Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It is time for Unearthed
this week. So it's when we talk about the things
that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last
few months. Things we've been doing regularly for many years now,
but we know there are new listeners coming into the
show all the time. So today we have some things
that are related to books and letters and edibles and potables,
(00:38):
and as we so often do, we are starting this
installment of Unearthed with updates, and for the third time
in a row, we are having to start the updates
with the ongoing federal assault on history and related fields.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
So in July, Boston public television station GBH announced that
it had laid off thirteen employees who worked on the
US history focused documentary series American Experience. This is in
the wake of the clawback of public media funding that
we talked about previously on Unearthed, and was in addition
to other layoffs that had already taken place at the station.
(01:16):
GBH announced that the twenty twenty five season of American
Experience would be abbreviated as a result of the budget
and staffing cuts, and that future production on the series
had stopped. Since its inception, American Experience has produced close
to four hundred history documentaries, many of them award winning,
including earning fourteen Peabody Awards, ten News in Documentary Emmy Awards,
(01:40):
and twelve Primetime Emmys. A whole lot has happened this year,
and this is one of the things that when I
saw the headline about it, I immediately burst into tears. Here
is a probably incomplete list of episodes in which Holly
or I have cited an American Experience documentary or something
from its associated website, in n o particular order. The
(02:02):
Paramount Decrease of nineteen forty eight, The first Transatlantic Telegraph Cable,
The Motherhood of Mamie Till Mobley, The Tacoma Narrows Bridge,
The Boxer Rebellion, A Philip Randolph Hernandez versus Texas, Eugene
Jacques Bullard, The zoot Suit Riots, Esa Andre's North Pole Balloon, Mission,
Buck Versus Bell Orphan Trains, Catherine Dexter McCormick, The Nelson
(02:26):
Pill Hearings, Grand Central Station, The Haymarket Riot, Head of Hopper,
Mary McLeod, Bethune, Henry Lewis Sullivan, Mississippi Freedom Summer, Ettian Kabe,
and The Utopia of Akaria roller Coasters, Alabama Governor George Wallace,
and Four paper Clippers, which was on four people brought
to the United States from Nazi Germany under a secret
(02:49):
program that was known as Operation paper Clip. We have
also previously talked about the Executive Branch's focus on Smithsonian Museums,
including discussions of executive orders that were issued earlier this year.
In our recent episode on Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton,
which was inspired by an article on the White House
website that criticized the Smithsonian. In August, the White House
(03:13):
sent a letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch the
Third with the subject line internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions
and Materials, and that letter set in part quote, as
we prepare to celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
of our nation's founding, it is more important than ever
that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring
(03:34):
values that define the American story. In this spirit, and
in accordance with Executive Order one four two five three
Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. We will be
leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions.
This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President's directive
(03:56):
to celebrate American exceptionalism, removed divisive or partisan narratives, and
restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions. From there, the
letter requested that the Smithsonian provide information on two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary programming, current exhibition content, traveling and upcoming exhibitions,
(04:18):
internal guidelines and governance, an index of the permanent collection,
educational materials, the digital presence, external partnerships, grant related documentation
and surveys, and other evaluations of visitor experience to a
team at the executive branch. This request currently applies to
eight museums, with the other museums expected to be included
(04:41):
in a later phase. The letter included timelines and next steps,
including that within one hundred and twenty days, quote museums
should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or
ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions,
(05:02):
across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public facing materials.
