Enlarge / A hunger stone in the Elbe River in Děčín, Czech Republic. The oldest readable carving is from 1616, with older carvings (1417 and 1473) having been wiped out by anchoring ships over the years.Dr. Bernd Gross/CC BY-SA 3.0
Stories have been circling around the Internet this past week about the re-emergence in certain Czech and German rivers of so-called “hunger stones“—rocks embedded in rivers during droughts to mark the water level and warn future generations of the likely famine and hardship to come whenever the stones became visible again. The coverage has been fueled largely by an August
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