Behind the Scenes Minis: Shakespearean Floorboards

Tracy explains why there aren't any repatriations or exhumations in this week's edition of Unearthed! There's also discussion of all the ways a sandal might end up in a well. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. We had our whole year end Unearthed for
twenty twenty three. Yes, indeed, you had a whole thing

(00:21):
you were going to talk about. I did so for
a long time. Pretty much every installment of Unearthed we
have had a whole section of repatriations. So sometimes this
has been like artifacts, artwork, something like that being returned

(00:43):
from a museum or other institution to the place that
originally came from. The word repatriations is also used to
talk about human remains being returned to their place of origin.
Some communities prefer the term repatriations. I have seen this
in a few write ups, especially relating to sometimes human

(01:06):
remains and sometimes other cultural or religious objects. And we
did not have any in the episode this time, even
though I had a whole gigantic list of them. And
part of it was the way that I did Unearthed
this year or this time, there were some things that

(01:29):
I wrote up. I did the write up sort of
as I went, but then I started just collecting the
links in the different categories and then I would go
back to them later and do the actual write up
up of all of them. Gotcha, And in this particular case,
the repatriations I had left for last, and I got

(01:51):
to them, and we already had two complete episodes of
Unearthed without the repatriations, and I was like, Okay, well,
I'm just gonna have to cut. I'm gonna have to
go through and like, let's find out what's the most interesting.
Make some cuts. And then as I was reading the
things that we had to talk about, overwhelmingly this time

(02:15):
they were things that had been looted, recently seized by
law enforcement. None of the ones. I mean, it's possible
that there were things that I did not see or
that were not reported, but nothing that I found from
the third quarter of or the fourth quarter of twenty
twenty three was about sort of the questioning of how

(02:39):
we look at these kinds of items from like a
cultural perspective, and how museums. None of it was about
like how are museums evaluating their own collection? Like what
does this mean? How do we how do we have
meaningful museum collections that are not harming communities that these
objects really belong to? Right? Overwhelmingly it was you know,

(03:04):
this was stolen from Nepal in nineteen eighty two, or
this was all connected to an antiquities dealer, and we
learned this antiquities dealer was trafficking and a lot of
stuff that was looted, like none of it really was
about greater questions, and I sort of just felt like
I was reading off a police blotterer. And the one

(03:27):
that wasn't related to that was one of a handful
of things that have made headlines where an individual person
has decided to return something that either they had gotten
or their family member had gotten, and in this case,
it was somebody who had inherited some items from their

(03:51):
late father, and one of their late father's last wishes
had been to return these items to where they came from.
And the reason that I didn't really get into that
was that, like, there was one specific expert who had
sort of volunteered their time to help with this, and

(04:11):
I was like, I feel like if I like, simultaneously,
I want to thank this person for their work, but
I also don't want to wind up in a position
where this person is being overwhelmed by requests for help
from people who are I want to return something and
I don't know how so yet. It just the more
I looked at it, the more I was like, I
cannot figure out a way to talk about this that

(04:33):
feels like it's a meaningful way and not just a
list of stuff that was more recently stolen. So that
is why no repatriation. We did not have an exhumations section.
It's actually been a little while I think since we
had a whole exhumation's section, because, as has been the

(04:55):
case a few times, most of the things that I
found that were about exhumations were not about like the
exhumation of a historically significant person for some reason. They
were like a family's ongoing effort to find closure in
their loved one's murder. And that does not feel like
what we are really focused on as a podcast. Yeah,

(05:17):
we are not a true crime show about ongoing murder
investigations unless the murder investigation is somebody that died in
like fifteen forty seven, the person who varnished the floorboards
of the theater where Shakespeare walked, where Shakespeare might have walked,
not even definitely walked, that varnisher might have been murdered.

(05:40):
I would actually love that story. That would be great.
That does sound pretty cool. So yeah, that's kind of
the thinking behind some of those things this time around.
We will see, we will see what happens next time.

(06:04):
Was there anything and in these in these episodes that
particularly jumped out at you this time around, Holly, there's
a there's a favorite that you have. I'm always writing
down notes as we go the Egyptian artifacts in Scotland.
Of course, I'm like, it does two things. I know

(06:25):
I've mentioned before that I often whenever we do unearthed,
it makes me think about how we live today and
what people are going to extrapolate, meaning wise, from the
things they dig up from our houses. Right, And I'm
I'm still working on my campaign to make sure future
civilizations think that Gredo was some sort of deity. I'm
working very hard on this. But the Egyptian stuff made

(06:49):
me think, like, did no one consider maybe his family
did not think it was Kurshed, but they were trying
to give him even though it was not at burial
site and an Egyptian style burial where they're like, here's
all your stuff, you sure love Egypt. We're gonna do
this ceremonially at home. If that speculation was anywhere in

(07:13):
the in the write ups on this, I did not
see it, but yeah, I can imagine that also, Right,
That's what my friends would do. They would be like,
let's figure out this person collects all this weird stuff
that doesn't make it, probably cackling at the fact that
someone is going to think that Egyptians magically visited. Yeah,
that's how it would work in our in our circle.