The letter ended quote, we view this process as a
collaborative and forward looking opportunity, one that empowers museum staff
to embrace the revitalized curatorial vision rooted in the strength, breadth,
(05:22):
and achievements of the American story. By focusing on Americanism,
the people, principles, and progress that define our nation, we
can work together to renew the Smithsonian's role as the
world's leading museum institution. What that letter describes doesn't really
read like a collaborative process, though it reads like Smithsonian
(05:44):
museums submitting an enormous amount of material with interviews with
curators and staff that are described as voluntary, followed by
the museums getting corrections from the executive branch that are
expected to be implemented. There is no indication of whether
those corrections will be coming from someone with experience or
expertise in history, museum curation, or any related field. Also,
(06:09):
Americanism and American exceptionalism are ideologies, and the idea that
history should be unifying and constructive is ideologically driven, so
it's not so much removing ideology from the Smithsonian, but
following an ideology that the executive branch approves of. This
letter also has to be read in the context of
(06:30):
statements from the President of the United States, such as
this one that was posted on truth Social on August nineteenth,
parts of which are in all caps quote the Smithsonian
is out of control, where everything discussed is how horrible
our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished
the downtrodden have been. Nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
About the future. We are not going to allow this
to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go
through the museums and start the exact same process that
has been done with colleges and universities, where tremendous progress
has been made. This country cannot be woke, because woke
is broke. We have the hottest country in the world,
(07:16):
and we want people to talk about it, including in
our museums.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
A thousand blessings on Tracy for arranging this outline so
that I did not have to read that, because I
don't know what I would have done. This letter has
raised a lot of the same concerns as earlier communications
that were sent to the federal land bureaus, including the
National Park Service, saying that they need to restore federal
sites dedicated to history to a quote solemn and uplifting
(07:44):
public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent
progress toward becoming a more perfect union, and unmatched record
of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. We talked about
those communications in earlier installments of On Earth this year
and about concerns that this kind of focus is going
(08:04):
to sanitize and whitewash the history that is presented to
the public. And this also applies to the Smithsonian.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Beyond that, the Smithsonian is not an executive branch agency.
It was founded in eighteen forty six as an autonomous institution.
It's governed as a federal trust with a seventeen member
panel of regents, and historically it has not been subject
to direct control by the executive branch or the President
in this way. So curators and archivists and historians have
(08:36):
all expressed a lot of alarm, both at the idea
that the Smithsonian should quote celebrate American exceptionalism, which again
is an ideology, and at the overreach that's involved with
this effort from the White House.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
This review of the Smithsonian sparked the creation of Citizen
Historians for the Smithsonian, an all volunteer effort to document
everything that is currently on display at Smithsonian Museum, so
the eight museums that are part of this initial phase
of the review, as well as thirteen others, and the
National Zoo and the US Holocaust Memorial. In its first
(09:14):
five weeks of existence, this effort documented more than half
of the current Smithsonian exhibits. That's a lot of work.
There's more information about this at citizenhistorians dot org.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
There is also a teach in in defensive history and
Museums planned for SunUp to sundown on Sunday, October twenty
sixth on the National Mall. One of the organizers of
that is past guest and friend of the show Nate Demeyo,
host of The Memory Palace. There's more information on this
at linktree dot com slash history teachIn.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Also, on top of.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Everything that we've just talked about, the Department of Education
made various announcements about prioritizing quote patriotic education in public
school and that has a lot of the same themes
as we've been talking about with things like public broadcasting
in the Smithsonian, But those announcements also have multiple additional
layers that I just was not able to fully sort
(10:12):
through to really articulate in time to feel like I
could speak knowledgeably about it for this episode. So I guess,
having acknowledged that that also exists, we can take a
quick sponsor break. Continuing with the updates on today's episode.
(10:37):
Prior hosts of the show did an episode on the
illuminated manuscript known as the Book of Kels in March
of twenty ten. The Book of Kels is an illuminated
account of the four Gospels of the Christian Bible, so
the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and there
is some debate about exactly where this manuscript was created.
The most common arguments are either that it started on
(11:00):
the island of Iona in western Scotland before being taken
to Kells after a Viking raid, or that it was
created entirely at Kells. According to an article published in
The Guardian, researched by doctor Victoria Whitworth suggests that it's
neither of those things, but that this is a Pictish
document that was started northeast of Inverness in eastern Scotland.
(11:24):
According to Whitworth, a monastery in Portmahomic easter Ross was
home to monks who made the type of vellum that
was used in the book and who created carvings that
are a stylistic match to the Book of Kells. Inscriptions
in Iona, on the other hand, were more focused on legibility.
This isn't the first time someone has proposed a Pictish
(11:47):
origin for the Book of Kells, and it's kind of
difficult for us to really evaluate this claim at this point.
