Unearthed! in Fall/Winter 2023, Part 1

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.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It is time for Unearthed,
this time for the episode that's just going to close
out the last three months of twenty twenty three, even
though it is now twenty twenty four. If you're new
to the show, this is when a few times a
year we take a look at things that have been
literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So

(00:37):
this is October, November, and December of twenty twenty three.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
We will be kicking.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Off with a whole whole lot of updates to prior
episodes of the show, including some updates on things that
have come up.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
On Unearthed before.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
We also in today's episode have some things that were
dug up in the garden, and some edibles and potables
which are not the garden, and some books and letters.
And then on Wednesday we'll have some other perennial favorites
like shipwrecks and artwork.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Those will all be next time.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
So back in twenty fourteen, we did a full episode
on Stone Hinge after non invasive imaging revealed a lot
of previously unknown monuments and other structures under the surface there.
Of course, there has been other research at the site
since then, some of which we have covered on subsequent
installments of Onearthed. This year, one team is focused on

(01:34):
Stone eighty, which is known as the Altarstone, leading to
a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science titled
the Stonehenge Alterstone was probably not sourced from the old
red sandstone of the Anglo Welsh basin time to broaden
our geographic and stratigraphic horizons. That whole thing is the
paper's title.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
It is.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
It amuses me as a title because it is just
structurally dissimilar from a lot of paper titles. You don't
usually have a complete sentence followed by a complete sentence
question as the title of the paper. They're borrowing from
old school title style.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, kind of.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
So in this paper, researchers used several methods to analyze
the altstone, and this included optical petrography, X ray fluorescence
and scanning, electron microscope and energy dispersive X ray spectography,
and they found that this stone has a higher barium

(02:36):
content than most of the other stones at the site,
and then, as that paper title suggests, the stone was
believed to have originated from the Anglo Welsh Basin. There
are some stones from that basin that have a similar
barium content to the ultrastone, but those do not have
the same mineral content as the altarstone, so they're kind

(02:59):
of not an exact match. This suggests that this stone
may have come from somewhere else, possibly farther north in Britain,
and possibly from sandstone deposits that are younger than this
roughly four hundred million year old Old Red Sandstone formation
of West Wales. I did not realize how challenging Old

(03:21):
Red Sandstone was going to be to say, to shift
gears and expand on, something we briefly mentioned in our
recent two parter on indigenous writer Mourning Dove. Research into
fossilized footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico
has been ongoing over the last couple of years. In

(03:41):
twenty twenty one, a paper titled evidence of humans in
North America during the Last Glacial Maximum was published in
the journal Science, and it described these footprints as having
been made between twenty one thousand and twenty three thousand
years ago, So this twenty twenty one research was controversy
for a few reasons. Within the field of archaeology, one

(04:04):
of the prevailing hypotheses about the arrival of humans in
the Americas is known as Clovis First, and that's basically
that the culture known as the Clovis people was the
first to inhabit North America and that started roughly thirteen
thousand years ago. So there was already archaeological research suggesting

(04:25):
that humans were in the Americas before that point, but
this ten thousand year difference between thirteen thousand years and
twenty three thousand years from this paper that seemed really dramatic.
There were also archaeologists who expressed some skepticism about the
conclusions because this research was based on radiocarbon dating of

(04:46):
aquatic plant seeds in what is now rock but had
been a lake bed, So if the seeds had absorbed
carbon from the water, that could have thrown off the
app accuracy of this carbon dating. In addition to that,
indigenous scholars and critics pointed out that this research and

(05:07):
the reporting around it didn't really acknowledge any connection between
these footprints and the indigenous peoples of North America. Although
the National Park Service's news release described the research as
done quote in connection with the Park's Native American partners,
this wasn't reflected in the text of the paper or
in reporting from major news outlets like The New York Times.

