A 15,000-year-old bone pendant found at Vlakno Cave in Croatia may be a late type of Venus figurine, such as the famous Venus of Willendorf, which dates to more than 24,000 years ago. The Croatian Venus is a more slender and abstract human figure than the zaftig woman of Willendorf. The geometric pattern on the bone is similar to patterns found on other pieces of art from the Epigravettian period, during which sea levels were approximately 400 feet lower than they are now. What is today the northern Adriatic Sea was a broad plain that supported large herds of game animals hunted by the people at Vlakno. Other than the Venus pendant, however, no art produced by the Epigravettian people has turned up. Some perforated deer teeth and seashells are the only other symbolic artifacts found at the site.

Almost one hundred years before the Roman Empire conquered Britain, Julius Caesar invaded the island in 55 B.C. and again the following year. The exact locations of his landings have been debated, but recent evidence suggests that one occurred at Ebbsfleet, at the Isle of Thanet in eastern Kent. During construction of a modern road, workers discovered a large ancient ditch measuring around 15 feet wide and six feet deep. Objects found nearby, including Roman weapons, indicated that it was constructed around the middle of the first century B.C., and its size and shape are consistent with Roman defensive networks of that era. Archaeologists believe that Caesar’s army built a temporary fort at the site to protect his fleet of 800 ships. “The wider significance of the discoveries at Ebbsfleet is to refocus attention on the aftermath of Caesar’s invasions,” says University of Leicester archaeologist Andrew Fitzpatrick. “Caesar never intended to stay in Britain,” he adds, “but we theorize that the peace treaty he concluded then paved the way for the eventual invasion and permanent occupation of the Romans in A.D. 43.”

While excavating three Byzantine churches in Galilee, archaeologists from Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee uncovered seven intact mosaic inscriptions that are beginning to fill in the story of small-village life in the fifth century A.D. The inscriptions are in Greek, and by virtue of mistakes in the language, Mordechai Aviam, who directs the project with historian Jacob Ashkenazi, who read the inscriptions, believes that the town and surrounding area was populated during the Roman period by a local Semitic people who were pagans. By the mid-fifth century, they had converted to Christianity. One inscription, one of the longest found to date in western Galilee, gives the names of donors and the names and positions of church officials, including Irenaeus, the bishop of Tyre in 445. “The first importance of these mosaics is that they give us good, dated inscriptions,” Aviam says. They also connect this small, unknown village to the larger Byzantine world.

Another mosaic mentions a woman named Sausann (or Shoshana) as a donor to the church’s construction. This inscription, the first in the region to mention a female donor, “tells us that even in the smallest villages in rural Galilee in the Christian period, women supported ecclesiastical structures and that there were women who had strong personal, social, and financial positions,” says Aviam.