When archaeologists first excavated a fifth-century A.D. cemetery in Pannonia, an ancient Roman province in present-day western Hungary, they found that a large portion of those buried there had intentionally deformed skulls. In all, 51 of 96 men, women, and children interred in the Mözs-Icsei dűlő cemetery between around A.D. 430 and 480 had elongated, oblong heads.

To learn more about the people buried in the cemetery, Zsófia Rácz, an archaeologist at Eötvös Loránd University, and her colleagues performed isotope analysis on samples taken from the skeletons’ bones and teeth. The results showed that 23 of the people had strontium isotopes that are not found locally, suggesting that they came from elsewhere. All these newcomers had modified skulls, leading Rácz and her team to conclude that this practice was imported and introduced to the local Pannonians, some of whose skeletons also have oblong heads.

The researchers aren’t certain why skull modification took hold in this region of the Carpathian Basin after the fall of the Roman Empire, but Rácz speculates that the unusual skull shapes may have been a way of cultivating group identity. “This kind of modification can be a tool for creating or maintaining different social identities,” she says. “It may signify status, ethnicity, familial affiliations, or communal affiliations.”

When hundreds of Phoenician ceramic figurines and vessels were first recovered from the seafloor off northern Israel almost 50 years ago, archaeologists interpreted the artifacts as cargo from a fifth-century B.C. shipwreck. Now, University of Haifa archaeologists Meir Edrey, Adi Erlich, and Assaf Yasur-Landau have reassessed the artifacts and determined that they were deliberately cast into the water, likely as part of a ritual that was repeated from the seventh through third centuries B.C.

Unlike other Phoenician caches of ritual statuettes, Edrey explains, all the figurines retrieved from the site depict women. “Some have protruding bellies or a hand placed over the abdomen, and others are even carrying children,” he says. “These attributes suggest that this assemblage was related to a specific cult connected with fertility and childbearing.” A few of the figurines portraying pregnant women bear the symbol of the Phoenician goddess Tanit. This symbol appears frequently in inscriptions at some central Mediterranean sites where infants were sacrificed in exchange for divine favor. Says Edrey, “These figurines could represent a local manifestation of this practice, in which they might have been used as a substitute for actual human infants who were often promised even before they were born.”

As early as the eleventh century A.D., Persians added chromium to iron to produce a strong type of steel that could be made into tools, armor, and weapons. Guided by medieval texts that describe areas where steel was manufactured, Rahil Alipour, an archaeologist at University College London, located a site named Chahak in southern Iran. There, she found broken ceramic molds called crucibles in which steel had been made, as well as slag, the waste product of metal production. Embedded in the slag were droplets of steel that were found to contain between 1 and 2 percent chromium by weight. “That might not sound like much,” says Alipour, “but it really does make a difference in the mechanical properties of steel.”

Among the evidence that chromium was intentionally added is a tenth- or eleventh-century recipe for crucible steel recorded by the Persian polymath Abu-Rayhan Biruni. The recipe includes an ingredient called rusakhtaj, which translates to “the burned.” Alipour notes that the mineral chromite, a form of chromium readily available near Chahak, is black, which may explain the description of the material in the recipe as burned. The area also has plentiful iron deposits. “We know that people of the past would choose their production centers around the materials they needed,” she says, “so that may be the reason why they chose Chahak.”

The steel droplets also contain around 2 percent phosphorous, which would have lowered the metal’s melting temperature, making it easier to produce. But the phosphorous would have made the finished product more fragile. This accords with historical accounts that blades made with Chahak steel sold for a high price, but often proved brittle and rapidly lost their value. Alipour says it’s unclear whether phosphorous was intentionally added to the mix.