(05:30):
There wasn't a suggestion that these footprints were made by
the ancestors of Indigenous people living today, or that the
results affirmed indigenous nations own histories about how long they've
been on the continents. The Pony Tribe member Nick Martin,
writing for High Country News, described it this way, quote
anyone who read only mainstream coverage would walk away without

(05:53):
a clue that this is actually an indigenous story, not
merely a triumphant discovery of capital science. Not a single
Indigenous citizen, historian, elder, storyholder, biologist, geneticist, or archaeologist was
quoted in the piece, nor did the word indigenous or
native appear once. Martin also cited cremate archaeologist Paulette Stevens,

(06:19):
whose book The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere details
archaeological sites that date back farther than twenty three thousand years,
sometimes much farther. But a lot of this news reporting
really made the newly published papers conclusions sounds almost unprecedented.
New research published in October supports the conclusions from the

(06:40):
twenty twenty one paper, this time using carbon dating of
ancient pollen greens, as well as a technique called optically
stimulated luminescence which estimates the age of the courts in
the sediment layers. This research was again published in the
journal Science under the title Independent age Estimates Resolve the
controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands. There have

(07:04):
been archaeologists who have pointed out that seeds, pollen, and
quartz luminescence all have downsides for use in dating. But
now there are three different sources of data, all pointing
to the same basic time period. So this paper's acknowledgments
begin quote. Science is a way of knowing, and we
acknowledge that there are many ways of knowing. Therefore, we

(07:26):
deeply appreciate the perspectives, cultural practices, and oral histories of
the tribes and pueblos whose homeland is in southern New Mexico.
This time around, The New York Times quoted Edward Jolie,
who is an enrolled citizen of the Muskogee Creek Nation
of Oklahoma and also has Oglala Lakota ancestry. Jolly said,

(07:47):
in part quote, it's another one of those we told
you so. A lot of Natives have said, We've always
been here. NPR also quoted Julie as saying, quote, given
that the vast majority of archaeology in the Americas is
the archaeology of Native Americans, it's particularly significant that Native voices,
Indigenous voices have become more prominent and more accepted. So

(08:10):
I feel like this is a step forward from the
first paper and how it is reported on, but I
still would not call this like a collaborative or indigenous
led project. Right moving on, we did an episode on
the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic in twenty fourteen, and then
again a year into the COVID nineteen pandemic. We revisited

(08:34):
that topic through the lens of what we had all
been living through. One of the things we mentioned in
both of those episodes was that the nineteen eighteen flu
pandemic disproportionately killed young, otherwise healthy people, unlike many infectious
diseases that are more likely to be fatal to the
very old, the very young, and people who have illnesses
or certain disabilities. That's been a widely repeated description of

(08:58):
the nineteen eighteen pandemic, but research published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences in October calls that
into question. So this research was based on analysis of
the skeletons of three hundred and sixty nine people from
the Hammontode Documented Osteological Collection in Cleveland, Ohio. The researchers

(09:19):
divided the bones that they were examining into a control
group people who had died before the pandemic, and then
the group that died during the pandemic. The skeleton's shin
bones were examined for lesions that would indicate some kind
of environmental, social, or nutritional stress. The researchers concluded that

(09:39):
the people who had active lesions were to use their
terminology frail, and that they were more likely to die
during the pandemic. They concluded that there wasn't clear evidence
that the nineteen eighteen flu disproportionately killed young, healthy people.
It was true that the people who cared for patients
during the flu and reported their deaths saw lot more

(10:00):
young adults dying than during other disease outbreaks, but according
to this research, pre existing medical conditions and socioeconomic factors
played a role in their deaths. In other words, they
may have been young, but they were not necessarily healthy.
There are some limits to this research though. The skeletons
in the Hammontide collection are all from people who died

(10:23):
in Cleveland. Most of them died in places like prisons,
charity hospitals, poorhouses, and tuberculosis clinics, and then their bodies
were unclaimed, So that's a very specific population of people.
It is not really clear whether these results would apply
to the population more broadly. And this also doesn't really
explain why the nineteen eighteen flu was disproportionately more lethal

(10:47):
among young adults compared to other epidemics, because people do
tend to develop more conditions that can place more stress
on their bodies as they get older. A side note,
this collection has come up on the show before it
was developed by carl A.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Hammon and Thomas W. Todd.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Past podcast subject W. Montague Cobb studied under Todd at
Western Reserve University and worked with this collection. We will
take a quick sponsor break and then we will come
back for a few more updates. In twenty eleven, prior

(11:30):
hosts of the show did an episode on the nineteen
eleven Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, which killed almost one hundred
and fifty workers, most of them young women in New
York City. There was not much to commemorate this fire
until October of last.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Year, when a new memorial.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
Was dedicated at the site where the fire took place.
This memorial has text in English, Yiddish, and Italian, which
are the languages that were spoken by the workers who
died there. And then there's also a stainless steel ribbon
mounted about twelve feet above the sidewalk on two sides
of the building. Those ribbons list the names of one

