On a windblown island in the Persian Gulf, archaeologists have found a 3,500-year-old jewelry workshop that may hold secrets to the collapse and rebirth of a major trade network. By 2100 B.C., Failaka—now part of Kuwait—was home to the Dilmun culture, a seafaring society whose trade economy fueled the cities of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, or present-day Iraq (“Archaeology Island,” March/April 2013).

Suddenly, around 1730 B.C., the Dilmun trade network collapsed. Cities and temples were abandoned, leading to a period scholars know little about. Now, a team led by researchers from Denmark’s Moesgaard Museum has uncovered fragments of semiprecious stones not native to the island and likely imported from India and Pakistan. “The presence of carnelian and jasper on Failaka indicates that shipping through the Gulf had picked up [a few hundred years later],” says Flemming Højlund, senior scientist and curator at the museum. “It indicates that Dilmun had emerged again as a political entity.”

Founded in 1594, the garrison town of Tara was one of the first Russian settlements in Siberia. Archaeologists led by Tomsk State University’s Maria Chernaya are now discovering what life was like there for the earliest Russian pioneers. In addition to wooden fortifications, the team has unearthed the remains of burned log houses that held toys, chess pieces, leather shoes, and knitted stockings that show that life on the Siberian frontier wasn’t as austere as some might imagine. Chernaya says the most unexpected discovery was a clay pot containing a charred turnip. “It was likely part of the winter stocks, so the house probably burned in the winter or spring.” She thinks the fire must have started just as someone was preparing to cook the root vegetable for a meal.

More than 13,000 jars and ceramic pots that once held jams and other condiments from the Victorian era were unearthed during construction of a new railway station on Tottenham Court Road in London’s West End. The containers—four tons in all—were found in a cistern at the site of a Crosse & Blackwell factory and warehouse that operated from 1830 until 1921.

The cistern probably held water used to provide steam power and was rendered unnecessary due to renovations carried out in the 1870s, according to Nigel Jeffries, an archaeologist with Museum of London Archaeology. “I think it was a very swift accumulation,” he says. “The cistern was probably filled over the course of a couple of weeks.” Most of the containers appear to have been discarded intact, and the labels of many remain legible. The range of condiments represented—from marmalades and jams to mushroom catsup, piccalilli, and chutneys—illustrate how once-conventional British tastes at the time were broadening to include flavors from India.