The 2026 FIFA World Cup is one of the most watched events of the international sports calendar, and fans from across the globe will be trying to predict how far their team will go.

I’m a data scientist and in an attempt to forecast the eventual tournament winner, semi-finalists and teams’ chances of progressing through the group stages, I built a model to predict how the World Cup may unfold.

Here’s how I did it and what my model predicted.

Lessons from recent history

For this World Cup, the traditional 32-team tournament structure (eight groups of four) has been expanded to a bulging 48 teams (12 groups of four), with new progression rules, an extra knock-out round and a rise in total matches from 64 to 104.

The changes were designed by FIFA primarily to increase global participation, maximise revenue through more matches and boost the popularity of soccer in new markets.

In trying to predict the 2026 event, what can recent history teach us?

Looking back to the seven 32-team tournaments since 1998, the 28 semi-final spots have been dominated by six nations who reached that stage more than once: Argentina (2), the Netherlands (3), Brazil (3), Croatia (3), France (4) and Germany (4).

If we include previous tournament winners (England, Italy and Spain), 78.6% of the modern semi-finalists have come from nine nations.

Further, all 14 finalists were from this group – the last finalist from outside these nine came in 1962 (Czechoslovakia); the last winner was in 1950 (Uruguay).

This is an amazing degree of dominance given the number of international teams playing the game – official FIFA rankings currently list 211 nations.

More teams at the 2026 event, though, means it is harder to accurately assess the likelihood of tournament results.

For this, we need analytics, and I’ve undertaken a simulation study designed to calculate the progression chances of all 48 teams in the field.

While the obvious outcome of such a study is to assess who the likely winners are, we can also gain insight from how the new format spreads these chances across the teams and how it affects the chances of the top sides raising the trophy.

What did it predict?

Each team’s chances of reaching each round, based on one million simulations, are shown in the below table.

It predicts Australia is a 67.1% chance of getting out of their group, a 31.3% chance of getting past their first knock-out match, but is just a 1.0% chance of making the final and 0.3% chance of winning.

Canada’s chances are quite similar: a 78.9% chance of making out of their group (thanks to being a host nation), a 37.9% chance of getting past their first knock-out but just a 1.0% chance of making the final and 0.3% chance of winning.

New Zealand, on the other hand, has basically no chance of winning and only a 19.5% chance of making it out of their group.

Lastly, while England has the fourth highest overall chance of winning, it is notably lower than the other three favourites. This is at least in part due to their recent drop in rating after a loss to Japan in March.

The only teams with more than 10% chance of winning the trophy are Spain (15.8%), France (15.6%), Argentina (15.3%) and England (11.0%) – all members of the “group of nine” and the current top four rated sides.

But the estimated proportion of semi-final spots taken by these nine nations is 54.2% – notably lower than the historical 78.6%.

Further, the estimated proportion of finalists to come from these nine nations is 63.6%, while there is a 72.6% chance the champion comes from this group, both down from the historical 100% values. Of course, this is partly due to Italy’s failure to make the World Cup.

So, FIFA’s new format does reduce the chances of the historically strong nations progressing far into the tournament but not as much as they may have hoped.

Had FIFA increased the size of the groups to six teams, instead of increasing the number of groups, the new format would have done more to spread the chances – but doing so would have required at least 136 matches.

I would like to thank Dr Chris Bilson and Noah Stern for their help in producing this article. In addition, I would like to thank a very careful reviewer for important comments.

Steven Stern, Professor of Data Science, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If I say the word “hobby”, you’ll likely think of something you like to do in your spare time – gardening, walking, reading, knitting, model kits. Maybe it’s pottery classes, DIY projects or learning something new on YouTube. But what you may not know is many hobbies were originally forms of work that evolved into something to do in our spare time as manufacturing practices changed.

Crafts are one type of hobby that have always been popular. Many, like lacemaking, were originally jobs that women and children did, and some, like tablet weaving, have long histories that can be traced back to the bronze age.

In the UK, the Heritage Association advocates for traditional craft skills and supports makers. One of their roles is to monitor the risk of a craft becoming extinct in the UK through their red list. Many crafts they list are professions; however, there are some that are now thought of as hobbies as well.

Here are three crafts that are at risk of becoming extinct in the UK. Maybe one will pique your interest. If so, why not give it a go – you might even help keep a traditional skill alive.

Hobbies can bring joy, wellbeing and focus to our busy lives, but so many of us don’t have one. If you’re ready to replace scrolling with stitching, or hustle with horticulture, The Hobby Starter Kit (a new series from Quarter Life) will help you get going.

1. Nålbinding

Also called naalbinding, nalebinding and needlebinding, nålbinding is a looping technique used to create textiles without using knots. It’s similar to crochet or knitting but much older. The earliest known example dates back to the Neolithic period, around 5,000 years ago.

Examples of nålbinding have been found all over the world. There are over 200 different types of stitch, often associated with specific places or cultures. Many surviving examples in Britain come from Viking contexts. The Coppergate sock is the most famous. Discovered in York, it dates to around the tenth century.

Nålbinding is still popular in Scandinavia. However, in the UK it is only worked by a small number of enthusiasts. Nålbinding is relaxing craft and a good way of using up left over yarn from other wool crafts. You can make not only socks but hats, gloves, mittens and other accessories, from traditional pieces to modern designs.

If you are interested in learning more, check out the work of nålbinding expert and archaeologist Emma Boast.

2. Lacemaking

Lacemaking, often called bobbin lace to distinguish it from machine lace, requires a pillow, bobbins, thread (normally cotton), a pricking (the pattern) and pins.

