Although they were only meant to be kept for a year or so, administrative documents recording the people and goods controlled by the palaces of Late Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1400–1200 B.C.) show signs of having been carefully edited to present information in a clear, orderly fashion. The documents, which were written on clay tablets using a script known as Linear B, have only survived because they were accidentally fired and hardened when the buildings in which they were stored burned.

In the case of a tablet listing offerings to various deities at the palace of Pylos, says Anna P. Judson, a research fellow at the British School at Athens, these edits affected how the entire document was organized. On the tablet’s front side, the scribe worked out a way of presenting the list by writing “At Pylos…” in large script and then applying this heading to a number of different offerings. On the back, the scribe put this system into practice throughout. “The fascinating thing about this is that you can see the decision-making process happening,” says Judson. “You can see this person 3,000 years ago in the middle of writing something stop and think, ‘Wait, should I do this a different way?’”

Another tablet from Pylos that records the amount of bronze allocated to a number of different smiths also shows signs of having been edited on the fly. After enumerating how much bronze each smith received, the scribe wrote the total amount of bronze distributed, then erased the sum and wrote it again on the next line. The scribe left another line blank before starting the next paragraph, allowing the total to stand out clearly.

While restoring a viewing area overlooking the Nazca Lines in the desert of southern Peru, archaeologists noticed the previously undocumented traces of a cat geoglyph crouching on a steep hillside. The 121-foot-long outline of a feline was badly eroded but has since been cleaned and conserved. Based on its resemblance to depictions of Andean cats frequently found on textiles, ceramics, and petroglyphs produced by the Paracas culture, researchers have dated the figure to around 200 B.C. This means it predates the creation of many Nazca geoglyphs by some 400 years. “This feline seems to have been part of Paracas religious cosmology of the time,” says archaeologist Johny Isla of Peru’s Ministry of Culture. “The cat was considered a deity that represented dominion over the earth, together with the killer whale and condor that signified dominion over water and air.”

The Tashtyk culture, which existed between the first and seventh centuries A.D. in southern Siberia, is known for its elaborate burial customs, including applying layers of gypsum onto the deceased’s face to create lifelike death masks. A stunning example of this practice—the mummified remains of a man buried some 1,700 years ago wearing a painted red death mask—was discovered in the late 1960s in the Khakassia region. More than half a century later, researchers from Russia’s Hermitage Museum have finally managed to glimpse the man’s face.

Since removing the mask would damage the mummy, the researchers instead conducted a CT scan to peer beneath the facial covering. The scan revealed that the man had a nasty gash across the left side of his face, running from his eye to his ear, that had been sutured shut prior to his burial. Experts believe the wound may have been fatal, and that it was stitched up after the man died so he would not have to go to the afterlife with a disfigured appearance. The scan also showed that the man’s skull has a two-to-three-inch hole in its left temple, likely resulting from the removal of his brain during his funerary ceremony.