The details of Whitworth's research are in a book called
The Book of Kells, Unlocking the Enigma, which came out
on October ninth, That is before this episode is airing,
but it was after. It's after the episode was researched
(12:09):
and written. We are recording this two days before the
book comes out. If this argument holds up, though, it
could have a major impact on the understanding of history
and illuminated manuscripts in this part of the world, since
no Pictish manuscripts are known to have survived today. Next,
research published in the journal Nature Communications in July has
(12:32):
examined the DNA of forty seven people whose remains were
found in the Eastern Italian Alps. These people lived between
about sixty three eighty and twelve ninety five BCE, and
that would make them neighbors of Utzy the Iceman, at
least relatively speaking. Utsy died in the region sometime around
thirty three fifty to thirty one oh five BCE, and
(12:56):
Utsy is of course the subject of a full episode
of the show. He has made many appearances on Unearth,
and previous research into his DNA showed that he was
most closely related to Neolithic farmers in Anatolia in what
is now Turkya.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So this research wanted to explore the question of whether
Utsey was an outlier or whether other people who were
in the Eastern Italian Alps thousands of years ago had
similar geographic origins and ancestry. According to their findings, these
people did share between eighty percent and ninety percent of
(13:31):
their ancestry with Neolithic Anatolian farmers, so that was similar
to Utzy. And like Utsey, they also probably had dark
hair and brown eyes, and they were probably all lactose intolerant.
At the same time, there were some differences between Utzie's
DNA and that of most of the people whose DNA
was part of this study. Many of the male remains
(13:53):
in the study had paternal ancestry that came from what's
now Germany and France, while Utzi's paternal ancestry retraces to
a broader geographic region. Ussy's maternal lineage also seems different
from both modern people and the group analyzed in this study.
It's not clear whether he was related to a population
(14:13):
on his mother's side that has since died out, or
if there is some other explanation for this. For this
installment's update on Pompeii, which has also come up on
Earthed a lot, research at the site suggests that some
people returned to the city after the eruption of Mount
Vesuvius in the year seventy nine. These were probably people
(14:35):
who survived the eruption but just had nowhere else to
go and no money or resources to try to resettle
somewhere else. There is evidence that people who came back
to Pompeii lived in the upper levels of buildings that
were not completely buried in ash, and that they built
shelters and cellars and more sheltered areas, and the lower
(14:58):
levels of those buildings kind of clear hearing them out,
and also dug into the ash deposits to look for
things that they could make use of. At first, this
would have been kind of a dirty, dusty existence, but
it didn't take long for plant life to flourish in
the volcanic debris. But this community would have had a
very different existence from the Pompei of prior to the eruption,
(15:21):
not just because of the physical destruction, but also because
Pompeii had been a structured Roman city. Emperor Titus, who
was emperor when the volcano erupted, did send two former
consuls to try to refound the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum,
but those efforts failed. Survivors who returned to the area
(15:42):
would have been its poorest residents, and they were now
living without any of the social or governmental structures that
were typically part of Roman life. A statement from the
site's director describes it as a quote precarious, gray populated area,
a kind of campsite with shacks sprouting up amongst the
still recognizable ruins of the former city of Pompeii.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
It's likely that this area was at least partially inhabited
until the aftermath of another major eruption in the fifth century,
at which point it's believed to have been abandoned. We
didn't have that many updates as time, relatively speaking, so
now we're ready to move on to books and letters.
In the fourteenth century, poet and writer Jeffrey Chaucer made
(16:28):
references to a medieval poem known as the Song of
Wade in two of his works, Troy Lis and Cressida
and Canterbury Tales. Both times he seemed to take for
granted that his audience would know what he was referencing.
It would be a little like someone today referencing one
of Shakespeare's plays, or maybe King Arthur or Robin Hood
and just taking for granted that the reader was going
(16:49):
to get the connection. Yeah, there are people who would
get the Song of Wade connection, but not like a
general audience for the both part. While Chaucer's works have
survived until today, the text of Song of Wade has not.
In the nineteenth century, University of Cambridge medievalist M. R.