The bobbins are worked in pairs and each pair is wound with thread. The pattern is drawn onto card that is pinned onto the pillow. The wound bobbins are hung in a set sequence at the top of the pattern and they are moved, interlacing and knotting the thread in particular ways. Patterns can range from the very simple to hugely complex.

Lace was popular during the 19th century. Queen Victoria was very keen on Honiton lace and had her wedding dress and veil made from it. Because it was handmade, lace was expensive, but this changed with the introduction and development of machine lace, much of which was made in Nottingham.

Bobbin lace is known around the world, but Bruges in Belgium and Malta are perhaps the best-known centres. It is thought to have arrived in the UK in the 16th century from either Flanders or Italy and became a way for women and children to earn money. Over time different techniques developed, many of which used to be practised in specific geographical areas. Honiton lace, for example, was made primarily in the English town in Devon and surrounding area of the same name.

There is also Bucks point and Bedfordshire, known a “midland laces”, which use midland-style bobbins. These have beads (spangles) to weigh them down and can be very elaborate pieces of art in their own right.

Lacemakers may have important celebrations engraved onto specific bobbins and there is much cultural history about otherwise unknown people memorialised in them. However, the technique that most people start with is Torchen, which uses midland bobbins to create geometric patterns.

Today, bobbin lace is championed by The Lace Guild and a small community of enthusiasts, who run workshops and give advice. The Lace Guild also has branches around the country welcoming starters and more experienced lace makers alike. If you are interested in learning more, The Lace Guild is a good place to start. You can also buy starter kits that you can expand as you develop your interest.

3. Straw working

Traditional straw working has been used for centuries. It is a plaiting technique that can make straw toys, accessories such as hats and baskets and straw marquetry – decorative designs used on furniture and objects. Today, straw making is primarily used to make ornaments for thatch roofs, with only 50 professionals and around 100 crafters remaining.

However, there are types of straw work more suitable for crafting. Straw plaiting has regional varieties of plait patterns that can be worked into ribbons, hats, baskets and other decorations. Corn dollies – decorative figures originally called harvest trophies – also have many regional variations that cover shape, size and type of plait or knot.

The Straw Craftsmen group promotes this craft in its many forms. If you are interested in exploring straw making more, their website has blogs, suppliers and other information. If you want to give it a go, independent craft shops sell starter kits and some crafting websites have free online step-by-step instructions.

As a textile archaeologist interested in traditional crafts and material culture, these three endangered hobbies particularly fascinate me. They are also relatively easy to try. Even if none of these become your long-term hobby, trying one might spark a new creative interest – and help keep these traditional skills alive for the future.

Alexandra Makin, Third Century Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From the air, you see it only through the constant jolt, tilt and shudder of the low-flying Cessna aircraft. The landscape of the Llanos de Moxos, northern Bolivia, appears as a disconnected patchwork of open grassland savannahs, forest islands and lakes.

It feels random, almost unreadable. Only gradually does the pattern resolve itself: raised causeways or paths fanning out to link the forest islands, and a dense, scattered web of canals threading the terrain. Slowly you realise it’s a structured network of intersecting lines, enclosures and roads – the imprint of past human design.

If you stand on the open savannah, there is almost nothing to see of this ancient network. The horizon feels open, with fires in the distance from local people burning pastures and clearing forest as dry season begins. The old geometry is still faintly perceptible, but you have to know how to look.

Step into the patches of forest and the canopy closes in. The earth softens underfoot and mosquitoes descend in relentless swarms. The sweat on your neck thickens into a humid film, carrying the familiar scent of suncream and the sharper, chemical note of DEET.

In the uneven light between the trees, the landscape dissolves into subtle rises and depressions. Against the rhythmic swish of machetes as our guides cut through the vegetation, your mind tries to piece together the fragments of structures into something coherent. Flying overhead doesn’t reveal anything about this forest area in the way that it does with the savannah. But fortunately recent advances in technology have transformed what we are able to see.

Archaeological explorations in this part of the world have been completely changed by lidar in the past couple of decades. Lidar maps an area from a plane or drone by bouncing rapid laser pulses off the Earth’s surface. Some of these pulses penetrate the forest canopy, reach the ground and reflect back to the sensor.

By measuring the return time, the system can generate highly precise three-dimensional models of the terrain. This allows you to strip away the camouflage of vegetation, making it possible to see what lies below the Amazonian forest for the first time.

It reveals the ancient Llanos de Moxos as not simply a collection of settlements, but an entire urbanised landscape. A large part in the south-east of this region belonged to the Casarabe culture, which dominated between around AD500 and 1400. It extends across 20,000km², which is roughly the size of New Jersey in the US.

The Casarabe organised into a hierarchy of four different sizes of settlements (those forest islands mentioned above). The biggest ones – the primary settlements – were as large as 3km² or 300 hectares. That’s enough space for over 400 football pitches, suggesting that they could have accommodated substantial numbers of people.

Welcome to our series on the great mysteries of archaeology. Viking explorers, Amazonian cities, artefacts from before civilisation. Archaeology may be all about the past, but it’s constantly shifting with every scientific discovery. This series will dig into some of the most fascinating debates in the field today.

These settlements connect along the raised causeways to smaller secondary and tertiary sites a number of kilometres away, all of which were permanently inhabited as opposed to empty ceremonial hubs. A fourth tier consists of groups of isolated mounds located out in the pampas, which likely correspond to dwelling areas occupied by farmers who would have worked the fields.

It’s not possible to show a lidar image of these four different types of sites interconnecting because they are too far apart for the resolution available, but the image below of a primary settlement known as Loma Cotoca shows the kinds of things we are now documenting.

