Approximately 3,500 years ago, in the Bronze Age settlement of Cabezo Redondo in present-day Villena, a fire razed dwellings and workshops to the ground. However, the same fire that destroyed part of the village also helped preserve an object that is incredibly hard to document in archaeology: a loom with a largely wooden structure.

Recently published in the journal Antiquity, this finding by a team of researchers from several Spanish universities is one of only a few known cases in Mediterranean Europe in which both the set of loom weights and components made from wood and plant fibres have been preserved.

A team of astronomers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian have for the first time used galactic archaeology, the study of detailed chemical fingerprints in deep space, to trace the history of a galaxy outside the Milky Way. The study, published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, demonstrates a new way to reconstruct the evolution of distant galaxies, and opens up a new field of astronomy, called “extragalactic archaeology.”