January 2, 2019 • 42 mins
Wrapping up coverage of things found, discovered and dug up in 2018, this second in our two-part Unearthed! episode includes a little potpourri, edibles and potables, shipwrecks, exhumations and repatriations.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It
is time for part two of Unearthed and eighteen. And
this installment includes a lot of the favorites among our listeners.
(00:25):
We've got the shipwrecks and the edibles and potables, and
the exhumations and the repatriations, and every time I put
one of these together, I also wind up with this
collection of stuff that's not thematically related in any way,
but it just seemed really cool. And I call that
potpourri like the Jeopardy category, and that's where we're starting today.
(00:45):
Archaeologists in Peru have found a thirty eight hundred year
old wall with reliefs that depict four humans heads with
snakes slithering between them. In the middle between the snakes
heads and the humans heads is a face that looks
like neither, with wide eyes and a very wide mouth
and five fingerlike or perhaps tentacle like appendages underneath. And
(01:07):
they have speculated that this represents a seed putting down
roots and that the snakes represent a water deity that
irrigates the crops after people plant the seeds. That's more
likely hypothesis than what some of the Internet speculates, which
is because it is obviously fulu. I mean, that's what
I believe. But it's also just a really striking relief carving,
(01:31):
because like the four human faces are all in a row,
and then there are the sinuous snakes in between them,
and this thing in between them that might be a seed.
This area was home to the Caral civilization, which is
also known as Norte Chico, and that's one of the
oldest known civilizations in the Americas. I think part of
why the association to Casulu is so strong is not
just the tentacle mention, but also the relief mention, which
(01:54):
comes up a lot in Lovecrafts writing he likes a
shop particulity in like at the Mountains of mannis at
all descriptions of reliefs. So there's a subconscious tie in.
I think that people aren't aren't necessarily aware that they're making.
Archaeologists with the National Institute of Anthropology and History that's
i n a H in Mexico have been excavating a
(02:14):
set of twenty six pits in Mexico City, They are
about dred years old and are between one point two
and three point three meters below street level. Some of
these pits seem to have been used to bury human remains,
so they were effectively graves, but others were used for
storing things like grains and artifacts, and two of them
(02:35):
might have been used for tasks related to caring for
babies and young children. One example that was given in
the write up of all of this was making steam
bats for newborn babies. One hypothesis is that this whole
area was used for activities related to pregnancy and child care.
Backing up this hypothesis is the presence of more than
(02:56):
one thirty figurines, a few of them representing babies, but
most of them depicting pregnancy. So it's possible that the
site was something along the lines of an ancient prenatal
care center. I like that idea too, like the idea
that there was a place where all the pregnancies were happening. Really,
it's where Casulu was making, no idea. Archaeologists in China
(03:22):
have found a miniature terra Cotta army. These are a
lot like the famous terra Cotta warriors, but on a
much smaller scale, so, for example, the infantry figurines are
about eleven inches or twenty eight centimeters tall. These were
probably created about years ago, roughly a hundred years after
the Terracotta Army, and they might have been created for
(03:46):
Emperor Wu's son Liu Hung. In eighteenth century, Mysore leader
Hyder Ali developed rockets for use in warfare. His son
and successor, Tipu Sultan, improved on his father's design to
make a rocket that came to known as the Mysorean
Tipoo Sultan used these to fight the British East India
Company successfully until he was killed in seventeen. This year,
(04:09):
excavators found what they believed to be Tippoo Sultan's rockets
dash in an abandoned well. The well smelled of gunpowder
and once they excavated it they found more than a
thousand rockets. Uh. Now we are coming to the section
of things that are unearthed by amateurs, starting with a
dog named Monty, who dug up more than twenty Bronze
(04:32):
Age objects while on a walk in the Czech Republic
in March. In September, archaeologists who had examined the objects
announced that they were all more than three thousand years
old and included two spear points, three axes, several bracelets,
and thirteen sickle shaped objects. The fact that there were
so many objects so close together suggested to the team
(04:54):
that they were probably buried for ritual reasons. Archaeologists are
still examining the area where they were found. A mushroom
picker who wished to remain anonymous, found two bronze helmets
and took them to the Eastern Slovakia Museum. It is
unclear where these helmets were initially made. They look more
like decorative headgear than actual armor. They were probably imported
(05:18):
to the side of the village where they were found
by this mushroom picker. A metal detector iss named Mike
Smith may have found Wales's oldest chariot burial. He found
what he thought was a brooch, but after sending a
picture to an expert, he learned that it was really
part of a horse harness. Eventually, authorities were convinced that
they should take a closer look, which led to a
(05:39):
preliminary excavation of the area. A more complete study of
that find is still to come. Speaking of metal detectorists,
finds by amateur metal detectors come up pretty often on
onearthed and overall, amateur detector ists have kind of a
complicated relationship with museums and archaeologists. Amateurs have definitely found
(05:59):
object x that otherwise would not have been found. Sometimes
this has led scholars and curators and archaeologists to excavation
sites that they would not have looked at otherwise, and
it's been meaningful and significant. But at the same time
we have also talked about amateur detectorists damaging delicate historical
sites or removing important fines without notifying authorities, things like that.
(06:21):
In Denmark, amateur metal detectorists are mostly known for their
positive contributions. They've been described as an international success story
and have meaningfully contributed to the nation's understanding of its
own history. To that end, this year, Denmark launched a
tool called dime to help amateur metal detectorists register their
fines in the field. This has been a collaborative process
(06:45):
involving twenty seven museums, with the goal of making it
easier for amateurs in Denmark to continue that work. We
also have several things that have been unearthed by construction,
as happens frequently workers digging a trench for a new
a rear center at a school in sugar Land, Texas
found a mass burial site earlier this year. In June,
(07:06):
the school got permission to excavate and exhume the bodies,
and the team has concluded that these burials at the
site took place between eighteen seventy and nineteen ten, and
that they were probably part of the state's convict lease
system that followed the end of the Civil War and
the abolition of slavery. The team that's working on it
has talked about how important this find is and illustrating
(07:26):
this transition from slave labor to prison labor after the
thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment, as we've said
on the show, a lot before it, abolished slavery except
in cases of punishment for a crime. A team doing
preventative archaeological work in northern France unearthed a wheeled water
mill dating back to the fourteenth century. We have written
(07:49):
records of the mill dating back to sixteen fourteen, so
the mill itself is much older than the records that
we have of it. This mill seems to have been
used for a lot of different purposes over the centuries,
It was originally constructed as a flour mill, but archaeologists
have found bolts there that were used for textile manufacturer.
In the eighteen thirties, the mill was being used to
(08:09):
make noodles and other pasta, but by about forty years
later the area was being used as a farmstead rather
than as a mill. Cruise working on Line four of
Milan's Metro contacted archaeologists after hitting what appeared to be
a wall. They concluded that it was the outer enclosure
of the mausoleum of Emperor Maximian. This is one where
(08:30):
I think the construction continued on after this discovery. But
when you look at um the plan of how big
this mausoleum was, it was huge, and so it was
like the the metro line was sort of cutting through
one edge of this much bigger potential find. Back in
(08:51):
twenties seventeen, a team in Cologne found the remains of
a building while excavating as a at a church, and
then this year they figured out what that building was.
It was a library which might have housed as many
as twenty thousand scrolls, built almost two thousand years ago.
And because this particular library was in what was then
a public space. This was probably a public library, not
(09:13):
just somebody's giant, personal private collection. And now we come
to a series of stories where things were unearthed by climate.
UH drought in Ireland revealed the existence of a Neolithic
or early Bronze Age monument in a field. The dried
out vegetation made the outline of the monument visible in
drone footage. The grass is actually greener in the area
(09:36):
over the monument. Steve Davis, an archaeologist at the University
College Dublin, called the find internationally significant. I put that
on the list and then I found other similar finds
happening all over Britain and Ireland. Aerial footage has spotted
burial monuments and settlements and burial sites all visible as
green outlines and otherwise dry fields and Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Suffolk,
(10:02):
Devon and Somerset, probably others too. I was like, how
many counties are there and do all of them have one?
To continue my paranormal intrusions into this, I'm like all
those crop circles from the drought in Europe has also
revealed stones known as hunger stones in the Elbe River
(10:26):
in the Czech Republic. These are stones that people have
used to record low water levels in the river for
hundreds of years. The oldest one that was visible as
of August dates back to nineteen sixteen and has an
inscription in German that translates to when you see me weep.
The last time we heard about somebody pulling a sword
from a lake on unearthed, it was a prop sword.
