July 26, 2021 • 39 mins
In part one of the 2021 July edition of unearthed things, there are updates to previous episodes, along with books and letters, edibles and potables, and art.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's time
for Unearthed. Hooray, the favorite time a year for a
(00:22):
lot of folks. For new listeners, this is when we
take time about four times a year to talk about
things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed. Over the
last few months, we've started doing this once a quarter.
The number has gradually increased. I think this is probably
the sweet spot at this point. So this episode today
(00:43):
is generally covering stuff that happened in April, May and June.
So today we have a ton of updates to previous episodes,
along with some fines related to books and letters and
edibles and potables and art. And then next time you
will get into some exhamations, some mysteries that have been solved,
(01:04):
and other stuff. Also, I know there are folks that
kind of check out of episodes when we get to
listener mail and they don't listen to that part, So
just a heads up. Both of these installments of Unearthed
have special Unearthed specific listener mail. Bump bump um uh
so we have mentioned before the search for the remains
(01:27):
of victims of the Tulsa Race massacre that's come up
several times previously. The search of the Oaklawn Cemetery in
Tulsa ended on June, having identified thirty five coffins and
exhumed nineteen sets of remains from unmarked graves. Investigators do
not believe that the people buried in all thirty five
(01:47):
coffins were victims of the massacre, so they focused their
exhimation efforts primarily on the ones who were buried in
cheaper coffins, which they saw as more likely to be
massacre victims. About half of their mains had been thoroughly
examined by the seven and at least one of them
showed obvious signs of trauma. This work included a section
(02:08):
of the cemetery known as the Original Eighteen, believed to
be the burial site of eighteen victims of the Tulsa
Race massacre who had been listed on a funeral home ledger.
And although this phase of the excavation at Oakland is
complete now, work with the remains that were exhumed is
still ongoing, including trying to identify exactly who these people
(02:29):
were so Our episode on the Tulsa Race massacre was
most recently a Saturday Classic on May twenty nine of
this year. In June, the U S Office of Army
Cemeteries announced a plan to exhume the bodies of ten
children buried on the grounds of Carlisle, Indian Industrial School
and returned them to their families. This is the U.
(02:51):
S Army's fourth such project at Carlyle Barracks, some of
which we have discussed on previous episodes of the show.
This disinterment was affected to start in mid June and
be completed by July eighteenth, so it is still ongoing
as of when we're recording this episode. Yeah, and the
US Army's announcement about this disinternment at Carlisle came amid
(03:14):
several announced discoveries of mass graves and unmarked burial sites
at former residential schools in Canada. We mentioned these on
our recent Saturday Classic on the Fort show Indian Schoolgirls
basketball team, and as of when we recorded this podcast,
which is happening on July seven, uh this involved two
(03:35):
different schools in British Columbia and one incests catch one,
so this is something that's still ongoing as of when
we're recording this. Based on what's happened so far, I
would not be surprised, sadly if further discoveries were announced
between July six, when we were recording and when this
episode is actually coming out. Yeah, that's I would say,
(03:56):
list that is more likely than unlikely at this point. Yeah,
it's it's an ongoing and just truly horrific and and
traumatizing to the people involved. Series of announced discoveries. So
way back in previous hosts Sarah and Bablina did an
episode on the pre Columbian Native American city of Khokia,
which was home to at least fifteen thousand people at
(04:19):
its peak in about the year eleven fifty. It's often
described as being bigger than the city of London was
at that time. One unanswered question about Kahokia is why
the people living there ultimately abandoned it. So one proposed explanation,
and one that was mentioned in that episode, has been
that the residents of Kahokia used too much wood from
(04:41):
the surrounding land, deforesting the area and contributing to runoff
and flooding. But according to research that was published in
the journal Geoarchaeology. While the reasons behind cohokias abandonment still
aren't clear, it probably wasn't because of deforestation. In the
world of Caitlin Rankin, who conducted this research as part
(05:02):
of her graduate studies, quote, there's a really common narrative
about land use practices that lead to erosion and sedimentation
and contribute to all of these environmental consequences. When we
actually revisit this, we're not seeing evidence of the flooding.
So there was evidence of lots of wood use, including
cutting down thousands of trees to build palisades, but there
(05:26):
was not evidence that catastrophic flooding had followed that, and
that was the thing that had theoretically led to Cokia's abandonment.
Last year, we did an episode on beekeeping and its
origins in honey and bee hunting. Researchers in West Africa
have been studying the Central Nigerian Knock culture, which existed
from about five hundred BC to two hundred CE, including
(05:49):
carrying out chemical analysis on four hundred fifty pieces of pottery.
The soil in the area is very acidic, so plant
and animal remains have not survived the intervening two thousand
years to be analyzed, so this pottery is archaeologist's primary
tool to learn about how the Knock people ate and
how it compares two groups living in the area today.
(06:12):
About a third of the pottery studied in this research
showed evidence of being used to store and process beeswax, and,
in the words of co author Peter Britting of god University, quote,
we originally started the study of chemical residues in pottery
shirts because of the lack of animal bones at Knock sites,
(06:33):
hoping to find evidence for meat processing in the pots
that the Knock people exploited. Honey thirty five hundred years
ago was completely unexpected and is unique in West African prehistory.
Archaeologists believed that they have found the home that Harriet
Tupman lived in when she was a teenager. The team
(06:54):
had been fruitlessly searching Dorchester County in Maryland's eastern shore
before a metal detect helped them spot a coin that
was dated eighteen o eight. That coin led them to
the likely site of a cabin owned by Tubman's father,
Ben Ross, about a quarter of a mile away. Archaeologists
have since found bricks, a drawer pull, a button and
(07:16):
a pipe stem, among other artifacts. This search started last
fall based on written records that pointed the team to
the direction of attractive land that the US Fish and
Wildlife Service purchased last year, and our two parter on
Harriet's Subman was most recently a Saturday Classic Justice. Past June,
(07:36):
we talked about the Philadelphia Move bombing. In May of
Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a home members of
the Move organization We're living in, and officials then allowed
the resulting fire to burn unchecked through the neighborhood. Eleven
people died, including five children. In April, news broke that
(07:57):
the bones of two children killed in the bombing, likely
belonging to twelve year old Delicia Africa and fourteen year
old Tree Africa, were being held in the collections of
University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, and that they were being
used as a case study in an online forensic anthropology course.
The course was originally filmed in twenty nineteen and was
(08:19):
presented by Princeton University on the Coursera platform under the
title Real Bones Adventures in Forensic Anthropology, but that has
since been taken down. Maya Castudo broke this story in
the Philadelphia publication Billy Penn on April, and from there
it really became international news. Costudo, who had previously worked
(08:41):
at the penn Museum, wrote about the careless and in
different way, that these remains had been handled at the
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and that
they had been transferred to Princeton, but a Princeton spokesperson
later said the university no longer had them. It was
really unclear where these bones were. When this story first
(09:03):
broke in May, city officials announced that Philadelphia's Health Commissioner, Dr.
Thomas Farley had ordered the remains cremated and disposed of
in ten rather than returning them to surviving members of
the Africa family. Farley later resigned, with his resignation announced
on the thirty sixth anniversary of the bombing, But then
(09:25):
it was announced that the remains had been found in storage.
The city announced that, after finishing an internal investigation into
all of this, the remains would be returned to the
children's surviving family members. And this is one of those
things that's also still a developing story and situation as
we are recording this um it's possible that there will
(09:47):
be further developments in it over the next few weeks.
