A salvage excavation occasioned by the construction of a rail project crossing the Bosphorus in Istanbul, Turkey, turned up a bonanza of shipwrecks from the Byzantine era: In all, 37 have been found since 2004. Now a team of researchers has scrutinized each timber in eight of the wrecks, dating from the seventh to tenth centuries A.D., and has gained new insight into the markedly different materials used to build merchant ships and warships of the time.

The team studied six merchant round ships, powered primarily by sail, and two galley warships, powered by oar. “The merchant ships were massive and would have bludgeoned through the waves,” says Cemal Pulak of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in College Station, Texas, “whereas the galleys are long and flexible and their timber is quite light—and they selected different types of material for that.”

Analysis of the ships’ timbers found a number of indications that the warships were built at greater expense. For example, the galleys’ planking consisted of European black pine, which would have been imported from afar, while readily available Turkey oak was used in the round ships. It is unclear whether merchant galleys of the time were built with the same high-quality materials as galley warships, as no merchant galleys from the Byzantine era have yet been found.

At a site soon to be a multistory parking garage in the English city of Norwich, recent excavations have uncovered an upmarket thirteenth-century tannery. In December 2014, trial trenches at this low-lying city-center location revealed temporary platforms and freshwater pits, typical of a tannery. Archaeologists also found vast numbers of goat horn-cores—the inner part of the horn—suggesting that it was mostly goatskin being processed there. “Goatskin was used to make very high-quality leather and it is possible they were making vellum, the parchment used for scrolls and books,” says lead archaeologist David Adams. The site’s location, between two monasteries, and the period it was in operation, from the 1200s to the 1500s, fit with this idea. Meanwhile, a handful of worked cat bones show that cat fur was also being produced there, perhaps for trim on hats or gloves—a common use for it in medieval Britain.

It’s hardly surprising that an Iron Age settlement in which livestock lived alongside people and open pits served as latrines would be overrun with intestinal parasites. As expected, researchers studying sediments from some of these pits at a settlement in present-day Basel, Switzerland, dating to around 100 B.C., found roundworm, whipworm, and liver fluke eggs.

What makes their findings notable is the method they used. Archaeologists typically detect parasite eggs through “wet sieving,” in which soil is moistened and then strained, which allows a large volume of fill to be searched, but provides no information on where the eggs were originally located. Instead, at Basel, scientists have produced very thin slices of sediment that can be studied under a microscope, which preserves the location of the parasite eggs in their original setting. “You would expect the parasite eggs to be close to where the feces were,” says Sandra Pichler of the University of Basel, “but we found that the eggs get washed out by water and spread around. Even sediments without any fecal indicators still had parasite eggs.”