(10:49):
It was kind of silly but not historically significant. But
this time it was an actual pre Viking Eero sword
pulled from a lake in Sweden by eight year old
Saga van Check. The is from the fifth or sixth century,
and she found it while she was skipping stones in
the water. The reason she was able to see it
there was that the water level was very low because
of all the dryness. At first she thought it was
(11:11):
just a stick. Low water levels also led to the
discovery of a stone covered in Pictish symbols in River
Dawn in Aberdeen, Scotland. Unlike the Hunger stones which are
left in the river, a team of archaeologists and academics
worked together to raise this one from the river. As
of August, they were working on where to permanently house it.
(11:31):
And not a related but slightly different note from these
fines that we have just talked about. There is a
large collection of human footprints in Tanzania that are vanishing
because of erosion. These footprints were made between five thousand
and nineteen thousand years ago, and they're located in a
mud flat that floods periodically and can also be very windy,
(11:52):
so it's really difficult to try to protect and conserve
the footprints. The prints themselves are extremely delicate, and then
there's a variety of natural factors that are contributing to
the erosion. Fortunately, there was a detailed three D scan
taken to the area when it was first described back
in so we do have documentation of the site if
(12:12):
preservation efforts fail. Uh, We're gonna have a little break
before we get to the possibly yummy depending on your
definition of that word. Section on edibles and potables. First,
we are going to have a little sponsor break. We
have so many edibles and potables to talk about that
(12:35):
they are going to be almost the entire middle of
this episode. First, a thirty six hundred year old tomb
in Israel has revealed the oldest known use of vanilla
vanilla's first use is often more associated with Mexico, and
today the orchids that are used in commercial vanilla production
are descended from species that are mostly native to Mexico,
(12:57):
but the vanilla orchid genus exists all around the world,
and in this case, it's chemical analysis of jugs in
a tomb that found two of the major chemical components
in vanilla extract, including vanillan. Most likely that or kids
that were used to produce this vanilla grew in East
Africa or the Indian subcontinent or Indonesia, and then we're
(13:20):
brought to the Middle East via sea trade. This find
predates the first known use of vanilla in Mexico by
more than two thousand years. That's a pretty delicious fine
that's not too too gruesome. Researchers in Ecuador announced that
they have unearthed the oldest proof of cocoa use. This
(13:40):
came from DNA analysis of the residues in fifties three
hundred year old pots. This discovery is fift hundred years
before the domestication of coco in Central America. Researchers believe
they've also found the earliest known use of nutmeg as
a food ingredient. Archaeologists found the residue and pottery from
the Banda Islands in Polynesia. This was dated to thirty
(14:04):
five hundred years old, and that's about two thousand years
earlier than the previous oldest known use of nutmeg and food.
I feel like if we could get all these discoveries together,
we could make something yummy, be a delicious pie. I
was thinking about a cookie. The world's oldest known champagne
was found in a shipwreck off of Finland in it
(14:27):
was purportedly still drinkable. This champagne dated back to roughly
eighteen thirty and Zukiko planned to auction it off, but
the champagne house wisely decided to have it analyzed first,
and after sending a few bottles away to do that,
they got the result that it was not in fact drinkable.
I like that. The fine was from the news this
(14:48):
year is please don't drink this too late. Yeah, we
thought it would be a good idea, but we have
determined it would not be a good idea. Researchers at
the University of York have concluded that the development of
ceramics may have been connected to an increase in fishing
and the need to store and process fish. In particular,
(15:10):
they looked at lipid residues from eight hundred pottery vessels,
most of them made in Japan, which is quote a
country recognized as being one of the earliest centers for
ceramic innovation. The lipid residues in the vessels show that
the types of fish stored and processed in them changed
as fishing evolved, but even after shifts in the climate
(15:31):
of Japan led to an increase in hunting and gathering,
the pots continued to be used mostly for fish and
not for other types of food. Archaeologists in China decanted
some liquid from a Western Han dynasty tomb. I'm saying decanted.
They really just poured it into a measuring glass as
part of their analysis of it, and it seems like
(15:51):
they have found some two thousand year old wine, at
least based on what it smells like, but more research
is needed to figure out its exact composition. Totally drinkable
until a few years hrore now we go. No no
no no. Archaeological research in northern Jordan's suggests that people
were making bread thousands of years before they developed agriculture.
(16:13):
They found fourteen thousand, four hundred year old bits of
charred flatbread. The research suggests that people were making bread
using wild cereals, which may have inspired them to try
to cultivate cereals rather than first cultivating cereal and then
figuring out how to make bread. This is the earliest
known evidence of bread making, and the breads themselves resemble
(16:35):
flatbreads from later sites in Europe and Turkey, and the
words of Professor Dorian Fuller of the University College London
Institute of Archaeology, quote bread involves labor intensive processing which
includes the husking, grinding of cereals and needing and baking.
That it was produced before farming methods suggests that it
was seen as special and the desire to make more
(16:56):
of this special food probably contributed to the decision to
begin to cultivate cereals. All of this relies on new
methodological developments that allow us to identify the remains of
bread from very small charred fragments using high magnification. I
love the idea that people had figured out how to
make some bread and they found it so delicious that
(17:16):
they were like, we've got to figure out how we
can make more of this magical substance, keep it coming.
What do we gotta do? Uh? You know what? Else
predated agriculture, beer, at least in the Eastern Mediterranean. Archaeologists
examined mortars from a cave in Israel that turned out
to have been used for brewing with wheat and barley
and for food storage. The site being studied was thirteen
(17:40):
thousand years old, so this predates the advent of brewing
in some other parts of the world and the development
of agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean. I'm imagining the same
thought process of this beer is great, how can we
make more? Uh? We need more ingredients. Researchers have solved
a mystery about the diets of some of the ancient
(18:02):
pueblo in People's So from about four hundred b c
E to about four hundred c E. The Pablo in
People's and what's now the Four Corners region of the
southwestern US had a very corn based diets, or technically
it was a maze based diet. As much as eighty
percent of their caloric intake was coming from corn, supplemented
(18:24):
with small amounts of other plants and very rarely some
wild rabbit. But corn isn't nutritionally complete enough to make
up that much of a person's diet. People whose diet
is nearly all corn are prone to a range of conditions,
including pelagra, which can lead to things like diarrhea and dementia.
But researchers had plenty of evidence that the ancient Puebloans
(18:46):
were eating mostly corn, but nearly no evidence of pelagra
or other conditions in the remains of those same people.
The possible answer to this mystery is corn fungus, also
known as corn smut. In Mexico, corn fungus as a
delicacy known as sweetly coach, and it's consumed in other
parts of Central America as well, But until now, there
(19:08):
was not a lot of evidence suggesting that it was
being consumed by the pueblo in peoples of the American Southwest,
and that changed with the analysis of some paleo feces
or poop Number one, there are a lot of corn
fungus spores in the paleopecs that they examined enough to
suggest that the ancient Puebloans were eating corn fungus intentionally,
(19:31):
and number two, there is also evidence that corn fungus
changes the nutritional makeup of corn increases protein levels and
the balance of amino acids, which would help prevent some
of these conditions that we have discussed. According to research
that was published in August, a lot of the fruits
and nuts that we consume today we're being cultivated along
(19:51):
the Silk Road. We normally talk about the Silk Road
in terms of the trade in textiles and spices and
the spread of disease, so I found it thing that
we're also talking about the cultivation of foods specifically. A
medieval agricultural site in the Pamir Mountains of Uzbekistan shows
evidence of cultivated apples, apricots, melons, grapes, almonds, and pistachios,
(20:15):
along with other food crops. M Archaeologists found a thirty
two year old piece of cheese in a tomb in Egypt.
It belonged to a high ranking official in the thirteenth
century b c. E. And this may be the oldest
solid cheese residue ever found, and it was probably also
contaminated with Brucella melitensis based on protein analysis, and if so,
(20:38):
not only is it the oldest solid cheese ever found,
it's the oldest evidence of that particular disease. Please do
not eat three thousand year old cheese. You have to
combine it with the sarcophagus juice for the true um
uh effects to take Yes, and the undrinkable champagne and
(20:59):
other cheese. New researchers have found what they believed to
be the oldest examples of cheesemaking in the Mediterranean, thanks
to samples from seven thousand year old pottery. Those pots
were found on Croatia's Dalmatian coast. Before we get to
our next break, we're going to talk about a few
things from the world of arts and letters. Researchers at
the University of Exeter found a collection of poetry dating
(21:21):
back to the US Civil War, but not written in
the United States, written in Lancashire, England, which was stricken
by famine because of the war. Before the war, Lancashire
had been home to a thriving cotton industry, and it
was using cotton that was being grown in the United States.
