The wildest, weirdest backyard discoveries we’ve ever heard of

In the run-up to America’s 250th birthday, it’s worth remembering that history doesn’t just live in museums or monuments. The backyard, it turns out, is less a patch of private property and more a layered archive. If you could slice your yard like a cross-section of cake, each layer would tell a different story. 

We’ve rounded up some of the most surprising finds in the 50 states, from every level of soil, plus some oddball discoveries, just because.

Long before zoning laws or picket fences, before even the idea of “America,” there were megafauna roaming New York. And sometimes, traces of them are waiting to be uncovered.

In one backyard in Orange County, New York, a homeowner noticed something protruding from the soil. It turned out to be a remarkably well-preserved mastodon jaw, along with toe and rib fragments. The animal, an Ice Age behemoth, had lived roughly 13,000 years ago. A team from the State University swooped in to help identify and preserve this treasure.

Elsewhere, in Boulder, Colorado, landscapers digging a fish pond uncovered a cache of 13,000-year-old stone tools. These 83 implements, shaped perfectly to fit the human hand, still carried traces of the animals they were used to butcher. The prevailing theory is a group of nomadic hunters buried their tools for safekeeping and simply never came back. Their forgotten loss is our historic gain.

Move up a few inches in the soil timeline, and there’s ample evidence of indigenous people who lived on the land long before it was divided into deeds.

For instance, an Oregon middle-school math teacher clearing his backyard berry bushes noticed the ground was unusually wet and dug out what turned out to be a natural spring. While at work, he kept tossing aside cool black rocks he’d dredged up. Fourteen of them. Only later did he realize they were obsidian tools, thousands of years old.

Archaeologists determined that the tools likely traveled about 80 miles from volcanic quarries in the Cascade Mountains. It seems his brambly backyard was a major waypoint of the pre-historic Pacific Northwest.

Dig a little higher, and you begin to encounter the artifacts of a young, turbulent United States.

In Virginia, landscapers working on a residential project thought they’d turned up a heavy rock. They rinsed it off and realized it was something else entirely: a metal sphere, almost certainly a Civil War cannonball. The reaction was equal parts awe and alarm (19th-century cannonballs can be explosive). Authorities were called in to handle this find with care.

In Saugus, Massachusetts, a backyard revealed a trove of post-Civil War history. The remnants of Pompey Mansfield’s home were unearthed. Aka King Pompey and previously enslaved, Mansfield was one of the first Black property owners in colonial New England. He used stones from a nearby riverbank to build his house, which hosted Black Election Day celebrations.

Squeamish much? Sometimes yards yield straight-up creepy stuff. Near San Antonio, a long-time homeowner digging in his yard unearthed a cache of roughly 100 human teeth. While thoughts of a CSI episode might spring to mind, the explanation was actually less gruesome. The home previously belonged to a dentist more than 70 years ago, and in some folk traditions, burying teeth was thought to bring good luck. Whether it worked is anyone’s guess.

We’ll leave you with something more “aww”-inspiring: A California couple, when renovating their backyard, uncovered a time capsule buried in 1961 beneath a playhouse. It contained a letter from the dad who built the play structure for his daughter. Imagine the couple’s surprise when that very girl, now all grown up, happened to come by, visiting her childhood home and her elementary school to stir up happy memories. The couple were able to hand off the time capsule and learned just how meaningful it was. The dad had died when his daughter was just eight years old, making the letter all the more precious. That’s the kind of buried treasure we like!