It features some very impressive civic-ceremonial architecture: conical pyramids over 20 metres tall and U-shaped structures that may have acted as areas for public gatherings for speeches or ceremonies. These were built on top of man-made platforms rising as much as five metres off the ground and extending over 20 hectares. To be clear, this is all still hiding under the forest, but the lidar data reveals the shape, height and layout of what lies below.

The volume of earth moved to create this architecture would have rivalled – and in some cases exceeded – that of well known Andean monuments such as Akapana a few hundred miles to the south-west on the other side of the Andes. Akapana was the epicentre of the Tiwanaku empire that dominated the southern Andes between about AD600 and 1000.

Yet where monuments like Akapana were surrounded by classic, compact bounded cities with thousands of inhabitants, the Casarabe equivalent was completely different. This was dispersed, low-density living amid extensive green space – a form of tropical urbanism that challenges longstanding assumptions about this area as sparsely populated and only lightly modified. It invites comparison with other low-density tropical urban landscapes such as the Maya in central America and the Angkor in latter day Cambodia.

Equally important is the coherence of the Casarabe system. The settlements are rarely isolated, part of a tightly connected network with shared water-management systems. It was clearly all planned and coordinated, designed not only as living spaces but for integrating the population across the region.

We can see that the Casarabe were sustained by drained-field agriculture: the canals were dug to make the land viable for planting during the wet season. The most prominent crop was maize, but there was a remarkable diversity of other produce. This was all embedded within a landscape that was engineered through reservoirs and farm ponds, which helped the Casarabe sustain cultivation and maintain access to water through the dry season in this extremely seasonal environment.

Also very noticeable is the fact that all the major architectural features and burial sites are oriented north-north-west. This suggests these people may have been led by cosmology, with important celestial bodies or regions of the night sky serving as symbolic reference points – hinting at a world where infrastructure, settlement and belief were inseparable.

Rethinking the Amazon

The Casarabe culture covered much less than 1% of Amazonia, which is the whole tropical interior of South America, spanning close to half of the entire continent. For much of the 20th century, this vast area was viewed by archaeologists as an environment that was limiting for human existence.

Poor soils, scarce game, extreme El Niño floods and droughts, and the challenges of tropical disease were all thought to constrain human populations to small, wandering groups living off the land as best they could. Large, settled societies – let alone towns or cities – were considered unlikely, if not impossible.

This view began to shift in the late 20th century for several reasons. Archaeologists realised that Amazonian people had been domesticating a diversity of plants since the end of the Ice Age. They manufactured some of the earliest ceramics in the Americas, and also devised soils known as Amazonian Dark Earths, which combined charcoal, bone and waste materials with the existing poor-quality soil to make it fertile enough for widespread farming.

It also became apparent that just like the Casarabe people, many other cultures across Amazonia had reclaimed vast expanses of seasonally flooded savannahs over several thousand years to create raised and drained field systems.

These discoveries were evidence of long-term settlement and landscape management far beyond what was previously thought possible. It meant Amazonia was not simply a backdrop to human activity; much of the landscape was shaped over the last 13 millennia by the people who lived there.

Enter lidar

Like lasers in the sky, lidar technology has accelerated this transformation in our understanding. The digital process feels near-magical, a “vegetation removal algorithm” that reveals the secrets below.

In practice, however, working with lidar in Amazonia is anything but straightforward. Running such a project here, as I have done, can feel like one of the greatest emotional rollercoasters in field archaeology. It’s all anticipation, frustration and sudden revelation – only comparable, perhaps, with shipwreck exploration.

Depending on what technology is available and most suitable for exploring a particular area, I’ve worked with lidar attached to drones, aeroplanes and helicopters. I’ve learned through trial and error that the technology is only as effective as the logistics and personalities behind it – above all on one occasion when we were trying to integrate a Hungarian lidar sensor with a Brazilian drone.

Lidar can perform beautifully one day and fail the next, depending on the equipment, weather, terrain, batteries, communications and the sheer difficulty of operating in remote Amazonian conditions.

Flights must be carefully planned in remote areas with limited infrastructure, where convective clouds, smoke from fires, wind and even vultures riding thermals can disrupt data acquisition. You have to arrange fuel in advance and improvise landings wherever a safe clearing can be found. Here’s our team refuelling a lidar helicopter in the football field of a small village in Acre state, western Brazil:

You also have to do constant troubleshooting with the technology, such as making sure it’s calibrated correctly and that the data from different flight paths all aligns. What appears in the final images as a seamless “removal” of the forest is, in reality, the product of improvisation, negotiation and persistence.

But given all these challenges, it makes the first successful images all the more powerful when they finally appear. The reward is that we’re finally finding the “lost civilisation” that explorers like Percy Fawcett were searching for a century ago, but by cajoling a drone rather than battering through jungle.

Incidentally, this technology also has important uses beyond archaeology. It can help people to locate and harvest crops like rubber or açaí palm fruits without having to clear so much rainforest. It is also used by pioneering projects such as Amazonia Revelada, which helps Indigenous and traditional people of the Amazon to prove their historic presence within an area to ward off modern commercial interests like loggers or farmers, while also protecting the living history and nature embedded in these landscapes.

Other lidar discoveries

Lidar surveys by French and Ecuadorian archaeologists have revealed that the Llanos de Moxos was certainly not the only example of large-scale, highly integrated society in Amazonia. The Upano Valley, which covers some 300-600km² on the mountainous forest of the Ecuadorian eastern flanks of the Andes, offers another striking example – this time from between about 500BC and AD600–700.

Lidar discovery areas

In Upano, archaeologists have been able to map a vast network of settlements connected by extensive road systems, with large platforms and clusters of buildings arranged in organised layouts across a broad area.

