In the ancient Maya city of San Bartolo in Guatemala’s Petén rain forest, researchers have recovered pieces of a painting that include the earliest known date from the Maya ritual calendar. The painting was once featured on the wall of a chamber at the base of the city’s central pyramid. The chamber has been dated to 250 B.C. So far, 250 fragments of the painting have been found, of which 11 are inscribed with examples of early Maya writing. This writing is not yet translatable, with the exception of two fragments that include glyphs for the number 7 and the word “deer.” Seven Deer is a date in the 260-day-long Tzolk’in calendar, which is still used by modern-day Maya to determine when rituals should be performed. To archaeologist Heather Hurst of Skidmore College, the discovery has illuminated a profound connection between past and present. “I was in awe that across the rise and fall of dynasties,” she says, “across the Spanish invasion and the decimation of people that occurred, this calendar has been maintained, and the count has kept going.”

Northwest England is known for its rugged mountains, clear lakes, fields of daffodils, and four lads from Liverpool who changed the history of music. It’s less known for well-preserved archaeological sites, though not because they are absent. Unlike in the south, where large construction projects in recent decades have necessitated extensive archaeological investigations and where the chalky soil preserves materials well, much that remains of the past buried in the northwest’s acidic soil is hidden or lost. But recent excavations at the town of Poulton along the banks of the River Dee in Cheshire have begun to change scholars’ perceptions of this part of Britain, especially in the Iron Age. “Northwest England is thought of as an Iron Age backwater,” says archaeologist Kevin Cootes of Liverpool John Moores University. “But the time capsule of Iron Age life we have found is extraordinary.”

Thus far, Cootes has uncovered at least eight roundhouses, along with ditches filled with household debris dating from the eighth to first century B.C. His finds include more than 20 pounds of pottery vessels used for holding salt, more than 1,000 animal bones, and valuable items such as an iron adze, jet jewelry, bronze brooches, and worked deer antlers. In one of the houses, Cootes unearthed two dog burials—which he thinks may have been sacrifices—60 percent of the site’s animal bones, half of its pottery, and most of its metalwork. Based on these finds, Cootes suggests this may have been a chieftain’s house. “Rivers are the motorways of antiquity, and this is a high-status Iron Age riverside trading settlement,” he says. “We’re beginning to see that this is a vibrant area that is much more similar to high-status sites elsewhere than previously thought.”

Artists have sought to depict sound in their work since at least the European Upper Paleolithic, some 36,000 years ago. A row of red dots emerging from the mouth of a lion in France’s Chauvet Cave, for instance, is one of the earliest known examples of an artist rendering an animal making a sound. Recently, Texas State University archaeologist Carolyn Boyd surveyed rock art made by hunter-gatherers living from around 2500 B.C. to A.D. 500 in the canyonlands of southwest Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila to explore how these people may have depicted human and animal speech. She found that the artists, who worked in a tradition known as Pecos River Style rock art, used dots and lines made almost exclusively with red pigment to create what she calls “speech-breath” emanating from the mouths of close to 100 human and animal figures. Some Pecos River Style figures stand face-to-face exchanging emphatic red dots, as if they are debating or perhaps singing. Still other figures have delicate red lines coming from their mouths. “It’s almost as if they are whispering,” says Boyd. One half-human, half-feline figure bellows forth a series of energetic zigzag lines. “That seems to be a thunderous roar,” says Boyd. “For their creators, these weren’t just silent images, they were full of sound and life.” To see more images featuring Pecos River Style rock art speech-breath, click here.