A well-preserved shipwreck lying in shallow water just a few hundred feet off the coast of Israel is providing new evidence of what life was like in the region when it sank, between the mid-seventh and mid-eighth century A.D. Volunteer student divers, who are part of a team led by archaeologist Deborah Cvikel of the University of Haifa, discovered almost 200 amphoras containing commodities such as olives, dates, fish, pine nuts, grapes, and raisins. This breadth of goods is surprising, as it has generally been thought that trade in the region declined greatly after the transition from Byzantine to Islamic rule in the mid-seventh century. “Here we have a large ship with cargo from all over the area,” says Cvikel. “I think we have proved that there was some large-scale maritime commerce at the time.” 

The team has also found indications that the ship’s crew may have included members of different faiths. Some of the amphoras bear Islamic benedictions, while others are painted with crosses, and the word “Allah” in Arabic was found burned into the ship’s wood. Says Cvikel, “Now we are wondering, Was the crew a mixture of Christians and Muslims?”

Two pipes unearthed at Indigenous sites in central and southeastern Washington—one dating to before contact with Europeans, and the other used after their arrival in the 1700s—have revealed the changing smoking habits of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Washington State University pioneered a process called ancient residue metabolomics, which has allowed them to extract multiple compounds from the pipes’ surfaces and interiors and to identify plants used for smoking.

In the precontact pipe, they detected the presence of smooth sumac (Rhus glabra), which smokers likely added to tobacco to improve its flavor and to take advantage of the plant’s medicinal properties. This pipe, which was made of stone, also contains traces of Nicotiana quadrivalvis, a species of tobacco that was once cultivated locally by Native tribes. The post-contact pipe, which was made of clay and discarded in the late eighteenth century, is of a type introduced by Europeans and quickly adopted by Native Americans. The pipe contains Nicotiana rustica, a more potent tobacco species of South American origin that was grown by tribes in the eastern United States. Its presence in the pipe helps establish that it was co-opted by Europeans for use in their trade tobacco. “The presence of rustica in the post-contact pipe confirms that indigenous tobacco was an important trade commodity after contact,” says Washington State University archaeologist Shannon Tushingham. This suggests that smoke plants cultivated by Native people continued to be used alongside tobacco domesticated by Europeans .

A recent study of the necropolis of Qubbet el-Hawa in Aswan has revealed that ancient Egyptian engineers possessed an uncanny sense of space. A team led by University of Jaen cartographer Antonio Mozas-Calvache used laser scanning and photogrammetry to create 3-D models of three tombs at the necropolis that were cut into the same rock face during the 12th Dynasty (ca. 1981–1802 B.C.). The entrances to the large tombs—which were built for local governors and their families—were separated by about 65 feet. But the models showed that the interiors of the complexes were so close together that two of the tombs were separated by only four inches in two places. “Initially, we didn’t believe these results,” says Mozas-Calvache. “We supposed that both tombs were close, but not so close.” After rechecking their data, the researchers determined that the tombs were indeed constructed to within just one hand width apart. Click on the video below to see 3-D models of the tombs.