(12:09):
hundred and forty six victims of the fire, and the
names are cut through the steel, so they reflect on
this dark panel that's below that. As I understand it,
I think there's a second part of this memorial that
is still in the works.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Moving on.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
In autumn of twenty twenty two, we talked about the
discovery of an iron folding chair that was found in
a burial site. This chair dates back to the sixth century,
and at the time it was removed from the site
as part of a whole block of soil. It has
now been fully excavated from that block. The Bavarian State
Office for Monument Preservation conducted the excavation as well as

(12:46):
an analysis of the chair, which found that it had
previously undetected brass inlays as decoration. When we first talked
about this chair, it was believed to have been buried
as a mark of status for the person it was
buried with, or maybe a mark of political office. That
continues to be true. This is a woman's burial site

(13:07):
and we don't really know much about her, but she
seems to have been very high status. Also, this chair,
it just looks like an iron frame if you look
at pictures of it, kind of an X shaped iron frame.
The seat has not survived until today, but there are
traces left on the iron that suggest it was made
from animal fur. In April of twenty sixteen, we did

(13:29):
an episode on Denmark's early history and the Yellingstones. These
runestones were part of research that was published in the
journal Antiquity this past fall. This research used three D
scanning to study the inscriptions on the Yelling Stone and
another set of runestones called the rov Noon two Stones.
Both sets of runestones mention a woman called Thyral. The

(13:53):
Yellingstones were raised by King Harold Bluetooth to commemorate his parents,
Gorm and Thyrus, so we know who that Thira is,
but it wasn't clear whether the Thiram mentioned and the
rabnuns two stones was the same person. The team's analysis
of the stones, shapes and carving techniques suggest that the
same person carved at least one each of the Yelling

(14:16):
Stones and the rabnunj two stones, so they concluded that
the thire mentioned and the two different stones were probably
the same person. If that is the case, then she
was mentioned more than any other person in runestones from
Viking Age Denmark, meaning that she was probably very powerful
and important. So last time we did an earst, we

(14:37):
talked about the discovery that more than one thousand items
were missing from the collection of the British Museum. As
of reporting in mid December, only about three hundred and
fifty of them had been recovered. Nearly all of the
recovered items came from the antiquities dealer who first warned
the museum that items were being stolen back in twenty
twenty one. There were also an the other three hundred

(15:01):
and fifty items in the museum's collection that were discovered
to be missing gold mounts or gemstones. It's likely that
most of those will not be recovered because they were sold.
In case of the gold mounts were just melted down
and sold as scrap. Next, the Cern Giant made an
appearance on Unearthed in July of twenty twenty one. That is,

(15:24):
the enormous chalk figure of a naked man carrying a
knotted club on a hillside in Dorset, England. At the time,
researchers were trying to figure out how old it was,
and that research wound up involving microscopic snails. These researchers
estimated that the oldest chalk layers dated to between the
years seven hundred and eleven hundred. They did not find

(15:46):
evidence to suggest who made the figure, why, or what
it is meant to represent. New research published last year
builds on that earlier study and suggests some answers to
those questions. The team included that the giant marked a
muster site for the armies of King Alfred and was
originally meant to represent the mythical figure of Hercules, and

(16:10):
then later on monkst that Cern Abbess reinterpreted it as
a representation of Saint Edwold Alfred lived in the ninth century,
which aligns with that earlier research on the age of
the chalklayers and researchers pointed out several similarities between classical
depictions of Hercules and the Cern giant, including the knotted club,

(16:32):
his nakedness, and the fact that Hercules was often depicted
in motion and that chalk figure looks like he's walking.
They described various written references to Hercules in the early
Middle Ages, and they pointed out how CERN's location, proximity
to water and shelter, and proximity to known Viking rating
sites made it an ideal muster point for an army,

(16:55):
as is the case a lot of the time. A
lot of the reports on this research made it so
like this is the conclusive solving of a mystery. This
is really, as the paper itself makes clear, a possible
explanation based on available evidence and the words of Thomas Morcombe,
a researcher at the University of Oslo, in one of
the paper's articles, quote, I think we found a compelling

