Unearthed! in Fall/Winter 2023, Part 2

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is the.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Second part of our Unearthed for the end of twenty
twenty three, and today we are going to be talking
about the shipwrecks and the art and just so many
things that are about animals. As is often the case,
we will be starting off with some things that didn't
really fit into categories, which I always call the potpourri.

(00:37):
And if you are a regular listener to Unearthed, you
might be thinking normally there's repatriations somewhere on the list.
We aren't talking about them this time, and we will
talk about why that is in the behind the scenes
on Friday. So on to Pope Pourri renovations work at

(00:57):
Saint George's Guildhall in kings Lynn unearthed floorboards dating back
to the fifteenth century, meaning that they likely would have
been in place when William Shakespeare is believed to have
performed there in fifteen ninety two or fifteen ninety three.
This is based on an account book from those years,
which shows the Earl of Pembroke's Men being paid to

(01:18):
perform in King's Lynn while the London theaters were closed
because of plague. The Earl of Pembroke's Men performed some
of Shakespeare's plays, but it's not conclusively established whether he
was with them at that time. So these boards were
dated using tree ring analysis, and if that dating is correct,
this may be the only surviving fifteenth century timber floor

(01:42):
in all of England. A replacement floor had been installed
over those original floorboards about seventy five years ago. Saint
George's Guildhall is the oldest working theater in England, so
even if Shakespeare himself did not actually perform on that
original floor or the theater still has its own historic importance.

(02:04):
Also in one of the funniest quotes in the research
for this installment of Unearthed, Michael Dobson, director of the
Shakespeare Institute in Stretford upon Avon, told The Times quote,
I don't think it's hugely important unless you're a kind
of fetishist who really thinks that having a piece of
wood that has probably been touched by Shakespeare's foot is
going to make an enormous difference to your understanding of

(02:26):
the place, which.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
I rather doubt. I read that and I laughed out loud.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
I love him for this because it was my almost
exact reaction when I heard this story.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, I'm like why though, why?

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah, it's like kind of a cool little bit of
trivia if Shakespeare did perform on this exact floor, but
we don't actually know for sure, and also does it
matter anyway. Next, archaeologists in northern Spain have found a
Roman era sandal in a well, presumably lost by somebody

(03:03):
who was cleaning that well about two thousand years ago.
I can think of some other scenarios that would wind
up with the sandal in the well, but like every
article about this says somebody was cleaning it. This is
one of only about twenty sandals that have been found
from what was Roman Hispania. And in addition to that,

(03:25):
it's really heavily decorated with this pattern of circles and
ovals and other shapes. Like when I first saw a
picture of it, I was like, I'm not, is this
the sole of a modern shoe? Like I had a
moment where I doubted what I was looking at because
there was no oxygen at the bottom of the well.
This sandal is very well preserved, and it was frozen

(03:45):
so it could be you know, preserved in that state
until it could go for actual cleaning and preservation. Once
all of that's done, it is planned to be exhibited
at the Archaeological Museum of Asturius. H potpourri is brief
this time, and this is our last bit. Researchers have
determined that a piece of iron found in a gravesite
in Bavaria in twenty seventeen was a prosthetic hand. Archaeologists

(04:10):
concluded that the person buried at this site was a
man between the ages of thirty and fifty, and based
on radiocarbon dating, he died sometime between fourteen fifty and
sixteen twenty. X rays of his arm and hand suggest
that his fingers may have been amputated and the bones
of his thumb were still present. So this prosthesis had

(04:31):
four slightly curved, immobile fingers. They were each made from
sheet metal, and there were remnants of a gauze like
fabric that suggested there was cushioning on the inside of it.
This prosthesis was probably secured to his arm using straps,
although the straps haven't survived.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
This is one of.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
About fifty prostheses that have been found in Central Europe
dating back to the medieval and early modern period, and
some of them, like this one, were sort of an
immobile peace, but others were articulated and had various mechanical
elements that could let a person do things like move
the prosthetic fingers and hold objects with them. It's time
for art, my favorite. A room that has recently opened