James found the only known surviving fragment of it in
(17:11):
a collection of Latin documents that dated back to the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This collection is known as Peterhouse
Manuscript two fifty five. The fragment of the poem was
included in a sermon which also referenced Wade's story. So,
like the narrative of what happens in the poem, and
like Jeffrey Chaucer, the author of this sermon seemed to
(17:33):
just assume that the congregation would get it, like he
didn't need to explain who this was.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
But this fragment was confusing. It was translated as referencing
elves and adders and sprites. Later translators used slightly different language,
like water monsters instead of sprites. But the references in
the sermon and Chaucer's work didn't really make sense if
the Song of Wade was a story involving fantastical or
(18:00):
mythological creatures. New research at the University of Cambridge suggests
that people have been reading this work incorrectly for centuries,
basically because of unclear handwriting. The twelfth century transcriber who
copied this sermon was probably more familiar with reading and
writing in the Latin of the sermon rather than the
(18:24):
Middle English of the poem that was being quoted. Middle
English uses some letters that Latin does not, including win,
which represents a W sound and looks kind of like
a P, and thorn, which represents a thh sound and
also looks kind of like a P. Whin and thorn
can also be written to look more like the letter why.
(18:46):
It's a character that's evolved over centuries, and there's a
dot written over win that's used to distinguish between these
two letters. So the idea is that either this scribe
mixed up some of these letters or was copying them
from another document that didn't clearly distinguish among them, and
consequently made a few mistakes that changed the words. By
(19:08):
this reasoning, elves should have been wolves and sprites should
have been sea snakes, which would have put the poem
more in line of a Middle English romance grounded in
ideas of chivalry instead of a more fantastic work with
roots in mythology. The biggest conflicts in such a poem
would have been among human beings, not between humans and
(19:29):
mythological beings or monsters.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
As happens so often and unearthed. A lot of the
writing about this has described it as like conclusively cracking
one hundred and thirty year old mystery when it's really
more like it is offering a different interpretation and potential
explanation of what's going on with this text. And that
(19:53):
kind of broad language includes things like press releases from
the University of Cambridge about the research. Research published in
the journal Iraq has translated a fragment of a qneiform
tablet revealing a previously unrecorded Sumerian myth. The tablet was
excavated back in the nineteenth century and an image of
it was used on the dust jacket of a book
(20:15):
called from the Tablets of sumer twenty five firsts in
Man's Recorded History, but it wasn't translated for the book
and it hasn't been thoroughly studied before now.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
It was basically on.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
The dust jacket and like on an interior picture because
it was a striking looking tablet covered in letters that
was pretty evocative, but they did not look at what
it actually said. So now that people have this seems
to tell the story of the Sumerian storm god Ishkur
Ishkur is held captive in the nether world or Kerr,
(20:50):
which leads to a drought. Ishker's father, the King of
the Gods, summons the divine pantheon to decide who is
going to go to Ishker's rescue, and one none of
the other gods want to go, Fox goes in their place.
The tablet starts to describe Fox's adventures on this quest,
but the end of the story is missing because the
tablet's broken. It seems like it would probably end with
(21:15):
Fox successfully rescuing Ishker, but we don't really know. We're
kind of guessing logically what would happen next.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
That's us presuming a happy ending. Maybe it's like a
European film. It just a maybe. This is a story
that seems to have similarities to other myths, involving seasons, floods,
and changes in weather. It starts with images of rivers
and canals filled with fish before Isher's capture changes all
of that, and it also features Fox as a sly
(21:45):
cunning character, which is also a theme in other mythology.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
We will take a sponsor break and then get to
lots of fines related to food and drink. I always
love all of our unearthed fines that are related to
food and drink, and I think my favorite ones are
(22:11):
when actual remnants of food are found at historical and
archaeological sites. This time, though we have more research that's
more about food rather than actual food items. First, archaeologists
in China have found ancient wooden tools at a site
that is roughly three hundred thousand years old. It is
(22:32):
incredibly unusual to find wooden tools that are that old,
and these only survived until today because they were in
layers of low oxygen sediment that was mostly clay, so
