A team of archaeologists scoured El Mirón Cave in northern Spain starting in 1996 and found abundant remains of prehistoric people, primarily the Magdalenians, hunter-gatherers who lived across Western Europe at the end of the last Ice Age. But it wasn’t until 2010, when they investigated a narrow space behind a large limestone block, that the cave began to reveal its greatest secret: a significant portion of the skeleton of a Magdalenian woman who had died around 18,700 years earlier at the age of 35 to 40.

The team, led by Lawrence Straus of the University of New Mexico and Manuel González Morales of the University of Cantabria, found that the woman’s bones were coated with ochre, a red, iron-based pigment, earning her the moniker the “Red Lady of El Mirón.” Her skull and most of her long bones were missing, but a group of researchers led by José Miguel Carretero of the University of Burgos found that her skeleton was otherwise mostly intact, suggesting she had been buried there. “This is the first more-or-less substantial human skeleton of the Magdalenian culture found in the entire Iberian Peninsula,” says Straus.

The limestone block next to the Red Lady’s burial spot has a large number of engravings on its outer face dating to around the time she died, including several that form a distinctive “V” shape, possibly meant to represent a female pubic triangle and to indicate that a woman had been buried nearby. In addition, the inner side of the block adjacent to the burial site was covered with ochre. “You could speculate that the block may have been a marker of her grave,” says Straus.

The researchers are unsure why such apparent effort was expended on the Red Lady after her death. “Whoever she was,” says Straus, “she was given special treatment that was different from the norm. We don’t know what the Magdalenians normally did with their bodies, but by and large they were not burying them.”

The remarkably well preserved, fully dressed body of a seventeenth-century noblewoman has been found in a lead coffin in the French city of Rennes. A team led by Rosenn Colleter of the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) made the discovery while excavating the remains of a fourteenth-century convent at the site of a future conference center. Along with some 800 graves, the archaeologists unearthed five lead coffins, one of which was still hermetically sealed and held the nearly intact body. “I knew at once that it was a beautiful discovery,” says Colleter, “and that we would need to work quickly so as not to lose any information to decomposition.”

The woman was buried with a heart-shaped relic inscribed with her husband’s name and containing his heart. This allowed the team to identify her as Louise de Quengo, Lady of Brefeillac, who died in 1656. The unusually complete state of de Quengo’s body and clothing is giving specialists a new look at French aristocratic burial practices of the time.

Laboratory analysis of the remains will allow researchers to reconstruct the pathogens she carried, including tuberculosis. “It’s rare that you are able to give a seventeenth-century person a comprehensive health check,” says Colleter. The Lady of Brefeillac will be reburied later this year.   

In the prehistoric American Southwest, trade with distant Mesoamerica was a source of power and prestige that could make or break a ruler. Within the massive multistory buildings at New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, for instance, archaeologists have discovered exotic goods from Mexico, such as cacao and the remains of 33 scarlet macaws, whose natural habitat is 1,000 miles away on the Gulf of Mexico. Scholars had assumed that long-distance trade became important only during the period when Chaco’s power was greatest, from A.D. 1040 to 1110. But now a team has dated the macaw bones and found that some were imported as early as A.D. 900.

“I was very much surprised,” says American Museum of Natural History archaeologist Adam Watson, who helped organize the dating. “I, along with everyone else, assumed the trade networks with Mexico didn’t become important until Chaco expanded. Now we have evidence that control over trade and political power were being consolidated long before then.”