(05:14):
to the public at the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence,
Italy is believed to be where Michelangelo hid after being
sentenced to death by Pope Clement the seventh. The pope
was part of the Medici family, which had been in
control of Florence until being overthrown in a populist revolt
in fifteen thirty seven. After the Medici's return to power,

(05:34):
the Pope sentence Michelangelo to death because he had worked
for the Republican government that had briefly displaced the Medicis.
Michelangelo was in hiding for about two months until the
pope lifted that death sentence. So this basilica is part
of the Museum of the Medici Chapels and the space
known as the Steanza Cigretta or the Secret Room, was

(05:56):
discovered there in nineteen seventy five. Are Horror had been
assigned to clean part of the walls with the hope
that the space could be used to make a new
visitor's entrance to Basilica, but it turned out that under
the layers of plaster, the walls were just covered in sketches,
and those sketches are believed to have been drawn by Michelangelo,

(06:19):
although it is not conclusively proven that he is the
person who drew them. This is a very small, narrow room,
mostly built below street level, with only one small window.
While it is open to the public, access is very limited.
Only four visitors are allowed in at a time, can

(06:39):
only stay for fifteen minutes, and then there's a forty
five minute break to reduce how much the space is
exposed to light, so that means that only about one
hundred visitors can see this space each week next. According
to research published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, an object
shown in the painting at Tianchevelle Saint Stephen by Jean

(07:01):
Fouquet maybe a prehistoric hand axe. This painting is part
of the malundiptych that was commissioned by Ettien Chevalier, and
it depicts him with his hands folded in prayer next
to his patron saint. His patron saint is holding a
copy of the New Testament with this object resting on the.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
Top of it.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
This object has usually before now been described as just
something like a jagged stone, but Stephen Kangis, lecturer in
the Department of Art History at Dartmouth, had for a
long time thought it resembled a hand axe. He eventually
discussed this with other professors and they collaborated with colleagues

(07:43):
at the University of Cambridge to analyze the object shape, color,
and flake scars, comparing that to stone tools known as
Eshulian hand axes those were common about five hundred thousand
years ago. They found that its shape and flake scars
were similar to hand axes used in the region where
the image was painted. Color was a little harder to determine,

(08:06):
since pigments and varnishes used on the painting may not
reflect the real object, but the amount of color variation
in the image suggests that the artist was recreating the
details of a real stone object. So for centuries hand
axes and other flaked or ground prehistoric objects have been
a source of fascination and study, although centuries ago people

(08:31):
did not really have a sense of exactly what these were.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Or how old they were.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
In Europe, this included folklore around the idea that these
were thunder stones created in the sky by lightning strikes.
The first written record of the term thunderstones, describing what
was probably a prehistoric hand axe, dates back to the
mid fifteen hundreds. This painting, though, was made in about

(08:57):
fourteen fifty five, so if it really does depict a
hand axe, this kind of pushes back the social history
of these hand axes in Europe by about one hundred years.
I want to develop a whole thor theory around this,
but that's just sure. In our last art find, the
UK National Trust restored four paintings by Joshua Reynolds in

(09:20):
commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of his birth, and
in his painting The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, painted in
seventeen eighty nine, they uncovered a demon lake figure that
had at some point been painted over. So this painting
depicts a scene from Shakespeare's Henry the sixth part two,
in which the King at the cardinal's deathbed says, quote

(09:43):
all beat away the busy meddling fiend that lays strong
siege onto this wretch's soul, and from his bosom purge
this black despair. So this is read as something that
was going on within the cardinal inner world, but Reynolds
painted an actual fiend peering out from behind a curtain.