We did a special Unearthed edition on Franklin's Lost Expedition
back in and we've had some other updates on the
expedition and finds from the rex involved in the expedition
since then. Now, for the first time a member of
(10:08):
that expedition has been identified through DNA and genealogical analysis.
It is Warrant Officer John Gregory, who was an engineer
aboard the HMS Arabis whose tooth and bone samples were
recovered in two from King William Island, none of it.
Last fall we talked about some incredible fines from Oxboroh
(10:29):
Hall in Norfolk, England, and we also talked in an
earlier on Earth about the discovery of some chocolate from
the Boer War that belonged to Australian poet and war
correspondent Banjo Patterson. Queen Victoria had commissioned this chocolate as
a morale booster for British troops. Well, now a ten
of chocolates from the same commission has been found at
(10:51):
Oxford Hall. This ten belonged to the eighth Baronet, Sir
Henry Edward Paston Bettingfield, who served in the war, and
it was among his daughter Francis Greathead's possessions found in
the Hall's attic. Something we didn't get into when we
talked about Banjo Patterson's chocolate. The Queen commissioned the chocolate
from Britain's three top chocolate manufacturers, all of which had
(11:14):
been started by Quakers. This led to some back and forth,
as the leadership of each of the three companies was
pacifist and didn't want to be associated with or to
make money from the war, but the Queen wanted it
to be clear to the troops that what they were
receiving was British chocolate. In the end, the chocolate was
distributed in unbranded tins, although some of the chocolate itself
(11:37):
was brandon also. It turns out there were so many
updates to talk about in this Unearth that we are
going to continue them after we take a quick sponsor break.
Last March, we talked about a cranium found near Pompey
(11:59):
that may have belonged to Plenty the Elder. Now it
is being speculated that a set of remains near Herculanum
may belong to a soldier from Plenty's fleet, maybe even
a high ranking officer. These bones were found among those
of about three hundred people who had tried to flee
the volcanic eruption, and they belonged to somebody who was
(12:21):
probably a man in his early forties, in pretty good health,
wearing some kind of armor, and carrying tools in his knapsack,
so all of that suggests that he was some kind
of a soldier. He was also wearing an ornate leather
belt that was decorated with silver and gold, and that
suggests that he was a soldier of some kind of rank.
It is not clear what kind of soldier he was, though.
(12:45):
Coins found next to the body total the monthly pay
of a member of the Praetorian Guard, which were the
household armies of Roman emperors. But some of his gear
and tools he was carrying were commonly used by ships
engineers and carpenters, suggesting that he might have been part
of Plenty's relief force. So, as was the case with
that cranium last time, headlines that make it sound like
(13:07):
these remains have been conclusively identified as belonging to a
soldier who came with Plenty's fleet to try to help
in the aftermath of the eruption of Pompeii seem a
bit overstated. Yeah, like that previous cranium, there were a
lot of headlines that were like Poliny the Elder found
and it was like maybe same with these remains. We
(13:31):
talked about Antony von Levin Hook and his animal cule's
back in March of and one lingering unknown has been
exactly how he made the lenses for the microscopes that
he used to make those observations. On leven Hook's microscopes
were exceptionally good for the time. They delivered a magnification
(13:52):
of up to two hundred and seventy times using a
single lens, but he kept his lens making methods and
recipes a secret. But now researchers at TU Delft in
the Netherlands have used neutron tomography to try to crack
that case. They needed a non invasive method to study
the lenses because von leven Hook riveted his lenses between
(14:14):
metal plates, so examining those lenses directly would require the
microscopes to be taken apart. Yes, people are of course
reluctant to take apart irreplaceable historical microscopes to see what
the lenses are made of. Let me just tinker with this,
I'll figure it out. So only eleven of the hundreds
(14:36):
of microscopes that he made are known to have survived today.
There could of course be more that we have not
on earthed yet. This research, though, suggests that he used
a unique lens for each one, depending on the purpose
of each microscope. On Leven Hook's highest powered microscope that's
still in existence today contains a ball shaped lens connected
(14:58):
to a tiny, tiny last thread, and that would have
been made by blowing the glass rather than by grinding it.
And this seems to be a refinement of a recipe
that was published by Robert Hook in sight. It's really
not surprising that some of On Leavin Hook's lenses would
build off of Hook's work, because he was a known
(15:19):
admirer of Hook's micrographia. The authors of this paper suggests
that one of the reasons on Leavin Hook was so
secretive about his work was to conceal this inspiration. He
kind of maintained this persona of a loan observer working
in scientific isolation, based almost on a whim. But really
these lenses suggest that he was pretty up to date
(15:41):
on the latest developments in optics and he was incorporating
them into his work. And for our last update this
time around, we did an episode on the nineteen sixty
four Mississippi Freedom Summer in February of this year, and
one big piece of that episode was the murder of
civil rights activist James Cheney, Drew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
(16:02):
Records related to that case have now been open to
the public for the first time. They are being housed
and available for viewing at the William F. Winter Archives
and History Building in Jackson, Mississippi. Moving on to a
couple of fines related to books. Kate McCaffrey, who used
to work as a steward at Haverdcastle, has researched two
(16:23):
books that were inscribed by Anne Boleyn, one being the
prayer book that she's believed to have carried to her execution.
McCaffrey did this research as part of her master's thesis,
so the prayer book was previously known to contain only
one inscription that being written by Anne, and it included
her signature and a rhyming couplet that said remember me
(16:46):
when you do pray that hope doth lead from day
to day. But McCaffrey found other inscriptions, including the family
names of Gauge, West and Shirley, which centered around the
name of the Guilfer family of Cranbrook. All of that
had been erased, and McCaffrey had to use ultra violet
(17:06):
photography and photo editing software to make it visible and
to puzzle out what these words said. Through this work,
McCaffrey traced how this book survived after Bolin's execution in
fifteen thirty six, after which many of her possessions were destroyed.
These inscriptions essentially trace a chain of people, mostly women,
(17:27):
who passed the book from one to another and kept
it concealed and safe, and in another book, story that
I find equal parts sad and sweet. Ten extremely overdue
books have been returned to the Somerville Public Library in
Massachusetts after being discovered in an attic. They had been
checked out of the Librari's West branch by Helen Godimus
(17:50):
when she was a teenager in the nineteen thirties, but
then she died of the flu in n seven at
the age of only sixteen, at which point the book
that she had checked out from the school library and
the public library wound up in a box in the
attic and then later in a relative's basement, where they
were rediscovered in June. The books themselves date back to
(18:12):
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ones
from the Summerville Library included a nineteen oh three copy
of Language Lessons from Literature Book one and a n
copy of Carpenter's new geographical Reader Asia. So the Summerville
West Branch Library actually used to be my branch of
the library before I moved away from Somerville. H It's
(18:35):
a Carnegie library that was originally built in nineteen o nine,
and it reopens July twelfth after some really extensive renovation work.
I think this episode will have come out by the
time it reopens. Uh. There is no fine do for
the massive lateness of these books, though the Summerville Public
Library went fine free on July one, and before that
(18:59):
point the maximum fine would have been ten dollars. So
I know with some of these headlines about very overdue
library books, there will be estimated fines do of like
fifteen thousand dollars, and the summer Hill Library had a
max of ten I have feelings about those kinds of
headlines and libraries. I do too, and so does my spouse,
(19:19):
who I discussed this story with. Now we are moving
on to uh some of my favorites. A few fines
related to food and drink. First up, teams in Oxford,
England have confirmed that two medieval households in Oxford's Jewish
Quarter were maintaining kosher dietary practices. Although Jewish dietary laws
(19:43):
are much older than this, this is the first time
they've been conclusively identified in British archaeology. So this team
started with the remains of two houses which, based on
a medieval census, appeared to have housed Jewish families, and
while excavating those two holmes, they found a latrine that
dated back to the eleventh or twelfth century, and that
(20:04):
latrine contained lots of different animal bones, but no pig
bones at all. They also used chemical and isotopic analysis
to confirm what kinds of foods had been prepared in
pottery at the site, and they found evidence that the
vessels had been used to cook cattle, sheep, and goat,
but again not pork. Pork residues have been found in
(20:25):
cooking vessels from other homes dated back to the same
time period, but those were located outside Oxford's Jewish Quarter.