What stands out is not just the scale – thousands of structures – but the rigour of the planning. The settlements didn’t just grow randomly, but as part of a deliberate design: we see straight lines of flat-topped platforms laid out in repeating rows and connected by straight paths that cut cleanly across the landscape, as you can see below.

Again, this is not urbanism in the conventional sense of dense, continuous occupation. There would have been none of the vertical stacking of buildings that you’d get in European settlements, and there were also green spaces between platform complexes – much more like a forest city.

Like the Casarabe region, this is a distributed settlement pattern that is both open and highly structured, but the arrangement is much more compact. This reflects the limited flat space available on the upper terraces of the Upano River, which rise up to 100 metres above the surrounding landscape.

Elsewhere in Amazonia, we see more variations. In the Upper Xingu of central Brazil, interconnected settlements were arranged around a shared ceremonial and road network, again suggesting a regionally coordinated social world.

Further north, the Tairona people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in present-day Colombia built terraced stone towns in the mountains, linked by paved paths. This was a form of urbanism shaped entirely by the demands of steep, high-altitude terrain. Below is a lidar image of one area in this region, with the platforms that would have housed the settlements marked in yellow. Below that, you can see what the platforms look like.

In western Amazonia, Acre adds another important variation. From around AD1–1000, people built large ditched enclosures, or geoglyphs, mainly in the south-eastern part of this region along the upper Purus River. These were square, circular, hexagonal or octagonal mounds, often 1-3 hectares in size, with ditches up to four metres deep. These were probably used as ceremonial gathering places rather than permanent settlements.

After about AD1000, these were followed by what we call circular mound villages, occupied until around AD 1650–1700. They featured rings of mounds around central plazas and straight roads radiating out like the rays of the Sun, often built to align with the four main compass points. These “Sun villages” were true settlements, and formed interconnected networks across the southern rim of Amazonia. You can see an example in the lidar image below.

Taken together, these discoveries fundamentally reshape our understanding of Amazonia. We now see a mosaic of managed landscapes, engineered environments and, in some cases, city-scale societies. What unites them is not a shared blueprint but a shared impulse: the organisation of people, space and movement across large landscapes in ways that were deliberate, durable and distinctly their own.

To stress, Amazonia was not uniformly dense or urban. It supported a diversity of types of settlements, from dispersed networks like Moxos to tighter grids like Upano, each of them adapted to local ecological conditions. They shared a low-density urbanism, in the sense of large, interconnected populations without the density of classic cities.

What we still don’t know

How were these societies organised politically and socially? How did they interact with variations in the climate and environment, ranging from the heavy rainfalls and droughts caused by El Niño to rivers forging new routes that could move them away from a settlement within a few generations?

What, if any, connections existed with mountain societies in the Andes? And perhaps most importantly, since both the Casarabe and Upano ceased to build monuments after 1492, what led to their transformation or decline before the arrival of Europeans?

There is active debate between archaeologists over whether these societies transformed because of environmental stress, internal political change, or shifts in things like trade routes or migration.

In the Llanos de Moxos, one possibility is that a prolonged period of climate change affected the Casarabe water-management systems that were so critical to feeding this thriving society. In the Upano Valley, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes may have disrupted settlements and agriculture, although it’s unclear whether that could have led to the area being abandoned.

It seems likely that as we uncover new things, it will reveal more and more integration between different societies. What we are seeing now in Amazonia is much like looking at a satellite image of a country at night: bright, isolated clusters of light – cities that appear disconnected. But as we continue to expand our coverage and fill in the gaps, I think this will change.

What now appear as isolated clusters may also resolve into extensive networks. For example a study across the southern rim of Amazonia has predicted that the kinds of settlement mounds that have been identified so far are likely to occur across about 400,000km², supporting an estimated regional population of roughly 500,000 to 1 million people in the era before the Europeans arrived.

Entire regions may emerge as previously unrecognised centres of population and landscape management. This could be particularly so for the Llanos de Moxos. The whole area covers as much as 200,000km², depending on where you draw the boundaries, stretching into Brazil and even Peru. It is often divided into several apparently distinct cultural regions — the Casarabe (aka the monumental mound region), and then two others called the platform ridge and zanjas (ditches) regions.

As lidar coverage expands and more archaeological work is conducted, we may begin to understand how these societies were economically specialised. We know, for example, that the fortified villages of the zanjas region had fish weirs spanning hundreds of miles that were capable of capturing vast quantities of migratory fish. The platform ridge region consisted of large drained fields, which could potentially produce surpluses of maize. It is conceivable that these belonged to a broader network that supported the more complex Casarabe centres.

Or perhaps – who knows – the relationships were more fluid and reciprocal. For now, the question remains open. But it is precisely this possibility of deep regional integration that lidar is beginning to bring into view. In time, we may even begin to identify Casarabe outposts scattered across the Llanos de Moxos.

What happens next

There’s still a huge amount to be done with lidar. Vast areas, particularly in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon – remain unexplored. One recent study suggested that there could be more than 10,000 more urban structures of the kind I’ve been describing still hidden throughout Amazonia, all of them dating from pre-European times.

Looking ahead 20 years, it is likely that our map of Amazonia will look very different. One promising technology is satellite-based lidar systems, which could provide broader, though less detailed, datasets across large areas. Advances in machine learning are also beginning to help us identify archaeological features within massive datasets, speeding up a labour-intensive process.

Against this, there are time pressures in some places. Llanos de Moxos, for instance, is unfortunately in rapid transition. The very ground that holds the traces of ancient networks is being transformed by mechanised agriculture and large-scale terraforming for rice cultivation and pastures.

