The path to God often comes through self-denial, but sometimes temptation is too great to overcome. St. Stephen’s, a fifth-century monastery in Jerusalem, was home to Byzantine monks who purported to practice an ascetic lifestyle, including the consumption of little more than bread and water (with some fruits and vegetables). Unlike other monasteries of the period, which were often remote desert enclaves, St. Stephen’s was an urban monastery. An isotopic analysis of bone collagen from 54 skeletons at the monastery conducted by Lesley Gregoricka of Ohio State University reveals that 16 of the individuals regularly consumed animal protein, perhaps from eggs, cheese, milk, fish, meat, and perhaps even garum (fermented fish sauce). The city monastery was famously affluent, says Gregoricka, so perhaps higher status monks had access to luxury, taboo, decidedly non-monastic food items.

Russian archaeologists excavating a third-century B.C. necropolis on the slopes of the Central Caucasus Mountains have unearthed a spectacular warrior’s burial. Along with a dozen gold artifacts, including a brooch that holds a small crystal, the warrior went to the afterlife dressed in iron chain mail and armed with two iron swords and a battle-ax. One of the swords measured three feet long and was discovered between the warrior’s legs, its tip pointed toward his pelvis. “The burial goods are exceptionally rich,” says archaeologist Valentina Mordvintseva of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who helped analyze the unprecedented trove. “He belonged to the upper class of the society and was possibly a chieftain.” The burial of three horses and a cow nearby indicate that his people held the warrior in unusually high esteem.

From the sixth through eighth century A.D., a terrifying illness called the Plague of Justinian gripped the Eastern Roman Empire. Like the Black Death pandemic that decimated Europe seven centuries later, this plague often caused death within a matter of days. New work by paleogeneticists at the University of Tübingen in Germany provides empirical evidence for an old historical theory: that the two pandemics were caused by the same pathogen. By comparing the genome of ancient Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the Black Death, with genetic data from hundreds of less virulent modern strains, the team reconstructed the pathogen’s genetic history, and found evidence suggestive of a significant Y. pestis outbreak corresponding to the Justinian plague. “Our results suggest that Y. pestis may have affected human populations several centuries before the Black Death,” says Kirsten Bos, the study’s lead author. “The Plague of Justinian seems like the best candidate for an earlier pandemic.”