An inscribed stone slab unearthed at an Etruscan site in Tuscany is proving to contain one of the most difficult texts to decipher. It was believed that the sixth-century B.C. stela would shed light on the still-mysterious Etruscan language, but so far it remains a puzzle. “To be honest, I’m not yet sure what type of text was incised on the stela,” says Rex Wallace, professor of classics at the University of Massachusetts. Inscribed with vertical dots and at least 70 legible letters, the four-foot-tall and two-foot-wide slab had been buried for more than 2,500 years in the foundations of a monumental temple at Poggio Colla, some 22 miles northeast of Florence in the Mugello Valley. Archaeologists speculate that the text, written right to left, may refer to a goddess who was worshiped at the site, but so far no name of any god or goddess has been found. “The inscription is divided into words by means of three vertically aligned dots, so it’s possible to identify some of the word forms in the text,” Wallace says. “Unfortunately, most of the words that have been identified, apart from the numeral ki, ‘three,’ appear to be new additions to the Etruscan lexicon and we can’t yet pinpoint the meanings,” he adds.

One of antiquity’s great enigmas, the Etruscans began to flourish around 900 B.C., and dominated much of Italy for five centuries. By around 300 to 100 B.C., they were absorbed into the Roman Empire. Their non-Indo-European language eventually died out, and much of what we know comes from short funerary inscriptions. “Now we are adding another example to the inventory of texts that aren’t short and formulaic,” Wallace explains. “However, this means it will be very difficult to interpret, for that very reason.”

The disappearance of USS Conestoga, a seagoing U.S. Navy tugboat traveling from San Francisco Bay to American Samoa, gripped the nation in the summer of 1921. The ship and the 56 officers and sailors on board departed on March 25 but missed a planned stop in Hawaii on April 5. A thorough sea and air search found nothing, and the fate of the ship was unknown until last year, when researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found a wreck in 189 feet of water near Southeast Farallon Island, just 20 miles from the Golden Gate. Video from a remotely operated vehicle has now confirmed the identity of the wreck, and based on its location and orientation, researchers concluded that the crew attempted to reach a cove on the island as shelter from rough seas.

Some scholars have accused British military officer T.E. Lawrence, later known as Lawrence of Arabia, of exaggerating his experience fighting with Bedouin guerillas during the 1916–1918 Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Now archaeologists working in the Arabian Desert in Jordan can place him at the scene of one of the most dramatic moments described in his autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In the account, Lawrence records that he led an ambush on a Turkish military train. While surveying the site of that attack, the team found a spent bullet that was fired from a Colt 1911 automatic pistol, a weapon that would have been extremely rare in the Middle East at the time—and that Lawrence is known to have carried. “You can never be 100 percent sure,” says University of Bristol archaeologist Nick Saunders, “but we are confident this bullet was fired from Lawrence’s gun.”