We also need to keep reminding ourselves that lidar is only the first step. What really matters is how it’s brought together with other lines of evidence. Most sites discovered by lidar have yet to be excavated, so we’ll have to do much of that, looking for everything from bones and plants to ceramics and weapons.

So far, most excavation has been in the Casarabe area of the Llanos de Moxos. The reason, for instance, that we know the culture lived primarily on maize was through the discovery of over 60 human skeletons, which underwent carbon isotope analysis. The same research paper also analysed excavated duck bones to show that the Casarabe were feeding them maize too, suggesting animal domestication in a continent that was not generally known for it.

Another fascinating Casarabe find is a single buried skeleton who may have been a leader, because he had a collar of jaguar teeth around his neck. He was also wearing ear pieces made of armadillo shell, studded with mottled blue stones called sodalite – it’s not clear what these were for.

We’ll also need to obtain more precise dates for key events using techniques like radiocarbon dating, and more pinpoint accurate environmental data to help support theories about ancient changes to the climate – as opposed to the wider regional information we’ve tended to rely on until now. Lake sediments are great environmental archives, preserving evidence of things like vegetation change and landscape disturbance.

Also important is comparing genetic data from excavated bones with people who live in these areas today – in dialogue and collaboration with local communities whose histories, memories and knowledge are essential to understanding these landscapes.

It’s all a question of how lidar is brought together with all this other evidence. The most convincing reconstructions will come from the convergence of all of these. One further major challenge ahead, however, will be to bridge the gap between scientific reconstructions and how past peoples understood and inhabited their world. Archaeology is increasingly rich in data, but we have to relate it to lived experience.

That is no easy feat, but it is essential if we are to move from mapping past worlds to understanding them. Crucially, Amazonia – with its rich, still-vibrant Indigenous societies and ethnographic record – offers an exceptional opportunity to do this, providing rare continuities through which to anchor and critically engage our interpretations of the past.

Lessons for today

My own sense is that we will move towards a view of Amazonia not as an exception, in line with the old view that the people lived within an untouched paradise, but as part of a broader pattern of human-environment interaction. The rainforest will be understood not only as a biological system, but as a historical one – shaped, in part, by the people who lived within it.

This does not mean the Amazonian people who simply lived “in harmony” with nature; the evidence points to something more interesting. Although Amazonian societies developed complex, and at times intensive, forms of land use, the evidence consistently shows that they often did so while maintaining continuous forest cover. Far from the large-scale deforestation that we might assume was necessary for such elaborate forms of human life, their practices created mosaics of managed forest, gardens, orchards, wetlands and settlement areas.

We know partly from lake sediment data that people enriched the forests with species that provided food, building materials, medicines and other resources, from açaí and cacao to palms, cinchona and copaiba. The fact that some of these species endure today suggests that past land use left lasting ecological legacies.

In the context of today’s climate crisis, the long-term balance that these people achieved offers a powerful lesson: it is possible to sustain complex societies without destroying the forest, if land use is guided by principles that integrate ecological knowledge, cultural values and a commitment to the continuity of the living landscape.

What lies beneath the Amazon is not just a hidden past. It is a reminder that even the most seemingly untouched landscapes can carry deep histories, waiting – sometimes just beneath our feet – to be revealed.

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José Iriarte, Professor of Archaeology, University of Exeter

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Americans typically commemorate the nation’s birthday with hot dogs and hamburgers.

Instead, I think we should mark the 250th anniversary of the United States with a hearty bowl of pepper pot stew.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, pepper pot stew was a popular street food. A dish of Afro-Caribbean origin, it was typically made with tripe and other cheap cuts of meat mixed with vegetables, hot peppers and other spices.

Enslaved Africans likely brought the dish to Philadelphia from the Caribbean in the 18th century, when the two regions were tightly connected through trade.

As a historian of women and labor in the early republic, I have learned how important impoverished and ordinary individuals were to the country’s founding. Cooking and preparing food, spinning and weaving cloth, washing and mending clothes, and caring for the sick were just some of the kinds of labor that supported the fledgling nation. Much of this work was carried out by marginalized women who are often overlooked in national commemorations.

One such woman I’ve researched represents both the possibilities and sharp limitations of freedom in that era. She was a pepper pot seller in Philadelphia known to us only as Dina.

Hiding in plain sight

Pennsylvania, like many northern states, responded to the Declaration of Independence’s rhetorical commitment to liberty by enacting a gradual emancipation law.

On the day the law went into effect in 1780, however, its provisions freed no one.

Children born to enslaved mothers before March 1, 1780, would remain enslaved for the rest of their lives. Children born after that date remained in bondage until they were 28 years old. So-called “slaves for life,” the status Dina held, would have had no hope of gaining legal freedom.

In the face of this grim reality, some, like Dina, seized freedom for themselves.

She slipped away from her enslaver, Rev. James Anderson, in Middletown, Chester County, sometime in 1785 or 1786 and made her way to nearby Philadelphia.

Almost all of the information we have about Dina comes from a notice Anderson placed in a local newspaper offering a reward for her return. Each detail is stained with his opinions about the woman he held as property. Anderson described Dina as “lusty,” a word that can be interpreted in a number of ways.

White people generally held insidious ideas about Black women’s sexuality in this period. In the 18th century, lusty also meant insolent, which might have conveyed Anderson’s frustrations with Dina’s unwillingness to accept his authority over her. The word also could refer to health and vigor, so it’s possible Anderson was describing Dina’s physique and general affect.

Nonetheless, the advertisement exemplifies the paradox of liberty and enslavement at the nation’s founding.

