B-SIDE-ART

  The room had been excavated in 2010 by the National Geographic Explorer William Saturno. Sixteen years later, someone was still staring at one faint patch of paint on its east wall, trying to work out what it said. The building is a small masonry structure at Xultun, a Maya site in the jungle of northeastern Guatemala, 340 kilometers southwest of Guatemala City. Its interior walls are covered with portraits of seated and kneeling men, each labeled with the title taaj — "obsidian," a term for a class of scribes and scholars — and with more than fifty faint mathematical notations scattered across the plaster like a scratch pad nobody bothered to erase. One cluster, designated Text 19, sat below a larger, already-deciphered inscription: eleven small hieroglyphs, ten centimeters tall in total, easy to miss even for people who had been staring at this room for years. The Met, Public Domain — Chakalte', "Relief with enthroned ruler" (770 CE), Maya, La Pasadita, Guat...

  Before the dead could pass into the underworld, they needed to speak. That is the belief encoded in one of the more striking finds to emerge from a newly announced excavation at Marina el-Alamein, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast: 24 small gold amulets, each cut into the shape of a tongue and placed in the mouths of the deceased. The idea, practiced widely across Hellenistic and Roman-era Egypt, was practical in its own way — the dead needed a voice to answer the gods of the underworld and, above all, to address Osiris himself, lord of the afterlife and judge of souls. A sheet of gold, tucked between the lips, was thought to grant that voice. Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery this week, crediting mission chief Eman Abdel-Khaliq and unveiled by Minister Sherif Fathy. The excavation uncovered 18 tombs at Marina el-Alamein, roughly 100 kilometers west of Alexandria — a site built on the ruins of the ancient city of Leukaspis. Eleven of the tombs a...

The excavators were not looking for anything old. They were clearing ground for a nuclear reactor. Beneath the topsoil on England's Suffolk coast, where two power stations already hum and a third is under construction, the sand held a shape that shouldn't have still been there: a faint rectangle, its edges gone soft after nearly six thousand years, but still legible enough for archaeologists to trace. Nobody had stood inside its boundary since roughly 3800 BCE. Oxford Cotswold Archaeology, the charity conducting the dig ahead of the Sizewell C nuclear station, has identified the shape as a long enclosure — a rectangular earthwork bounded by ditches, measuring about 165 by 65 feet. Stonehenge didn't have a single stone standing yet when someone was already digging this rectangle. Long enclosures like it are rare. Unlike burial mounds or settlements, they typically held no bodies and few possessions, because their purpose wasn't storage or shelter. Most archaeologists bel...