In the words of the papers, lead author Dr Julie Dunn, quote,
this is a remarkable example of how biomolecular information extracted
from medieval pottery and combined with ancient documents and animal bones,
(20:45):
has provided a unique insight into eight hundred year old
Jewish dietary practices. Similarly, archaeologists in Spain have unearthed evidence
of Muslim dietary practices that persisted after Catholic space A
finished its conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in fourteen At first,
Muslims were allowed to continue their religious observances and practices,
(21:10):
but the Catholic government soon outlawed the practice of Islam
and began forcing people to convert. Various Spanish kingdoms then
expelled their remaining Muslim populations in the early sixteen hundreds.
Some evidence of Muslim customs and dietary practices that have
been unearthed recently include the presence of atas, which were
(21:31):
large communal bulls, and these were gradually replaced by small
bowls for individual portions in the decades after the Catholic conquest.
Among the Catholic community, the idea of a lot of
people eating from one communal bowl was not great, and
so that is what led to this shifting toward individually
(21:52):
portioned poles. Another is the presence of sheep bones and
the absence of pig bones around Muslim households, and that
again persisted after the Catholic government uh started banning Muslim practices.
As a side note, one thing that Tracy read when
she was going through this research discussed how this fed
into the popularity of pork in Spanish cuisine, as Christians
(22:17):
signaled their religion by publicly displaying and consuming pork products,
which also reinforced the idea that Muslims and Jews were
not welcome and moving on. According to research that was
published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Neolithic farmers living
seventy years ago altered the reproductive cycles of sheep, allowing
(22:39):
these communities to have meat and milk throughout the year.
The team came to this conclusion through stable isotope and
dental microware analysis from sheep remains that were found in
a cave in Spain. This was a really huge cave
with about three thousand square meters of habitable space, which
seems to have been home to just thousands of goats, sheep,
(23:01):
and pigs. Their research suggested that lots of lambs were
born in the fall in winter, rather than in the spring,
which was typical in wild sheep in the same area
and time period. Among other things, this would involve controlling
when ewes and rams had contact with each other. The
sheep also seemed to have been fed a pretty consistent
diet rather than one with a lot of seasonal variability.
(23:24):
And in our last fine before we take another quick break,
CRUs working to restore Michigan Central Station found a beer
bottle wedged into the ceiling containing a message. Once archivists
worked to remove this and open up the paper, which
took some doing. Its very old paper that had been
a beer bottle for a very long time, it was
(23:45):
found to read quote Dan Hogan and Geo Smith stuck
this ceiling of Chicago July Michigan Central Station, by the way,
is in Detroit, not Chicago. Correct. But I feel a
kinships through time with Dan and Geo because that's the
kind of garbage I would have done when I was young. Yeah, yeah,
(24:06):
there was some speculation in one of the articles that
I read about this that perhaps that was not their
first beer of the day, considering that they appear to
have possibly been confused about what city they were in,
or maybe they were saying they were from. It's a
little garbled in the way that it's written. Anyway, We're
gonna take a quick break and then come back with
(24:28):
some artwork. So we're kicking off the third act of
this episode with some art. There is ancient cave art
in just all kinds of places. We've talked about lots
of cave art on the show before, and some of
these places are fairly brightly lit places like rocky overhangs
(24:52):
and near the mouths of caves. But some of this
cave art is in really deep dark parts of cave system,
and the artwork itself does not suggest that people were
making it in the dark. Also doesn't necessarily suggest this
was a part of the cave that they were like
living in all of the time. So the question is,
(25:12):
of course, why make art in a place you have
to light a fire to see it, especially if it
wasn't a place you lived in or routinely used for
some other reason. A newly published paper puts forth one idea.
That paper is called hypoxia and Paleolithic decorated caves. The
use of artificial light in deep caves reduces oxygen concentration
(25:34):
and induces altered states of consciousness. This was published in
Time and Mind, the journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture.
So the basic idea here is that ancient artists took
torches or other fiery light sources into caves and notice
that after a while they started to get lightheaded thanks
(25:54):
to the dwindling oxygen supply and the build up of
byproducts from the flame. And then they moved on to
recreating this experience intentionally, using the cave art not only
as a visual representation of something, but also as a
more mind altering or transcendent experience. The authors of this
paper argue that the caves were decorated because they were significant,
(26:17):
rather than the artwork being what made the caves significant.
I find this to be a very interesting idea. I
have no idea if that's really what was going on,
but I did find it fascinating to read about. It's
like historical whippets in other news. One of the pieces
(26:39):
of art that has previously been attributed to Leonardo da
Vinci is the Flora wax bust in the Bodha Museum
in Berlin. The key piece of evidence for that attribution
was the fact that the face resembles faces from several
of Leonardo's portraits. This is not really a lot of evidence,
so people hotly debated whether Leonardo really made this bust
(27:00):
after the museum first acquired it in nineteen o nine.
And when we say hotly debating, there have been more
than seven articles arguing both four and against this attribution. However,
according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, this
matter is now definitively and absolutely settled. The bust is
(27:20):
made primarily from sperm st which comes from sperm whales,
and carbon fourteen dating, which is routinely used to figure
out the ages of things as long as they're not
too old or too young. That works a little differently
when it comes to something made from spermaceti. Radio carbon
dating works off the idea that there's a consistent amount
(27:41):
of carbon fourteen in the atmosphere, but that's not true
when it comes to the ocean. The ocean surface layers
get carbon fourteen from the atmosphere, but they also get
it from the deeper regions of the ocean, which are
basically giant carbon fourteen reservoirs. Generally speaking, if you carbon
date marine animals, they seem a lot older than they
(28:01):
really are, as much as four hundred years older because
of the availability of carbon fourteen from both the atmosphere
and the deeper ocean. So taking the marine reservoir effect
into account, this research puts the Flora Busts creation is
happening in the nineteenth century, almost three hundred years after
Leonardo's death, and that adds to previously known evidence suggesting
(28:26):
a nineteenth century creation. Some things that were backing that
idea up include that spermacetti became a lot more common
in the nineteenth century to do pieces like this than
it had been during the Renaissance. There's also the fact
that when the back of the bust was opened up
at one point, it was found to contain nineteenth century
(28:46):
would and newspapers. Uh supporters of the attribution that it
had been created by Leonardo, suggested that this material might
have been stuck into the bus later on. Sure that
could happen, Yeah, that's like not that's another thing that's
not a definitive proof in either direction. It kind of
goes along with the face idea um. On top of
all of that, British sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas's son Albert
(29:10):
submitted an affidavid saying he had a quote perfect and
vivid recollection of all the steps involved when his father
made the bust in eighteen forty six. Richard Lucas's source
for the sculpture was an oil painting then attributed to
Leonardo which Albert had made. A watercolor copy of Albert
(29:30):
Lucas's testimony, which was corroborated by another witness, has actually
been around since nineteen ten. So honestly, it seems like
this was pretty conclusive way before all of this carbon
fourteen dating. Yeah to me, like the multiple witness statements
and also the newspapers and also the prevalence of spermacette
like that seems like a lot. But now we also
(29:53):
have this new carbon fourteen analysis. But people wanted to believe,
and that's very powerful. It is um. Also, apparently that
oil painting that was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was
probably really by one of his students. Graduate student Aurelia
Azama figured out that a bronze toe in the collection
(30:18):
at the Louver was not a toe, it was a finger,
and that it belonged to a statue that was at
least twelve meters tall, and that finger has now been
reunited with the statue that it came of. This was
a statue of Constantine the Great and the Capitalina Museums
of Rome. It's believed that this finger was taken off
the statue in four and that was when a sphere
(30:40):
that had also been part of the statue had been removed.