(10:06):
This was incredibly controversial when the painting was first shown
at the Shakespeare Gallery, which had also commissioned it. Basically,
a lot of people thought Shakespeare's words had been figurative
or metaphorical, and that Reynolds should have stuck with that,
having you know, the maybe metaphorical anguish on his face,

(10:28):
rather than depicting an actual devil in the painting. I
love this literalist reading of so much drama about this
fiend in the painting. So the fiend was ultimately painted over,
and there was also an attempt to remove it from
the printing plate for a second run of prints in
seventeen ninety two, after Reynolds had died. Removing the layers

(10:50):
of paint and varnish obscuring the Fiend took restorers about
six months yeah. I'm not sure whether Reynolds was pressured
into painting it over or if somebody else did it
after he died. That was not clear to me from
the reporting on this. But anyway, that's the last of
the art, and we will take a quick break and
come back for animals. Now we have some animals, in fact,

(11:21):
many animals. This whole section of the episode is just
going to be animals. According to research published in the
journal Environmental Archaeology, ancient Egypt may have had more types
of venomous snakes than it does today. This came from
an analysis of a medical treatise known as the Brooklyn Papyrus,
which dates back to some time between six sixty and

(11:43):
three thirty BCE. It is called the Brooklyn Papyrus because
it was donated to the Brooklyn Museum in the nineteen thirties.
It lists thirty seven different species of venomous snakes, although
the descriptions of thirteen of those have been lost, but
modern Egypt has fewer venomous snake species than that. There

(12:06):
are eight species that are capable of causing significant envenoming
if they bite something, and then a few others can
cause minor envenoming. One of the snakes was described as
the great snake of a Pofis, Apofos being a deity
that took the form of a serpent. This snake is
described as having four fangs, which is not the case

(12:28):
for any snake currently living in Egypt. The snake living
closest to modern Egypt that does have four fangs is
the Boomslang, which lives farther south in Africa. Its range
starts about four hundred miles or six hundred and fifty
kilometers south of modern Egypt. So the basic idea here
is that snakes that currently live in tropical Africa, including

(12:52):
the Boomslang, may have been able to live in ancient Egypt,
which was wetter and more humid than Egypt is to say.
The team identified snakes that could plausibly have lived in
this environment from thousands of years ago, and then they
used niche modeling, which is also known as species distribution modeling,

(13:13):
to try to predict where ten identified snake species might
have lived around four thousand years ago, and then they
also tested proposed identifications for some of the species that
were described in the papyrus. According to their modeling, nine
of the ten snakes that they examined could have lived
in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago. This was likeliest

(13:35):
in the more southern and southeastern parts of the region
and along the Nile Valley and the Red Sea coast.
This included the boom slang and the puff adder, both
of which aligned with descriptions of snakes from the Brooklyn Papyrus.
And speaking of snakes in Egypt, archaeologists in Egypts have
also found a burial chamber belonging to a scribe that

(13:58):
was adorned with spell that were meant to ward off
snake bites. So this chamber is roughly twenty five hundred
years old. It belonged to a royal scribe who died
at the age of about twenty five and these inscriptions,
which are on the north wall, both described the snakes
as protectors of the deceased and served to protect his

(14:21):
mummy from bites. So I don't know if these were
literal or figurative snakes, but they were there to protect him.
But also they wanted to make sure that the snakes
did not bite his mummy. This is they wanted to
keep Indiana Jones out.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
That's what it was.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Now we've got some studies about beavers. Beavers became extinct
in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century and then were
reintroduced in nineteen eighty eight, and their population has been
growing there in recent years. And according to research published
in the Holocene, beavers were a key part of the
diets of prehistoric people in the Netherlands as well as

(14:58):
other parts of northern Europe. They also played a major
role in the ecosystems where they lived. According to this research,
beavers were one of the most common mammals found at
archaeological sites of hunter gatherer communities in the Netherlands. So
in addition to using beavers for their meats and their
pelts and teeth and bones, and for the glandular substance

(15:21):
known as castorium, Mesolithic hunter gatherer peoples also benefited from
the landscapes that beavers created with their lodges and dams.
When the beavers daml water source, the resulting landscape is
often home to other animals, including an abundance of fish
and otters and waterfowl. It is possible, according to this research,