It is impossible to know how familiar Dina was with Philadelphia, or if she had friends or family there when she arrived. She might have simply decided that her best chance of avoiding recapture was in an urban area where she could blend in with the free Black community that was growing rapidly due to migration from neighboring states and people manumitted by their enslavers. Dina might have imagined she could tuck herself into the hustle and bustle of this incredibly dense city more easily than in a thinly populated rural area.

After Dina got to Philadelphia, she made an interesting decision. Instead of finding more discrete employment, such as working as a domestic, she supported herself by selling pepper pot stew in one of the city’s markets. According to Anderson, she had been seen “numerous times” over the past 18 months.

One of many Black women selling the dish, Dina could essentially hide in plain sight from Anderson and anyone who hoped to collect the US$4 reward he offered.

It is unclear how long she was able to evade Anderson, but the fact that she maintained her freedom for at least a year and a half is remarkable. Philadelphia’s vagrancy docket is full of examples of freedom seekers who were apprehended almost immediately.

Dina’s ultimate fate is unknown. After Anderson’s three newspaper notices, she disappears from the archive. She may have been captured and returned to Anderson. Or it’s possible that working as a pepper pot seller allowed her to gain her freedom permanently.

Opportunity in Philly’s informal economy

Spiraling war debt and inflation during the 1780s fell heavily on the neediest Americans. In Philadelphia, impoverished people often subsisted on bread. Affordable, hearty street food like pepper pot stew would have offered important nutrients and perhaps pleasure from a good meal. By providing cheap, nourishing food for working Philadelphians, pepper pot sellers could be seen as participating in a kind of informal mutual aid.

However, city officials characterized some market activities during this period as “riotous and disorderly” and imposed stricter regulations around when and where pepper pot sellers could operate. Boisterous gatherings of Black and white working-class people might have seemed potentially threatening or disruptive to city leaders.

Dina’s role as an informal trader echoed across the 19th century. Many Black women took up the pepper pot trade, and some earned decent incomes. These women, in turn, contributed to a range of charitable, religious and abolitionist organizations that formed the backbone of a vibrant Black Philadelphia. They also helped support their families, even in an economic order that devalued Black women’s labor.

As the United States celebrates its semiquincentennial this year, many Americans will be reminded of the stories of popular Revolution-era figures such as Paul Revere or George Washington.

But I’ll be thinking of Dina and the countless other Black women who sold pepper pot stew on the streets of Philadelphia, the nation’s first capital. To me, they symbolize the fragile hope, terrible failures and tireless quest for true freedom that defined the founding era.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Carolyn Zola, Lecturer, Department of History, California State University, East Bay

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Since her official debut in 1959, Supergirl has struggled to emerge from the shadow of her cousin, Superman. So it’s a bold move that the second cinematic release in the newly rebooted DC Universe will be Supergirl.

Milly Alcock first appeared as Supergirl in the epilogue to Superman (2025). Her Supergirl is a brash “party girl” – an immediate contrast to David Corenswet’s squeaky clean rendition of Superman. Based on the comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021) by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, she is a traumatised character, dealing with the destruction of her home planet of Krypton. “I have no people,” Supergirl laments in the trailer.

However, Supergirl was not always so introspective. The character and her alter ego, Kara Zor-El, first appeared in 1938, to cash in on the popularity of Superman. She was a preppy teenager who played a supporting helpmate role, allowing Superman to display his paternal side.

Publishers DC Comics also flirted with the concept of Superwoman. A 1943 story had Superman’s girlfriend, reporter Lois Lane, dream that she was Superman’s female counterpart. In her book Supergirl: Contemporary Feminist Reboot of a Hapless DC Comic Helpmate (2022), Batya Weinbaum suggests this moment reflected the “changing position of women in wartime”.

In a 1947 story, Lois Lane, Superwoman! from Superman issue #45, Lane is convinced she has superpowers, only to discover she is the victim of a ruse where Superman is using his influence to simulate the experience. This prompts her frustrated exclamation: “You men who try to keep women weak and defenceless – I hate you!”

Lane may well have been addressing the DC editors who published her adventures. In his cultural history of comic book heroines, comic book historian Mike Madrid outlines an excerpt from 1950s-era DC Comics’ editorial policy which reluctantly accepts stories featuring women, but only if the female characters are “secondary in importance”.

The ever-changing Supergirl

Nevertheless, as Supergirl developed through the 1960s there were signs that she could develop an identity of her own.

Two years after her secret arrival on Earth, in issue #285 of Action Comics, Superman finally reveals Supergirl to the world. She appears in public in an act that cultural historian Gerard Beritela interprets as her “emergence from male domination”. But ultimately Madrid’s take on this era is that “she is a girl, not a woman, and therein lies the secret of her appeal”. Supergirl isn’t a threatening Superwoman who might develop ideas of her own.

This was the model followed in the 1984 attempt to bring Supergirl to cinema screens. In his DVD commentary, director Jeannot Szwarc discusses his intention to convey Supergirl’s grace and intelligence.

Whereas Superman (played by Christopher Reeve) was introduced in 1978 by the same producers with a daring rescue of a plummeting helicopter, Helen Slater’s Supergirl performs an aerial ballet and frolics with woodland creatures. In comics, Supergirl fared even worse. The character was killed off in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline, partly because of her threat to Superman’s unique status as “the last son of Krypton”, and partly because of the film’s disappointing box office takings.

Various incarnations of Supergirl have been explored following the obliteration of the original version. This regular rewriting has encouraged creators to experiment.

Danny Fingeroth describes a 1996 example, when fellow comic book writer Peter David developed a version of Supergirl to explore Jewish identity, revising the character as an Earth-bound angel based on the concept of Shekhinah, or the divine feminine. This Supergirl’s stories integrated themes of redemption and spirituality.