The finger that everyone thought was a toe wound up
in the Louver collection all the way back in eighteen
sixty three. So it's like long time of the mystery
of which body part we are talking about and what
other pieces of art it came off of the mystery
of the toe? Oh uh. Two off duty officers from
(31:03):
the Italian Arts Squad discovered a first century Roman statue
in an antique shop in Brussels. The officers were in
Belgium on assignment when they happened to stroll into the
shop after work one day. That statue had been stolen
from the Villa Marini Datina archaeological site in two eleven
kind of love the idea that they were just kind
(31:24):
of wandering around town after work and went, oh, this
shop has a stolen item. I love that art is
their work, and then in their off time they go
look at art in weird shop. So to move on.
Researchers have been trying to figure out the age of
the Cern Giant, which is a chalk figure on a
(31:47):
hillside in Dorset, England. This chock figure is very large,
It's fifty five tall. It's also very distinctive. It depicts
a naked male figure wielding a very large club. It
is also just very naked. You've ever seen this thing,
it's super nude. The first written documentation of the figure
(32:10):
is an account of it being repaired in sixteen ninety four,
and there's no mention of the figure in a sixteen
seventeen survey of the area. So there's you know, been
some people who wondered if it was made in the
seventeenth century, but it just seemed like something much older
than that. Right, it appears, as Tracy said, so much older.
And after finishing sentiment analysis, the National Trust has announced
(32:33):
that the deepest oldest chock layers of the figure date
to between the year seven hundred and eleven hundred, so
it's possible that the figure was created during the medieval
period but then forgotten about or neglected and allowed to
grow over in grass before being rediscovered. There's no evidence
that the grassing over was intentional though. One thing that
(32:54):
they found when they were examining these choc layers, though,
was microscopic stales, which I also love. These snails were
introduced into Britain in the medieval period. There are still
some un answered questions like who made this and why
and who is it supposed to depict. Here's one idea,
so in ven Certain Abbey was established to try to
(33:17):
convert the local population to Christianity. They had previously worshiped
a god known as Hyle or Heleth, so this may
perhaps be meant to be a depiction of that god.
And speaking of nudity, a carved piece of soap stone
has been unearthed at vendor Landa, which is place that
we've talked about a lot on unearthed before. This piece
(33:40):
depicts a naked male figure in front of a horse
or a donkey holding a spear, and this went on
display at the vendor Landa Museum on July first, after
having been found. It looks almost as though he has
a pacifier in his mouth, but that is most likely
just how it has worn over time, although how funny
would it be it does yet. Uh, And that is
(34:04):
where we are going to stop until next time, all right,
as promised, Tracy Unearthed related email. I do have unearthed
related email. This is from Katie, and Katie says, dear
Tracy and Holly, greetings from Cardiff, Wales. I hope you
and your loved ones are all safe and well at
this point in the pandemic, and that things are looking
up in Massachusetts and Georgia. I'll apologize in advance for
(34:28):
the novel I have written below. I will pause and say,
do not apologize for the novel is a really good novel.
I'm not going to read a whole hundred percent of
it um today, but I saved it for this because
it is so unearthed specific um. So, Katie talks about
being a bioarchaeologist and working on a PhD uh, and
(34:49):
then says, not so recently, I was lucky enough to
work with my friend and colleague Jess on her project,
which very recently made headlines for her master's thesis. Jess
examined die it and mobility of eight crew members of
the mary Rose ship using isotope analysis. I then contributed
further osteological analysis on three of them. I know the
(35:10):
Mary Rose has appeared on the Six Impossible episodes about Shipwrecks,
so I won't rehap it here, though I say as
an archaeologist, it was an honor to analyze these men
and help tell their individuals stories which are often swept
up in the narrative of the ship and repopular tellings.
Just discovered that three of the eight analyzed were not
(35:30):
local to the British Isles, with possible origins in the Mediterranean,
Spain Slash, the Iberian Peninsula and or North Africa. We
also identified that three of the eight were people of color,
one of whom was local to the British Isles. The
peer reviewed publication attached of this work will come out
later this month, and because of that it received some
(35:52):
press on this side of the pond at least uh
and then Katie linked to the the article all that
introduction to say, as an Avid stuff you missing history
class listener, I realized this may pop up on on
Earth and if it does. I was hoping y'all might
take the opportunity of highlighting a few things that some
of the media missed out on and some of the
public comments we received through that media. Mostly, I think
(36:14):
some of the summaries in the news made it seem
like the diverse origins were based on artifacts found near
the remains alone, and I wanted to highlight that this
absolutely is not the case. This work is based on
stable isotope analysis elements extracted directly from the remains that
are reflective of the food they ate in the environment
where they grew up. The online comments were interesting to
(36:36):
read and seemed to be a contrasting mix of people
saying they already knew all this. The work was featured
in a documentary in the updated museum exhibit in twenty nineteen,
and people saying that we were forcing a quote woke
agenda of diversity onto the past where it didn't belong.
My favorite comment being a simple tweet the Mary woke
ha ha ha. I can't believe I have to say it,
(36:57):
but there was no ulterior agenda in this research to
just felt passionately about this project because she grew up
near Portsmouth, where the ship now resides and has had
a lifelong interest in it, and as the lead researcher
of this study, just was determined to make the article
open access, meaning that the methods, results and interpretations are
available for free to anyone interested. They're very transparent about
(37:20):
all those steps in there, and our emails are easily searchable.
Then Katie has a tip about how if there's ever
a peer reviewed article that you really want to read
and it's behind a paywall, a lot of the times
the researchers will email you that PDF because they're not
really making any money off of the journal publication process
or the fact that the journal is trying to charge
(37:42):
you fifty dollars to read one article one time. Then
also Katie talks about the methods that were used for
ancestry estimation. Um, there are lots of different conversations about
how to do these kinds of studies and and whether
there's methods are ethical, and so Katie says, quote, I
(38:03):
understand if people have doubts or questions about them. In
this case, we decided that not sharing the results of
these methods would only feed white nationalist narratives that we
have shown with the physical evidence is false. And then
Katie goes on to say that was not the goal
of quote forcing diversity into the past. They were not
about to hide that diversity having actually found it. Um.
(38:25):
So Katie goes on with a bit more that I'm
not gonna read through our love because I want to
kind of wrap up the episode at this point. Um,
but this was a great email to receive. I don't
think I had found this particular find when I got
the email, and when I first looked at it, I
did have the exact same response that that Katie mentions,
(38:47):
of sort of saying, well, we already know that a
lot of nautical crews were a lot more diverse because
it was there was a more opportunity a lot of
times for people to be able to rise through the
ranks on a ship, then they might be able to
do in a comparable job on land. Um. But having
gone through and looked at the stable isotope analysis to
(39:08):
really confirm where all of these people are from, like
that is actually new research that was done. So thank
you so much Katie for sending this and for sending
all these links to the paper, and uh, if other
folks would like to send us an email, were History
podcast at i heart radio dot com and all over
social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find
our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. And you
(39:31):
can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio
app and really anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's time
for Unearthed. Hooray, the favorite time a year for a
(00:22):
lot of folks. For new listeners, this is when we
take time about four times a year to talk about
things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed. Over the
last few months, we've started doing this once a quarter.