(15:43):
that people specifically sought out places where beavers were living
when they were deciding where to make their homes and
we have another beaver find. Research in eastern Germany also
shows that people were hunting beavers much earlier than previously thought,
as long as four hundred thousand years ago. This comes
from the careful examination of the remains of ninety four

(16:06):
beavers using magnifying glasses and digital microscopes to look for
evidence that they had been cut with stone tools. They
found that most of the ones that showed evidence of
cut marks were young adults, suggesting that they were fully
grown but not particularly experienced animals. The paper didn't say this,
but I read it as being that they were not

(16:28):
as adept at staying out of people's way, right, They
had not developed their savvy yet.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
We have talked on previous installments of Unearthed about the
assumption that ancient hunter gatherers mostly hunted really large animals,
the idea being that smaller animals like beaver just would
not provide enough resources to be worth the effort of
hunting them. But the researchers involved with this project suggested

(16:54):
a different possibility, which is that the bones of larger
animals from this far back in history are usually better
preserved than those of smaller animals, making it easier to
find them and study them and see evidence of their
being cut or processed by humans. Next, according to research
published in the journal Antiquity, researchers have found the oldest

(17:17):
known use of shark teeth in composite weapons. These are
two weapons with blades made from the teeth of tiger
sharks found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. They're about
seven thousand years old, which is two thousand years older
than the previous oldest known shark tooth knives. These teeth
were affixed to a handle using a glue like substance

(17:38):
and plant fibers, which is still a technique used by
people living in parts of the Pacific. These teeth showed
evidence of having been used to pierce and cut flesh
and bone, but according to the researchers, it was unlikely
that these knives were for everyday purposes. Shark teeth get
dull very quickly. Living sharks are just continually growing new teeth,

(18:02):
so it is more likely that these knives were used
maybe for ritual purposes or in some kind of combat,
not something that you would have just cut your food
with every day. I'm literally picturing like a teenager of
this era making it and going doesn't this look cool?
Like there's no real use Next, A couple of different

(18:23):
teams have looked at baboons in ancient Egypt. While baboons
do not live in Egypt today and there's no evidence
to suggest that they did so in the past, baboons
were brought to Egypt from elsewhere, kept in captivity, and
mummified after their debts. Research published in the journal eLife
tried to pin down exactly where these baboons came from.

(18:46):
They compared the mitochondrial DNA of mummified baboons to the
DNA of modern baboons, as well as the DNA from
one hundred to one hundred and fifty year old baboons
specimens in museum collections. One of the collaborators on this
paper had previously identified the general region of the Horn
of Africa as where most of these animals had been

(19:07):
born and had lived during their early years. We talked
about this on an episode of Unearthed in twenty twenty.
This year's research narrowed the area further to a specific
part of Eritrea and neighboring regions. This area was home
to the ancient port of Adulis. As we mentioned in
that twenty twenty installment of Unearthed, this overlaps with research

(19:31):
into the exact location of the Kingdom of Punt, something
that we also talked about in our episode on Hat
Sheepsit's expeditions to Punt, which came out in twenty nineteen.
The baboons were described as having come from Punt, so
it is possible that Punt was an earlier name for
that same ancient port. The other baboon research published late

(19:53):
last year looked at the living conditions of these animals
while they were kept in captivity in Egypt. Egyptians held
these animals in very high regard and they were believed
to be representations of the god TOAs, but they weren't
actually treated very well, or at least given the kind
of treatment they needed to be healthy. This research looked

(20:14):
at the mummies of thirty six baboons, which lived between
eight hundred and five hundred BCE, and found that many
of them had signs of rickets or a deficiency of
vitamin D, probably because of being kept indoors and away
from natural sunlight. Otherwise, they didn't show evidence of being
abused or mistreated. But only four of the mummies they

(20:34):
studied were those of animals who seemed to be in
actual good health. Researchers who were interviewed about this work
stressed that they didn't think the people who cared for
these animals met them any harm. But since baboons are
very good climbers, if you wanted to keep them in captivity,
they had to be in enclosures that had very high walls,

