It is extremely rare to find paper in a shipwreck, but a number of small scraps were retrieved from the wreckage of Queen Anne’s Revenge, the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship, which ran aground off the North Carolina coast in 1718. Now, based on words printed on the fragments, researchers have determined that they came from a 1712 narrative of a round-the-world voyage. It’s unclear whether Blackbeard or his men actually read Captain Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World, Perform’d in the Years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711 between bouts of plundering merchant ships on the way from Africa to the Caribbean. After all, the paper was found amid sludge removed from the chamber of a breech-loading cannon. But Queen Anne’s Revenge project conservator Kimberly Kenyon notes that tales of South Sea voyages were wildly popular with the reading public at the time—and may well have been among pirates, too.

About 34,000 years ago the hunter-gatherers living on what are now the plains of Russia east of Moscow are known to have had a complex society with well-defined social roles. Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis and Alexandra P. Buzhilova of Lomonosov Moscow State University have been reanalyzing burials from the site of Sunghir, which was excavated in the 1960s. In 2017 their most intriguing discoveries came from a grave containing two adolescent boys who had been buried head to head. This grave held more than 10,000 beads and 16 spears made of mammoth ivory, as well as several ivory disks and a pendant with a carving of a mammoth on it. Analysis of the skeletons shows that both boys suffered from physical abnormalities. One boy had severely shortened and bowed leg bones. The other seems to have suffered from a deformation around the mouth and muscle weakness. Both, though, were physically active. To Trinkaus the fact that these boys were buried with so many luxury goods confirms that they lived in a complex society where individuals were born into specific roles within the group. He says, “There is diversity in death, which should reflect diversity in the living.”

During the Iron Age, people in what is now Leicestershire, in the Midlands region of England, generally lived in village-like settlements devoted to farming. But the discovery of 11 complete or nearly complete cauldrons—along with a scattering of other artifacts—buried at the site of Glenfield Park and thought to date to the third or fourth century B.C. suggests that people from the surrounding area were drawn there to partake in large feasts. “These gatherings may have taken place at significant times of the year—festival times or rites of passage,” says excavation director John Thomas of University of Leicester Archaeological Services. “Feasting is thought to have played an important social role within Iron Age society, and it may have helped bring the wider community together and increased opportunities for social interaction.”

Given the cauldrons’ fragility and size, they were removed from the site in blocks of soil. They were then CT scanned, revealing extensive patching at the bottoms of the copper-alloy bowls, indicating a long history of intensive use. So far, one of the vessels has been excavated in the lab at Museum of London Archaeology. Its base was covered with a thin layer of soot, presumably from the last time it hung over a fire. Thomas says the cauldrons were likely used to serve beef stew, oat porridge, or alcoholic drinks such as mead.