(07:36):
This one might surprise you that this stuck out to me,
The sandal in the well, yeah, because I'm like, again,
has anybody theorized that this is a Braddy brother scenario? Right?
That's one of Yeah. I mean, like, especially if it's
all kind of fancy and beautifully you know, designed with

(07:57):
all the curly cues and the circular symbols. I'm like, yeah,
is that like, you know, two wealthy kids running around
playing and somebody steals somebody's sandal and throws it down
the well so they can never get it back. Yeah,
Or you know your ex who broke your heart throw

(08:17):
the favorite sandal down the well, just the one, keep
one for the other one might still be down there
in this scenario, that's true not be found in the well. True,
it was I don't know how. Uh. So often when
we're working on on Earth's I will wind up with
multiple articles about the same thing, and they are all

(08:37):
reporting the same points, and I'm like, I really feel
like everyone is reporting the same sources, reporting like people.
Sometimes a reporter is clearly doing original reporting, conducting interviews themselves,
all of that. Like, we've made no secret about the
fact that when we do this, we are reporting on

(08:58):
what is reported, right, we are not generally There are
some exceptions, but we're not generally like conducting interviews ourselves
with the people who did this research that would not
work for this format of episode in the time allowed
to do it. But sometimes it seems like there are
eight different newspaper articles all saying the exact same thing,

(09:20):
and it sort of feels like everybody is just kind
of reporting each other's work. And so I don't know
if that's what happened with this detail of it was
the sandal of somebody who was cleaning the well, right,
but like that just appeared everywhere and the description was
always so definitive, and I was like, how did we

(09:41):
conclude that it was clean? Possible? It's possible that somewhere
there's an explanation of how that was determined to be
the source of the sandal in the well. But every
time I was like, how do you know that's what happened,
because like I'm sort of thinking, I don't know. Maybe
somebody had a weird superstition about their shoe and they

(10:03):
wanted to throw it in the well, right, Maybe they
thought the shoe was haunted. Maybe somebody spin on their shoe.
There could be anything, and there's very beautiful. The one
of the other things that jumped out at me, of course,
was the Busy Fiend. Yes, and I told you I

(10:25):
want to make a drink called the Busy Fiend now
that has a lot of caffeine and cinnamon in it.
We'll get ready to work on that. But what it
really made me chuckle about is the idea of it
made me want to start going to thrift stores and
buying paintings so that I could paint a little fiend

(10:46):
into each one of them. That sounds great. One of
the things that struck me about that is that one
of the things that I read had all of these
quotes from like reviews of the painting from the time
that really reminded me of like when somebody reads an

(11:07):
advanced copy of a book and they post about it
on their good Reads and then twenty seven other people
who have not read the book give it a one
star review, right like it just people seemed, uh so,
they had such strong feelings about this, this image in

(11:28):
the painting, and some of them, I was like, did
you were you? You weren't there though it seems like
you were not writing from where the painting was displayed,
right like, uh yeah, but they're an expert on Shakespeare.
Did you know he walked upon the I can't get
over the floorboard thing, the floorward thing. I'm like, okay.

(11:53):
The last thing that of course jumped out at me
that will surprise no one is like, bring the wooly dog. Yeah,
did you see any pictures of the pelt or the
I didn't see pictures of the pelt. Something we did
not mention was part of this work involved an artistic

(12:15):
rendering of what these dogs would have looked like, because,
of course, based on when there are no photos, we
few to know there may be some somewhere, but they
would have been like from a pretty early era of photographs.
But yeah, there was an artistic rendering that was made

(12:37):
oh they're white. Yeah, oh they're spits type. Oh my gosh,
bring back the wooly dog. Yeah, yes, I did think
that this dog was very cute from the painfully cute rendering.

(12:59):
So yeah, oh my goodness, yeah, oh my goodness. As
I understand it, the way this happened was that the
Smithsonian was like, hey, we want to look at this
at this pelp, but we also like, we want your input,
and so actively sought out input for that, which is cool,

(13:21):
and I'm glad that they not taged not only that
there was co authorship, but they made it very clear
like we would not have understood any of this. Yeah, yeah,
had we not spoken to these people, which is very cool.
But also bring back the only dog just for the
not of any cultural or heritage importance. I just want

(13:42):
there to be booling dollar. Yeah. Yeah. I am looking
at an article now where there are some photos that
were taken in like the late eighteen hundreds that are
are printed in this and like, I don't know, as
we've talked before, I have always been more of a
cat person than a dog person. But I find this

(14:03):
dog to be very cute. So cute puppers all the
puppers all the time. Yeah. Yeah, those are the main
things that jumped out at me this time around art
art art hand axes, love it. Yeah, it took me
a while to figure out like that. I read the

(14:25):
same you know, same basic points right up of the
hand acts and the painting a few times, and I
was like, why, I feel like there's something missing. And
then I went to the actual paper and got into
the papers description of like thunderstones and the sort of

(14:48):
cultural importance of these objects people were finding that they
did not really understand was like a prehistoric hand ax,
which is what we think they are today, but people
had sort of built a mythology around them. And I
was like, oh, this makes it make sense, Like why
why he'd want one? Yeah? Yeah. So again, Happy Friday everybody.

(15:08):
Whatever is happening on your weekend. I hope it is
as great as possible. We will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow.
We will have something brand new on Monday. Stuff you
missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For

(15:29):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.