(20:56):
and these would have blocked out most of the sunlight.
Archaeologists in China have found evidence of a chariot in
Shanxi Province, one that would have been drawn by sheep
rather than the more commonly used horses or oxen. The
body of the chariot has not survived until today, but
the rigging used to pull it was still evident on
the bones of the sheep. This chariot was found in

(21:19):
the mausoleum of an emperor who ruled between two twenty
one to two ten BCE, which was hundreds of years
before the first written mention of a sheep drawn chariot
that appears in an account of Emperor sima Yan of
the Western Jin dynasty, who lived from two sixty five
to three sixteen and is said to have ridden a
sheep drawn chariot to the palace every night before going

(21:43):
to sleep. Moving on, archaeologists also believe they have found
the oldest true saddle in East Asia, one that involved
a wooden frame covered in horse hide with a pommel,
a cantle, and stirrups, as well as various straps, states
back to around the fourth century, meaning it's also one

(22:03):
of the earliest known frame saddles in the world. This
suggests that cultures living on the steps of western and
northern Mongolia, where the saddle was found, were early adopters
of both frame saddles and stirrups, and helped spread these
technologies to other parts of the world and in our
last animal snd Coast Salish people and researchers from the

(22:26):
Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History have worked to study
the pelt of a dog named Mutton, who was donated
to the Smithsonian by naturalist and ethnographer George Gibbs after
the dog died in eighteen fifty nine. Mutton was a
wooly dog, which was a type of dog that Coast
Salish nations bred and cared for for thousands of years,

(22:49):
but which had died out by the turn of the
twentieth century. Wooly dogs had a very thick pelt and
they were sheared like sheep, and Mutton's pelt is the
only known wooly dog's flot left in the world. This
wool was used to make things like blankets and other
woven items, some of which were used for ceremonial and
spiritual purposes. This project included the work of anthropologists, an

(23:13):
evolutionary molecular biologist, and elders, knowledge keepers, and master weavers
from Coast Salish nations who provided the context for how
these dogs lived in Coast Salish societies. And the words
of anthropologist Logan Kissler, the museum's curator of Archaeobotany and Archaeogenomics, quote,

(23:35):
Coast Salish traditional perspective was the entire context for understanding
the study's findings. Michael Povel, an elder from the Skacomish
Tauana Coast Salish community in Washington, said, quote, we were
very excited to participate in a study that embraces the
most sophisticated Western science with the most established traditional knowledge.

(23:57):
It was incredibly rewarding to contribute to this effort to
race and celebrate our understanding of the wooly dog. Many
of the Coast Salish people who were part of this
work were cited in the paper as co authors, and
the text of the interviews conducted with Coast Salish people
is included in the paper's supplemental materials. Researchers also compared

(24:17):
Mutton's DNA to that of other dogs to try to
determine what made the wooly dog's coat so different and
when this breed split off from other dogs. They found
that this likely happened at least five thousand years ago,
and Coast Salish people continued to carefully breed these dogs
long after other dogs were introduced to the area. At

(24:41):
least eighty five percent of Mutton's genetic ancestry came from
precolonial dogs. The researchers work with Coast Salish people also
contradicted earlier assumptions about what caused the populations of these
dogs to decline. Scholars had generally concluded that the introduction
of machine made blankets into the region in the nineteenth

(25:02):
century meant that the dogs were no longer seen as
a priority, but indigenous experts cited other factors, including the
introduction of diseases, forced assimilation and genocide that caused indigenous
populations to decline, along with other external factors that made
it increasingly difficult for coast Salish people to care for

(25:22):
these dogs. Essentially, the indigenous people who were interviewed as
part of this research made it clear that the dogs
were too important to their communities to have just been
forgotten about because of machine made blankets. And that is
the last if our animal finds this time, and we
will take a quick sponsor break before we move on
to shipwrecks. It is time for a number of shipwrecks.

