March/April 2026 Issue

Games were such an integral part of Maya society that they were sometimes embedded into a building’s design. A unique fifth-century a.d. patolli gaming board was found on the floor of a wealthy residential complex in the ancient city of Naachtun. While most known patolli boards—which feature a pattern of squares forming a cross—were roughly scratched into stucco floors or benches, this one was inlaid as a mosaic. It is the only one of its kind.

The Vikings have long been credited with building Ireland’s first towns in the ninth century a.d. New evidence from County Wicklow, however, indicates that Irish urban traditions might be much older. A survey of the Brusselstown Ring hillfort, which was inhabited between 1200 and 400 b.c., revealed as many as 600 possible house platforms located within two concentric circular ramparts. If these structures were, in fact, dwellings, this would be the largest prehistoric settlement ever discovered in Britain or Ireland.

If there are few resources on hand, you build with what you’ve got. Some 18,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, what people had was mammoth bone. Four circular structures built almost entirely from mammoth tusks and bones were discovered decades ago in the village of Mezhyrich. Archaeologists have been unsure whether they were houses, storage facilities, or ritual monuments. New data indicates that the structures were likely used as temporary dwellings that provided refuge during brief periods of extreme weather.