Frenzied development in San Francisco is introducing the city’s real estate and tech booms to its industrial and mercantile history. The $1.6 billion Central Subway project, which will connect Chinatown and the booming South of Market district by light rail, unearthed the latest finds: 10 late nineteenth-century industrial sewing machines, and pieces of several more, from what is thought to have been a basement room in Chinatown. The building, at 1018 Stockton Street, was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, along with the rest of the city’s original Chinatown, and archaeological remains of the neighborhood are vanishingly rare, according to Adrian Praetzellis, an archaeologist at Sonoma State University. It is hoped that archives can help connect these ornate machines with the names of the men who might have used them.

Skulls and bones from cows and rams found in a 2,500-year-old tomb—discovered in a village near Luoyang, a city in China’s Henan Province with particular historical significance as the capital of nearly a dozen dynasties—could indicate that the burial site belonged to the Luhun Rong, an ethnic minority tribe. The tribe, active during the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 B.C.) of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, was described in historic texts as barbarians, and was later eliminated during the ensuing Warring States Period (475–221 B.C.).

Conclusive evidence linking the tomb to this ethnic minority group would be significant, and some say further evidence could even link it to a completely unrecorded group of people. Chinese history is long and complex, and researchers are always working to fill gaps in certain regions. The artifacts inside the tomb, including a number of chariots, skeletal remains of horses, bronze bells, bronze tripod vessels used to hold food and wine during important rituals, and cowrie shells, may have come from as far away as the Indian Ocean or the South China Sea. The finds are also characteristic of burial traditions of royal or otherwise wealthy families from the Zhou as well as the later part of the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 B.C.), archaeologists say.

“This is a great find,” Robert Murowchick, a Boston University archaeology professor, says. “But the importance of the tomb does not hinge only on the connection to the Luhun Rong. It is important because it was found in Luoyang, where not many tombs from the Eastern Zhou period have been excavated.”

From the iron bands that signified citizenship to those bearing a state seal and worn by the emperor, rings were the most common piece of jewelry for both men and women in the ancient Roman world.

A metal detectorist in Tangley, Hampshire, in southern England, has uncovered a late Roman example dating to the fourth century A.D., fashioned of gold and an unusual type of onyx called nicolo. The ring depicts the god Cupid, his left arm resting on a column and his right arm holding a torch, which he will use to test Psyche (in the guise of a butterfly), in an allegory of love overcoming death. In the absence of the context that comes with a complete archaeological site, it is unknown who might have worn the relatively traditional design.