The fungus Ustilago maydis may damage the plant it grows on (and certainly looks disgusting), but it was an important part of the diet of the people who lived at Turkey Pen Ruin in Utah from 400 B.C. to A.D. 400. The fungus, better known as corn smut, infects maize plants, turning the kernels gray and misshapen. About 80 percent of the diet eaten by the Ancestral Puebloan people living at Turkey Pen Ruin was maize, which lacks certain amino acids. As a result, those who rely heavily on maize can fall prey to a potentially fatal nutritional deficiency called pellagra. Jenna Battillo, an archaeologist with Southern Methodist University, wanted to understand why these Ancestral Puebloan people didn’t suffer from this kind of malnutrition. She analyzed samples of feces from 44 individuals who lived between A.D. 1 and 200. Forty-three of the samples contained high levels of corn smut spores. These spores contain the amino acids missing from maize and may have given the people of Turkey Pen Ruin a way to stave off nutritional diseases.

More than 1,000 unexploded rockets have been recovered from an abandoned well in the state of Karnataka in southern India. The excavators believe the corroded shells date to the eighteenth century when the Muslim warrior King Tipu Sultan ruled the region. The cache was uncovered when the well, located at Nagara Fort in the Shivamogga District, was being repaired. “The rockets, which are of several sizes, are metallic cylinders filled with some powder, possibly saltpeter or some form of explosive propellant,” says R. Shejeshwara Nayaka, assistant director of the Karnataka Department of Archaeology, Museums, and Heritage (DAMH), who led the excavation in 2018. “They have circular end caps on oneside, while on the other side there is an opening which lights like a fuse. We have also found some equipment that might have been used for assembling or making them.” G. Venkatesh, commissioner of DAMH, adds, “Records say that Tipu Sultan’s father, Hyder Ali, was the first to use metal-cased rockets. He also had an armory and factory at Nagara Fort, a strategically very important city. There is a strong possibility that this site was used as a storage point or a factory for the rockets.”

The remains of 95 individuals have been discovered in an unmarked cemetery in Sugar Land, Texas, just outside Houston. In the mid-1800s, the town of Sugar Land was built on a sugar plantation that used slave labor. When slavery was abolished in 1865, the plantation, and later the Imperial Sugar company, leased convicts from state prisons as laborers until 1910, when the practice was outlawed.

In 1908, the state had bought 5,235 acres of land from Imperial Sugar, establishing the Imperial Farm Prison. The incarcerated were forced to provide agricultural labor for the prison farm until the state closed the prison in 2011. The Fort Bend Independent School District purchased the former prison’s land seven years ago and, in compliance with Texas’s Antiquities Code, commissioned an archaeological evaluation of the site. The skeletons were uncovered during the evaluation by Goshawk Environmental Consulting, Inc. Archaeologists believe that the remains can be tied to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American prisoners who were forced to work the plantation as part of the state’s post–Civil War convict-lease system. Many historians have called the convict-lease system “slavery by another name.” Researchers plan to study the bones before they are reinterred to learn more about life under those harsh conditions.