(17:18):
narrative that fits the giant into the local landscape and
history better than ever before, changing him from an isolated
mystery to an active participant in the local community and culture. Also,
I realized after I wrote this entire piece that it's
technically something I should have saved for the first Unearthed
installment of twenty twenty four. But oh well, no one

(17:40):
really cares. You're going to unearthed jail, which I have
to now build. Thanks a lot, Tracy. In November, the
US MEANT unveiled a new quarter featuring past podcast subject
Maria tallchief that was part of the American Women Quarters program.
These quarters all feature the head of George Washington shown

(18:00):
in profile on the obverse, with the women on the reverse.
Tall Chiefs coin shows her in a balletic leap with
both her English and Osage names, with her O Sage
name written in Osage orthography. Past podcast subject Nina Otero
Warren was also featured on one of these quarters back
in twenty twenty two, which I did not know about

(18:21):
until just now. Forthcoming quarters that are planned through twenty
twenty five include past subjects Mary Edwards Walker, I To
b Wells, and Juliette Gordon Lowe, and in our last update,
the n C Wyeth illustration that somebody bought for four
dollars at a Savers in New Hampshire, which we talked
about in our previous installment of Unearthed, continued to make

(18:44):
news in Q four. It sold at auction for one
hundred and ninety one thousand dollars in September, but the
buyer never paid the auction house and the seller had
to reclaim it. But in December the illustration was scx
specfully sold to a private buyer for more than one
hundred thousand dollars. Moving on, we have three fines that

(19:07):
were found out in the garden. First, a metal detectorist
found some bronze discs in a newly harvested carrot field
in northeastern Switzerland over the summer and notified archaeologists about them.
They then worked with the landowner to get permission to
cut a block of soil out of this carrot field

(19:28):
and take it to the lab, where they wound up
finding more of these discs, along with two spiral finger
rings and more than one hundred amber beads that were
so tiny they had to be picked out of the
soil with sweezers. The discs were probably part of a
necklace and the team also found some gold spirals separate

(19:48):
from those finger rings that might have been spacers in
between the discs when it was worn as a necklace.
All this dates back to about fifteen hundred BCE. They
also found some things that were jewelry, including a beaver tooth,
a bear tooth, and a shark tooth, as well as
bits of ore in crystal, an arrowhead, and an ammonite fossil.

(20:09):
It's possible that they and the necklace were all intentionally buried.
An article in Smithsonian Magazine describes them as possibly someone's
collection of curiosities or things that were worn together as
a protective amulet. Next, a family on the island of
Yomferland in southern Norway was using a metal detector to

(20:30):
try to find a lost ear ring in their garden
when they instead found two ninth century broaches under a tree.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
One was oval.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
Shaped and was a style that was often worn as
part of a pair, but the other one is not
the match to that one. It is circular and matches
a style that was known to have been used in
Denmark sometime around seven eighty to eight fifty CE. It
is possible that these items came from a burial site,

(20:59):
and that the map to the oval pen, along with
other grave goods or possibly remains, they might be found
with some further excavation. According to an article in artnet News,
this is the earliest conclusive evidence that Jomfrelun was actually
settled in the ninth century. This last one, before we
take a break, starts out in a garden, but then

(21:20):
moves beyond it. The National Museums of Scotland published work
in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
in November detailing discoveries that were made back in the
nineteen fifties and sixties. The first was in nineteen fifty two,
when a schoolboy in Fife was assigned to dig potatoes
in the school garden as a punishment. In addition to

(21:43):
the potatoes, he found a four thousand year old Egyptian
statue head made from sandstone. The statue head was sent
to the Royal Scottish Museum, which is now the National
Museums of Scotland, and at the time people thought this
was a really unexpected but isolated find. They seemed to
have kind of gone, wow, that's weird, and then moved on.

(22:05):
This school was located at a historic building called Melville House,
and in nineteen sixty six another student there was vaulting
during pe class and landed on part of a bronze
votive statue of an APIs bowl that was sticking out
of the ground. And what was really just a wild coincidence,
the teacher who was supervising this pe class was the

(22:28):
boy that had dug up the sandstone head out of
the ground in nineteen fifty two. He apparently left the
school with this statuette, which was never recovered. The school
eventually closed and the Fife Regional Council purchased Melville House
to use as a residential school for children with behavioral
issues who had been convicted of a crime. In nineteen

(22:51):
eighty four, a group of teens took yet another find
to the National Museum of Scotland, this time an ancient
Egyptian figurine of a man made from bronze. It was
at this point where people were like, Okay, something's going
on here, what's under the Melville School.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
After finally getting some more specific information about exactly where
this statue had been found, the museum did a more
thorough investigation and they found a number of other Egyptian
objects buried there. The Crown claimed the figurine and other
finds from the former school site as a treasure trove.