(25:56):
A fourth century shipwreck discovered off the coast of Sales
in twenty twenty was named the MARIUSA two because of
its similarity to another shipwreck by the same name that
had been found not far away in nineteen ninety nine.
Last year, this second ship was raised up from the
seabed intact, something that was possible because it was both

(26:18):
very well preserved and was only in about six feet
or one point eight meters of water. After underwater archaeologists
documented this site, the wreck was basically surrounded in a
cage and then secured with nets lifted from the seafloor
with floatation devices and towed to shore. From there, it

(26:40):
was transported by road to an archaeological museum for desalination
and study. So the research on this one is ongoing.
I just find making a big cage to lift a
shipwreck up off the ocean floor. I found the whole
process of that fascinating. I know it's not the only
time we've raised a ship off the ocean floor.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
It is interesting, Yeah, but.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
For one dating back to the fourth century, Like, what
a delicate thing to need to try to raise up. Yes,
this past summer, a team conducting sonar scans in Lake
Superior found the wreck of a freighter called the Hourantum,
announcing the find in October for the one hundredth anniversary
of its sinking. The Herontin collided with the Cetus on

(27:23):
October eleventh, nineteen twenty three, when Lake Superior was under
a heavy fog and visibility was obscured even further because
of smoke from wildfires. The SETAs hit the Heurnton on
its port side, and the captain of the Seatus basically
used the ship to plug the hole to give the
Hourntan's crew time to escape, including a bulldog who was

(27:44):
serving as the ship's mascot, who at first was accidentally
left behind. But no worries about the dog, the first
mate went back for him before the ship sank. This
wreck is one of so many in Lake Superior, and
it was found during a systemic search of the lake
bed undiscovered wrecks. Thousands of vessels sank in the lake,

(28:04):
especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
a lot of them are now being threatened by muscles,
especially zebra muscles and quaga muscles. There is ongoing work
to just try to find and document as many of
these as possible before they are lost to these and
other factors. Speaking of the Great Lakes, a father and

(28:26):
daughter fishing in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Lake Michigan spotted
a shipwreck on their sonar and that may be the
remains of the George L.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
Newman. The George L.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
Newman sank during the Great Peshtigo Fire, which prior hosts
of the show talked about in a twenty eleven episode
called History's Unforgettable Fires. The ship ran aground because visibility
was so poor due to the smoke that they could
not see where they were going. The crew were rescued
by a nearby lighthouse keeper. The Wisconsin Department of Natural

(28:57):
Resources used a remote operated vehicle to take pictures of
the wreck, and further research is expected in the spring
next A crew with the Florida Department of Transportation found
a shipwreck while working on a drainage improvement project in
Saint Augustine. This was found more than eight feet underground
and probably dates back to the mid to late nineteenth century.

(29:20):
The ship's stern had been exposed at some point and
was probably consumed by marine life, but the rest of
the boat, which is believed to have been a single
masted fishing vessel, is mostly intact. It's possible that the
boat was abandoned along the edge of a waterway that
has since been covered up by landfill. This wreck was

(29:41):
taken to wet storage for preservation and further study.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
Moving on.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
The Santase has come up on a few installments of
an Earth. This is a galleon that the British sunk
off the coast of Carnagena in seventeen oh eight. Its
discovery was announced in twenty fifteen, which led to a
dispute about who owned the enormous amount of gold and
other valuable goods that it was carrying. It was a
Spanish ship found off the coast of Columbia, and many

(30:08):
of the precious metals aboard were mined by indigenous peoples.
On top of all of that, a US salvage company
claims to have originally found the wreck back in nineteen
eighty one, and the latest update on this, President Gustavo
Petro has ordered his administration to begin recovering the Rere's
cargo in April or May, depending on sea conditions, intending

(30:30):
to remove as much of it as possible from the
wreck before his term in office ends in twenty twenty six.
So this has of course added another layer of controversy
to the ship, with some archaeologists arguing that it should
be treated as an archaeological site, not as cargo to
be retrieved. This past spring, we talked about the discovery

