British researchers are going beyond standard X-rays to study nearly 500-year-old lead cannonballs found on the wreck of Mary Rose, a Tudor warship brought to the surface of the English Channel in 1982. The ship sank when the British fleet squared off with the French during the Battle of the Solent in 1545.

Using neutron-based imaging, which employs beams of the neutral subatomic particles that can pass through lead, the team has developed 2-D and 3-D renderings that reveal the Mary Rose’s cannonballs had lumps of iron in them. Why was the iron used? Possibly to save on expensive lead or because it altered the flight or impact of the projectiles. 

According to battlefield archaeologist Glenn Foard of the University of Huddersfield, Mary Rose’s 1,600 rounds of unfired shot can help researchers understand state-of-the-art weaponry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Says Foard, “We can compare it to the much rarer battlefield finds of projectiles which have firing and impact evidence telling us something of the guns that fired them.”

In the remote mountains of southwestern Oregon, researchers have uncovered a pre–Civil War battlefield that was lost for more than a century and a half. The Battle of Hungry Hill was a pivotal fight during the Rogue River Wars of 1855 to 1856, a conflict between Oregon settlers and Native Americans. The battle, a defeat for the U.S. Army and a local militia, prompted the government to evict the native population from Oregon’s Rogue and Umpqua Valleys. 

For years, pioneer family stories led researchers searching for evidence of the battle in the wrong direction. However, archaeological surveys, according to Mark Tveskov, an archaeologist with Southern Oregon University, eventually identified the location where it had been fought. During the research, which began in 2009, Tveskov found previously unknown primary documentation, including a front-page article in the New York Herald, published 12 days after the battle concluded on October 31, 1855, and eyewitness accounts. This led the team to 24 square miles of the Grave Creek Hills, several miles northwest of the spot where the battle was previously thought to have taken place. 

In September, the team turned up three artifacts that match weaponry used by the U.S. Army during the mid-nineteenth century—two .69 caliber lead musketballs and a lead stopper from a gunpowder container. Tveskov hopes to uncover more details, which might, among other things, corroborate two historical accounts of a Native American sniper picking off the majority of the Army’s 39 casualties.

Lucas Asicona Ramírez probably had no idea that he was embarking on an archaeological excavation five years ago when he began scraping down the plaster on the walls of his 300-year-old home in Chajul, Guatemala. But his renovation uncovered a series of murals that had been painted by his Ixil Maya ancestors in the years after the Spanish conquest. Some of the paintings depict what archaeologists Lars Frühsorge, Jarosław Źrałka, and William Saturno believe to be a ritual called the Dance of Conquest. The people in this painting seem to be Maya, yet wear some pieces of European clothing. The seated figures are playing instruments while the figure on the right, wearing a jaguar skin and cape, dances.