Nine walls made up entirely of human bones have been uncovered by archaeologists at the site of the former Church of Saint John, now Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, in Ghent, Belgium. Most of the remains have been radiocarbon dated to the second half of the fifteenth century, but the bones were likely not used for construction projects until sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, when a section of the church cemetery was cleared to make room for new burials. “We have more than a thousand skeletons in all from in and around the church site,” says project leader Janiek De Gryse of Ruben Willaert Restoration & Archeology/Decoration, “but these walls tell us something about the practice of clearing churchyards.” She adds that future researchers will investigate whether the layering of bones was undertaken purely due to space limitations, or whether the walls may have held religious or spiritual significance.

A six-foot-tall monolith called the Tulloch Stone offers new evidence of the beliefs of the elusive Picts of ancient Britain, who resisted the Romans and later formed powerful independent Scottish kingdoms. Discovered by construction workers during a road project in central Scotland, the stone features a carving thought to date to the fifth or sixth century A.D. of a possibly unclothed man carrying a spear with a doorknob-shaped end. Similar figures, each holding an identical spear, are carved on two other Pictish stones that were found in cemeteries in Scotland dating to roughly the same period. Archaeologist Gordon Noble of the University of Aberdeen says that, rather than representing deceased individuals, all three carvings probably depict a pagan warrior god. “By the post-Roman period, this was very much a warrior-oriented society,” Noble says. “These images seem to represent a distinctive regional manifestation of a warrior ideology.”

Thirty lead tablets recovered from the bottom of a public well at the edge of the Kerameikos necropolis in Athens have been found to record curses cast by Athenians against their rivals some 2,300 years ago. Several of the tablets were folded and pierced with nails, while others were fashioned in the shape of livers or coffins. A particularly scathing malediction condemns an allegedly promiscuous newlywed named Glykera and her vulva.

Until the late fourth century B.C., such Athenian curse tablets were usually deposited in tombs. At that point, according to the first-century B.C. Roman author and orator Cicero, the statesman Demetrius of Phaleron instituted a new law restricting elaborate burials and funeral practices. To evade detection by the officers employed to enforce this law, crafty sorcerers seem to have turned to wells as a more secretive venue for their magic rituals. The Greeks believed that water, and in particular groundwater, was a conduit to the streams of the underworld, explains archaeologist Jutta Stroszeck of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens. “Water nymphs protected the water,” she says, “and were thus thought to be capable of directing the curses to the gods of the underworld.”

TRANSLATION OF THE GLYKERA CURSE TABLET:

We curse Glykera the wife of Dion, to the gods of the underworld, so she be punished and her wedding be unfulfilled. I bind down Glykera, the wife of Dion, to Hermes Eriounios of the underworld, her vulva, her debauchery, her vice and everything of the sinful Glykera