that helped preserve them.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
These tools were likely used for cutting, grinding, and digging,
and the site where they were found also contained evidence
of an assortment of foods pine nuts and hazel nuts,
various fruits, herbs, and ferns. There was also evidence of
edible aquatic plants, so these wooden tools were likely used
for both harvesting and processing an array of foods, or,
(23:09):
if your mind is like me, muddling a cocktail, that too,
are used in those herbs to make something delicious. This
find is the earliest known use of purpose made digging
sticks in what is now southern China and the surrounding areas,
and it's also the earliest evidence of underground plant parts
(23:30):
like roots and tubers being used as food. The tools
are also so old that they date back to before
Homo sapiens were known to be in this part of Asia,
so it's possible that they were made and used by Denisovians,
or by homoerectus, or by some other early hominin. On
(23:51):
a somewhat similar note, research at two caves near the
Mediterranean Sea that were used by Neanderthals suggests that each
group had its own distinct practices for butchering animals and
preparing meat. The two caves are only about forty five
miles apart and were occupied at roughly the same time
during the Middle Paleolithic period. This research involved examining almost
(24:15):
three hundred and fifty bone fragments, and they had distinctly
different cut marks at each of these two caves. The
differences have been described as the groups having different family
recipes or having different traditions around food. It's also just
possible that the two groups had different preferences on what
(24:36):
kinds of meat to eat. One cave had more bones
that came from larger animals, although that could also mean
that the group from the other cave butchered larger animals
somewhere else rather than at the cave. So this research
suggests that Neanderthal society was more complex and varied than
we might imagine today.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
I can't remember if it was in this, uh, this
find or something else, because I think there's more than
one Neanderthal thing this time, but one of them had
a subhead in the text of the article that was
something like Neanderthal's colon not dummies, which is a recurring
theme on the kinds of Neanderthal things we talk about
(25:18):
on Unearthed. Keeping with this ancient food theme, research in Shangdong,
China have found charred at zuki beans dating back to
eight thousand to nine thousand years ago, meaning those were
being grown and used in the Yellow River region at
least four thousand years earlier than was previously thought. At
(25:40):
Zuki beans are a nutritious food and they also have
nitrogen fixing properties that helps enrich the soil. This research
was part of a larger study that looked at how
these beans were used at sites in China, Japan, and
South Korea. Another finding involved significant differences in how large
the beans were and how they were used. These findings
(26:02):
suggest that these beans were domesticated at several different places
in parallel, rather than having one variety of bean plant
that was domesticated in one place and then spread out
from that point. I'm laughing because I'm like in my garden,
some plants make big beans and some plants just kind
of peter out. Sure, sure there were trends among the beans.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yes, it's just like maybe one of them is just
a really bad gardener.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Continuing on with our plant based food, researchers working in
the Canary Islands have studied the DNA of lentils that
were placed in storage silos there more than a thousand
years ago. The indigenous people on the islands created these
silos by digging down into the volcanic bedrock, and some
(26:51):
of the seeds that are still in there are extremely
well preserved. When Europeans arrived in the Canary Islands in
the thirteen hundred, they described their inhabitants farming methods, but
they didn't mention lentils. Spain ultimately colonized the islands in
the fifteenth century, and a lot of the indigenous population
and knowledge were lost through conquest in genocide, But by
(27:15):
that time lentils were being grown there. So the question
was when and how did the lentils arrive there? Did
they predate those fourteenth century accounts or were they introduced afterward.
So this genetic research and other parts of this suggest
that the Canary Islands indigenous peoples brought lentils from northern
(27:37):
Africa roughly two thousand years ago, so long before the
arrival of Europeans, and that the same types of lentils
have been cultivated on these islands ever since. The particular
lentil variety that they were studying is also really well
adapted to a hot and dry climate, and that is
(27:58):
something researchers say could be useful as the Earth climate
continues to get warmer due to climate change. Other food
DNA research has looked into the question of whether DNA
can help researchers figure out what kinds of fish people
were eating in the ancient world, even when the fish
were heavily processed. We have talked about the use of
(28:19):
food residues on pots to figure out what those pots contained.
