An ancient structure of unknown purpose has been discovered during the laying of fiberoptic cable in the town of Torreano, near Udine in northeastern Italy. It is made of heavy stone slabs — two long walls and a short back topped by a “roof” — forming a rectangle. At first glance, archaeologists thought it was a burial cist, but an excavation of the structure found no evidence it had ever contained human remains. All it contains is silty, muddy soil typical of waterways.

The most plausible hypothesis right now is that it was a causeway, built to allow carts to pass through an ancient water course that flowed through the structure. A culvert or drainpipe is another possibility, but roughly-hewn, heavy stone slabs are not ideal for that job. Given the heavy weight and massive size of the stones, this was probably an infrastructure project of some significance requiring an investment of personnel and raw materials, not something erected quickly by a local farmer.

There is no stratigraphic information to be had in this find, and it is otherwise practically impossible to date a group of heavy stone slabs without associated artifacts or remains amenable to radiocarbon or dendrochronological analysis. In summary, we don’t know what it is or how old it is, but it’s cool anyway.

The structure has now been reburied for its own protection. The fiberoptic installation proceeds apace.

Mexico’s National Institute of Archeology and History (INAH) has unearthed a Maya tomb near Palenque in Chiapas. Built of stone slabs in a style never before discovered in Palenque, the burial contains the remains of at least two individuals.

The burial chamber contained the skeletal remains of two individuals buried at different times. The primary burial is of an intact, articulated skeleton buried in supine position facing the north. The other set of remains, believed to belong to an adult woman, are a secondary burial. She was initially buried somewhere else and then her bones reinterred in this access space of the burial chamber. A cranium discovered in the mix of bones of the secondary burial shows the wisdom teeth mid-eruption, indicating the deceased was about 25 to 28 years old. (Because the bones were moved in antiquity, archaeologists cannot be certain the skull matches the rest of the second body, so there may actually be parts of two people in the secondary burial.)

The grave goods in the burial chamber consist of ceramic vessels that would have held offerings of food and drink. (The organic contents have long since decomposed.) There were also green stone figurines placed in a wall niche. The remains have not been radiocarbon dated yet, but the grave goods are consistent with Maya funerary practices from the Late Classic (9th century A.D.) period. Mayan burials are usually located inside temples or homes, so this chamber is unusually distant from the center of activity.

In other recent Palenque news, detailed analysis of a skeleton discovered last May in another atypical venue (inside a stone tool workshop in the city center) has found that she was between 45 and 50 years old when she died. Her skull had been intentionally deformed, marking her as a member of the elite, but the type of deformation employed in her case (erect tabular, in which the skull expanded both in width and height) was not the preferred iteration in Palenque. The city-state’s culturally approved form was oblique tabular cephalic modeling which elongates the skull backwards only. This suggests the Lady SAS, as she was dubbed last year, may have been a visitor from another area of the Maya kingdom.

Another anomaly of the Lady SAS burial is the green stone inlays in her teeth. The Maya filed their teeth and implanted green stone as a status symbol, but interestingly, the highest echelons of Palenque eschewed dental inlays. The remains of kings and aristocrats that have been unearthed there have no dental modifications.

Archaeologists have uncovered a rare representation of the zodiac on the ceiling of the Temple of Esna near Luxor, Upper Egypt. It is one of only three complete zodiac groups found in Egypt. The ceiling paintings depict the 12 signs of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, imports from Hellenistic astrology interpreted through Egyptian religious iconography.

The overall project is in the hands of Hisham El-Leithy of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and Professor Christian Leitz of the University of Tübingen.

“Representations of the zodiac are very rare in Egyptian temples,” Leitz says, adding “The zodiac itself is part of Babylonian astronomy and does not appear in Egypt until Ptolemaic times.” Researchers think the system of zodiac signs and their related constellations was introduced to Egypt by the Greeks and subsequently became popular. “The zodiac was used to decorate private tombs and sarcophagi and was of great importance in astrological texts, such as horoscopes found inscribed on pottery sherds,” says Dr. Daniel von Recklinghausen, a Tübingen researcher. “However, it is rare in temple decoration: Apart from Esna, there are only two completely preserved versions left, both from Dendera,” he says.

In addition to the zodiac and the star constellations, the restoration revealed colorful images of snakes, crocodiles and various fabulous beasts, including a snake with a ram’s head and a bird with a crocodile’s head, the tail of a snake and four wings.

The Temple of Esna was dedicated to Khnum, the god of the source of the Nile who made human children out of the river’s clay on a pottery wheel and then planted them in the uterus of the mother. Construction began in 186 B.C., but today only the pronaos (vestibule), built in the reign of the Emperor Claudius (41-54 A.D.), survives. It is covered in painted inscriptions and reliefs from the column bases to the ceiling. The intricate decoration of the Claudian structure took two centuries to complete, finally during the reign of the Emperor Decius in 250 A.D.

It survived the centuries thanks to its prime location in the middle of the city center and its conversion to different uses. It was handier to keep it as a working structure instead of mining it for building materials. The space was used as a caravanserai (a roadside or urban hostelry where travelers and their animals could find accommodations and nourishment) and in the 19th century as a cotton warehouse. Centuries of torches and cooking fires and candles left thick layers of soot on the interior ceiling of the temple. Between the grey soot and the bird droppings, the ceiling decoration was completely obscured.

The reliefs on the columns and walls were rediscovered by Egyptologist Serge Sauneron who excavated the temple in the 60s and 70s and published the inscriptions in full. Or, rather, what he thought was in full. The Roman-era hieroglyphic reliefs were roughly chiseled in outline. With no depth to the relief, constellations were painted directly on the ceiling and were all but invisible under the grime.

A comprehensive restoration of the painted surfaces of the temple began in 2018. The team cleaned the walls, removed centuries of layered filth, stabilized the colors, removed salts and revealed the original colors and shapes of the decoration. In the course of the restoration, the team discovered depictions of the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, stars and constellations including the Big Dipper in the shape of a bull’s leg, Orion as Osiris and Sothis as Isis. They also discovered previously unknown constellations, including the Geese of Ra, and constellations like the “seven arrows” which the Egyptians used to measure time.