(23:29):
They are now in the museum's collections, and this seems
to be the only collection of Egyptian objects to be
declared a treasure trove in Scotland. It's not entirely clear
where these objects came from or why they were buried
at Melville House, but one possibility is at Alexander Lord Balgoni,
who had inherited the property, acquired them during a visit

(23:52):
to Egypt in eighteen fifty six. He took that trip
to try to improve his health, but he died of
tuberculosis in eighteen fifty seven. It's possible that his relatives
buried these things because the memories of him they invoked
were painful, or because they thought they were cursed, which
was a commonly held superstition in Britain in the nineteenth century.

(24:14):
Now that superstition was not held only in Britain, obviously,
but that was sort of a thing that a lot
of non Egyptian people thought about things that had been
brought out of Egyptian teams will take a quick sponsor
break before we talk about edibles and potables. Next, we

(24:42):
have some edibles and potables. First, research using dental calculus
or tartar suggests that people in a lot of western
Europe regularly used seaweed as a food source for thousands
of years. Researchers evaluated samples from the tea the seventy
four People taken from twenty eight archaeological sites. Those sites

(25:05):
stretched from southern Spain to northern Scotland, and they found
evidence that people made seaweed, pond weed, and other similar
aquatic plants a regular part of their diets from roughly
sixty four hundred BCEE to the twelfth century SAE. This
is interesting because while seaweed is part of the cuisine

(25:25):
in other parts of the world, especially parts of Asia,
it has not been as associated with food from Europe
in the modern era, at least until very recently. Instead,
most archaeological evidence suggested that Europeans were using seaweed and
similar plants to make things like fertilizer and fuel. It
seems that by the eighteenth century, most people in Europe

(25:47):
saw seaweed as something to be eaten only in times
of famine, not as an everyday staple. Yeah, unless I
missed it, I don't think this paper speculated on why
seaweed fell out of favor as a food source. I
found that interesting, especially since now you can go buy
some real expensive seaweed chips or whatever in that truthday

(26:08):
agriculture would be my guess. But uh, this is what
that makes this next one kind of like tangentially related
because next, according to research published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, early farmers who settled on
the Baltic coast about six thousand years ago may have
included fish in their diets. This research involved studying the

(26:31):
fat residues and pottery fragments, and about half of the
fragments belonging to early farmers contained residues from fish. This
probably doesn't sound all that surprising, since fish would have
been an available food source, but previous research examining prehistoric
cooking pots has suggested that people in Britain, Spain, France,
and Portugal stopped fishing once they started farming, and this

(26:54):
included people living in coastal areas. But this research suggested
that farmers who arrived on the coast stretching from what's
now western Denmark to southern Finland, instead learned fishing techniques
from hunter gatherers who were already living there. In the
words of Professor Oliver Craig, director of the bio Arc
Lab at the University of York, quote, while this might

(27:17):
seem like an obvious and logical strategy, it is insignificant
contrast to virtually all other early Neolithic sites that are
located in coastal areas where we see no evidence that
they made use of marine resources. Craig also noted that
there did not seem to be a lot of intermarriage
between the two groups between like the newcomer farmers and

(27:39):
the existing hunter gatherers, and that might have provided some
kind of explanation for why this community kind of adopted
fishing when other coastal farming communities did not. Another surprising
find they thought was that about five percent of the
hunter gatherer community's pots contained dairy residues, suggesting they had
some kind of access to dairy prior to transitioning to

(28:02):
farming and presumably keeping domesticated animals that produce milk. Moving on,
researchers in Puerto Rico have used plant DNA extracted from
copper LTEs to study the diets of two pre Columbian
Caribbean communities, the Hikoid culture and the Saladoid culture. The copproltes,
which are basically mummified poop, suggest that both communities ate

(28:25):
a diverse variety of foods, including sweet potatoes both wild
and domesticated, peanuts, peppers, papaya, and maize. There was also
evidence of the consumption of edible fungus, including Judla cooce,
which grows on corn. The team also found residues from
two plants that might not be thought of as food.

