It may be an archaeologist’s job to unearth astounding discoveries, but every year some people just have an extraordinarily lucky — or strange — day. That was no different in 2024, with a construction worker turning up a nude marble deity hidden some 1,600 years ago, an art historian spotting a missing painting on his social media feed, and an amateur excavator digging up a confounding ancient Roman object. The experts made plenty of headlines, too, locating the earliest known cave paintings in South America, as well as what may be the oldest lipstick scientifically documented (in a daring red, no less).

Below are some of the most important art historical and archaeological discoveries of the year.

It’s hard to imagine a holiday season without “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The 1965 broadcast has become a staple — etched into traditions across generations like decorating the tree or sipping hot cocoa.

But this beloved TV special almost didn’t make it to air. CBS executives thought the 25-minute program was too slow, too serious and too different from the upbeat spectacles they imagined audiences wanted. A cartoon about a depressed kid seeking psychiatric advice? No laugh track? Humble, lo-fi animation? And was that a Bible verse? It seemed destined to fail — if not scrapped outright.

And yet, against all the odds, it became a classic. The program turned “Peanuts” from a popular comic strip into a multimedia empire — not because it was flashy or followed the rules, but because it was sincere.

As a business professor who has studied the “Peanuts” franchise, I see “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as a fascinating historical moment. It’s the true story of an unassuming comic strip character who crossed over into television and managed to voice hefty, thought-provoking ideas — without getting booted off the air.

If fashion is a language, Arianne Phillips, costume designer on James Mangold’s latest film “A Complete Unknown,” is a polyglot.

In 2005, she mastered the visual lexicon of Johnny Cash’s style for Mangold’s “Walk the Line,” dressing the Rockabilly legend in Western work shirts and all-black stagewear. For 2019’s “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood,” Phillips perused Sharon Tate’s real wardrobe to outfit Margot Robbie in the same snakeskin trench coat and yellow hot pants that the actor and model wore before her harrowing death in 1969. But for the last five years, Phillips has been studying Bob Dylan — becoming “fluent” in both his worldview and his wardrobe.

Releasing on Christmas Day in the US, “A Complete Unknown” stars Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, charting the musician’s meteoric rise from his arrival in New York at age 19 to becoming a bonafide star at 24.

“We were recreating known events that are widely documented,” Phillips told CNN in a video interview. “That was the beginning point for me, just in terms of the research. Excavating and forensically breaking the script down to known events.”

The film spans the years 1961 to 1965 and covers seminal moments in the folk-rock star’s early career, including, the now-iconic 1963 photoshoot of his “Freewheelin’” album cover, his tumultuous 1964 year tour with Joan Baez and his divisive performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.