A monumental Minoan building surrounding a 110-foot-long courtyard has been uncovered at Sissi on the northern coast of Crete. Built around 1700 B.C. and featuring finely plastered floors, the structure is similar in size and grandeur to a number of palaces on the island dating to the same period. However, it lacks many typical features of these complexes, including storage rooms, administrative materials, and industrial areas. Archaeologists with the Belgian School at Athens, in collaboration with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Lassithi, did find a range of ritual paraphernalia at the site, offering a clue to what it was used for. “This building was really focused on its central court,” says excavation director Jan Driessen of the Catholic University of Louvain. “It’s quite clear that religious ceremonies took place there.”

Nearby, researchers unearthed the tomb of a woman dating to around 1400 B.C. that is typical of the Mycenaeans, who came from mainland Greece around the time she died. The woman was buried with an ivory-handled bronze mirror and a necklace of gold beads. Bone and bronze pins resting on her skeleton appear to have once held the woman’s clothing in place. Hers is the first Mycenaean-style grave to have been found so far east on the island.

Amid the ruins of two eighteenth-century farmsteads in a forest near Scotland’s Loch Ard, archaeologists have identified buildings that appear to be the remains of an illicit whisky distillery. (When in Scotland, be sure to leave out the “e” in whiskey.) The buildings survive alongside the remnants of kilns for drying corn, which may have been used in the distilled spirits. A number of factors, including the site’s secluded location, its relative proximity to Glasgow, roughly 25 miles south, and its easy access to the loch’s waters, would have made it attractive to illegal whisky producers, says archaeologist Matt Ritchie of Forest and Land Scotland. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, felonious distilling became common in the Scottish Highlands as stills making less than 100 gallons of whisky were banned, and high taxes were imposed on the malted grains used to produce the spirit.

A cache of artifacts found beneath the central plaza at the site of Paso del Macho in the northern part of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula may have been an offering made when the settlement was founded between 900 and 800 B.C. It contains some of the earliest evidence of Maya fertility rituals. Archaeologist Evan Parker of Tulane University, a leader of the ongoing excavation, which is conducted in cooperation with Millsaps College, says that more than 30 artifacts made of greenstone, including small stones that symbolize maize sprouting from the underworld, represent events in the story of the maize god’s birth. This myth was a central part of Maya fertility and rainmaking rituals. The cache also contains several pots painted with images associated with fertility, along with spoons, clamshell pendants, and a large plaque.