(28:46):
Those were tobacco and cotton. The team proposed several possible
explanations for why these people would have had tobacco and
cotton and their feces like they may have chewed tobacco
or added it to food for medicinal or victual reasons,
or the residues may be a side effect of crushing
and inhaling tobacco. The cotton may have come from grinding

(29:09):
cotton seeds for oil, or from wetting strands of cotton
in the mouth while using the cotton for weaving or
other crafts. Although a number of chronicles have described people
in the Caribbean using cassava as a staple food. There
wasn't evidence of that in these samples. It's possible that
the steps needed to process cassava root into an edible

(29:31):
food degraded its DNA to the point that it could
no longer be detected in these copper lights, or it
may have been eaten more seasonally, and these samples were
produced at the wrong time of year. There's a lot
of pounding and grinding and drying involved in that process,
and so the idea was maybe there just wasn't a
lot of DNA left, especially after all these centuries have passed.

(29:54):
So aside from the fact that copper lights can only
show what a person was eating during one relatively small
window of time, this research also involved comparing the DNA
from the copper lights to contemporary plant DNA, so it's
possible that there was also DNA from other plants that
just isn't in this modern database. The team also compared

(30:19):
the copper lights to feces from modern people living in Mexico, Peru,
and the United States, which suggested that present day hunter
gatherers had a similar diet to those living in pre
Columbian Puerto Rico. And to close off the edible and potables,
we have two finds that are related to wine. The
first is five thousand year old wine discovered at the

(30:41):
tomb of merit Neath and Abidas, Egypt. Archaeologists found hundreds
of wine jars, many of them still intact and some
of them still sealed. Some of the vessels also contained
well preserved grape seeds. Queen Merrit Knith lived during Egypt's
first dynasty, and according to recas searchers, the wine and

(31:01):
other grave goods found in this tomb suggests that she
may have been Egypt's first pharaoh. She was definitely a
powerful woman. Abidas was Egypt's first royal cemetery, and Meret
Neith is the only woman known to have her own
monumental tomb there. This tomb is part of a complex
that also includes the tombs of forty one of the

(31:22):
queen's servants and courtiers, and inscriptions in the tomb complex
state that merret Neath was responsible for central government offices,
including the treasury. Beyond that, though we currently know very
little about her or her life. Yeah, there's I would
say it's not conclusively agreed that she could have been
Egypt's first pharaoh. There some that are like, well, clearly

(31:44):
she was very powerful, but like not to the point
of being a pharaoh.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
This tomb has also raised some questions around the idea
of human sacrifice and the burials of Egyptian royals during
the First Dynasty. So in a lot of tombs that
we know about, it appears that the rule retainers were
killed and buried along with them to serve them in
the afterlife. But in this tomb, the tombs of the
servants and the courtiers seem to have been built at

(32:10):
different times over a longer period, so not all.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
At once when she was in tombs.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
So it suggests more that, you know, perhaps people died
of other causes and then were entombed, or something else
was going on. Our other wine discovery is a Roman
era winery found along a river in southern France that
happened during excavations for a parking lot at a factory.
This winery is nearly two thousand years old, with a
raised platform for pressing grapes flanked by basins to collect

(32:39):
the juice. There's also a three room building that was
probably used for fermentation and storage. The floors still have
impressions from the large vessels that would have been used
to store the wine.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
And now we.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Will close out today's episode with books and letters. First,
a box of undelivered letters from the Seven Years War
has been in the UK's National Archives and they were
opened and read for the first time in twenty twenty three.
This was three stacks of letters, tied and ribbon, most
of them sealed with wax, and they were addressed to

(33:13):
men serving aboard the French warship Galatee. The ship was
captured by the British in seventeen fifty eight and the
French postal administration tried to direct these letters to various ports,
sort of hoping to catch up with the ship before
learning of the ship's capture. The letters were ultimately intercepted
and confiscated. This work was spearheaded by Renault Moriau, who

(33:36):
was working on a book and got permission to open
the letters. About a quarter of the men stationed aboard
the Galatei had a letter in this collection, and more
than half of the letters were signed by women. Some
letters were written by the women themselves and others were
written by scribes. Many turned out to mostly be love
letters written by the men's wives or fiancees or companions.

