Archaeologists say they located a Black Death burial site containing some of a village's 12,000 dead. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The Black Death () killed as much as half of Europe's total population between 1346 and 1353, so there are a of bodies buried across the continent. For example, contemporary accounts from Thuringia--a state in central Germany--report that about 12,000 plague victims died around Erfurt amid the city's outbreak in 1350. But despite multiple accounts attesting to this devastation, none of the 11 mass graves could be pinpointed for centuries.

As a child of refugees, my parents' narrative is missing huge gaps of information. In our data rich world, archivists are finally piecing together new clues of history using unmanned systems to reopen cold cases. The Nazis were masters in using technology to mechanize killing and erasing all evidence of their crime. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Treblinka, Poland. The death camp exterminated close to 900,000 Jews over a 15-month period before a revolt led to its dismantlement in 1943.

AAAS analyst assists a human rights organization in gathering data during an exhumation. Against a backdrop of summer heat and a constant roar of distant howler monkeys, a scientific analyst piloted a drone to collect data from a hillside in northern Guatemala. At his side, anthropologists affiliated with a regional human rights group painstakingly cleared soil and roots from human remains in a mass grave. "Remains contorted, overlapping, interlaced, a cruel, tragic mashup of Hieronymus Bosch and H.R. Giger," noted Jonathan Drake, senior program associate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Geospatial Technologies Project, summoning images from 15th- and 20th-century artists to describe the nightmarish remnants of an atrocity estimated to have occurred sometime after 1980, during Guatemala's lengthy civil war. Clothing with burnt edges stuck to the bones of some.

Over the last decade, Mexican drug cartels have been fighting each other--and corrupt police and military units--for control of the lucrative drug trade, plunging the country into chaos. Outsiders might think of Mexico as sunny and tequila-soaked, but beyond the beach resorts of Cancun and Mazatlan there hides a grimmer tale: levels of murder, rape, and kidnapping are hitting levels rarely seen outside hotspots in Africa, Asia, and South America. So grim the tale, when 43 college students went missing in Mexico's southern state of Guerrero in 2014, investigators found 129 other bodies in 60 fosas clandestinas (mass graves) before stumbling on badly burned remains in a mass grave they think might--possibly, maybe--contain what's left of the missing students. Mexico's attorney general says the local mayor conspired with the town's police force to abduct the students and turn them over to a local gang, who murdered them and burned the bodies, and dumped the charred corpses into a river. The situation is so bad that, after six decades of gains, the average life expectancy in Mexico has decreased, according to recent research.

In March of this year, a massive grave was uncovered buried beneath the soil of the coastal Mexican state of Veracruz. The grave made national headlines because it contained more than 240 skulls and corpses, the remains of disappeared people (link in Spanish). But for many, the grave's existence came as no surprise. In Mexico, a country where almost 30,000 people have gone missing due to drug-related violence since 2006, the grave was a reminder of a difficult reality: the search for missing people often begins by looking underground. Mexico is home to over 122 million people and spans more than 750,000 square miles of land.