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Overview: Explore a mystery‑driven archaeological puzzle website that blends real excavations, artifact photography, and immersive UX into a fully shrouded mail‑order adventure.

Puzzles from the Past is a mail order puzzle experience of archaeological intrigue. Each experience is a mystery to solve inspired by real life excavations, collectible artifact replicas, and historical materials authored by anthropology/archaeology experts.

The entire experience is wrapped in lore and education, truths mixed with fabrications, and just enough clues to solve the mystery at hand. And this time I promise nobody will get squished by a boulder 🪨! Read on adventurer, your quest awaits!

Background

Dig into the past with a team of archaeologists, historians, explorers, and ghost hunters as Puzzles From the Past unearths an excavation site’s history and delivers an experience that will educate and enthrall.

A mail order adventure

Using a similar mail‑order format as the Mysterious Package Company and Curious Correspondence Club, Puzzles From the Past is inspired by real archaeology, artifacts, and stories of past civilizations

When you join an adventure (or send one to a friend), a series of packages will arrive on your doorstep on a weekly cadence. Each delivery includes an assortment of pictures, documents, travel logs, diaries, artifacts, personal belongings, and other items of interest from an active archaeological site.

Lanzon spear tip recovered from an excavation in Spain.

The clues push you into the past where the roots of a mystery originated—though things aren’t always what they seem.

Real clues, real archaeology

As clues are uncovered during the excavation, one will experience a first hand view of a real historic site shared through the ongoing activity of a team of experts. Your job is to piece together the clues and uncover the truth.

Each adventure is based upon a real site and the history is interwoven into the mystery. There is a dash of fiction to ensure the story ties together, and also because there are always gaps in our understanding of a specific location or item.

With the final delivery of each adventure, a reveal is included. This reveal identifies the line between fact and fiction.

Design and business goals

Build—A tantalizing mail order storefront using actual archaeological projects–wrapped in professional narrative and mystery–complete with replica artifacts found in Belize, Spain, Greece, and Portugal.
Create—Craft a landing page for each adventure experience with actual historic data, contributing archaeologist/anthropologist bios, endorsements, and supporting (though perhaps exaggerated… or maybe not… 😉) narratives.
Design—Make art and assets to complement each experience, without spoiling the actual experience. Everything should be shrouded in mystery!
Ship—Because each experience varies in weight and quantity, I developed rules to calculate payments for shipping such a wide variety of pieces across multiple mailings.
Catalog—Gather artifacts found across the various dig sites into a collection. Categorize and tag each object to allow filtering throughout the site.
Search—Include full search capabilities.

UI/UX design results

The completed site has a relatively small footprint: a few experiences, a store, catalog of artifacts, and some supporting lore. It’s important to have a degree of immersion, clarity, pacing, and narrative tension.

The content itself was meticulously authored by several archaeologists and anthropologists who possess a wonderful flair for the Indiana Jones-vibe kind of archaeology.

The Visuals

The website has a vintage explorer or museum vibe. The visuals lean heavily on maps, expedition photos, journals, and other supporting elements.

Some items were photographed by myself in‑house, while other, more precious finds were provided by the Puzzles team, and the rest is archival museum imagery from Unsplash and collaged together.

Iconography

The icons and graphic elements are inspired by actual artifacts, old museum catalog and marking systems, and passport stamps.

The Experiences

Adventure experiences are collected into long dossier-style pages. Each page contains several artifacts, historical notes, photos, endorsements, lore, and a brief biography of the archaeologist or team working on that specific site.

The hero image for each is a black and white looping 30 second reel of the excavation to set the mood and provide a mysterious atmosphere.

The Artifacts

All artifact photos were provided by the Puzzles team from various excavations. Each object was isolated, touched up for presentation, and cataloged. Brief notes have been added, including a ruler for scale and relevant origin & significance data. This section is practical as well, and serves as a template for future expansions with its search capabilities.