrounding a favorite literary genius makes a bit more sense once you learn why people are so intrigued by the tale.

Mary confessed her love to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley on her mother’s grave

Mary Shelley was born in 1797 to the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher William Goodwin. According to an article published in The Portalist, her mother died just a few weeks after Mary’s birth due to childbirth complications.

A young Mary would visit her mother’s grave often, and it’s written that she used the letters carved into the headstone as a means to teach herself how to write her name, according to Profile Books.

As she grew older, the gravesite she so often visited became the spot for another piece of her life. According to some, it’s the location where she supposedly lost her virginity to her love, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Charlotte Gordon, author of the book “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley,” was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in 2015. According to Gordon, “That’s where we think she had sex for the first time, on her mother’s grave. We can’t prove that they actually had sex, but they certainly declared their love and became intimate. It was a really dangerous thing to do.”

Yes, Mary Shelley, famed science fiction and horror literature writer and inspiration to millions, possibly lost her virginity on her mother’s grave. Profile Books points out that social media users accurately characterize the story as “the most goth thing ever.”

Her father might have committed murder on her and Percy Shelley’s behalf

Mary Shelley’s romantic life seems like something right out of one of her own works, but the reality is that her relationship with her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, was seemingly equal parts love and tragedy. At the age of 16, Mary fell in love with Percy, who at the time was her father’s apprentice. The two eloped to France, even though Percy was already married to another woman, Harriet Westbrook, according to The Portalist. The forbidden love led to Mary’s father disowning her, but not before possibly committing a crime on her behalf.

It’s long been speculated that Shelley’s father murdered his son-in-law’s wife in an attempt to salvage Mary’s reputation and allow Percy and Mary to officially wed, according to Lynn Sheperd Books. Though Harriet’s body was recovered in the Hyde Park River, the suspicions surrounding William Goodwin have never been met with any proof, and ultimately the death was ruled a suicide by drowning. 

Nevertheless, Harriet’s death was something that ate away at Mary for years to come. James L. O’Rourke’s book “Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession” quotes an 1839 journal entry in which Mary wrote, “Poor Harriet, to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows as the atonement claimed by fate for her death.”

Shelley’s life was littered with tragedy and macabre acts of love

Perhaps Mary Shelley’s draw to her mother’s grave for both the experience of grief and love fit seamlessly into the rest of her life, as Shelley’s days were filled with more despair than most see in a lifetime.

Her mother’s death just a few weeks after birth was just the beginning of death’s hold on Shelley’s life, as her sister died when Mary was only a teenager, and three of her four children didn’t live to see adulthood, with one dying just days after birth and another dying at the age of three, according to The Portalist.

Shelley’s life would continue to see dark days when her husband, Percy, drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 1822, and her closest friend and fellow writer, Lord Byron, passed away two short years after, according to an article published in Refinery29.

Shelley herself died of a brain tumor when she was 53 years old. After her passing, it was found that she’d been keeping the heart of her deceased husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the drawer of her writing desk, gently wrapped in poetry and silk. The poem of choice was Shelley’s own “Adonais” (posted at The Poetry Foundation), according to The Portalist. In love, life, and death, Mary Shelley lived a life filled with macabre details in every moment, whether filled with pleasure or tragedy.

A scientific study has uncovered massive, ghostly figures carved into the ceiling of an Alabama cave more than 1,000-years ago. 

The figures, three of which were humanoid in shape, are among the biggest ever uncovered in the Northern Americas. Some are more than 6ft long per a study presenting the findings published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity on Tuesday. 

Known as glyphs, the unique carvings sculpted in the soft mud on the cave’s ceiling could provide clues into the traditions of Native American peoples of this southeastern US, say the study’s authors.

“We know that Native Americans over a very wide area have certain ideas in their religious concepts that they share. They believe in a tiered universe,” said archeologist Jan Simek.

“They believed that there were these spirit worlds all around them that permeate the natural world, even though you couldn’t see them,” he said. 

Invisible figures revealed by months of tenuous work

The project was decades in the making for the paper’s authors — archeologist Jan Simek and photographers Alvarez and Alan Cressler.

Despite this, they could not document the artwork because of a simple, technically challenging barrier: The cave ceiling is so close to the floor that it was impossible to take good pictures of the carvings. 

Alvarez first tried to document the glyphs as a photographer on a National Geographic assignment in 1999. “The images were so faint!” he told Insider.  

