A significant piece of global telecommunications history has been found 2,000 feet below the waves near Oahu. Using the manned submersible Pisces V, Terry Kerby of the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory and researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration discovered the wreck of Dickenson, a commercial vessel that repaired and serviced the undersea cables that made global communications possible in the early twentieth century. The ship was launched in 1923 and served remote Pacific communications stations until 1941, when it was chartered by a British telecommunications company to evacuate employees from Fanning Island. Dickenson arrived in Honolulu Harbor with the evacuees on December 7, 1941, just hours before the attack on Pearl Harbor. During the war, the ship was chartered by the U.S. Navy, dubbed USS Kailua, and set to work maintaining cable and submarine nets. The recent mission found the vessel upright and intact, raising doubts about the report that it had been sunk by a torpedo when it was retired from service in 1946. “It looks to me like the USS Kailua was scuttled and settled peacefully on the bottom,” says Kerby, “and looks like she is sailing off into the dark like a ghost ship.”

By about 6,000 years ago, people in Mexico had domesticated a tropical grass called teosinte, beginning a process that would radically alter the plant, turning it into maize, responsible for feeding people across the world today. A team of archaeologists and biochemists recently documented the genetic changes the plant underwent in the southwestern United States. Their results show that the earliest maize in the region was a drought-resistant variety that came from the highlands of Mexico about 4,000 years ago. Sometime between 2,000 and 750 years ago, that highland maize was either accidentally cross-pollinated or intentionally bred with a starchier coastal maize variety, which likely improved its nutritional value. According to Rute da Fonseca, a biochemist at the University of Copenhagen, understanding maize evolution can help us understand how the cultures that consumed maize changed along with it. Cultivated maize can be stored and eaten year-round and requires less work to farm than most other crops. “It frees you, it gives you more free time for other things,” says Fonseca. “Maize allowed for the development of more complex societies.”

Last year, the discovery of an ax head on a mountaintop overlooking Norway’s Trondheim Fjord led archaeologists to a tenth-century Viking grave. Though they found no remains, the team recovered a sword and a shield boss. The discovery seemed routine, until the boss was X-rayed. “We could see there was stuff in there,” says archaeologist Ingrid Ystgaard of the Norwegian University Science and Technology’s Museum of Natural History and Archaeology. It turned out to contain a leather purse holding Islamic silver coins that were minted in what is now Iraq, along with agates and a small lead weight. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Ystgaard. “It’s extremely rare to find coins in Viking burials, and so far as I know, none have ever been found in a shield boss.”  

Ystgaard points out that Vikings were known to travel as far as Constantinople, and the agates and coins could have been obtained through either trading or raiding. Extensive marks on the sword and shield boss show that they had been used in combat, but the lead weight secreted inside suggests the warrior may have at least occasionally played the role of merchant. “It’s a good reminder that they were not just raiders,” says Ystgaard. “This man was likely a classic trader-warrior of the Viking Age.”