The number has gradually increased. I think this is probably
the sweet spot at this point. So this episode today
(00:43):
is generally covering stuff that happened in April, May and June.
So today we have a ton of updates to previous episodes,
along with some fines related to books and letters and
edibles and potables and art. And then next time you
will get into some exhamations, some mysteries that have been solved,
(01:04):
and other stuff. Also, I know there are folks that
kind of check out of episodes when we get to
listener mail and they don't listen to that part, So
just a heads up. Both of these installments of Unearthed
have special Unearthed specific listener mail. Bump bump um uh
so we have mentioned before the search for the remains
(01:27):
of victims of the Tulsa Race massacre that's come up
several times previously. The search of the Oaklawn Cemetery in
Tulsa ended on June, having identified thirty five coffins and
exhumed nineteen sets of remains from unmarked graves. Investigators do
not believe that the people buried in all thirty five
(01:47):
coffins were victims of the massacre, so they focused their
exhimation efforts primarily on the ones who were buried in
cheaper coffins, which they saw as more likely to be
massacre victims. About half of their mains had been thoroughly
examined by the seven and at least one of them
showed obvious signs of trauma. This work included a section
(02:08):
of the cemetery known as the Original Eighteen, believed to
be the burial site of eighteen victims of the Tulsa
Race massacre who had been listed on a funeral home ledger.
And although this phase of the excavation at Oakland is
complete now, work with the remains that were exhumed is
still ongoing, including trying to identify exactly who these people
(02:29):
were so Our episode on the Tulsa Race massacre was
most recently a Saturday Classic on May twenty nine of
this year. In June, the U S Office of Army
Cemeteries announced a plan to exhume the bodies of ten
children buried on the grounds of Carlisle, Indian Industrial School
and returned them to their families. This is the U.
(02:51):
S Army's fourth such project at Carlyle Barracks, some of
which we have discussed on previous episodes of the show.
This disinterment was affected to start in mid June and
be completed by July eighteenth, so it is still ongoing
as of when we're recording this episode. Yeah, and the
US Army's announcement about this disinternment at Carlisle came amid
(03:14):
several announced discoveries of mass graves and unmarked burial sites
at former residential schools in Canada. We mentioned these on
our recent Saturday Classic on the Fort show Indian Schoolgirls
basketball team, and as of when we recorded this podcast,
which is happening on July seven, uh this involved two
(03:35):
different schools in British Columbia and one incests catch one,
so this is something that's still ongoing as of when
we're recording this. Based on what's happened so far, I
would not be surprised, sadly if further discoveries were announced
between July six, when we were recording and when this
episode is actually coming out. Yeah, that's I would say,
(03:56):
list that is more likely than unlikely at this point. Yeah,
it's it's an ongoing and just truly horrific and and
traumatizing to the people involved. Series of announced discoveries. So
way back in previous hosts Sarah and Bablina did an
episode on the pre Columbian Native American city of Khokia,
which was home to at least fifteen thousand people at
(04:19):
its peak in about the year eleven fifty. It's often
described as being bigger than the city of London was
at that time. One unanswered question about Kahokia is why
the people living there ultimately abandoned it. So one proposed explanation,
and one that was mentioned in that episode, has been
that the residents of Kahokia used too much wood from
(04:41):
the surrounding land, deforesting the area and contributing to runoff
and flooding. But according to research that was published in
the journal Geoarchaeology. While the reasons behind cohokias abandonment still
aren't clear, it probably wasn't because of deforestation. In the
world of Caitlin Rankin, who conducted this research as part
(05:02):
of her graduate studies, quote, there's a really common narrative
about land use practices that lead to erosion and sedimentation
and contribute to all of these environmental consequences. When we
actually revisit this, we're not seeing evidence of the flooding.
So there was evidence of lots of wood use, including
cutting down thousands of trees to build palisades, but there
(05:26):
was not evidence that catastrophic flooding had followed that, and
that was the thing that had theoretically led to Cokia's abandonment.
Last year, we did an episode on beekeeping and its
origins in honey and bee hunting. Researchers in West Africa
have been studying the Central Nigerian Knock culture, which existed
from about five hundred BC to two hundred CE, including
(05:49):
carrying out chemical analysis on four hundred fifty pieces of pottery.
The soil in the area is very acidic, so plant
and animal remains have not survived the intervening two thousand
years to be analyzed, so this pottery is archaeologist's primary
tool to learn about how the Knock people ate and
how it compares two groups living in the area today.
(06:12):
About a third of the pottery studied in this research
showed evidence of being used to store and process beeswax, and,
in the words of co author Peter Britting of god University, quote,
we originally started the study of chemical residues in pottery
shirts because of the lack of animal bones at Knock sites,
(06:33):
hoping to find evidence for meat processing in the pots
that the Knock people exploited. Honey thirty five hundred years
ago was completely unexpected and is unique in West African prehistory.
Archaeologists believed that they have found the home that Harriet
Tupman lived in when she was a teenager. The team
(06:54):
had been fruitlessly searching Dorchester County in Maryland's eastern shore
before a metal detect helped them spot a coin that
was dated eighteen o eight. That coin led them to
the likely site of a cabin owned by Tubman's father,
Ben Ross, about a quarter of a mile away. Archaeologists
have since found bricks, a drawer pull, a button and
(07:16):
a pipe stem, among other artifacts. This search started last
fall based on written records that pointed the team to
the direction of attractive land that the US Fish and
Wildlife Service purchased last year, and our two parter on
Harriet's Subman was most recently a Saturday Classic Justice. Past June,
(07:36):
we talked about the Philadelphia Move bombing. In May of
Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a home members of
the Move organization We're living in, and officials then allowed
the resulting fire to burn unchecked through the neighborhood. Eleven
people died, including five children. In April, news broke that
(07:57):
the bones of two children killed in the bombing, likely
belonging to twelve year old Delicia Africa and fourteen year
old Tree Africa, were being held in the collections of
University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, and that they were being
used as a case study in an online forensic anthropology course.
The course was originally filmed in twenty nineteen and was
(08:19):
presented by Princeton University on the Coursera platform under the
title Real Bones Adventures in Forensic Anthropology, but that has
since been taken down. Maya Castudo broke this story in
the Philadelphia publication Billy Penn on April, and from there
it really became international news. Costudo, who had previously worked
(08:41):
at the penn Museum, wrote about the careless and in
different way, that these remains had been handled at the
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and that
they had been transferred to Princeton, but a Princeton spokesperson
later said the university no longer had them. It was
really unclear where these bones were. When this story first
(09:03):
broke in May, city officials announced that Philadelphia's Health Commissioner, Dr.
Thomas Farley had ordered the remains cremated and disposed of
in ten rather than returning them to surviving members of
the Africa family. Farley later resigned, with his resignation announced
on the thirty sixth anniversary of the bombing, But then
(09:25):
it was announced that the remains had been found in storage.
The city announced that, after finishing an internal investigation into
all of this, the remains would be returned to the
children's surviving family members. And this is one of those
things that's also still a developing story and situation as
we are recording this um it's possible that there will
(09:47):
be further developments in it over the next few weeks.
We did a special Unearthed edition on Franklin's Lost Expedition
back in and we've had some other updates on the
expedition and finds from the rex involved in the expedition
since then. Now, for the first time a member of
(10:08):
that expedition has been identified through DNA and genealogical analysis.