(33:59):
Others were from parents or siblings. Some of them sort
of chronicle some drama over several letters sent by different people.
This next one came to us from listener Megan, who
sent us a link about the discovery of a three
hundred and eighteen year old Scottish Bible in Iowa. Kathy Magruder,

(34:21):
who runs a bookstore in Indianola, was going through the
library and a retirement home in Des Moines when she
found this bible. The retirement home had realized that there
were a lot of books in their library that were
never being checked out, and they had given Magruder the
opportunity to just go through them and make an offer
on any of them that she might want. The title

(34:42):
page of this bible said that it had been printed
in sixteen oh five, which Magruder quickly realized could not
be true since it was a King James Bible and
that edition of the Bible was first printed in sixteen eleven.
After further research and consulting with a rare books expert,
she learned that the title page had a known misprint

(35:02):
and that it was from seventeen oh five, not sixteen
oh five. According to news reports, the Bible was also
printed without oversight from the church. That would have been illegal.
It's really not clear at this point how the Bible
wound up in the library at the retirement home. None
of the Holmes residents have shared the names of the

(35:23):
people that are mentioned in a family history that was
included among the pages of the Bible. Magruder ultimately sold
this Bible to another Indianola resident. Our last letter find
is a bit of a journey. In twenty thirteen, archaeological
curator Sarah Rivers Coofield found a silk bustle dress at
an antique mall in Maine. After buying it and getting

(35:46):
it home, she found a concealed pocket, one that seemed
a lot harder to get at than typical pockets in
Victorian era ad dresses. Once she got into that pocket,
she found a couple of pieces of paper. The notes
on the paper seemed to be written in some kind
of code, saying things like spring wilderness, lining one reading novice.

(36:09):
There were also lines in a different color that seemed
like they were checking off each line of code, as
well as some notes in the margin that looked like
times of day, like ten PM. Obviously this was intriguing. Yeah,
she posted about this in her blog and she said
it was quote in case there's some decoding prodigy out
there looking for a project. People figured out pretty quickly

(36:32):
that this seemed like it had to be some kind
of telegraph code, and then eventually Wayne Chan, and analyst
with the Center for Earth Observation Science at the University
of Manitoba, made the connection that it was.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
A weather code.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
Eventually, a librarian at Noah's Central Library in Silver Spring, Maryland,
sent Chan a pdf of a weather codebook published by
the USDA Weather Bureau in eighteen ninety two. With that
as a starting point, Chan finally figured out that this
was a code that had been used by the Army
Signal Service Corps, which eventually became the National Weather Service.

(37:07):
We talked about the evolution of the Signal Service Corps
in our twenty sixteen episode on the Schoolhouse Blizzard. The
string of words were the station location, followed by code
words for temperature and barometric pressure, dew point, precipitation and
wind direction, cloud cover and wind velocity, and sunset observations.

(37:28):
Chan's work on this was printed in the journal Cryptologia.
There is still some mystery around these papers, though it
seems like they were written by somebody working with the
Signal Service Corps in eighteen eighty eight. The codes on
those papers align with specific observations that are on record
from May of that year, but there's also a label

(37:50):
sewn into the dress that has the name Bennett. There
were women on the clerical staff at the Service Corps
DC office, but none of those women were named Bennett.
There was a man named Maitland Bennett, and it's possible
that his wife helped him in his work, but she
would have been about eight months pregnant when these notations
were made. It is not totally impossible that this dress

(38:14):
could have been worn by somebody who was eight months pregnant,
kind of depending on how she was carrying, and whether
the dress had all of its boning in, and like
what kind of maternity course that she might have had
on at the same time. Though this is a really
fitted garment, it doesn't seem necessarily likely that somebody eight
months pregnant could have been wearing it. So there's just

(38:37):
some question marks that I was sent the blog right
up about the dress to Holly, and I was like, Holly,
do you think somebody's eight months pregnant could have worn it?
And I was like, yeah, yeah, it might not have
been the most common, but yeah, but yeah, it wouldn't
have certainly been comfortable looking at it through today's eyes,

(38:58):
But we also have seen so many examples of evidence
of women wearing very uncomfortable things to today's eyes. Yeah,
it's there is material in the dress that could have
been like let out to an extent. But like as
it is sort of shown on the blog, it the