This industry was of course, completely disrupted by the war
and the period there came to be known as the
(21:43):
Cotton Famine. Most of these are really heartbreaking poems about
hunger and poverty, and the university has made a publicly
available database of them if you wish to peruse it
at Cotton Famine Poetry dot Exeter dot ac dot UK.
We will also have that link in the show notes.
Archaeologists may have unearthed the oldest known copy of Homer's
(22:05):
Odyssey and the ancient city of Olympia. It's definitely from
the Odyssey, but it is not yet clear exactly how
old it is, whether it is actually the oldest one
or not. A research team from the University of Basil
has identified a papyrus whose contents have been a mystery
since the sixteenth century. This papyrus has mirror writing on
(22:26):
both sides, and using ultra violet and infrared imagery, the
researchers found that it's not one papyrus. It is actually
several layers that have been glued together. So after very
very carefully separating these layers, they discovered that it's an
ancient medical text, probably by Galen or by somebody commenting
on Galen's work, and the condition that it describes is
(22:48):
hysterical apnea. So the sixteenth century mystery is in fact misogyny.
So that's annoying. A nine five letter from Suffrage Annie
Kenny to her sister was unearthed in a Canadian archive,
and it's being described as the oldest letter from a
woman involved in the movement for women's suffrage and the
(23:09):
oldest firsthand account of a woman's imprisonment for her voting advocacy.
That letter starts quote, you may be surprised when I
tell you I was released from strange ways yesterday morning.
I love that very matter of fact, just by the way,
I might surprise you to learn I was in prison.
Why I Kenny's sister Nell later emigrated to Canada, and
(23:31):
that's how the letter came to be in a Canadian
archive while it was about the movement in Britain. And
we are going to take another quick sponsor break before
we get on to some exhumations. So we're going to
(23:53):
finish today's episode with several other listener favorites, starting with
the exhumations. Although some of these exhumations are quite tragic.
The Bond Sea Corps Mother and Baby Home in tomb
Ireland has been in the news repeatedly since Catherine Corliss
has been researching the home, including obtaining death certificates for
(24:13):
as many as possible of the seven hundred nineties children
who died there while the home was operating. A lot
of the reporting that has come out over the last
few years took a much more sensationalized turn than Corliss's
actual work. She had talked about the fact that there
were no burial records for these children and that part
of the burial site appeared to be a disused septic tank,
(24:36):
and then these two threads got kind of mixed together
into headlines along the lines of eight hundred children dumped
in septic tank at Mother and Baby Home. So what
happened at the Mother and Baby Home was appalling. This
was a place where unmarried mothers and their children were sent,
usually against their will, because their pregnancies were so stigmatized.
(24:59):
Children die they're at a rate of about one every
two weeks, often of malnutrition. But it was slightly different
from those headlines. So further study and further excavation have
gone on since it really started to make headlines, and
authorities have been trying to figure out exactly what to
do about these unmarked and unrecorded burials. This October, it
(25:20):
was announced that plans are in the works to fully
excavate the site to try to exhume all the bodies,
to identify as many of them as possible, and if possible,
to return them to families. Archaeologists in West Flanders have
been excavating World War one's Hill eighty, which was a
German stronghold. This excavation effort was largely crowdfunded and used
(25:41):
largely volunteer labor, so those funds mostly paid for expenses.
In December, when the team issued their final report of
the previous season's work, they said that they had uncovered
the remains of one ten people that included seventy Germans,
nine British, three French, one South African, and twenty seven
others who could not be identified. This team really wanted
(26:04):
to identify the remains and return them to their families
wherever possible. But while most of the Germans were identified
as being from the twenty first Reserve Regiment, as of
December eighteen, only one set of remains had been personally
and conclusively identified, not quite an exhumation or a repatriation,
which is what we're talking about next. But in seventeen
(26:25):
eighty three, a man named Charles Byrne died at the
age of twenty two. He was seven feet seven inches
tall that's two point three one meters and he was
nicknamed the Irish Giant. And when he died, he asked
his friends to seal him in a lead coffin, weigh
it down and bury him at sea because based on
his life experience so far, he feared his body being
(26:47):
stolen and dissected. This was at a time when there
was no honor in donating your body to science or medicine.
Uh there is more detail about that in our episode
on the Doctor's Riot of seventeen eighty eight, which is
in our archive. He had been really viewed as a
medical curiosity and he was he was very concerned that
something was going to happen to his body after his death. However,
(27:09):
while Burns friends made the arrangements for the burial that
he asked for, surgeon and anatomus John Hunter stole his body,
possibly switching it with another body, and then after removing
the flesh from the body, Hunter kept the skeleton in
his personal collection. The British government later purchased the collection
and gave it to the Company of Surgeons, which became
(27:30):
the Royal College of Surgeons, and that became part of
the Royal College of Surgeons Hunter Harryan Museum. Burns remains
made a meaningful contribution to medical science, including helping doctors
understand how pituitary tumors can lean to giants um and
the discovery of genetic links to giant is um. But
this was not what Burne wanted. Hunter's treatment of his
(27:53):
body was the exact opposite of what he had asked for,
and he definitely did not consent to being put on
display in a museum. So over the years the museum
has resisted calls to abide by burns wishes about the
treatment of his body. Excited the medical importance of these remains,
but the museum closed for renovations this year. It's going
(28:13):
to remain closed for three years, and a spokesman issued
a statement that quote, the Hunterian Museum will be closed
until and Charles burns skeleton is not currently on display.
The board of Trustees of the Hunterian Collection will be
discussing the matter during the period of closure of the museum.
So that's not a definitive statement that they are going
(28:35):
to bury him as he requested. But there are people
who are like, now that you've said this publicly, it's
going to be real hard for you to walk it back. Uh. Yeah, Basically,
they've just committed to discussing it further outside of the
public eye. Right now, we're moving on to repatriations. In
Earnest in ninety six, a relief carving of an acimmened
(28:57):
soldier was stolen from Persepolis. It was later donated to
the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and then it was
stolen from there in eleven. In September, it was returned
to Iran following an order from a New York Supreme
Court judge. This return happened after it was seized in
October of seventeen when somebody was trying to sell it
at an art fair. Its owners argued that they had
(29:21):
legally purchased it, but once investigators traced out the whole
history of this relief, including the fact that it was stolen,
they agreed to return it. A collection of antiquities was
returned to Iraq after British authorities were able to trace
where that they had come from. They had been looted
from Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein and brought
to London, where they were later seized from a dealer
(29:43):
Identifying where these pieces had come from was the work
of the British Museum. After examining all these pieces and
the inscriptions on them, they were able to pinpoint exactly
which temple they came out of. It was the any
New Temple at Tello, which is in southern Iraq today.
These pieces that were turned include pottery, a cuneiform covered cone,
and a little amulet that shaped like a bull. In
(30:06):
nineteen sixty one, fourteen statues were stolen from the Archaeological
Survey of India's Site museum. One turned up in London
this year and that was returned to India and this
one was a twelve century bronze statue of Buddha and
it was reported to authorities after being seen at a
trade fair. The Birmingham Museum of Art returned a four
(30:27):
foot statue of Shiva to India after it learned that
it had been stolen. This statue was one of many,
many many pieces that were illegally acquired and sold by
Sabash Kapoor, who was extradited to India in twenty eleven
to face charges that he illegally sold millions of dollars
worth of artifacts to museums around the world. A lot
(30:50):
of the museum that he sold these stolen artifacts, too,
were very very well known that they included the met,
the Boston m f A, and the l A County
Museum of Art. A relief of a Menhotep, the first,
which was found in a London auction house, was returned
to Egypt after it was discovered that it had been
stolen from the Temple of karnak In. So we could
(31:13):
have included a whole lot more of these because there
were a lot of headlines like this this year. They
were mostly institutions in North America and Europe agreeing to
return artwork and artifacts that had been stolen at some
point in the last few decades. What we really did
not see as much of was institutions agreeing to return
artifacts that had been in their collections for a lot
(31:35):
longer than that. And that doesn't mean that nothing like
that happened, but if it did, it just wasn't really
reported in the sources that I was using to put
together this episode. It also doesn't mean that there were
no calls for institutions to return long standing parts of
their collections. For example, Italy Supreme Court ordered the Getty
Museum in Los Angeles to return a statue known as
(31:57):
the Losippo Statue or the Statue of the Victorious Youth.