“I feel like there are stories that get entrusted to me,” said Alvarez. “That was the motivation behind doing all the work.”

 Finally, hi-tech 3D photogrammetry would be the key to capturing the glyphs. It can read the minute variation in light between two images taken a few inches apart to draw precise 3D models of objects.

It was still a grueling, month-long task to capture more than 16,000 pictures that very slightly overlap to map out the entire cave ceiling.

“It took like years for my knees to recover. It’s just kneeling and stooping for hours and hours and hours in days and days and days on end,” Alvarez said.

Finally able to digitally lower the cave floor they first glimpsed the enormous humanoid glyphs.

Deciphering an ancient story for the first time in centuries 

The glyphs portray what archeologists call anthropomorphs, figures that could either represent humans in costumes and masks or humanoid spirits, Simek said. 

These characters were probably deeply ingrained in the culture of the people living near the cave so that they could understand who they were from seeing only a part of them, Simek said.

The style of the drawings in the Alabama cave is reminiscent of figures seen in the midwest and the western US. They are very large with square shoulders, ghost-like, with headgear and elaborate clothing, and directly face the viewer. That suggests that these figures represented inhabitants of the supernatural world, per the study. 

One example of similar anthropomorphs can be seen in the Barrier Canyon in Utah. 

However, the study authors have not been able to link the Alabama figures to recognizable characters recorded in southeast Native American stories.

“They clearly represent a character or a set of characters that we’ve never seen before,” said Simek. 

Philip Carr, a professor of Native American Studies and Anthropology at the University of South Alabama who was not involved in the study, was complimentary of the work. 

“It is the work of archaeological teams such as this one that provide those rare glimpses into past ideologies that leave us wanting to know even more,” he told Insider. 

“Are these figures related to the underworld?  If so, what was the relationship of the people who drew them to those beings of the underworld?”

Rediscovering the old to inform the new

We know little about the people that would have lived around that cave 1,000 and 1,500 years ago, what is called the Middle Woodland phase. 

“We don’t have the kind of documentation about artwork that we have for later time periods,” said Simek. “We know the archeological context, but even that is relatively hard to find that at this date,” he said. 

These findings are relevant to present-day Native American communities, which see these traditions as part of their heritage, Simek said. 

“Their descendants are the native people of the southeast that were in the region when Europeans arrived: The Cherokees, the Creeks, Muscogee people, Choctaw, Chickasaw,” he said.

“These people and their culture are vibrant and alive. Europeans moved them out of the Southeast forcibly, to Oklahoma, to reservations that were not their homeland. But they still maintain their connectivity,” he said.

“Archeology is not always about the dead,” Simek said.

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a bestselling author in his day and yet he spent most of his life behind bars.

His novels inspired the term “sadist” – “a person who derives pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from inflicting pain or humiliation on others” – and yet, in 2017, France declared his work a “national treasure”. So, was Sade a pornographer or a philosopher – and why does his name continue to cause such heated debate?

Two centuries after his death, Sade (1740-1814) remains a figure of controversy. On the one hand, his name is associated with the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille, on the other, with rape, sexual terror and torture.

During his lifetime, Sade was found guilty of sodomy, rape, torturing the 36-year-old beggar woman Rose Keller, imprisoning six children in his chateau at Lacoste, and poisoning five prostitutes with the aphrodisiac “Spanish fly”.

He managed to avoid the death sentence but still spent 32 years in prisons and insane asylums, partly due to the intervention of family members who kept him locked up to avoid disgrace.

Momentarily freed under the French Revolution, he became “Citizen Sade”, participating in some of the key political events of the era, only to see his works seized, destroyed and banned under Napoleon Bonaparte.

His work remained censored throughout the 19th century and most of the 20th – but in 2017 the French State declared his 120 Days of Sodom (1785), written in the Bastille on a 12-metre scroll, to be a “national treasure”. So what happened between his lifetime and ours to change his profile so radically? Here are five things we should all know about the Marquis de Sade.

1. The most disgusting books

Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), The New Justine (an extended version of Justine published in 1797) followed by the Story of Juliette, Her Sister (1797) and The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage (1785) – these are the works that led Napoleon Bonaparte to call Sade an author of “abominable” books and to have a “depraved imagination”. But they were penned behind bars and are the products of an incarcerated imagination – not accounts of his personal life and crimes.

No one escapes the satirical power of Sade’s pen – young or old, virtuous or corrupt, rich or poor – although his narratives are dominated by certain types, especially bankers, clergy, judges, aristocrats and prostitutes.