It is Warrant Officer John Gregory, who was an engineer
aboard the HMS Arabis whose tooth and bone samples were
recovered in two from King William Island, none of it.
Last fall we talked about some incredible fines from Oxboroh
(10:29):
Hall in Norfolk, England, and we also talked in an
earlier on Earth about the discovery of some chocolate from
the Boer War that belonged to Australian poet and war
correspondent Banjo Patterson. Queen Victoria had commissioned this chocolate as
a morale booster for British troops. Well, now a ten
of chocolates from the same commission has been found at
(10:51):
Oxford Hall. This ten belonged to the eighth Baronet, Sir
Henry Edward Paston Bettingfield, who served in the war, and
it was among his daughter Francis Greathead's possessions found in
the Hall's attic. Something we didn't get into when we
talked about Banjo Patterson's chocolate. The Queen commissioned the chocolate
from Britain's three top chocolate manufacturers, all of which had
(11:14):
been started by Quakers. This led to some back and forth,
as the leadership of each of the three companies was
pacifist and didn't want to be associated with or to
make money from the war, but the Queen wanted it
to be clear to the troops that what they were
receiving was British chocolate. In the end, the chocolate was
distributed in unbranded tins, although some of the chocolate itself
(11:37):
was brandon also. It turns out there were so many
updates to talk about in this Unearth that we are
going to continue them after we take a quick sponsor break.
Last March, we talked about a cranium found near Pompey
(11:59):
that may have belonged to Plenty the Elder. Now it
is being speculated that a set of remains near Herculanum
may belong to a soldier from Plenty's fleet, maybe even
a high ranking officer. These bones were found among those
of about three hundred people who had tried to flee
the volcanic eruption, and they belonged to somebody who was
(12:21):
probably a man in his early forties, in pretty good health,
wearing some kind of armor, and carrying tools in his knapsack,
so all of that suggests that he was some kind
of a soldier. He was also wearing an ornate leather
belt that was decorated with silver and gold, and that
suggests that he was a soldier of some kind of rank.
It is not clear what kind of soldier he was, though.
(12:45):
Coins found next to the body total the monthly pay
of a member of the Praetorian Guard, which were the
household armies of Roman emperors. But some of his gear
and tools he was carrying were commonly used by ships
engineers and carpenters, suggesting that he might have been part
of Plenty's relief force. So, as was the case with
that cranium last time, headlines that make it sound like
(13:07):
these remains have been conclusively identified as belonging to a
soldier who came with Plenty's fleet to try to help
in the aftermath of the eruption of Pompeii seem a
bit overstated. Yeah, like that previous cranium, there were a
lot of headlines that were like Poliny the Elder found
and it was like maybe same with these remains. We
(13:31):
talked about Antony von Levin Hook and his animal cule's
back in March of and one lingering unknown has been
exactly how he made the lenses for the microscopes that
he used to make those observations. On leven Hook's microscopes
were exceptionally good for the time. They delivered a magnification
(13:52):
of up to two hundred and seventy times using a
single lens, but he kept his lens making methods and
recipes a secret. But now researchers at TU Delft in
the Netherlands have used neutron tomography to try to crack
that case. They needed a non invasive method to study
the lenses because von leven Hook riveted his lenses between
(14:14):
metal plates, so examining those lenses directly would require the
microscopes to be taken apart. Yes, people are of course
reluctant to take apart irreplaceable historical microscopes to see what
the lenses are made of. Let me just tinker with this,
I'll figure it out. So only eleven of the hundreds
(14:36):
of microscopes that he made are known to have survived today.
There could of course be more that we have not
on earthed yet. This research, though, suggests that he used
a unique lens for each one, depending on the purpose
of each microscope. On Leven Hook's highest powered microscope that's
still in existence today contains a ball shaped lens connected
(14:58):
to a tiny, tiny last thread, and that would have
been made by blowing the glass rather than by grinding it.
And this seems to be a refinement of a recipe
that was published by Robert Hook in sight. It's really
not surprising that some of On Leavin Hook's lenses would
build off of Hook's work, because he was a known
(15:19):
admirer of Hook's micrographia. The authors of this paper suggests
that one of the reasons on Leavin Hook was so
secretive about his work was to conceal this inspiration. He
kind of maintained this persona of a loan observer working
in scientific isolation, based almost on a whim. But really
these lenses suggest that he was pretty up to date
(15:41):
on the latest developments in optics and he was incorporating
them into his work. And for our last update this
time around, we did an episode on the nineteen sixty
four Mississippi Freedom Summer in February of this year, and
one big piece of that episode was the murder of
civil rights activist James Cheney, Drew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
(16:02):
Records related to that case have now been open to
the public for the first time. They are being housed
and available for viewing at the William F. Winter Archives
and History Building in Jackson, Mississippi. Moving on to a
couple of fines related to books. Kate McCaffrey, who used
to work as a steward at Haverdcastle, has researched two
(16:23):
books that were inscribed by Anne Boleyn, one being the
prayer book that she's believed to have carried to her execution.
McCaffrey did this research as part of her master's thesis,
so the prayer book was previously known to contain only
one inscription that being written by Anne, and it included
her signature and a rhyming couplet that said remember me
(16:46):
when you do pray that hope doth lead from day
to day. But McCaffrey found other inscriptions, including the family
names of Gauge, West and Shirley, which centered around the
name of the Guilfer family of Cranbrook. All of that
had been erased, and McCaffrey had to use ultra violet
(17:06):
photography and photo editing software to make it visible and
to puzzle out what these words said. Through this work,
McCaffrey traced how this book survived after Bolin's execution in
fifteen thirty six, after which many of her possessions were destroyed.
These inscriptions essentially trace a chain of people, mostly women,
(17:27):
who passed the book from one to another and kept
it concealed and safe, and in another book, story that
I find equal parts sad and sweet. Ten extremely overdue
books have been returned to the Somerville Public Library in
Massachusetts after being discovered in an attic. They had been
checked out of the Librari's West branch by Helen Godimus
(17:50):
when she was a teenager in the nineteen thirties, but
then she died of the flu in n seven at
the age of only sixteen, at which point the book
that she had checked out from the school library and
the public library wound up in a box in the
attic and then later in a relative's basement, where they
were rediscovered in June. The books themselves date back to
(18:12):
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ones
from the Summerville Library included a nineteen oh three copy
of Language Lessons from Literature Book one and a n
copy of Carpenter's new geographical Reader Asia. So the Summerville
West Branch Library actually used to be my branch of
the library before I moved away from Somerville. H It's
(18:35):
a Carnegie library that was originally built in nineteen o nine,
and it reopens July twelfth after some really extensive renovation work.
I think this episode will have come out by the
time it reopens. Uh. There is no fine do for
the massive lateness of these books, though the Summerville Public
Library went fine free on July one, and before that
(18:59):
point the maximum fine would have been ten dollars. So
I know with some of these headlines about very overdue
library books, there will be estimated fines do of like
fifteen thousand dollars, and the summer Hill Library had a
max of ten I have feelings about those kinds of
headlines and libraries. I do too, and so does my spouse,
(19:19):
who I discussed this story with. Now we are moving
on to uh some of my favorites. A few fines
related to food and drink. First up, teams in Oxford,
England have confirmed that two medieval households in Oxford's Jewish
Quarter were maintaining kosher dietary practices. Although Jewish dietary laws
(19:43):
are much older than this, this is the first time
they've been conclusively identified in British archaeology. So this team
started with the remains of two houses which, based on
a medieval census, appeared to have housed Jewish families, and
while excavating those two holmes, they found a latrine that
dated back to the eleventh or twelfth century, and that
(20:04):
latrine contained lots of different animal bones, but no pig
bones at all. They also used chemical and isotopic analysis
to confirm what kinds of foods had been prepared in
pottery at the site, and they found evidence that the
vessels had been used to cook cattle, sheep, and goat,
but again not pork. Pork residues have been found in
(20:25):
cooking vessels from other homes dated back to the same
time period, but those were located outside Oxford's Jewish Quarter.