So this isn't like a totally new idea, but this
study involved Roman fish fermentation vats that were used to
make a paste called garum. In addition to being fermented,
these fish were salted and crushed, So it's extremely rare
for archaeologists to find a recognizable sample that could conclusively
(28:43):
point to one specific type of fish. Researchers were able
to extract DNA from residue at a site in what's
now Spain, which they compared to DNA from modern sardines,
and they confirmed that what they were looking at in
this paste residue was from sardines and that it was
(29:03):
genetically similar to today's sardines from the same part of
the world.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
At the same.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Time, the researchers stress that this is not a perfect technique.
The process of creating these kinds of fish pastes can
still mean that there is just no usable DNA left
and residues that survive until today, so at worked this
time might not always work.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
This may have been a fluke. Research on samples from
the Levant region and northern Mesopotamia has examined seed and
wood samples from grape and olive plants that date back
to between five thousand and twenty six hundred years ago.
Researchers used carbon isotope analysis to assess how much water
these plants had available when they were growing during the
(29:49):
earlier part of that time span. Evidence of water stress
lined up with seasonal variations in average moisture and rainfall,
but in later samples a different pattern emerged. There was
a wider range in the periods of water stress and
evidence of plants being grown in places that were not
as well suited to them, requiring more irrigation.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Grape plants, in particular, were increasingly grown in areas that
required extra water, so researchers concluded that this suggests grapes
and the wines that were made from them had a
particularly high economic value, more so than olives and olive oil,
because otherwise people would not have bothered to put in
(30:31):
the effort to grow them in places where it was
harder to do so. The press release headline on this
boiled it down to quote bronze and iron age cultures
in the Middle East were committed to wine production. We've
finally gotten to a couple of fines that involved the
discovery of an actual food substance. For this first one,
(30:52):
we got a tip from our listener Tom Its bottles
containing lactic acid bacteria cultures found in a basement under
green houses at the University of Copenhagen. Lactic acid can
extend the shelf life of cheese's butter and other dairy products,
and these bottles dated back to the late eighteen hundreds.
DNA research confirmed that the bottle's contents still matched up
(31:15):
with what was on their labels, and these strains of
lactic acid cultures match ones that were used in Danish
dairies after the introduction of pasteurization, that's heat treating milk
and other foods to kill pathogenic bacteria. These cultures were
probably used as part of butter production. Perhaps unsurprisingly, researchers
(31:38):
also found evidence of contamination from other bacteria in these samples,
including pathogenic bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus and Vibrio furnissie.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Please do not taste these culturesbatter make you see.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
The other actual food substance is a residue from bronze
vessels at a shrine in southern Italy. These vessels were
discovered in nineteen fifty four, and a series of tests
carried out in the year since then had been inconclusive.
Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum received some of the residue in
(32:17):
twenty nineteen, and they've concluded that it is nearly identical
to today's beeswax and honey, although with a higher acidity
level because it's basically been in storage for about twenty
five hundred years. They also found some proteins similar to
royal jelly. It didn't obviously look like any of these
things just by looking at it because it was so old,
(32:40):
but that's where we seem to have landed, and our.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Last food is more food adjacent. But Tracy just found
it charming and there is no better reason for inclusion
in my opinion. It's a pottery vessel found in what
is now Tajikistan, dating back to between the first century
BCE and the third century CE, when the Kushan Empire
controlled the area. It had an inscription in the Bactrian
language which reads, this water jug belongs to the woman's sagkeina.