(39:20):
shape does it looks like it would have been at
best very uncomfortable for most people unless it were worn
differently than in the photographs.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
I think, does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (39:31):
Yes, I think it would have been worn differently than
in the photographs. Yeah, because I think if she carried low,
she absolutely could have been wearing it. Yeah, it just
is a matter of where the waistline sat before her
baby bump protruded. So it could have because we looked
at some pictures of women who were wearing very similar
garments when they were obviously pretty pregnant. Yeah, but it's

(39:54):
like it's a complete crapshoot. You don't know, we don't
know what she looked like when she was pregnant, so
there's no additional info. Yeah, some of the some of
the articles that I'd liked, she definitely couldn't have. And
I was like, I don't think that's really how like
Victorian our addresses worked like they there's a lot of
material there to work with, sort of depending on somebody's body. Oh,

(40:16):
they are like secret compartments in some of them that
can move around and shift stuff out and expand and contract.
We talk about that forever. But that is it for
today on on Earth. And we'll have, of course more
next time, as Tracy promised at the top, Yeah, do
you have listener mail. In the meantime, I have two
quick things today. They are both following our episode on

(40:40):
the the Great English Sparrow War, and we talked about
a commitment in North America to like rename all the
common names of birds that are named after people or
are otherwise exclusionary. And I said, I was not sure
if there was a similar movie meant in the names

(41:01):
of other animals. To be very clear, what I was
trying to say was like another organization definitively saying we
are renaming all the names. I definitely know that there are,
like our various individual animals that have been renamed, and
like other calls for renaming, but like, I don't know
if like another organization that has said we are doing

(41:23):
this in a broad way across all of the names.
So we got a couple of emails. One is from
Kiki who said Happy New Year. Was such a joy
to return to work and have almost two whole weeks
of backlog to listen to. I was enthralled with the
English sparrow war and extremely excited when the Starlings were mentioned.
There have been lots of other names updated names in

(41:44):
the last decade, ish insects, implants, and places think military
installations in Mountain Denali. There are two articles that talk
about renaming for cultural reasons instead of just discovering species
twice so. The first of these links is to a
Smithsonian article about renaming what is now called the spongy moth.

(42:05):
This article is actually from before that renaming. It is
for a moth that was previously named a slur for
the Romany people.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
The other is an article.

Speaker 1 (42:18):
From Scientific American that is about a call in New
Zealand to make changes to animal names and then the
email goes on to say, obviously it's an ongoing issue,
but we are so much farther than we were. Please
find attached a picture of my new coworker, obviously doing
a great job at bookkeeping.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Thanks Kiki.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
The new co worker is a very very cute puppy
dog in a gray bed looks so exciting to be
at work.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
And the way of lying down in.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
Just the laziest way possible, in the way that I
always envy my cats when I am working and they
are sleeping in the most comfortable looking positions. Oh, there's
such jerks about it too. They're like, oh work really,
look they are. Opel has started doing a thing where
she yells at me and what she wants me to
do is come back to bed, and I'm like, I'm working, ople,
I cannot come back to bed. So the other email

(43:17):
we got was from Rachel. Rachel said, Hi, Tracy and Holly.
As usual, I'm a week behind with a podcast. However, today,
when listening to the behind the scenes for the English
Sparrow episode, Tracy mentioned that she knew there was a
move to rename birds that were named after people. She
also mentioned that she didn't know if it was happening
to any other animals. Here's a link to a recent
New York Times article the answer to that question. Hope
you haven't received this numerous times already. Thanks for all

(43:38):
you do. I learned so much for the shows over
the many years I've been listening, Rachel. Thank you, Rachel.
No one had sent this article to me, so this
article is a little bit different. It is about a
call to look at the scientific names. Like we had
been talking mostly about common names, but these are like
the scientific enus and species names named.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
After in this case Hitler.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
And there's actually been a whole big back and forth,
some of it after that episode was recorded about the
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which oversees a lot of
this internationally, basically saying it would be really disruptive if

(44:31):
we just renamed all of this this stuff for cultural reasons,
and then other people saying no, it really wouldn't be.
So this is obviously still ongoing, So thank you very
much Rachel and Kekey for these emails. If you would
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast or history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and

(44:52):
you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app,
or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(45:13):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

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