That statue is nearly twenty hundred years old, and it
was pulled out of the water by fishers in nineteen
sixty four. The Getty bought it from an art dealer
in nineteen seventy seven, and Italy started asking for its
return in nineteen eighty nine. In two thousand seven, an
Italian court cleared the Getty of wrongdoing, but also affirmed
(32:21):
that the statue was the property of Italy. The Getty
has refused to return the statue, though, and plans to
appeal this decision. News also broke in November that an
Egyptian museum had called for the British Museum to return
the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was discovered by a
French soldier in seventeen ninety nine during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.
(32:42):
The Rosetta Stone has been in the British Museum since
eighteen o two, although it was removed for security reasons
for part of World War One. The proposal from the
museum in Egypt is that basically the British Museum should
send back the original Rosetta stone and replace it in
the Air Museum with like a c G I rendering
(33:02):
of it rather than the actual stone itself. Now shipwrecks,
uh uh. Tracy thinks we said this already in a
listener mail segment, but in case people missed it, that
bone that was found near the widow that were we
talked about in July was not black Sam Bellamy, Nope,
I was. I was skeptical about that when we talked
(33:26):
about it. Then that skepticism was warranted. In twenties sixteen
we talked about the discovery of forty shipwrecks and the
Black Sea. Then that fine came from the Black Sea
Maritime Archaeology Project, which has continued to survey the shipwrecks
of the Black Sea in the years since then. This October,
the team announced that they had mapped sixty Black Sea
(33:46):
shipwrecks over the course of this project, and one of
them is being described as the world's oldest intact shipwreck.
It is a Greek trading vessel that's about twenty four
hundred years old. A joint US Australian Expedy s has
surveyed the wreck of the h M A S A
E one. This was Australia's first submarine and it disappeared
(34:07):
while on patrol in September of nineteen fourteen. This made
it the first Allied submarine lost in World War One,
and its wreckage was discovered at the end of seventeen.
The survey conducted this year was done aboard the late
Paul Allen's RV Petrol which we used a remote operated
vehicle to get a lot of high definition images and
(34:27):
video of the wreck. The team is hoping to use
this footage to try to reconstruct what happened to the submarine,
which has been a mystery since the vessels lost. They
also left the flags of Australia, New Zealand and the
United Kingdom at the site on the ocean floor to
honor the dead who are still there in the submarine.
A team from the scripts Institution of Oceanography at the
(34:48):
University of California, San Diego and the University of Delaware
located the stern of the U S. S. Abner read
the Abner Reid struck a Japanese mine off the coast
of a Alaska after the Battle of at two. Although
men aboard the ship were able to pull survivors out
of the water and return to port, they were only
(35:08):
able to recover the body of one of the seventy
one men killed. There aren't currently plans to try to
raise the stern of this ship from the seafloor, and
the research team lowered a wreath into the water to
honor the dead. Similarly to the fine that we just
talked about, archaeologists in Poland have started an eight year
conservation project on a massive barge that is being unearthed
(35:31):
from an apple orchard. The barge was actually found thirty
years ago during an attempt to deepen a pond adjacent
to the orchard, and most likely the pond had been
part of the Vistula River, which has since changed course,
and that is how that barge came to be in
an apple orchard. Fortunately, the owner of the orchard contacted
authorities and it was quickly determined that not only did
(35:53):
the barge date all the way back to four eight one,
but it was also one of the largest vessels of
its type ever discovered. A more thorough study was conducted
in two thousand nine, and while archaeologists wanted to remove
and conserve the barge they had nowhere to put it.
It's huge. It's one long, seven ms wide and about
(36:13):
one point five meters deep, with room for a crew
of about twenty. However, a special basin has been constructed
at the State Archaeology Museum, which is why the excavation
got started. Just this year, a four hundred year old
shipwreck was found off the coast of Portugal and described
as the find of a decade. The identity of the
ship isn't yet clear, but it was probably used in
(36:35):
the spice trade with India between fifteen seventy five and
sixteen twenty five. A shipwreck off the coast of Newport,
Rhode Island, maybe Captain James Cook's HMS Endeavor, which had
been sold and renamed the Lord Sandwich. Cook sailed around
the world aboard the Endeavor and then it was scuttled
by the British Navy during the Revolutionary War. The anniversary
(36:58):
of Cook's voyage is in so the team is hoping
to confirm and excavate it. By then. A lot of
the coverage that went around after this fine described the
ship as conclusively definitely found, except in National Geographic which
appended this to an article it had previously published in
twenties six quote. Once again, despite recent news claims that
(37:20):
Captain Cook's HMB Endeavor has been found, it still actually
remains undiscovered. According to a press release from the Rhode
Island Marine Archaeology Project, they have narrowed the search for
the ship to possibly one or two archaeological sites that
will be excavated in twenty nineteen. Previous claims that the
HMB Endeavor may have been found were made in nine
(37:42):
thousand to two thousand six, two thousand twelve, and twenties sixteen.
Divers have found the Danish warship Prince Friedrich, which sank
in seventeen eighty in the Kodagut straight between Denmark and Sweden.
There were six hundred sixty seven sailors aboard, but only
eight were killed when the ship went down, thanks to
people from a nearby island mounting a rescue effort. Finding
(38:03):
this ship required more than two hundred dives and a
ten year search. Yeah, they had been looking for that
ship for a long time and as kind of a
shipwreck side note, The mal Fisher Marine Museum in Key West,
Florida used to have a seventeenth century gold bar on display.
Fisher himself had recovered the bar from a shipwreck in
(38:24):
nineteen eighty, and the bar had been housed in a
case that let visitors reach in and touch it and
lift it up to see how heavy it was, which
was about four and a half pounds. On August, two
thieves stole the bar from the museum, and they were
caught on camera, but it wasn't until law enforcement received
an anonymous tip in the fall of seventeen that they
(38:44):
were identified. Richard Stephen Johnson and Jared Goldman were charged
with the crime in January and sentenced in July. The
bar was not recovered, though the two men had chopped
it up and sold off the pieces in Las Vegas.
And we will end this years Unearthed with a little
bit of utsy news, because there's always some utsy news.
(39:04):
Researchers had previously concluded that Utsi's sixty one tattoos might
have some kind of a medical purpose, basically that they
were the result of a form of acupuncture. This year,
research looked at all of these tattoos, plus the herbs
and fungi that were present in and near his body,
and compared that to all the various ailments that are
(39:25):
evident in Utsie's remains, and what they concluded is that
the society that Utsy was living in had an established
idea of medical care and disease treatment. It wasn't just
a random, haphazard situation. It was an organized system of
medical care. Oh, thank you for all that unearthed research.
You're very welcome. Do you also have listener mail? I
(39:49):
sure do, and this is from Margie and it goes
back to our Crystal Knocked episode. I know that is
a while ago at this point, but we keep getting
these very lovely photos and remembrances from people. And Margie says,
first of all, let me say just how much I
adore your podcast. Your thorough and thoughtful and take on
global historical events makes my inquisitive and curious heart happy.
(40:11):
I moved to Hamburg, Germany, from the American South to
be with my German partner about two years ago. Side note,
I never knew how much I didn't know about German
and European history until I moved here. Your backlog has
been super helpful in trying to catch up. I listened
to your episode on Crystal Knocked with my boyfriend and
I thought you might be interested in our experience. We
live in a Jewish neighborhood in Hamburg. Every year, on
(40:32):
November night, they hold a remembrance of Crystal Knock. I've
included some photos, but essentially the event consists of placing
candles around the buildings rans act or destroyed during Krystal
Knocked and every stumbling stone there's the stones outside a
building denoting a person who lived or worked there and
who was deported or murdered during the Holocaust in the area.
I do hope you enjoy this little glimpse into German remembrance.
(40:55):
Thank you so much for all that you do. All
the best, Margie. And then Margie sent these very lovely
and moving pictures of all of these candlelit areas where
the remembrance was going on um and one of the
things that she noted is that one of the places
is a Jewish school that actually survived. Crystal Nocton is
(41:15):
still open today, but there are armed guards twenty four
hours a day, which is now required for synagogues and
Jewish schools in Germany because anti Semitism has continued to
rise in recent years. So thank you so much. Margie
for those photos and for that information. UM, happy belated
New Year to everyone. I think these are actually coming
(41:36):
out right at the turn of the new year, so
we will look forward to some new topics in and
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast or history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. And then we are all over social
media at missed in History. That's our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram,
and Twitter. You can come to our website, which is
(41:59):
Missed in History dot com and find the incredibly long
list of sources for this episode. If you want to
look further into any of these stories, and there is
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(42:22):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how staff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It
is time for part two of Unearthed and eighteen. And
this installment includes a lot of the favorites among our listeners.