(33:08):
This jug was broken when archaeologists found it, and some
of the pieces are missing, but all of the pieces
containing parts of the inscription are there. Inscriptions in this
language are very rare in what is now Tajikistan, so
this is a very great find, okay.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
I just like the idea that somebody basically wrote their
name on their water jug because they were tired of
people taking it from the well without asking or whatever.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Ye uh.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Before we close out today's installment of Unearthed, I wanted
to talk about a paper that is connected to like
the research that goes into these episodes and then the
episodes that we produce as a result. I have talked
before about how it can be challenging to feel like
we are covering fines from all over the world because
(33:56):
we're dependent on what's being published and publicized and covered
in English language media. So this paper, which was published
in the journal Science Advances in July, is called regional
disparities in US media coverage of archaeology research, and it
is about what kinds of peer reviewed papers wind up
(34:17):
being covered as popular science news. Overwhelmingly, the general public
learns about archaeology research from news sources or maybe from
our podcast, and not directly from the peer reviewed journals
where it's published. But there's a big gap between popular
science news and peer reviewed journals. Some of this is
(34:38):
really to be expected, since what is newsworthy to a
general audience is not necessarily the same as what's notable
from a scientific perspective. At the same time, there are
editorial decisions and judgment calls about what to cover. So
this paper looked at how what's published in journals compares
(34:58):
to what is covered in mainstream news reporting. The researchers
surveyed archaeology papers published in seven peer reviewed journals. Those
were Antiquity Science, Nature, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports,
and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They also
collected metrics on all of these publications, and they noted
(35:22):
whether press releases about the archaeology papers were published on
eurek alert, which is a news release platform. They also
looked at whether each paper got coverage in fifteen different
major US media outlets and news aggregators. So those peer
reviewed journals, I feel like every one of them has
(35:42):
been cited repeatedly on Unearthed and eurek alert and major
US media outlets. They are all part of what goes
into creating our Unearthed episodes.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
This paper has a lot of math and statistics. It's
offul found that relatively speaking, articles about North America were
twice as likely to have a press release on eurek
alert than articles about Asia, and across the board, news
outlets covered articles with a press release at eurek alert
far more often than they covered ones that did not.
(36:18):
Paleolithic archaeology articles were also covered more often than archaeology
about more recent periods, possibly because people interpret Payolithic findings
as universal regardless of where the research takes place. One
of this paper's overall conclusions was that papers about archaeology
in the United Kingdom, Israel and Palestine, and Australia were
(36:42):
all more likely to be covered in US popular publications
than papers about archaeology in China and Taiwan. Asia was
the geographic region least likely to receive news coverage, even
though the greatest numbers of papers were about China or Taiwan.
(37:02):
The authors concluded that these disparities reflect an anti Chinese
bias and the false notion that only history related to
quote white Judaeo Christian pasts is relevant to people in
the United States today. So, after working on Unearthed episodes
for more than a decade and just really immersing myself
(37:23):
in both peer reviewed papers and the news coverage of
them multiple times a year for all of that time,
these trends are really apparent. Like we talked so much
about like early human history Paleolithic era stuff today compared
to things that are more recent. Geographic trends are also
(37:44):
really apparent. This paper wasn't really focused on Africa, but
some of these same things also apply to archaeological research
in Africa. These trends totally make their way into our show.
As I just said, it's absolutely true that editor's decisions
are influenced by their own biases and by their perceptions
(38:07):
of what will be relevant to their audiences. All people
have biases, and these biases are still there when we
are consciously trying to be aware of them and not
fall into that same pattern. This is not in any
way a criticism of the paper, but in my experience,
I do think the news releases on eurek Alert play
(38:31):
an even bigger role in these patterns than the paper suggests.
It's not just a yes or no checkbox about whether
there is a press release. A press release on eurek
alert is typically written to be accessible to a general audience,
which peer reviewed papers and academic journals often are not.
The press releases also signaled that there is a media
(38:53):
contact who is prepared to answer questions about the research
and give quotes to reporters, and that person's contact information
is right there on the press release, so it's easy
to find. Overwhelmingly when I'm working on these episodes and
there is an archaeology story that gets just a ton
of coverage and lots of different publications, with lots of
(39:15):
perspectives and lots of different quotes from archaeologists or the
lead authors of the papers, it's overwhelmingly something that also
has a press release on EUREK Alert, or if not,
it is coming from a university or another institution that
has dedicated PR and media relations people on staff who
(39:35):
are doing outreach and promoting the work of their faculty
and staff. Additionally, some of the countries that the paper
showed as getting proportionally more news coverage are also countries
that intentionally use archaeological research as a PR and international
publicity effort, and so that includes Egypt and Israel. So
(39:58):
this paper was published as open access anyone can read it,
and I mostly wanted to say, yeah, this really aligns
with my observations. It includes trends that I try to
be aware of and should try to take into account
and as much as possible, kind of undermine when I'm
working on these episodes. Again, it is called regional disparities
(40:19):
in US media coverage of archaeology research, and it was
published in the journal Science Advances in July, and that
concludes part one of Unearthed.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I'll have a question about this on Friday. Yeah, I'm
sure we can talk more about it on Friday. Do
you have listener mail in the meantime? I do have
listener mail in the meantime. This email is actually from
back in July, and I accidentally skipped it when I
was reading things. It has come from Megan, and Meghan wrote, Hi,
(40:52):
Tracy and Holly. I've been listening to stuff you mists
in history class for the past ten years or so.
