Some fascinating historical footnotes are bubbling up from underground at the sites of three archaeological digs - two in the Middle East and one in the Baltic.

At Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, evidence seems to have emerged that whatever kind of battle it was that Joshua fit, it didn't involve walls tumblin' down.

Not very far away, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, archaeologists are involved in an unseemly scrap over whether remains recently unearthed are those of none other than John the Baptist.or, if that stretches your imagination too far, maybe they're those of Jesus's brother, James.

And in Vilnius, in Lithuania, a mass grave first thought to contain victims of a Stalinist-era pogrom has turned out to be that of as many as 7,000 soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army, who froze to death during the retreat after the disastrous siege of Moscow in 1812.

Let's deal with Jericho first. The story goes that Moses was told by God to lead his people out of Egypt, where they had been made slaves. After 40 years of wandering about the Sinai desert, looking for the land God had promised, they came upon Jericho. Moses died immediately after his first look at it, but his chosen successor, Joshua, captured Jericho and went on to conquer Palestine, where the wandering Israelites settled. God is said to have given Joshua very precise instructions about Jericho. For six days, the people marched around the city, preceded by priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant, blowing trumpets. On the seventh day, they marched around Jericho seven times. On the seventh circuit, just before the trumpets were blown, Joshua told his people to shout. The people shouted, the trumpets blew, the walls collapsed.and it was all over but the killing.

Good story. But as far as archaeologists can determine, that's all it is. They have been digging at Jericho since the 19th Century, unearthing at least 23 levels of occupation, periods of prosperity, decline and conquest. But no evidence of walls coming down.

In fact, during the only period when it is thought possible that the Israelites might have conquered the Promised Land - the period between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age (1550-1000 BCE) - Jericho was probably in the state of ruin it was left in when it was destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age. (Scholars nowadays tend to use the less specifically Christian form, Before the Common Era and Common Era.) Israelis base their claim to residence rights in Palestine on the evidence in the Bible. As you can perhaps imagine, they go to tremendous trouble, as a result, to find evidence that supports Biblical accounts. But archaeologists say there isn't much - no evidence at Jericho, not of slavery in Egypt, not of Abraham, Isaac or Jacob, and not of anyone wandering in the desert.

Professor Ze'ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, a man who has taken part in excavations up and down the country, says it's time to stop looking. "After so many years of development of Israeli culture, we are now mature enough to look at the evidence in a more critical way, and not accept the legendary parts of the Bible as historical ones." As you can imagine, he's not the most popular man in Israel.

One of the other digs in Israel is at Qumran, about 13 kilometres east of Jerusalem. Most scholars believe that the Qumranites were Essenes - members of a Jewish sect that broke away from the Jerusalem establishment and thrived between the 2nd Century BCE and the 2nd Century CE. The Essenes followed a mystical interpretation of the ancient scriptures, and were especially strict about laws of ritual purity. It's believed that they were the authors and compilers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Just outside the perimeter of Qumran's ancient cemetery is a clump of dirt known as T (for Tomb)-1000. Ignored for years, this summer it was surveyed with Ground Penetrating Radar and, as a result, judged to be worth excavating. A skeleton was found, and everyone got very excited.

One scholar, Professor Richard Freund, reasoned the John the Baptist claim out this way: "Since it's the biggest structure around, and since we know it's from the 1st Century, it's not a big leap to assume it's the tomb of the Qumranites' leader." And since John the Baptist was an active leader of the Essenes.well, you get the rest. James gets in there in the same way, as a kind of reserve.

That's nonsense, says archaeologist Magen Broshi, It's much more likely that the skeleton found in the grave is that of a Bedouin buried recently.

They're both wrong, says Joe Zias, a paleopathologist from Hebrew University.

"If they had allowed me - an anthropologist - to visit the site and see the skeleton, we'd know for sure within minutes what century it belongs to," he said.

So why don't they test the skeleton? Well, they apparently re-buried it. Kept the poor man's teeth, though, which are now being carbon-14 dated.

Will that solve the mystery? Unlikely, most experts agree. There are too many personalities involved, too many different agendas, too many research grants to be justified.

Why does this make me think of the Bermuda Housing Corporation? But it is an idea that takes us neatly over to those dead soldiers, doesn't it? Poor old Napoleon. Invading Russia turned out to be such a lousy idea. But he did it for the best of strategic reasons - he wanted to make sure his backside wasn't threatened when he moved to finish Britain off. He started his Russian campaign in June, which was reasonable. But Czar Alexander was a clever opponent. He knew that Napoleon liked to concentrate his forces at a single, critical point and strike with absolutely everything he had. The Russians delayed him, they harried him, but they would never stand still and give him the opportunity he wanted. He had a quarter of a million men under his command, certainly. some say as many as half a million. so his was a very formidable force, indeed. He did well, but his forward progress was slowed to such an extent that he wasn't able to get to Moscow until mid-September, when winter starts in those parts. The Russians gave him such a hard time that he couldn't re-gather his strength. He had no choice but to abandon the siege and leave a month later. When the French left Moscow in October, the temperature was 0?C. When they managed finally to get out of Russia into Poland in December, the temperature had dropped as low as -38?C. The Russians forced him to leave more or less the same way he came, on a route that had already been denuded of food. His troops were not only freezing, they were starving as well.

He left them on December 5, with instructions to re-group at Vilnius. But his troops were in no shape to regroup.

"I must tell you the truth," one of his commanders wrote him, "The soldiers throw their guns away because they cannot hold them; both officers and soldiers think only of protecting themselves from the terrible cold." When the Russians caught up with them on December 10, there was hardly anyone left alive to defeat. There were so many bodies in Vilnius's central square that movement from one side to another was blocked. There were reported to have been 7,500 dead in one hospital alone. The Czar's troops tried to cremate them, but eventually gave that up in favour of just dumping their bodies in their defensive trenches and covering them over. It took them until March.

It is one of these trenches that has been uncovered. For anthropologists, it's an exciting find. "It's an enormous database," one of them said, "a cross-section of the population of young males in Europe at the beginning of the 19th Century." The dead have already given up some of their secrets. Twenty-seven of them, so far, have proven to be women - the camp-followers who travelled with armies in those days. Some of the dead showed evidence of bone damage from advanced syphilis. And many of the corpses had been hacked about as looters, some of them, no doubt, other freezing French soldiers, removed boots and other bits and pieces they thought might help in their own futile struggle against the cold.

Napoleon loved his troops. A defeat like this one must have been heart-breaking for him on more than one level. Yet to come, of course, was Waterloo and exile for six years, until his death, in St Helena. A sad end to the life of one of the greatest soldiers of all time.

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