(00:25):
We've got the shipwrecks and the edibles and potables, and
the exhumations and the repatriations, and every time I put
one of these together, I also wind up with this
collection of stuff that's not thematically related in any way,
but it just seemed really cool. And I call that
potpourri like the Jeopardy category, and that's where we're starting today.
(00:45):
Archaeologists in Peru have found a thirty eight hundred year
old wall with reliefs that depict four humans heads with
snakes slithering between them. In the middle between the snakes
heads and the humans heads is a face that looks
like neither, with wide eyes and a very wide mouth
and five fingerlike or perhaps tentacle like appendages underneath. And
(01:07):
they have speculated that this represents a seed putting down
roots and that the snakes represent a water deity that
irrigates the crops after people plant the seeds. That's more
likely hypothesis than what some of the Internet speculates, which
is because it is obviously fulu. I mean, that's what
I believe. But it's also just a really striking relief carving,
(01:31):
because like the four human faces are all in a row,
and then there are the sinuous snakes in between them,
and this thing in between them that might be a seed.
This area was home to the Caral civilization, which is
also known as Norte Chico, and that's one of the
oldest known civilizations in the Americas. I think part of
why the association to Casulu is so strong is not
just the tentacle mention, but also the relief mention, which
(01:54):
comes up a lot in Lovecrafts writing he likes a
shop particulity in like at the Mountains of mannis at
all descriptions of reliefs. So there's a subconscious tie in.
I think that people aren't aren't necessarily aware that they're making.
Archaeologists with the National Institute of Anthropology and History that's
i n a H in Mexico have been excavating a
(02:14):
set of twenty six pits in Mexico City, They are
about dred years old and are between one point two
and three point three meters below street level. Some of
these pits seem to have been used to bury human remains,
so they were effectively graves, but others were used for
storing things like grains and artifacts, and two of them
(02:35):
might have been used for tasks related to caring for
babies and young children. One example that was given in
the write up of all of this was making steam
bats for newborn babies. One hypothesis is that this whole
area was used for activities related to pregnancy and child care.
Backing up this hypothesis is the presence of more than
(02:56):
one thirty figurines, a few of them representing babies, but
most of them depicting pregnancy. So it's possible that the
site was something along the lines of an ancient prenatal
care center. I like that idea too, like the idea
that there was a place where all the pregnancies were happening. Really,
it's where Casulu was making, no idea. Archaeologists in China
(03:22):
have found a miniature terra Cotta army. These are a
lot like the famous terra Cotta warriors, but on a
much smaller scale, so, for example, the infantry figurines are
about eleven inches or twenty eight centimeters tall. These were
probably created about years ago, roughly a hundred years after
the Terracotta Army, and they might have been created for
(03:46):
Emperor Wu's son Liu Hung. In eighteenth century, Mysore leader
Hyder Ali developed rockets for use in warfare. His son
and successor, Tipu Sultan, improved on his father's design to
make a rocket that came to known as the Mysorean
Tipoo Sultan used these to fight the British East India
Company successfully until he was killed in seventeen. This year,
(04:09):
excavators found what they believed to be Tippoo Sultan's rockets
dash in an abandoned well. The well smelled of gunpowder
and once they excavated it they found more than a
thousand rockets. Uh. Now we are coming to the section
of things that are unearthed by amateurs, starting with a
dog named Monty, who dug up more than twenty Bronze
(04:32):
Age objects while on a walk in the Czech Republic
in March. In September, archaeologists who had examined the objects
announced that they were all more than three thousand years
old and included two spear points, three axes, several bracelets,
and thirteen sickle shaped objects. The fact that there were
so many objects so close together suggested to the team
(04:54):
that they were probably buried for ritual reasons. Archaeologists are
still examining the area where they were found. A mushroom
picker who wished to remain anonymous, found two bronze helmets
and took them to the Eastern Slovakia Museum. It is
unclear where these helmets were initially made. They look more
like decorative headgear than actual armor. They were probably imported
(05:18):
to the side of the village where they were found
by this mushroom picker. A metal detector iss named Mike
Smith may have found Wales's oldest chariot burial. He found
what he thought was a brooch, but after sending a
picture to an expert, he learned that it was really
part of a horse harness. Eventually, authorities were convinced that
they should take a closer look, which led to a
(05:39):
preliminary excavation of the area. A more complete study of
that find is still to come. Speaking of metal detectorists,
finds by amateur metal detectors come up pretty often on
onearthed and overall, amateur detector ists have kind of a
complicated relationship with museums and archaeologists. Amateurs have definitely found
(05:59):
object x that otherwise would not have been found. Sometimes
this has led scholars and curators and archaeologists to excavation
sites that they would not have looked at otherwise, and
it's been meaningful and significant. But at the same time
we have also talked about amateur detectorists damaging delicate historical
sites or removing important fines without notifying authorities, things like that.
(06:21):
In Denmark, amateur metal detectorists are mostly known for their
positive contributions. They've been described as an international success story
and have meaningfully contributed to the nation's understanding of its
own history. To that end, this year, Denmark launched a
tool called dime to help amateur metal detectorists register their
fines in the field. This has been a collaborative process
(06:45):
involving twenty seven museums, with the goal of making it
easier for amateurs in Denmark to continue that work. We
also have several things that have been unearthed by construction,
as happens frequently workers digging a trench for a new
a rear center at a school in sugar Land, Texas
found a mass burial site earlier this year. In June,
(07:06):
the school got permission to excavate and exhume the bodies,
and the team has concluded that these burials at the
site took place between eighteen seventy and nineteen ten, and
that they were probably part of the state's convict lease
system that followed the end of the Civil War and
the abolition of slavery. The team that's working on it
has talked about how important this find is and illustrating
(07:26):
this transition from slave labor to prison labor after the
thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment, as we've said
on the show, a lot before it, abolished slavery except
in cases of punishment for a crime. A team doing
preventative archaeological work in northern France unearthed a wheeled water
mill dating back to the fourteenth century. We have written
(07:49):
records of the mill dating back to sixteen fourteen, so
the mill itself is much older than the records that
we have of it. This mill seems to have been
used for a lot of different purposes over the centuries,
It was originally constructed as a flour mill, but archaeologists
have found bolts there that were used for textile manufacturer.
In the eighteen thirties, the mill was being used to
(08:09):
make noodles and other pasta, but by about forty years
later the area was being used as a farmstead rather
than as a mill. Cruise working on Line four of
Milan's Metro contacted archaeologists after hitting what appeared to be
a wall. They concluded that it was the outer enclosure
of the mausoleum of Emperor Maximian. This is one where
(08:30):
I think the construction continued on after this discovery. But
when you look at um the plan of how big
this mausoleum was, it was huge, and so it was
like the the metro line was sort of cutting through
one edge of this much bigger potential find. Back in
(08:51):
twenties seventeen, a team in Cologne found the remains of
a building while excavating as a at a church, and
then this year they figured out what that building was.
It was a library which might have housed as many
as twenty thousand scrolls, built almost two thousand years ago.
And because this particular library was in what was then
a public space. This was probably a public library, not
(09:13):
just somebody's giant, personal private collection. And now we come
to a series of stories where things were unearthed by climate.
UH drought in Ireland revealed the existence of a Neolithic
or early Bronze Age monument in a field. The dried
out vegetation made the outline of the monument visible in
drone footage. The grass is actually greener in the area
(09:36):
over the monument. Steve Davis, an archaeologist at the University
College Dublin, called the find internationally significant. I put that
on the list and then I found other similar finds
happening all over Britain and Ireland. Aerial footage has spotted
burial monuments and settlements and burial sites all visible as
green outlines and otherwise dry fields and Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Suffolk,
(10:02):
Devon and Somerset, probably others too. I was like, how
many counties are there and do all of them have one?
To continue my paranormal intrusions into this, I'm like all
those crop circles from the drought in Europe has also
revealed stones known as hunger stones in the Elbe River
(10:26):
in the Czech Republic. These are stones that people have
used to record low water levels in the river for
hundreds of years. The oldest one that was visible as
of August dates back to nineteen sixteen and has an
inscription in German that translates to when you see me weep.
The last time we heard about somebody pulling a sword
from a lake on unearthed, it was a prop sword.