(30:52):
of a shipwreck in Newport, Wales. This was found in
the River Usk back in two thousand and two, and
when we talked about it last year, it was being
conserved with plans to eventually reassemble it and make it
a public attraction. Now, study of the ship's timbers have
pinpointed that it was built from trees that were cut
down over the winter of fourteen fifty seven to fourteen

(31:14):
fifty eight. Yes, this is sort of narrowing down exactly
when it was built and hopefully eventually learning more about
the exact.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
Ship that it was.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Next, the wreck of the SS Dix has been found
in Puget Sound in Washington. The dis was working as
a ferry, part of a collection of privately owned vessels
known as the Mosquito Fleet that operated in the area
for about a century. Obviously, there are still lots of
ferries in the Seattle area, but this was before a
lot of the roads and bridges that connect Farrious Islands

(31:45):
were there. There were a lot more ferries operating. The
Dix was taking passengers from Seattle to Bainbridge Island when
it sank in nineteen oh six after colliding with the
SS Genie. At least forty two passengers died, making one
of Seattle's worst maritime disasters. This wreck was apparently found
all the way back in twenty fifteen, but not announced

(32:07):
until now. Experts working with the seventeenth century Swedish warship
Vasa have said it urgently needs a new structural support system.
The wreck was raised from the Baltic Sea in nineteen
sixty one and it's been displayed at the Vasa Museum
in Stockholm since nineteen ninety. But the existing steel cradle
is putting uneven pressure on parts of the ship, and

(32:30):
the ship itself is deteriorating due to the effects of
pollution it absorbed from the water while it was still submerged.
This is something the museum has been studying and working
on for years, and now it has reached the point
that it has to raise the funds to pay for it.
The Vasa Museum is self funded and the estimated cost
of a new support structure is one hundred and fifty

(32:53):
million kroner. And we will close out our shipwrecks with
a few items that came from Rex, not the themselves.
A steamship called the Saint Lucy sank off the coast
of Miami on October eighteenth, nineteen oh six, during a hurricane.
That ship was eventually raised from the seafloor, repaired, and
put back into use, but researchers announced the discovery of

(33:16):
its anchor in November. Maritime archaeologist Joshua Morto had been
showing two summer interns around Biscayne National Park when he
noticed a sea turtle behaving strangely and then saw it
sitting underneath this anchor. This is an anchor, so of
course it is extremely heavy. The cost of removing and

(33:36):
restoring it would be significant, so the current plan is
to leave it in place, but hopefully to eventually make
a three D rendering of it next. Archaeologists working off
the coast of Capri, Italy, have found several pieces of
worked obsidian that were probably used as trade materials. They
are believed to have come from a lost Neolithic cargo vessel.

(34:00):
They're incredibly old. There's no evidence of the wreck itself
found so far, and honestly, at this point probably would
not be. It is also possible that this may have
come not from a cargo vessel, but from a Neolithic
coastal settlement that was eventually submerged. Of course, no evidence
of that settlement has been found either. And lastly, one

(34:23):
of the artifacts that was recovered from the wreck of
a cog in Estonian twenty twenty two has turned out
to be the oldest functioning dry compass in Europe. We
talked about the discovery of the cog On unearthed and
at the time it wasn't clear what the reck's fate
would be. It was excavated and the wreck was moved
to the Estonian Maritime Museum. The compass is one of

(34:45):
the items to have been found during the cleaning and
conservation process. They have also found things like tools, weapons
and shoes, and to finish up are unearthed. From twenty
twenty three, we have two baths, both of them found
under or something else. First, archaeologists in Bath, England have
unearthed a cold bath, one that was documented in the

(35:07):
historical record but had not been located yet. This was
in a suite of three rooms under one end of
the ballroom at Bath Assembly Rooms. Those rooms were completed
in seventeen seventy one and then at some point after
that the bath was covered over with a floor, so
excavating this bath involved removing that floor and just a

