A seventeenth-century silver hawking ring called a vervel has been uncovered in a field near the town of Harwich, on the southeast coast of England. An inscription on the vervel links the artifact to a man named Thomas Playters, a member of the gentry who bore the title Baronet of Sotterley. The ring would have been placed on a hunting raptor’s leg, to attach the bird to a perch via a line. “Vervels are very helpful items when it comes to tracing individuals through history, especially when they are inscribed,” says Sophie Flynn, finds liaison officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme at Colchester and Ipswich Museums. She notes that while most vervels discovered in Britain are made of silver, those crafted from copper and bronze do turn up as well. Finding more examples made from cheaper materials may help determine to what extent hawking was—or was not—the exclusive preserve of the upper classes.

An extraordinary collection of bronze tools and weapons was recovered at a construction site near the Thames in East London. Dubbed the Havering Hoard, the assemblage comprises 453 artifacts dated to between 900 and 800 B.C., making it the largest Bronze Age hoard discovered in London. The artifacts, including axes, spearheads, swords, and woodworking tools, were found buried close together in four separate pits within an ancient enclosure. Most were partially broken or damaged in antiquity. Some of the axes are of a style that originated on the European continent, suggesting that the tools were either traded across the English Channel or brought by immigrants to Britain. Researchers are stumped as to why these artifacts were so carefully buried. One theory is that they may represent the stockpile of a local metallurgist, who had set aside the broken bronze objects for safekeeping with the intention of recycling them into new objects.

For thousands of years, in a field next to the site of the Palace of Nestor in Pylos in mainland Greece, tens of thousands of watermelon-sized stones protected two Bronze Age tombs dating to between 1600 and 1500 B.C., the very beginning of the Mycenaean era. After more than a year and a half of removing the stones—which were the remains of the tombs’ collapsed roofs—a team from the University of Cincinnati led by archaeologists Sharon Stocker and Jack Davis unearthed the two beehive-shaped, or tholos, tombs, which contained gold jewelry and multiple skeletons. A gold ring, which was found in the smaller of the two tombs, depicts a unique scene of bovines and barley. A gold pendant depicting the Egyptian goddess Hathor was found in the larger tomb. “Such imported objects are exotica that were highly prized,” says Davis. For example, adds Stocker, “It’s not impossible that the people who included the pendant with the Pylos burials understood that in Egypt Hathor was a protectress of the dead. These things are not just bric-a-brac, but objects collected with an understanding of their meaning." In addition to the gold ring and pendant, the team also recovered thousands of flakes of gold foil. At this point, the researchers aren’t certain what the original purpose of the flakes may have been, but suggest it’s possible that certain bodies were covered with gold foil.