Seldom, if ever, do artifacts allow us to experience what people heard in the distant past. But a team excavating at the medieval Convent of the Jacobins in Rennes, France, recently made a discovery that brings to life a short snatch of a song that was last sung by monks in the sixteenth century. Beneath the convent’s refectory, the team found a number of schist plaques inscribed with casual etchings, including caricatures of people, medieval versions of the game of hopscotch, and personal names. Among them was an etching of four lines of diamond shapes that the archaeologists quickly recognized were musical notes representing a short melody of a plainchant, or an unaccompanied sacred song. “It’s very difficult to know just what kind of song the notes record,” says Gaëtan Le Cloirec of the National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research, who led the excavation. “It’s probably a short religious song that was engraved by a Dominican monk as an exercise.” Click below to hear ancient music specialist and soprano Dominique Fontaine sing the melody.

Today, urban sports arenas are often surrounded by restaurants, bars, and souvenir shops where crowds of people gather before and after an event. New research outside the amphitheater in the Roman city of Carnuntum suggests that the same was true 2,000 years ago. Located east of Vienna, Carnuntum was once one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire, although much of it is unexcavated and hidden from view. Over the past several years, Austrian archaeologists have been using high-resolution magnetometers and ground-penetrating radar to analyze the ancient city’s topography. A recent investigation detected an entire “entertainment district” surrounding Carnuntum’s suburban amphitheater. The scans revealed that the street leading to the amphitheater from the city was lined with an array of inns, shops, bakeries, and Roman “fast food” restaurants (thermopolia) that would have catered to the large crowds attending gladiatorial contests.

The excavations of a royal palace complex within the site of El Palenque in Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley may provide evidence for one of the earliest central governments in the Americas, according to archaeologists Elsa Redmond and Charles Spencer of the American Museum of Natural History. The complex dates to between 300 and 100 B.C. and contains a multiuse building with a sophisticated water management system, a grand private residence, dining facilities, rooms for official functions, and ritual spaces. Radiocarbon samples and ceramics confirm the dating of the palace to a time when states associated with the Zapotec civilization were emerging in the region. To guide the research, the team studied later colonial descriptions of Aztec royal palaces. “We would not expect all the architectural details of a late Postclassic or early colonial period Aztec palace in the basin of Mexico to be the same in prehistoric Zapotec palaces,” Redmond says. “But there are some common aspects of a centralized, hierarchical, and differentiated state administration that might be present in all royal palaces of different time periods.”