In comic books, however, death is never permanent. Kara Zor-El and Supergirl were resurrected in 2004 in The Supergirl from Krypton. There was an attempt to add nuance to the character, with a greater emphasis on the trauma she suffered from witnessing the loss of her home planet. But this was rather undermined by various revealing costumes clearly designed to satisfy the male gaze.

It wasn’t until 2015 and the six season Supergirl television show that creators began to deal head on with the character’s agency. Another updated origin story saw Kara (played by Melissa Benoist) being sent ahead to help her baby cousin acclimatise to life on Earth. But after her spaceship arrives late, she has no clear purpose, finding an already adult and established Superman.

In the pilot episode she finally strikes out on her own with the dramatic rescue of an airliner, assuming the mantle of Supergirl. In a show that employed several female writers and became known for its positive representation of LGBTQ+ issues, problematic topics such as Supergirl’s infantilising name and costume were directly addressed.

Kara refuses to wear revealing versions of the costume from the character’s comic book past. In discussions with her employer, CatCo Worldwide Media CEO Cat Grant, she is told: “I’m a girl. And your boss. And powerful. And rich, and hot, and smart. So, if you perceive Supergirl as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?” Significantly, Grant is portrayed by actor Calista Flockhart, known for the Ally McBeal series – a show that sparked debates about feminism and women in the workplace in the late 1990s.

The 2021 comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow follows the young alien Ruthye Marye Knoll, who recruits Supergirl to seek revenge after her father is murdered. The story is told from Ruthye’s point of view, the fractured narrative lending the story a fatalistic quality. The narration also emphasises the mythic quality of Supergirl, “who lost everything and kept walking”.

It remains to be seen how closely the film will follow the philosophical source material. Meanwhile, in the pages of the latest DC comic book, writer and artist Sophie Campbell has returned to the brighter tone of the 1960s version of the character, merged with the sensibilities of the 2015 television series. The many interpretations of Supergirl continue to reveal the character’s durability and versatility.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

John Caro, Principal Lecturer, Film and Media, University of Portsmouth

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Chinese food heritage is diverse and vast, and embodies the distinct geographical and historical traces of various cultural identities.

As migrants in Australia, Chinese food features prominently in our everyday lives. Jing grew up eating regional cuisine from northern China; Wilfred grew up eating Cantonese food; Catherine grew up in Singapore enjoying home cooked Chinese food with a Eurasian twist.

The ways in which we understand, approach, enjoy and cook Chinese food are different, and we set out to find the role of food in the lives of other migrants of Chinese ancestry.

Tracing food heritage

We talked to Chinese-Australians between the ages of 18 to 40 to learn about how their food heritages have guided them to navigate and adapt to Australian lives.

They spoke to us about incorporating non-traditional Chinese ingredients, new ways of cooking and sourcing cooking equipment.

In their Australian kitchens, they experimented with the recipes they learnt from their families and those they interpret as “Chinese” cuisine.

They were concerned about authenticity, health and taste to varying degrees in the Chinese dishes they cooked, and spoke about how food heritage helped intergenerational families connect.

Fei* is ethnically Chinese and was born in Indonesia. She has lived in Australia for the past 12 years. She told us:

Whenever I go back to Indonesia, my auntie would cook for us, so I would ask a lot of old recipes […] I love their response because they will always say, when you were a child, you liked to eat this food. They will give you some feedback, but they’ll say, there’s a new way of cooking this.

Fei’s cooking was co-developed with family members, even when they are living in different countries. The art of cooking becomes a way for her family connect, despite distance.

Sally* migrated to Australia about nine years ago from Yunan Province. She shared a poignant story of the health of the older members of her family:

Even my grandmother [who] had Alzheimer’s and she barely remember who am I, but when she had – before I hang up the phone call, she’s like, remember to eat vegetable.

For Sally’s grandmother, even in old age, food was an expression of care.

Food facilitates new understandings of intergenerational family members – even those who have passed away.

Lynn* is an undergraduate student who migrated to Australia as a baby. She describes herself as “ethnically Chinese, but culturally Singaporean”, and told us how she got to know her grandfather through her father’s cooking:

I actually have never tried my grandpa’s chilli crab. I didn’t know that he actually made chilli crab until I think it was like two years [after] he’d passed when my dad made this recipe. […] I’m not sure how similar it was to the original, but it was pretty good.

Lynn’s father’s cooking his father’s chilli crab recipe as a way of honouring him and keeping his memory alive.

New habits

Food heritage is the phrase for the traditional cuisines which define our cultural identities and includes ingredient sourcing, food preparation and food consumption.

Food heritage is not static. It changes as migrants adapt to life in Australia.

Australia’s rich multicultural food cultures create transcultural food experiences for our Chinese-Australians.

Sally spoke to us about her and her mother melding Italian and Chinese ingredients:

If I cook dishes that require Yunnan’s ham, I use Italian prosciutto ham to replace it. It tastes really similar to Yunnan’s ham. My mum does that as well. She likes to get Italian Deli ham, smoked cured bacon, and then she’ll think it tastes like the actual thing from Yunnan.

Rong* came to Australia about 10 years ago from Shandong Province. She told us how she cooks for her daughter who loves noodles:

I need to bring something healthier to her table, and then I was like, okay, I’m not going to use the noodles, the Chinese noodles. I’m going to use pasta noodles, which is low GI, healthier. So, I just tried to figure different kind of ways of the noodles, not only Chinese noodles, but also Italian noodles, Vietnamese noodles, like pho. So all those kinds of things, and she loved them.