(35:29):
huge amount of rubble underneath it. When Bath came up
on the show earlier in twenty twenty three, in our
episodes on Dean Muhammet, we were talking mostly about steam
baths and warm water baths, but cold baths and cold
plunges were recommended. For people's health as well. Most of
them were built at people's private homes or in public

(35:50):
facilities devoted to bathing and wellness. This is the first
cold bath known to have been built at an assembly room,
and the other bath is a Roman bath found under
the Split City Museum in Split, Croatia. The museum is
housed in what was once a palace, and centuries before
it had been the site of Diocletian's Palace, built for

(36:12):
the Roman emperor Diocletian in the third century. Diocletian's Palace
is still part of much of Split's old city core today.
This bath featured mosaic floors with an underfloor heating system
and a furnace, and there was also an oil and
grape press. These baths were discovered during repairs that were

(36:34):
part of a project called Palace of Life, City of Change,
which is a development and restoration project for the central
city and the site of Diocletian's Palace. The hope is
to open at least part of the bath to the
public once it's clear that the building structural integrity will
make it safe to do so, and that is the
end of our twenty twenty three I was going to

(36:56):
say twenty twenty four, but that's where we are now,
three on Earth, and I have just one little bit
of listener mail. It is from Katie, and Katie said, Hi,
Holly and Tracy. I have a lot of thoughts about
your discussion of math in this week's Behind the Scenes,
but none of them are about Tracy perpetuating gendered math stereotypes.
I was an elementary school teacher for several years, and

(37:18):
now I'm a mom, so I see what my kids
are learning math wise. In college, I had to take
a class about how math works meant for educators. Part
of the class involved relearning basic operations in a base
other than ten, so we were adding subtracting, multiplying, and
dividing in base seven. The idea was that it would

(37:39):
help us remember how difficult it can be for young
kids to learn math. The math programs I used to
teach and the ones my kids have been using all
teach both customary and metric measures, but then it seems
after the introduction they mostly stick with customary measures moving forward. Finally,
the complaints of parents about the new math annoyed me
as a tea and a parent, but over the years

(38:02):
I've seen schools address it more. Some schools hold seminars
for parents to teach them the methods their kids are learning.
Some homework has examples at the top, and many math
programs have an online video component that shows you how
to do it. Of course, the easiest way to keep
parents from complaining is just to get rid of homework,
especially in elementary school where there isn't much evidence for

(38:25):
its usefulness. Thanks for all your hard work on the podcast, Katie.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
Ps.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
Here's our cat Stella in a moment where she wasn't
knocking over our Christmas tree and our dog. Are you
confused about the shirt he had to wear post lumpectomy?
I love both of these pictures. What adorable dog and
cat boy do? I love not having homework in elementary school.
That was the age I got in the most trouble

(38:52):
for not doing my homework because I thought it was
a waste of my time. It is as as Katie
said in this email, there's just an increasing body of
evidence that like homework in elementary school does not help
children learn more, and if anything, the only homework that
should be happening is like class work that wasn't finished

(39:15):
in class. Yeah, I mean I don't know. It's I'm
not a teacher and I'm not a parent, but it
seems like kids should get to be kids. Yeah, I
was like great about my homework because I whipped that
stuff out on the bus.

Speaker 2 (39:35):
It never got opened in the house. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
When I got to high school, I was big on
the doing homework on the bus, which was only possible
because I found a just a weird seating position where
I was wedged into the bus seat that allowed me
to do my homework on the bus without getting motion
sick because if I try to read in the car,

(40:00):
stint motion sickness. Bus doesn't move quite the same as
a car. And I also just I found this really
weird way to sit that's like supported my head on
the back of the bus seat, and that is where
I did overwhelmingly, especially math homework, always on the bus.
So yeah, yeah, thank you so much for that email.

(40:22):
If you'd like to send us a note about this
or any other podcasts, we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio
dot com.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
We're all over social media.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
Missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show
on the iHeartRadio app and 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, or wherever you listen to

(40:52):
your favorite shows.

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Stuff You Missed in History Class News

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Hosts And Creators

Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

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