In the words of the papers, lead author Dr Julie Dunn, quote,
this is a remarkable example of how biomolecular information extracted
from medieval pottery and combined with ancient documents and animal bones,
(20:45):
has provided a unique insight into eight hundred year old
Jewish dietary practices. Similarly, archaeologists in Spain have unearthed evidence
of Muslim dietary practices that persisted after Catholic space A
finished its conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in fourteen At first,
Muslims were allowed to continue their religious observances and practices,
(21:10):
but the Catholic government soon outlawed the practice of Islam
and began forcing people to convert. Various Spanish kingdoms then
expelled their remaining Muslim populations in the early sixteen hundreds.
Some evidence of Muslim customs and dietary practices that have
been unearthed recently include the presence of atas, which were
(21:31):
large communal bulls, and these were gradually replaced by small
bowls for individual portions in the decades after the Catholic conquest.
Among the Catholic community, the idea of a lot of
people eating from one communal bowl was not great, and
so that is what led to this shifting toward individually
(21:52):
portioned poles. Another is the presence of sheep bones and
the absence of pig bones around Muslim households, and that
again persisted after the Catholic government uh started banning Muslim practices.
As a side note, one thing that Tracy read when
she was going through this research discussed how this fed
into the popularity of pork in Spanish cuisine, as Christians
(22:17):
signaled their religion by publicly displaying and consuming pork products,
which also reinforced the idea that Muslims and Jews were
not welcome and moving on. According to research that was
published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Neolithic farmers living
seventy years ago altered the reproductive cycles of sheep, allowing
(22:39):
these communities to have meat and milk throughout the year.
The team came to this conclusion through stable isotope and
dental microware analysis from sheep remains that were found in
a cave in Spain. This was a really huge cave
with about three thousand square meters of habitable space, which
seems to have been home to just thousands of goats, sheep,
(23:01):
and pigs. Their research suggested that lots of lambs were
born in the fall in winter, rather than in the spring,
which was typical in wild sheep in the same area
and time period. Among other things, this would involve controlling
when ewes and rams had contact with each other. The
sheep also seemed to have been fed a pretty consistent
diet rather than one with a lot of seasonal variability.
(23:24):
And in our last fine before we take another quick break,
CRUs working to restore Michigan Central Station found a beer
bottle wedged into the ceiling containing a message. Once archivists
worked to remove this and open up the paper, which
took some doing. Its very old paper that had been
a beer bottle for a very long time, it was
(23:45):
found to read quote Dan Hogan and Geo Smith stuck
this ceiling of Chicago July Michigan Central Station, by the way,
is in Detroit, not Chicago. Correct. But I feel a
kinships through time with Dan and Geo because that's the
kind of garbage I would have done when I was young. Yeah, yeah,
(24:06):
there was some speculation in one of the articles that
I read about this that perhaps that was not their
first beer of the day, considering that they appear to
have possibly been confused about what city they were in,
or maybe they were saying they were from. It's a
little garbled in the way that it's written. Anyway, We're
gonna take a quick break and then come back with
(24:28):
some artwork. So we're kicking off the third act of
this episode with some art. There is ancient cave art
in just all kinds of places. We've talked about lots
of cave art on the show before, and some of
these places are fairly brightly lit places like rocky overhangs
(24:52):
and near the mouths of caves. But some of this
cave art is in really deep dark parts of cave system,
and the artwork itself does not suggest that people were
making it in the dark. Also doesn't necessarily suggest this
was a part of the cave that they were like
living in all of the time. So the question is,
(25:12):
of course, why make art in a place you have
to light a fire to see it, especially if it
wasn't a place you lived in or routinely used for
some other reason. A newly published paper puts forth one idea.
That paper is called hypoxia and Paleolithic decorated caves. The
use of artificial light in deep caves reduces oxygen concentration
(25:34):
and induces altered states of consciousness. This was published in
Time and Mind, the journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture.
So the basic idea here is that ancient artists took
torches or other fiery light sources into caves and notice
that after a while they started to get lightheaded thanks
(25:54):
to the dwindling oxygen supply and the build up of
byproducts from the flame. And then they moved on to
recreating this experience intentionally, using the cave art not only
as a visual representation of something, but also as a
more mind altering or transcendent experience. The authors of this
paper argue that the caves were decorated because they were significant,
(26:17):
rather than the artwork being what made the caves significant.
I find this to be a very interesting idea. I
have no idea if that's really what was going on,
but I did find it fascinating to read about. It's
like historical whippets in other news. One of the pieces
(26:39):
of art that has previously been attributed to Leonardo da
Vinci is the Flora wax bust in the Bodha Museum
in Berlin. The key piece of evidence for that attribution
was the fact that the face resembles faces from several
of Leonardo's portraits. This is not really a lot of evidence,
so people hotly debated whether Leonardo really made this bust
(27:00):
after the museum first acquired it in nineteen o nine.
And when we say hotly debating, there have been more
than seven articles arguing both four and against this attribution. However,
according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, this
matter is now definitively and absolutely settled. The bust is
(27:20):
made primarily from sperm st which comes from sperm whales,
and carbon fourteen dating, which is routinely used to figure
out the ages of things as long as they're not
too old or too young. That works a little differently
when it comes to something made from spermaceti. Radio carbon
dating works off the idea that there's a consistent amount
(27:41):
of carbon fourteen in the atmosphere, but that's not true
when it comes to the ocean. The ocean surface layers
get carbon fourteen from the atmosphere, but they also get
it from the deeper regions of the ocean, which are
basically giant carbon fourteen reservoirs. Generally speaking, if you carbon
date marine animals, they seem a lot older than they
(28:01):
really are, as much as four hundred years older because
of the availability of carbon fourteen from both the atmosphere
and the deeper ocean. So taking the marine reservoir effect
into account, this research puts the Flora Busts creation is
happening in the nineteenth century, almost three hundred years after
Leonardo's death, and that adds to previously known evidence suggesting
(28:26):
a nineteenth century creation. Some things that were backing that
idea up include that spermacetti became a lot more common
in the nineteenth century to do pieces like this than
it had been during the Renaissance. There's also the fact
that when the back of the bust was opened up
at one point, it was found to contain nineteenth century
(28:46):
would and newspapers. Uh supporters of the attribution that it
had been created by Leonardo, suggested that this material might
have been stuck into the bus later on. Sure that
could happen, Yeah, that's like not that's another thing that's
not a definitive proof in either direction. It kind of
goes along with the face idea um. On top of
all of that, British sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas's son Albert
(29:10):
submitted an affidavid saying he had a quote perfect and
vivid recollection of all the steps involved when his father
made the bust in eighteen forty six. Richard Lucas's source
for the sculpture was an oil painting then attributed to
Leonardo which Albert had made. A watercolor copy of Albert
(29:30):
Lucas's testimony, which was corroborated by another witness, has actually
been around since nineteen ten. So honestly, it seems like
this was pretty conclusive way before all of this carbon
fourteen dating. Yeah to me, like the multiple witness statements
and also the newspapers and also the prevalence of spermacette
like that seems like a lot. But now we also
(29:53):
have this new carbon fourteen analysis. But people wanted to believe,
and that's very powerful. It is um. Also, apparently that
oil painting that was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was
probably really by one of his students. Graduate student Aurelia
Azama figured out that a bronze toe in the collection
(30:18):
at the Louver was not a toe, it was a finger,
and that it belonged to a statue that was at
least twelve meters tall, and that finger has now been
reunited with the statue that it came of. This was
a statue of Constantine the Great and the Capitalina Museums
of Rome. It's believed that this finger was taken off
the statue in four and that was when a sphere
(30:40):
that had also been part of the statue had been removed.