2. Philosopher of the bedroom

Sade lived in a time of terror. His writings may be read as a knowing inversion of Enlightenment high ideals as they were penned in France at the end of the 18th century in the shadow of the bloody guillotine. For example, Philosophy in the Bedroom – which contains a mock political pamphlet: “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans” – was written shortly after the fall of the leading radical Robespierre and it offers an absurdist take on the rhetoric and promises of the French Revolution.

In it, Sade also reminds us that “were it among Nature’s intentions that man be born modest, she would not have caused him to be born naked”.

3.Sade and sadism

Sade’s taste for sodomy, paedophilia and flagellation, in addition to his fictional accounts of excessive orgies, which describe sexual cruelty and murder in excessive detail, led many to presume he was deranged. This status was magnified by the fact that he ended his life in the asylum of Charenton, although a scientific examination of his skull by a Dr Ramon after his death showed no physical or mental abnormalities – phrenology determined the skull “was in all respects similar to that of a Father of the Church”. Casts were even made of his skull, one of which now sits in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

In Sade’s writings, however, the clergy are typically amoral characters and by the 19th century, the term “sadism” was coined by psychoanalysts to denote the experience of pleasure through the infliction of physical pain.

4. Pornography at the service of women

The feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir defended Sade in a 1951 essay entitled: “Must We Burn Sade?”.

She argued that his novels’ exploration of the idea that “in a criminal society, one must be criminal” was never more relevant and that his life story and increasing perversity in his fiction was a symptom of society’s increasing attempts to control him.

In the 1970s and 1980s, feminists engaged in heated debate over Sade and his philosophical value. Angela Carter defended him for putting pornography “at the service of women” while Andrea Dworkin insisted his fiction only defended the male sexual desire to “possess” women.

5. ‘Divine Marquis’

By the 20th century, Sade was deemed “divine” by many intellectuals and artists who interpreted his writings as a dark mirror of man’s inhumanity to man. From Man Ray’s imaginary portraits of Sade in the late 1930s, portraying him as a paragon of liberty beside the burning Bastille, as war loomed in Europe, to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Saló (1975), which restages Sade’s 120 days of Sodom in fascist Italy, Sade’s name and writings offered modern artists and writers a means to address the horrors of war and totalitarian regimes. These are themes American artist Paul Chan explores in his mixed-media installations “Sade for Sade’s Sake” (2009) by conflating Sade and the “War on Terror”.

Sade’s writings may seem cold and cruel, but they can but leave a mark on the reader. Surely that is the power of art and why we must continue to read Sade.

A pile of 150 skulls that sparked a murder probe after their discovery in a Mexican cave were actually the remains of women sacrificed to the Aztec gods thousands of years ago.

The historic find was made close to the Guatemalan border in an area plagued with violent smuggling gangs.

Investigators thought the decapitated skulls were unfortunate victims of ruthless local gangsters and launched a probe to uncover how the remains got there, the Daily Star reports.

After 10 years of extensive tests, experts learned the women were not murder victims, but human sacrifices beheaded during rituals to the Aztec gods millenia ago.

A spokesperson for INAH, the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History, said: “Believing they were looking at a crime scene, investigators collected the bones and started examining them in Tuxtla Gutierrez”, the state capital.

Experts have said the unfortunate victims had been beheaded and their skulls put on display in a trophy rack known as a “tzompantli”.

It is believed were killed between 900 and 1200CE.

What confused investigators is that pre-Hispanic skull piles usually show a hole knocked through each side of the skull and are found in plazas not caves.

Among the vicitms of this latest find there were more women than men, with none of them having any teeth.

In the wake of the find, archaeologist Javier Montes de Paz said people should probably call archaeologists, not police.

“When people find something that could be in an archaeological context, don’t touch it and notify local authorities or directly the INAH,” he said.

In 2017, archaeologists found a staggering 650 skulls caked in lime at the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Atzec capital Tenochtitlan – which went on to become Mexico City.

They also found thousands of skull fragments encased in the same central edifice.

A few years later, Mexican archaeologists found the remains of over 100 Aztec men, women and children who were suspected to have been sacrificed to the gods.

The grisly findings were discovered during the restoration of a building in Mexico City and are believed to be part of a five metre “skull rack” at a shrine to the Aztec god of the sun, war and human sacrifice.

Hundreds of human heads have been previously unearthed at the site, first uncovered three years ago.