(10:49):
It was kind of silly but not historically significant. But
this time it was an actual pre Viking Eero sword
pulled from a lake in Sweden by eight year old
Saga van Check. The is from the fifth or sixth century,
and she found it while she was skipping stones in
the water. The reason she was able to see it
there was that the water level was very low because
of all the dryness. At first she thought it was
(11:11):
just a stick. Low water levels also led to the
discovery of a stone covered in Pictish symbols in River
Dawn in Aberdeen, Scotland. Unlike the Hunger stones which are
left in the river, a team of archaeologists and academics
worked together to raise this one from the river. As
of August, they were working on where to permanently house it.
(11:31):
And not a related but slightly different note from these
fines that we have just talked about. There is a
large collection of human footprints in Tanzania that are vanishing
because of erosion. These footprints were made between five thousand
and nineteen thousand years ago, and they're located in a
mud flat that floods periodically and can also be very windy,
(11:52):
so it's really difficult to try to protect and conserve
the footprints. The prints themselves are extremely delicate, and then
there's a variety of natural factors that are contributing to
the erosion. Fortunately, there was a detailed three D scan
taken to the area when it was first described back
in so we do have documentation of the site if
(12:12):
preservation efforts fail. Uh, We're gonna have a little break
before we get to the possibly yummy depending on your
definition of that word. Section on edibles and potables. First,
we are going to have a little sponsor break. We
have so many edibles and potables to talk about that
(12:35):
they are going to be almost the entire middle of
this episode. First, a thirty six hundred year old tomb
in Israel has revealed the oldest known use of vanilla
vanilla's first use is often more associated with Mexico, and
today the orchids that are used in commercial vanilla production
are descended from species that are mostly native to Mexico,
(12:57):
but the vanilla orchid genus exists all around the world,
and in this case, it's chemical analysis of jugs in
a tomb that found two of the major chemical components
in vanilla extract, including vanillan. Most likely that or kids
that were used to produce this vanilla grew in East
Africa or the Indian subcontinent or Indonesia, and then we're
(13:20):
brought to the Middle East via sea trade. This find
predates the first known use of vanilla in Mexico by
more than two thousand years. That's a pretty delicious fine
that's not too too gruesome. Researchers in Ecuador announced that
they have unearthed the oldest proof of cocoa use. This
(13:40):
came from DNA analysis of the residues in fifties three
hundred year old pots. This discovery is fift hundred years
before the domestication of coco in Central America. Researchers believe
they've also found the earliest known use of nutmeg as
a food ingredient. Archaeologists found the residue and pottery from
the Banda Islands in Polynesia. This was dated to thirty
(14:04):
five hundred years old, and that's about two thousand years
earlier than the previous oldest known use of nutmeg and food.
I feel like if we could get all these discoveries together,
we could make something yummy, be a delicious pie. I
was thinking about a cookie. The world's oldest known champagne
was found in a shipwreck off of Finland in it
(14:27):
was purportedly still drinkable. This champagne dated back to roughly
eighteen thirty and Zukiko planned to auction it off, but
the champagne house wisely decided to have it analyzed first,
and after sending a few bottles away to do that,
they got the result that it was not in fact drinkable.
I like that. The fine was from the news this
(14:48):
year is please don't drink this too late. Yeah, we
thought it would be a good idea, but we have
determined it would not be a good idea. Researchers at
the University of York have concluded that the development of
ceramics may have been connected to an increase in fishing
and the need to store and process fish. In particular,
(15:10):
they looked at lipid residues from eight hundred pottery vessels,
most of them made in Japan, which is quote a
country recognized as being one of the earliest centers for
ceramic innovation. The lipid residues in the vessels show that
the types of fish stored and processed in them changed
as fishing evolved, but even after shifts in the climate
(15:31):
of Japan led to an increase in hunting and gathering,
the pots continued to be used mostly for fish and
not for other types of food. Archaeologists in China decanted
some liquid from a Western Han dynasty tomb. I'm saying decanted.
They really just poured it into a measuring glass as
part of their analysis of it, and it seems like
(15:51):
they have found some two thousand year old wine, at
least based on what it smells like, but more research
is needed to figure out its exact composition. Totally drinkable
until a few years hrore now we go. No no
no no. Archaeological research in northern Jordan's suggests that people
were making bread thousands of years before they developed agriculture.
(16:13):
They found fourteen thousand, four hundred year old bits of
charred flatbread. The research suggests that people were making bread
using wild cereals, which may have inspired them to try
to cultivate cereals rather than first cultivating cereal and then
figuring out how to make bread. This is the earliest
known evidence of bread making, and the breads themselves resemble
(16:35):
flatbreads from later sites in Europe and Turkey, and the
words of Professor Dorian Fuller of the University College London
Institute of Archaeology, quote bread involves labor intensive processing which
includes the husking, grinding of cereals and needing and baking.
That it was produced before farming methods suggests that it
was seen as special and the desire to make more
(16:56):
of this special food probably contributed to the decision to
begin to cultivate cereals. All of this relies on new
methodological developments that allow us to identify the remains of
bread from very small charred fragments using high magnification. I
love the idea that people had figured out how to
make some bread and they found it so delicious that
(17:16):
they were like, we've got to figure out how we
can make more of this magical substance, keep it coming.
What do we gotta do? Uh? You know what? Else
predated agriculture, beer, at least in the Eastern Mediterranean. Archaeologists
examined mortars from a cave in Israel that turned out
to have been used for brewing with wheat and barley
and for food storage. The site being studied was thirteen
(17:40):
thousand years old, so this predates the advent of brewing
in some other parts of the world and the development
of agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean. I'm imagining the same
thought process of this beer is great, how can we
make more? Uh? We need more ingredients. Researchers have solved
a mystery about the diets of some of the ancient
(18:02):
pueblo in People's So from about four hundred b c
E to about four hundred c E. The Pablo in
People's and what's now the Four Corners region of the
southwestern US had a very corn based diets, or technically
it was a maze based diet. As much as eighty
percent of their caloric intake was coming from corn, supplemented
(18:24):
with small amounts of other plants and very rarely some
wild rabbit. But corn isn't nutritionally complete enough to make
up that much of a person's diet. People whose diet
is nearly all corn are prone to a range of conditions,
including pelagra, which can lead to things like diarrhea and dementia.
But researchers had plenty of evidence that the ancient Puebloans
(18:46):
were eating mostly corn, but nearly no evidence of pelagra
or other conditions in the remains of those same people.
The possible answer to this mystery is corn fungus, also
known as corn smut. In Mexico, corn fungus as a
delicacy known as sweetly coach, and it's consumed in other
parts of Central America as well, But until now, there
(19:08):
was not a lot of evidence suggesting that it was
being consumed by the pueblo in peoples of the American Southwest,
and that changed with the analysis of some paleo feces
or poop Number one, there are a lot of corn
fungus spores in the paleopecs that they examined enough to
suggest that the ancient Puebloans were eating corn fungus intentionally,
(19:31):
and number two, there is also evidence that corn fungus
changes the nutritional makeup of corn increases protein levels and
the balance of amino acids, which would help prevent some
of these conditions that we have discussed. According to research
that was published in August, a lot of the fruits
and nuts that we consume today we're being cultivated along
(19:51):
the Silk Road. We normally talk about the Silk Road
in terms of the trade in textiles and spices and
the spread of disease, so I found it thing that
we're also talking about the cultivation of foods specifically. A
medieval agricultural site in the Pamir Mountains of Uzbekistan shows
evidence of cultivated apples, apricots, melons, grapes, almonds, and pistachios,
(20:15):
along with other food crops. M Archaeologists found a thirty
two year old piece of cheese in a tomb in Egypt.
It belonged to a high ranking official in the thirteenth
century b c. E. And this may be the oldest
solid cheese residue ever found, and it was probably also
contaminated with Brucella melitensis based on protein analysis, and if so,
(20:38):
not only is it the oldest solid cheese ever found,
it's the oldest evidence of that particular disease. Please do
not eat three thousand year old cheese. You have to
combine it with the sarcophagus juice for the true um
uh effects to take Yes, and the undrinkable champagne and
(20:59):
other cheese. New researchers have found what they believed to
be the oldest examples of cheesemaking in the Mediterranean, thanks
to samples from seven thousand year old pottery. Those pots
were found on Croatia's Dalmatian coast. Before we get to
our next break, we're going to talk about a few
things from the world of arts and letters. Researchers at
the University of Exeter found a collection of poetry dating
(21:21):
back to the US Civil War, but not written in
the United States, written in Lancashire, England, which was stricken
by famine because of the war. Before the war, Lancashire
had been home to a thriving cotton industry, and it
was using cotton that was being grown in the United States.
