In the seventeenth century, the 1,200-year-old Hilton of Cadboll Stone had a great fall. Now, National Museums Scotland (NMS) is enlisting video game players to help put it together again.

The sandstone slab was carved by the Picts of northern Scotland around A.D. 800, likely to celebrate their conversion to Christianity. In the 1670s, a storm toppled it and a cross emblazoned on one side was damaged. Originally discovered in 2001, the bottom portion of the 7.5-foot-tall stone was in 3,000 pieces, ranging in size from two to eight inches. Reassembling it by hand would prove a daunting task.

Enter the techies. A Scottish company called Relicarte has transformed the fragments into 3-D virtual objects and made them available to the public in a special application. Starting in late October 2013, gamers could use their spatial reasoning skills to reassemble the slab. “The ability to manipulate 3-D images easily and interact over social media is key,” says Mhairi Maxwell, an NMS curator. “Archaeology has always had to draw upon a diverse range of skill sets for understanding the past—it is both an art and a science.” The researchers don’t know how long the process will take, but it will certainly be faster than the old-fashioned way.

Archaeologists excavating an ancient mountaintop sanctuary in southeastern Turkey have unearthed more than 600 seals and amulets left at the temple as votive offerings. Originally dedicated to a Near Eastern storm god, the sanctuary was in use from the first millennium B.C. until the seventh century A.D. But around 200 B.C., the temple was rebuilt, a process that sealed off the site’s older layers and protected the objects intentionally left behind by generations of worshippers seeking the storm god’s help.  Dating from the seventh to fourth centuries B.C., the artifacts come from all over the Near East and depict both simple geometric symbols and intricate scenes of men praying. Some show a royal hero in the midst of fighting animals or mythical creatures. University of Münster archaeologist Englebert Winter says worshippers would have worn the amulets in everyday life to ward off evil, and that offering them to the storm god was an intensely personal pious act. “People consecrated to the god an object that was closely associated with their own identity,” says Winter.

Nearly half a mile beneath the surface of the Pacific, southwest of Oahu, lie massive remains tied to a stunning tale from the last days of World War II and the first days of the Cold War that followed. Archaeologists using Pisces V, a manned submersible operated by the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, found the wreck of I-400, a Japanese submarine remarkable not only for its size (400 feet long, twice that of a German U-boat), but also for its capabilities (it held three aircraft with folding wings that could be launched by catapult) and mission (its crew trained to attack the Panama Canal). Following the end of hostilities in the Pacific, the Allies had agreed to share military technology seized from Japanese forces. But I-400 and its sister vessels were simply too advanced and important—the United States scuttled the ships rather than share their secrets with the Soviets.