A mass burial containing the remains of at least 25 soldiers who were killed defending Christian-held Sidon during the Crusades was uncovered during excavations close to the town’s Saint Louis Castle. Archaeologists uncovered a belt buckle of a style worn by French-speaking Crusaders, as well as a coin dating to between 1245 and 1250. These objects led them to conclude that the men were likely killed during a 1253 attack by an army of the Mamluk Sultanate, an Islamic empire that spanned Egypt, much of the Levant, and part of the Arabian Peninsula from 1250 to 1517. Bournemouth University archaeologist Richard Mikulski says the large number of wounds to the men’s necks suggests they were killed by assailants on horseback wielding heavy medieval weapons, such as swords, axes, and war clubs or maces, possibly while fleeing. This is one of only two archaeologically documented mass burials of Crusaders. “For a period that is meant to be so full of violence and conflict,” says Mikulski, “we actually have very little physical evidence of battle from the Crusades.”

When a settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland, was first excavated in the 1960s, the style of its buildings made clear they were constructed by Vikings who had arrived from Greenland in the tenth or eleventh century. But exactly when they made their voyage, becoming the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic Ocean, was a matter of debate. Now, a team of researchers led by Margot Kuitems of the University of Groningen has used a new method of dating wood associated with the settlement to determine precisely when the Vikings were there. The researchers took advantage of a rare solar storm that occurred in A.D. 992, significantly increasing the amount of radioactive carbon-14 absorbed by trees the next year. By identifying the tree ring containing elevated levels of radiocarbon in each of three wood samples and then counting the number of rings to the bark edge of the wood, they found that the wood all came from trees that had been felled in A.D. 1021.

The Vikings do not appear to have intended to colonize L’Anse aux Meadows, says Birgitta Wallace, a retired Parks Canada archaeologist who has worked at the site for decades. “It was a base for further exploration, a gateway to other sites,” she says. “They were going to see what there was in this new territory that could benefit them.” Among the coveted resources they collected from farther south, most likely from present-day New Brunswick, were hardwood lumber, butternuts, and possibly even grapes. After a decade or so, the Vikings headed back across the seas. “They decided, ‘It is very good land, but there is danger here because of the Indigenous people,’” says Wallace, “‘so we’ll go home to Greenland and stay there.’”

A tag worn by an enslaved person who was hired out by his or her enslaver has been discovered in the remnants of a mid-nineteenth-century kitchen on the campus of the College of Charleston. Such tags, which were issued from the late eighteenth century until 1865, bore registration numbers and identified enslaved people by their trades, such as carpenter, blacksmith, fisherman, or domestic servant. This example, badge number 731, dates to 1853 and is stamped with the word “servant.”

While other southern cities had similar hired labor arrangements, Charleston is the only one that produced such tags, says archaeologist R. Grant Gilmore III of the College of Charleston. “What is uncommon about this discovery is that this object was found in context, unlike many other examples now in the hands of private collectors that have no provenance,” he says. “An enslaved person living in the house may have discarded the tag in the hearth, or someone on loan from across town may have lost it one day.” Property records for the kitchen and those who worked in it may help connect the object with specific enslaved individuals. “These objects are emblematic of urban slavery and the way it worked in Charleston,” says Bernard Powers, a College of Charleston historian. “You have a designation of an occupation and a connection to an individual that breaks through an amorphous group of enslaved humanity and allows for an identity and a personhood to emerge.”