Thank you for the hours of education and entertainment. I
really enjoyed your recent episode about Wilfred Owen and wanted
to recommend one of my favorite books, actually the first
of a trilogy, Regeneration by Pat Barker. It's a fictionalized
account of Owen, Sasoon, and their contemporaries at Craig Lockhart
(41:15):
Hospital under the care of WHR.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Rivers. Fun fact, the R in Rivers's middle initials also
stands for Rivers. The novel is powerful, haunting, and will
stay with you for a long time. I like to
reread the books that have affected me the most, especially
so I can revisit them and relate to them at
different stages of my own life. On your recommendation, I
read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, which was good timing
(41:40):
since I got COVID last month and I felt like
I had the plague.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
I'm sure I will come back to it in the
future At Christmas time. Listening to your episode about Wilfred
Owen made me realize that I haven't reread the Regeneration
trilogy since I started my current job almost six years ago.
I'm a psychologist for the US Department of Veteran Affairs
in North Carolina. Working in mental health at the VA
(42:05):
has allowed me to bear witness to generations of trauma,
from veterans who served in conflicts dating back to World
War II in Korea, to those who faced violence and
discrimination related to their race or sexual orientation, to those
who have experienced military sexual trauma. When you discussed Rivers's
treatments for shell shock at Craig Lockhart, it struck me
(42:25):
that he was remarkably insightful about how to work with PTSD.
The evidence to based psychotherapies we used today are also
based in helping veterans retell their stories of trauma, exposing
themselves in a safe environment to painful memories and emotions.
I often use written exposure therapy, which is directly related
to the writing therapy at Craig Lockhart. Thank you for
(42:46):
reminding me that it's time for a regeneration read for Pettas.
Here are some pictures of my boys, Mino and Tibby.
They are littermates twelve years old and have the biggest
personalities of any cat I have ever known. Tibby is
the one lying on his back like he owns the place,
and Minnow is on my lap. The picture of them
on the beams of my parents' ceiling shows minnows distinguishing quirk.
(43:10):
He always holds his tail in a curly cube or
loop over his back like a chow. Tibby's formal name
is Tibbolt, after Shakespeare's Tibolt Capulate and Tibert, the cat
for medieval Reynard stories. Like his namesakes, he's smart and
strong willed, and can sometimes have a bit of a
timber when he doesn't get his way. But he's also
a sweetheart and sleeps cuddled next to me every night,
(43:31):
although he snores. Minnow's name is really Minilouche after the
poem The Cat in the Moon by Yates. It's about
a cat named black Miniluchhe who dances under the moon.
My Mino also dances wanders and whales at night, although
he is an indoor cat. But Minnow has the most
jouis de vive of any creature I've ever met. I
(43:53):
don't know when I gave him the name as a kitten,
just how apt it would be. He really does dance.
Thank you for letting me share my book War and
Cat Stories. The work you do helps me make sense
of the world and keeps me going through the hard times.
Best Megan. Thank you so much Megan for this email.
I don't think I had heard of the Regeneration trilogy,
(44:13):
and I am intrigued. And thanks for also talking about
your experience at the VA. There's a paragraph that I
skipped over that talked about how that is a rough
moment right now, and I hope you are doing as
well as possible, uh, and that things are going as
well as possible for you. And then we have adorable
(44:34):
pictures of.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
Black cats, and I love black cats. I have two
of them. They are also littermates and today are the best.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
I have a curly que tail cat, except her curly
cue is often in the opposite direction, so instead of
going up and over her back, it goes up and
over the opposite way and makes a little spiral.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
It is very cute.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Uh So, thank you again for this email, Megan. If
you would like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast, we are at History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to our show
on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to
get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is
(45:21):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.