New photographic techniques have shown that that walls in Pompeii were covered with graffiti, including pictures of gladiator fights, lewd poetry, and inscriptions in non-local languages like Safaitic. So sort of like New York City subways in the 1970s. Who says the past doesn’t repeat itself?

A new study suggests that Iron Age Judean grandparents lived on the ground floor. Sure, it’s not like they were going up and down the ladder to the roof. But did they get their own suites and hey hey stop that, that’s a cooking pot!

The discovery of an elephant bone in third century BCE Spain has us asking questions. Was the circus in town or was it a war elephant, like one of those Hannibal used to climb the Alps? But where did it come from and how did Carthaginians learn to drive them? After all, the trunk is in the front.

New research suggests that the painted designs on prehistoric Halafian pottery represent mathematical reasoning. If you count all the leaves and bushes, this tracks. What kind of crazy people count the leaves and bushes? Archaeologists, that’s who.

Did Mamluks mill sugar in the Beth Shean Valley of Israel using water powered mills? Do elites own industries creating tasty and addictive foodstuffs and foist the products on the unsuspecting? Talk about a sugar rush!

The discovery of opium residues in an Egyptian alabaster jar with the Achaemenid king Xerxes’ name on it has us wondering. How stoned were they in the past? Was that why the jar ended up at Yale? Talk about a legacy admission!

The lagoon off Tel Dor is filled with shipwrecks and wouldn’t you know it, new excavations have turned up three from the Iron Age. Our contestants talk about the finds, changing patterns of Mediterranean trade, and the problem of getting insurance. Iron Age maritime economies? Learn to swim.

The discovery of a teeny tiny figurine at the 12,000 year old site of Nahal En Gev II has us asking uncomfortable questions. Why is the woman carrying the goose on her back? Why does the goose seem pleased about this? Are women and geese separate parts of nature or sort of the same? Wait, what? It’s the Mother Goose mythogram of the millennia!

In Iron Age Jerusalem, finding a tiny bit of a cuneiform tablet is a big deal, since in that town, they use the alphabet. But when the Neo-Assyrian authorities ask, hey, where’s our tax money, they can do it in any script and language they want. So you’d better read the email, otherwise -there- will be a meeting, and you won’t like it.

How much gold was mined in antiquity anyway? A new economic analysis suggests that second millennium BCE Nubia produced hundreds of tons of the stuff, which is way more than anyone ever thought. Mining expeditions were super profitable too. So where’s the archaeological and textual evidence? Screw that, where’s all the gold now dammit?