This industry was of course, completely disrupted by the war
and the period there came to be known as the
(21:43):
Cotton Famine. Most of these are really heartbreaking poems about
hunger and poverty, and the university has made a publicly
available database of them if you wish to peruse it
at Cotton Famine Poetry dot Exeter dot ac dot UK.
We will also have that link in the show notes.
Archaeologists may have unearthed the oldest known copy of Homer's
(22:05):
Odyssey and the ancient city of Olympia. It's definitely from
the Odyssey, but it is not yet clear exactly how
old it is, whether it is actually the oldest one
or not. A research team from the University of Basil
has identified a papyrus whose contents have been a mystery
since the sixteenth century. This papyrus has mirror writing on
(22:26):
both sides, and using ultra violet and infrared imagery, the
researchers found that it's not one papyrus. It is actually
several layers that have been glued together. So after very
very carefully separating these layers, they discovered that it's an
ancient medical text, probably by Galen or by somebody commenting
on Galen's work, and the condition that it describes is
(22:48):
hysterical apnea. So the sixteenth century mystery is in fact misogyny.
So that's annoying. A nine five letter from Suffrage Annie
Kenny to her sister was unearthed in a Canadian archive,
and it's being described as the oldest letter from a
woman involved in the movement for women's suffrage and the
(23:09):
oldest firsthand account of a woman's imprisonment for her voting advocacy.
That letter starts quote, you may be surprised when I
tell you I was released from strange ways yesterday morning.
I love that very matter of fact, just by the way,
I might surprise you to learn I was in prison.
Why I Kenny's sister Nell later emigrated to Canada, and
(23:31):
that's how the letter came to be in a Canadian
archive while it was about the movement in Britain. And
we are going to take another quick sponsor break before
we get on to some exhumations. So we're going to
(23:53):
finish today's episode with several other listener favorites, starting with
the exhumations. Although some of these exhumations are quite tragic.
The Bond Sea Corps Mother and Baby Home in tomb
Ireland has been in the news repeatedly since Catherine Corliss
has been researching the home, including obtaining death certificates for
(24:13):
as many as possible of the seven hundred nineties children
who died there while the home was operating. A lot
of the reporting that has come out over the last
few years took a much more sensationalized turn than Corliss's
actual work. She had talked about the fact that there
were no burial records for these children and that part
of the burial site appeared to be a disused septic tank,
(24:36):
and then these two threads got kind of mixed together
into headlines along the lines of eight hundred children dumped
in septic tank at Mother and Baby Home. So what
happened at the Mother and Baby Home was appalling. This
was a place where unmarried mothers and their children were sent,
usually against their will, because their pregnancies were so stigmatized.
(24:59):
Children die they're at a rate of about one every
two weeks, often of malnutrition. But it was slightly different
from those headlines. So further study and further excavation have
gone on since it really started to make headlines, and
authorities have been trying to figure out exactly what to
do about these unmarked and unrecorded burials. This October, it
(25:20):
was announced that plans are in the works to fully
excavate the site to try to exhume all the bodies,
to identify as many of them as possible, and if possible,
to return them to families. Archaeologists in West Flanders have
been excavating World War one's Hill eighty, which was a
German stronghold. This excavation effort was largely crowdfunded and used
(25:41):
largely volunteer labor, so those funds mostly paid for expenses.
In December, when the team issued their final report of
the previous season's work, they said that they had uncovered
the remains of one ten people that included seventy Germans,
nine British, three French, one South African, and twenty seven
others who could not be identified. This team really wanted
(26:04):
to identify the remains and return them to their families
wherever possible. But while most of the Germans were identified
as being from the twenty first Reserve Regiment, as of
December eighteen, only one set of remains had been personally
and conclusively identified, not quite an exhumation or a repatriation,
which is what we're talking about next. But in seventeen
(26:25):
eighty three, a man named Charles Byrne died at the
age of twenty two. He was seven feet seven inches
tall that's two point three one meters and he was
nicknamed the Irish Giant. And when he died, he asked
his friends to seal him in a lead coffin, weigh
it down and bury him at sea because based on
his life experience so far, he feared his body being
(26:47):
stolen and dissected. This was at a time when there
was no honor in donating your body to science or medicine.
Uh there is more detail about that in our episode
on the Doctor's Riot of seventeen eighty eight, which is
in our archive. He had been really viewed as a
medical curiosity and he was he was very concerned that
something was going to happen to his body after his death. However,
(27:09):
while Burns friends made the arrangements for the burial that
he asked for, surgeon and anatomus John Hunter stole his body,
possibly switching it with another body, and then after removing
the flesh from the body, Hunter kept the skeleton in
his personal collection. The British government later purchased the collection
and gave it to the Company of Surgeons, which became
(27:30):
the Royal College of Surgeons, and that became part of
the Royal College of Surgeons Hunter Harryan Museum. Burns remains
made a meaningful contribution to medical science, including helping doctors
understand how pituitary tumors can lean to giants um and
the discovery of genetic links to giant is um. But
this was not what Burne wanted. Hunter's treatment of his
(27:53):
body was the exact opposite of what he had asked for,
and he definitely did not consent to being put on
display in a museum. So over the years the museum
has resisted calls to abide by burns wishes about the
treatment of his body. Excited the medical importance of these remains,
but the museum closed for renovations this year. It's going
(28:13):
to remain closed for three years, and a spokesman issued
a statement that quote, the Hunterian Museum will be closed
until and Charles burns skeleton is not currently on display.
The board of Trustees of the Hunterian Collection will be
discussing the matter during the period of closure of the museum.
So that's not a definitive statement that they are going
(28:35):
to bury him as he requested. But there are people
who are like, now that you've said this publicly, it's
going to be real hard for you to walk it back. Uh. Yeah, Basically,
they've just committed to discussing it further outside of the
public eye. Right now, we're moving on to repatriations. In
Earnest in ninety six, a relief carving of an acimmened
(28:57):
soldier was stolen from Persepolis. It was later donated to
the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and then it was
stolen from there in eleven. In September, it was returned
to Iran following an order from a New York Supreme
Court judge. This return happened after it was seized in
October of seventeen when somebody was trying to sell it
at an art fair. Its owners argued that they had
(29:21):
legally purchased it, but once investigators traced out the whole
history of this relief, including the fact that it was stolen,
they agreed to return it. A collection of antiquities was
returned to Iraq after British authorities were able to trace
where that they had come from. They had been looted
from Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein and brought
to London, where they were later seized from a dealer
(29:43):
Identifying where these pieces had come from was the work
of the British Museum. After examining all these pieces and
the inscriptions on them, they were able to pinpoint exactly
which temple they came out of. It was the any
New Temple at Tello, which is in southern Iraq today.
These pieces that were turned include pottery, a cuneiform covered cone,
and a little amulet that shaped like a bull. In
(30:06):
nineteen sixty one, fourteen statues were stolen from the Archaeological
Survey of India's Site museum. One turned up in London
this year and that was returned to India and this
one was a twelve century bronze statue of Buddha and
it was reported to authorities after being seen at a
trade fair. The Birmingham Museum of Art returned a four
(30:27):
foot statue of Shiva to India after it learned that
it had been stolen. This statue was one of many,
many many pieces that were illegally acquired and sold by
Sabash Kapoor, who was extradited to India in twenty eleven
to face charges that he illegally sold millions of dollars
worth of artifacts to museums around the world. A lot
(30:50):
of the museum that he sold these stolen artifacts, too,
were very very well known that they included the met,
the Boston m f A, and the l A County
Museum of Art. A relief of a Menhotep, the first,
which was found in a London auction house, was returned
to Egypt after it was discovered that it had been
stolen from the Temple of karnak In. So we could
(31:13):
have included a whole lot more of these because there
were a lot of headlines like this this year. They
were mostly institutions in North America and Europe agreeing to
return artwork and artifacts that had been stolen at some
point in the last few decades. What we really did
not see as much of was institutions agreeing to return
artifacts that had been in their collections for a lot
(31:35):
longer than that. And that doesn't mean that nothing like
that happened, but if it did, it just wasn't really
reported in the sources that I was using to put
together this episode. It also doesn't mean that there were
no calls for institutions to return long standing parts of
their collections. For example, Italy Supreme Court ordered the Getty
Museum in Los Angeles to return a statue known as
(31:57):
the Losippo Statue or the Statue of the Victorious Youth.
