More than a hundred marble fragments have come out of the Penkalas stream at Aizanoi, and they cluster in one place, the wreckage of a single bridge. Five heads of Aphrodite and Dionysus have been lifted from it so far, along with sphinxes and other cult figures, some from statues two to three metres tall. The excavator reads them as statues smashed and thrown in from the bridge and the quay walls after the empire turned Christian. The team has now dug a metre and a half below the stream bed and is still pulling up blocks.

Red glyphs painted inside a cliffside cave at Chalcatzingo, Mexico, have been identified as writing from Teotihuacan, the great city of the pyramids. Cave 19 sits high on Cerro Delgado, reachable today only by abseiling down the rock face. Sometime around AD 350 to 550, someone climbed up there with a brush and red haematite paint and left three signs. One names the place "Singing Mountain." The exact same place name appears in the murals of Teotihuacan itself, over 100 km away, in a scene of priests marching in procession. Centuries later, locals still called a nearby hill Cuicatepec, Nahuatl for "Singing Mountain." The second sign shows a necklace, a cloak and an atlatl dart, read as a warrior title. The third, a star-studded frame, surrounds a fire-blackened stone ledge where incense or even a warrior's funerary bundle may have burned. For decades, Teotihuacan was called a civilization without true writing. Cave 19 adds to the case for a full script of around 120 signs. A pilgrimage to honor the warrior dead, on a mountain that sang?