In a valley in eastern Kazakhstan’s remote Tarbagatai Mountains, archaeologists recently excavated a kurgan, or burial mound, holding the remains of two Iron Age teenagers who lived roughly 2,700 years ago. The two belonged to the Saka, a nomadic Iranian-speaking people closely related to the Scythians, who occupied much of Central Asia from the eighth to the second century B.C. Led by Zainolla Samashev, director of the Margulan Institute of Archaeology, the team identified the scant remains of a young woman of about 16 whose grave had been looted and the undisturbed skeleton of a man no older than 19. The man wore a golden torc around his neck, held a gold and bronze dagger, and was equipped with a gold-plated wooden quiver holding arrows with bronze tips. Both teenagers were buried in finery once covered with gold beads and gold appliqués of miniature deer heads with oversized antlers.

Archaeologists believe that a bronze hand from the Roman fort of Vindolanda was associated with the cult worship of Jupiter Dolichenus at the site. The palm of the four-inch hand may have once held a small effigy of the god, who was often depicted riding a bull and grasping an ax and a lightning bolt, says Vindolanda director of excavations, archaeologist Andrew Birley. The hand was originally attached to a staff that was likely used to bless worshippers. Although much is still unknown about the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus, it is believed that its origins lie in the Near East. “What little we do know is that the cult was open to both men and women, and to different social strata in Roman society, which would make it appealing to a broad audience,” says Birley. Both the hand and the temple of Jupiter Dolichenus in Vindolanda date to the early third century A.D., a tumultuous period in Roman Britain, fraught with war, rebellion, and bloodshed.

Mexican archaeologists have discovered a 39-inch-long sawfish blade at the bottom of a stone box packed with thousands of other ceremonial objects at the Aztec religious complex in Mexico City known as the Templo Mayor. This isn’t the first sawfish blade excavated there—archaeologists have found 77 so far—but it is possibly the largest, says the project’s director, Leonardo López Luján. Sawfish, a type of ray, had deep spiritual significance for the Aztecs because the fish was considered a hybrid of earth and sea, says archaeologist Alejandra Aguirre. The blade, its sharp teeth intact, was the last object to be excavated from a deposit containing some 11,800 artifacts, including the carcass of a wolf dressed in gold armor (“Aztec Warrior Wolf,” Top 10, January/February 2018), birds, and thousands of snails. Known as Offering 174, the box was interred under a floor during the reign of the emperor Ahuitzotl (1486–1502) and, according to Aguirre, may be a kind of tribute to the expansion of the Aztec realm under his rule.