That statue is nearly twenty hundred years old, and it
was pulled out of the water by fishers in nineteen
sixty four. The Getty bought it from an art dealer
in nineteen seventy seven, and Italy started asking for its
return in nineteen eighty nine. In two thousand seven, an
Italian court cleared the Getty of wrongdoing, but also affirmed
(32:21):
that the statue was the property of Italy. The Getty
has refused to return the statue, though, and plans to
appeal this decision. News also broke in November that an
Egyptian museum had called for the British Museum to return
the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was discovered by a
French soldier in seventeen ninety nine during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt.
(32:42):
The Rosetta Stone has been in the British Museum since
eighteen o two, although it was removed for security reasons
for part of World War One. The proposal from the
museum in Egypt is that basically the British Museum should
send back the original Rosetta stone and replace it in
the Air Museum with like a c G I rendering
(33:02):
of it rather than the actual stone itself. Now shipwrecks,
uh uh. Tracy thinks we said this already in a
listener mail segment, but in case people missed it, that
bone that was found near the widow that were we
talked about in July was not black Sam Bellamy, Nope,
I was. I was skeptical about that when we talked
(33:26):
about it. Then that skepticism was warranted. In twenties sixteen
we talked about the discovery of forty shipwrecks and the
Black Sea. Then that fine came from the Black Sea
Maritime Archaeology Project, which has continued to survey the shipwrecks
of the Black Sea in the years since then. This October,
the team announced that they had mapped sixty Black Sea
(33:46):
shipwrecks over the course of this project, and one of
them is being described as the world's oldest intact shipwreck.
It is a Greek trading vessel that's about twenty four
hundred years old. A joint US Australian Expedy s has
surveyed the wreck of the h M A S A
E one. This was Australia's first submarine and it disappeared
(34:07):
while on patrol in September of nineteen fourteen. This made
it the first Allied submarine lost in World War One,
and its wreckage was discovered at the end of seventeen.
The survey conducted this year was done aboard the late
Paul Allen's RV Petrol which we used a remote operated
vehicle to get a lot of high definition images and
(34:27):
video of the wreck. The team is hoping to use
this footage to try to reconstruct what happened to the submarine,
which has been a mystery since the vessels lost. They
also left the flags of Australia, New Zealand and the
United Kingdom at the site on the ocean floor to
honor the dead who are still there in the submarine.
A team from the scripts Institution of Oceanography at the
(34:48):
University of California, San Diego and the University of Delaware
located the stern of the U S. S. Abner read
the Abner Reid struck a Japanese mine off the coast
of a Alaska after the Battle of at two. Although
men aboard the ship were able to pull survivors out
of the water and return to port, they were only
(35:08):
able to recover the body of one of the seventy
one men killed. There aren't currently plans to try to
raise the stern of this ship from the seafloor, and
the research team lowered a wreath into the water to
honor the dead. Similarly to the fine that we just
talked about, archaeologists in Poland have started an eight year
conservation project on a massive barge that is being unearthed
(35:31):
from an apple orchard. The barge was actually found thirty
years ago during an attempt to deepen a pond adjacent
to the orchard, and most likely the pond had been
part of the Vistula River, which has since changed course,
and that is how that barge came to be in
an apple orchard. Fortunately, the owner of the orchard contacted
authorities and it was quickly determined that not only did
(35:53):
the barge date all the way back to four eight one,
but it was also one of the largest vessels of
its type ever discovered. A more thorough study was conducted
in two thousand nine, and while archaeologists wanted to remove
and conserve the barge they had nowhere to put it.
It's huge. It's one long, seven ms wide and about
(36:13):
one point five meters deep, with room for a crew
of about twenty. However, a special basin has been constructed
at the State Archaeology Museum, which is why the excavation
got started. Just this year, a four hundred year old
shipwreck was found off the coast of Portugal and described
as the find of a decade. The identity of the
ship isn't yet clear, but it was probably used in
(36:35):
the spice trade with India between fifteen seventy five and
sixteen twenty five. A shipwreck off the coast of Newport,
Rhode Island, maybe Captain James Cook's HMS Endeavor, which had
been sold and renamed the Lord Sandwich. Cook sailed around
the world aboard the Endeavor and then it was scuttled
by the British Navy during the Revolutionary War. The anniversary
(36:58):
of Cook's voyage is in so the team is hoping
to confirm and excavate it. By then. A lot of
the coverage that went around after this fine described the
ship as conclusively definitely found, except in National Geographic which
appended this to an article it had previously published in
twenties six quote. Once again, despite recent news claims that
(37:20):
Captain Cook's HMB Endeavor has been found, it still actually
remains undiscovered. According to a press release from the Rhode
Island Marine Archaeology Project, they have narrowed the search for
the ship to possibly one or two archaeological sites that
will be excavated in twenty nineteen. Previous claims that the
HMB Endeavor may have been found were made in nine
(37:42):
thousand to two thousand six, two thousand twelve, and twenties sixteen.
Divers have found the Danish warship Prince Friedrich, which sank
in seventeen eighty in the Kodagut straight between Denmark and Sweden.
There were six hundred sixty seven sailors aboard, but only
eight were killed when the ship went down, thanks to
people from a nearby island mounting a rescue effort. Finding
(38:03):
this ship required more than two hundred dives and a
ten year search. Yeah, they had been looking for that
ship for a long time and as kind of a
shipwreck side note, The mal Fisher Marine Museum in Key West,
Florida used to have a seventeenth century gold bar on display.
Fisher himself had recovered the bar from a shipwreck in
(38:24):
nineteen eighty, and the bar had been housed in a
case that let visitors reach in and touch it and
lift it up to see how heavy it was, which
was about four and a half pounds. On August, two
thieves stole the bar from the museum, and they were
caught on camera, but it wasn't until law enforcement received
an anonymous tip in the fall of seventeen that they
(38:44):
were identified. Richard Stephen Johnson and Jared Goldman were charged
with the crime in January and sentenced in July. The
bar was not recovered, though the two men had chopped
it up and sold off the pieces in Las Vegas.
And we will end this years Unearthed with a little
bit of utsy news, because there's always some utsy news.
(39:04):
Researchers had previously concluded that Utsi's sixty one tattoos might
have some kind of a medical purpose, basically that they
were the result of a form of acupuncture. This year,
research looked at all of these tattoos, plus the herbs
and fungi that were present in and near his body,
and compared that to all the various ailments that are
(39:25):
evident in Utsie's remains, and what they concluded is that
the society that Utsy was living in had an established
idea of medical care and disease treatment. It wasn't just
a random, haphazard situation. It was an organized system of
medical care. Oh, thank you for all that unearthed research.
You're very welcome. Do you also have listener mail? I
(39:49):
sure do, and this is from Margie and it goes
back to our Crystal Knocked episode. I know that is
a while ago at this point, but we keep getting
these very lovely photos and remembrances from people. And Margie says,
first of all, let me say just how much I
adore your podcast. Your thorough and thoughtful and take on
global historical events makes my inquisitive and curious heart happy.
(40:11):
I moved to Hamburg, Germany, from the American South to
be with my German partner about two years ago. Side note,
I never knew how much I didn't know about German
and European history until I moved here. Your backlog has
been super helpful in trying to catch up. I listened
to your episode on Crystal Knocked with my boyfriend and
I thought you might be interested in our experience. We
live in a Jewish neighborhood in Hamburg. Every year, on
(40:32):
November night, they hold a remembrance of Crystal Knock. I've
included some photos, but essentially the event consists of placing
candles around the buildings rans act or destroyed during Krystal
Knocked and every stumbling stone there's the stones outside a
building denoting a person who lived or worked there and
who was deported or murdered during the Holocaust in the area.
I do hope you enjoy this little glimpse into German remembrance.
(40:55):
Thank you so much for all that you do. All
the best, Margie. And then Margie sent these very lovely
and moving pictures of all of these candlelit areas where
the remembrance was going on um and one of the
things that she noted is that one of the places
is a Jewish school that actually survived. Crystal Nocton is
(41:15):
still open today, but there are armed guards twenty four
hours a day, which is now required for synagogues and
Jewish schools in Germany because anti Semitism has continued to
rise in recent years. So thank you so much. Margie
for those photos and for that information. UM, happy belated
New Year to everyone. I think these are actually coming
(41:36):
out right at the turn of the new year, so
we will look forward to some new topics in and
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast or history podcast at how stuff
works dot com. And then we are all over social
media at missed in History. That's our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram,
and Twitter. You can come to our website, which is
(41:59):
Missed in History dot com and find the incredibly long
list of sources for this episode. If you want to
look further into any of these stories, and there is
a searchable archive of every episode we have ever done,
you can find and subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcast,
the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you get podcasts.
(42:22):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how staff works dot com.
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