Rong also told us that she had to change the way she cooks because her apartment has an induction stove rather than a gas stove.

Although gas and induction stove tops are both common in China, certain dishes such as stir-fry are perceived to taste better in a hot wok on a gas stove.

“Soggy food”, according to many of our participants, is the result of induction stoves and flat pans rather than woks. Rong even told us that now, when she returns to China, she does not know how to cook in a Chinese kitchen with a gas stove.

Adapting to Australia

Food culture, is central to migrant adaptation, acculturation and wellbeing.

By better understanding the evolving nature of food heritage practices in Australia, we can better understand how migrants navigate Australia creatively while these transcultural connections provide an anchor for settlement and belonging.

*Names have been changed.

Catherine Gomes, Professor in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University; Jing Qi, Associate Professor, Social Equity Research Centre, RMIT University, and Wilfred Yang Wang, Senior Lecturer in Media & Communications Studies, The University of Melbourne

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We see glass objects every day, and often don’t think much about them. Mass-produced glass has become so cheap we barely think about the things it allows us to do.

In fact, glassblowing has a fascinating history dating back to the late first century BCE.

Roman experimentation with recycling glass permanently changed everyday life, facilitating a vast expansion of trade and economic activity.

And the way glassblowing was done during the Roman era is still very similar to the way we do it today.

The old ways

Of course, glass was invented long before glassblowing.

The earliest glass beads were made in Ancient Mesopotamia in the second half of the third millennium BCE (around 4,500–4,000 years ago).

The first closed glass vessels followed about a thousand years later (around 1500–1400 BCE) in Mesopotamia and nearby Ancient Egypt.

These early glass vessels were moulded, and the closed containers were made with a process called core-forming.

This involved sticking a plug made of animal dung, clay, mud and sand onto the end of an iron rod. Molten glass the consistency of treacle (and over 1,000°C), was poured over the plug. After it was worked, decorated, and cooled, the hardened plug had to be scraped out manually.

Later vessels were made with casting techniques (which also involved heating glass and laying it atop a mould). This also required long periods of working, and laborious grinding and polishing. Glass was only for the wealthy as this process took tens of hours to complete.

Invention of a new technology

Glassblowing – invented towards the end of the first century BCE in the coastal Levant (in what is now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan) – cut all this down to mere minutes.

The earliest evidence we have is from modern-day Jerusalem which, in the final quarter of the first century BCE, was ruled by Roman Jewish client kings Herod the Great and Herod Archelaus on behalf of Rome’s Emperor Augustus.

Our earliest glassblowing evidence in Jerusalem suggests furnace workers were experimenting by heating the ends of glass tubes to rework them. Scholars have suggested this was an experiment in glass recycling.

One day, someone blew into that tube and changed the industry – and history – forever. You could now make a glass container quickly and comparatively easily.

Glassworkers spread the technique as they travelled

Ancient glassblowers travelled all over the Mediterranean, and in the first century BCE, the Levant was a hotbed of glass technology and experimentation.

Some of the only named glassworkers we know from that period, such as Ennion, were Greek-speaking Syrians.

Glassworkers and their products soon spread to the rest of the Mediterranean, wherever the Romans were.

Glass vessels were frequently traded or gifted beyond the Roman frontier, with people as widespread as northern Scotland, Scandinavia, the Sahara and even China.

Blown glass vessels became readily available to most of society.

The Greek historian Strabo tells us (not long after the discovery of glassblowing) in Rome, a glass cup could cost as little as one copper coin.

Olive oil and wine were produced in large terracotta amphorae, which were stocked in Roman shops.

Glass containers allowed people to buy smaller quantities at a time, as they could have glass containers filled at shops and taverns.

And because the surface of glass is inert, it does not affect the taste of food or drink – meaning you can store things for longer periods. Most ancient pottery was unglazed (which resulted in seepage), and metals could affect taste.

Roman writers Petronius and Pliny the Elder both share a fanciful story in which the imagined discovery of an unbreakable glass is brought to Rome’s Emperor Tiberius. Tiberius has the man killed, fearing economic collapse as gold and silver would not be as useful or pretty as glass.

Like us, the Romans stored glass jars and bottles on shelves and in cupboards. We can find the vessels where they fell after the eruption of Vesuvius, in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The easiest vessel to make in glass is a small perfume or cosmetic flask. Roman perfumes were oil and fat-based, and having an effective spoil-free container made perfumes and cosmetics more affordable.

Glass changed the way people interacted with food and drink, as well as their personal care and hygiene. It also transformed domestic comfort, as glass windows could provide draught-free light in Roman homes and baths.

Roman art figurines and everyday objects were commonly made into the shape of animals, plants and humans (and sometimes body parts). While simple vessels were most common, Roman glass also got weird and kitschy at times, featuring things such as gladiator fight scenes or a monkey playing the pan-pipes.

Some moulds were made of stone or ceramic and lined with a thin layer of soot (usually from a lamp). This meant the hot glass bubble could be blown inside the mould, and the soot would prevent sticking.

Mythological scenes and themes also featured heavily.

Some vessels featured the equivalent of live, laugh, love in the form of ancient Greek phrases such as katachaire kai euphrainou (rejoice and enjoy yourself!) or euphrainou epi toutoi eph hoi parei (delight in that at which you are present).

Flasks could be shaped like fish or fruit, such as dates and grapes. Presumably, these were the ancient equivalents of the tomato-shaped sauce container at a diner or the plastic soy sauce fish at a sushi chain.

These point to things the Romans found entertaining (and glassworkers thought sellable).

Thomas J. Derrick, Gale Research Fellow in Ancient Glass and Material Culture, Macquarie University

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