Dolia were not typical furniture for a defensive turret.

Their presence suggested that at some point, this military structure had been used for storage — or that goods had been brought into it during an emergency, when the normal order of a functioning city was breaking down.

But then came the bones.

“It’s very rare for archaeologists to discover human remains inside the cities of antiquity,” Vagalinski told Live Science, “except in the case of ‘extraordinary circumstances.'”

Deultum, in the period around A.D.