The finger that everyone thought was a toe wound up
in the Louver collection all the way back in eighteen
sixty three. So it's like long time of the mystery
of which body part we are talking about and what
other pieces of art it came off of the mystery
of the toe? Oh uh. Two off duty officers from
(31:03):
the Italian Arts Squad discovered a first century Roman statue
in an antique shop in Brussels. The officers were in
Belgium on assignment when they happened to stroll into the
shop after work one day. That statue had been stolen
from the Villa Marini Datina archaeological site in two eleven
kind of love the idea that they were just kind
(31:24):
of wandering around town after work and went, oh, this
shop has a stolen item. I love that art is
their work, and then in their off time they go
look at art in weird shop. So to move on.
Researchers have been trying to figure out the age of
the Cern Giant, which is a chalk figure on a
(31:47):
hillside in Dorset, England. This chock figure is very large,
It's fifty five tall. It's also very distinctive. It depicts
a naked male figure wielding a very large club. It
is also just very naked. You've ever seen this thing,
it's super nude. The first written documentation of the figure
(32:10):
is an account of it being repaired in sixteen ninety four,
and there's no mention of the figure in a sixteen
seventeen survey of the area. So there's you know, been
some people who wondered if it was made in the
seventeenth century, but it just seemed like something much older
than that. Right, it appears, as Tracy said, so much older.
And after finishing sentiment analysis, the National Trust has announced
(32:33):
that the deepest oldest chock layers of the figure date
to between the year seven hundred and eleven hundred, so
it's possible that the figure was created during the medieval
period but then forgotten about or neglected and allowed to
grow over in grass before being rediscovered. There's no evidence
that the grassing over was intentional though. One thing that
(32:54):
they found when they were examining these choc layers, though,
was microscopic stales, which I also love. These snails were
introduced into Britain in the medieval period. There are still
some un answered questions like who made this and why
and who is it supposed to depict. Here's one idea,
so in ven Certain Abbey was established to try to
(33:17):
convert the local population to Christianity. They had previously worshiped
a god known as Hyle or Heleth, so this may
perhaps be meant to be a depiction of that god.
And speaking of nudity, a carved piece of soap stone
has been unearthed at vendor Landa, which is place that
we've talked about a lot on unearthed before. This piece
(33:40):
depicts a naked male figure in front of a horse
or a donkey holding a spear, and this went on
display at the vendor Landa Museum on July first, after
having been found. It looks almost as though he has
a pacifier in his mouth, but that is most likely
just how it has worn over time, although how funny
would it be it does yet. Uh, And that is
(34:04):
where we are going to stop until next time, all right,
as promised, Tracy Unearthed related email. I do have unearthed
related email. This is from Katie, and Katie says, dear
Tracy and Holly, greetings from Cardiff, Wales. I hope you
and your loved ones are all safe and well at
this point in the pandemic, and that things are looking
up in Massachusetts and Georgia. I'll apologize in advance for
(34:28):
the novel I have written below. I will pause and say,
do not apologize for the novel is a really good novel.
I'm not going to read a whole hundred percent of
it um today, but I saved it for this because
it is so unearthed specific um. So, Katie talks about
being a bioarchaeologist and working on a PhD uh, and
(34:49):
then says, not so recently, I was lucky enough to
work with my friend and colleague Jess on her project,
which very recently made headlines for her master's thesis. Jess
examined die it and mobility of eight crew members of
the mary Rose ship using isotope analysis. I then contributed
further osteological analysis on three of them. I know the
(35:10):
Mary Rose has appeared on the Six Impossible episodes about Shipwrecks,
so I won't rehap it here, though I say as
an archaeologist, it was an honor to analyze these men
and help tell their individuals stories which are often swept
up in the narrative of the ship and repopular tellings.
Just discovered that three of the eight analyzed were not
(35:30):
local to the British Isles, with possible origins in the Mediterranean,
Spain Slash, the Iberian Peninsula and or North Africa. We
also identified that three of the eight were people of color,
one of whom was local to the British Isles. The
peer reviewed publication attached of this work will come out
later this month, and because of that it received some
(35:52):
press on this side of the pond at least uh
and then Katie linked to the the article all that
introduction to say, as an Avid stuff you missing history
class listener, I realized this may pop up on on
Earth and if it does. I was hoping y'all might
take the opportunity of highlighting a few things that some
of the media missed out on and some of the
public comments we received through that media. Mostly, I think
(36:14):
some of the summaries in the news made it seem
like the diverse origins were based on artifacts found near
the remains alone, and I wanted to highlight that this
absolutely is not the case. This work is based on
stable isotope analysis elements extracted directly from the remains that
are reflective of the food they ate in the environment
where they grew up. The online comments were interesting to
(36:36):
read and seemed to be a contrasting mix of people
saying they already knew all this. The work was featured
in a documentary in the updated museum exhibit in twenty nineteen,
and people saying that we were forcing a quote woke
agenda of diversity onto the past where it didn't belong.
My favorite comment being a simple tweet the Mary woke
ha ha ha. I can't believe I have to say it,
(36:57):
but there was no ulterior agenda in this research to
just felt passionately about this project because she grew up
near Portsmouth, where the ship now resides and has had
a lifelong interest in it, and as the lead researcher
of this study, just was determined to make the article
open access, meaning that the methods, results and interpretations are
available for free to anyone interested. They're very transparent about
(37:20):
all those steps in there, and our emails are easily searchable.
Then Katie has a tip about how if there's ever
a peer reviewed article that you really want to read
and it's behind a paywall, a lot of the times
the researchers will email you that PDF because they're not
really making any money off of the journal publication process
or the fact that the journal is trying to charge
(37:42):
you fifty dollars to read one article one time. Then
also Katie talks about the methods that were used for
ancestry estimation. Um, there are lots of different conversations about
how to do these kinds of studies and and whether
there's methods are ethical, and so Katie says, quote, I
(38:03):
understand if people have doubts or questions about them. In
this case, we decided that not sharing the results of
these methods would only feed white nationalist narratives that we
have shown with the physical evidence is false. And then
Katie goes on to say that was not the goal
of quote forcing diversity into the past. They were not
about to hide that diversity having actually found it. Um.
(38:25):
So Katie goes on with a bit more that I'm
not gonna read through our love because I want to
kind of wrap up the episode at this point. Um,
but this was a great email to receive. I don't
think I had found this particular find when I got
the email, and when I first looked at it, I
did have the exact same response that that Katie mentions,
(38:47):
of sort of saying, well, we already know that a
lot of nautical crews were a lot more diverse because
it was there was a more opportunity a lot of
times for people to be able to rise through the
ranks on a ship, then they might be able to
do in a comparable job on land. Um. But having
gone through and looked at the stable isotope analysis to
(39:08):
really confirm where all of these people are from, like
that is actually new research that was done. So thank
you so much Katie for sending this and for sending
all these links to the paper, and uh, if other
folks would like to send us an email, were History
podcast at i heart radio dot com and all over
social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find
our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. And you
(39:31):
can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio
app and really anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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