Unearthed! in July 2025, Part 1

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Before we get into this episode today, it
includes some discussion of a recision package which when we
recorded it had not been voted on by the US
House of Representatives. As of now, it has and it
has passed and has been sent to the President for signature.
That signature has not happened as of this moment, but
by the time this episode comes out, it most likely

(00:22):
will have so by the time you're hearing it, most
likely that recision package will be law. Just to update everything.
And now we will get on to the episode. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,

(00:44):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frye. It's time for our quarterly installment of Unearthed.
If you are brand new to the show over the
last few months, this is when a few times a
year we talk about things that have been literally and
figuratively unearthed. This time it's once again two part episode.

(01:06):
Today we have updates. We have so many updates that
it is two thirds of this episode being updates. We
also have art finds in this episode, and we have
a little bit at the end that I'm calling adult content.
The last part of this episode has some archaeological finds

(01:29):
and whatnot that are related to things like drug use
and sex. It's a little more mature than often what
we talk about on the show. And I just put
that at the end of this one so that if
you're listening with maybe little kids or in a classroom
or whatever, and you need to just end the episode there,

(01:50):
it will be easy to do it. So smart. So
Tracy started out our last installment of Unearthed by talking
about actions that were being taken to the federal level
here in the US and how those actions were impacting
her work on the show and how they might affect
the show in the future. And this includes budget cuts
and grant freezes affecting academics, researchers, and institutions that we

(02:14):
rely on for our research. A lot of that is
still ongoing and still in flux, as universities and other
institutions reckon with new financial constraints and with federal hostility
to the idea of DEI. There are still some legal
cases related to all of this that are still working
their way through the courts. Some of those cuts have

(02:36):
already had an effect on a show, For example, as
of July fet I no longer have access to a
long list of databases, several of which I have been
using for many, many years, which were being funded through
the Institute of Museum and Library Services Grants to States program.
As we talked about last time, the IMLS was targeted

(02:59):
by an executive of order. Its entire staff was placed
on leave. But the Congress also passed a budget and
spending bill that was signed into law on July fourth,
that's of course connected to all of this. Since we
are recording this just a couple of weeks after I
lost access to those databases, Like, I'm not really sure
what the next step is with it, and the President

(03:24):
has also asked for a recision package in addition to
that budget that was already passed that would cancel additional
funds that were already previously allocated. This precision package that's
still in the works, it is expected to target foreign
aid and public media. The foreign aid cuts aren't really

(03:45):
directly related to our podcast, which is what we've been
kind of sticking with with these updates, but given the scope,
it just seems weird to me to not mention them
at all. Research that was published in the Lancet at
the end of June concludes that cuts just to the
United States Agency for International Development will lead to the
deaths of fourteen million people around the world who otherwise

(04:07):
would have lived by the year twenty thirty. In terms
of this recision package and what does directly apply to
our show, we really cannot count the number of times
we have cited reporting and documentaries and other work from
NPR and PBS. I just went into the file where
I have all of our old outlines and I put

(04:29):
the words NPR and PBS in there to see how
often they showed up in source lists. It again was
too many to count, so hundred. The idea of losing
funding for those is something else likely to affect the show.
Also still in the works our federal departments taking steps

(04:49):
to align with the executive orders that we talked about
last time, one of those being the one that's called
Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I had a
stomach ache just saying that executive orders are basically memos
from the President to the federal government about how to operate,
and then it is up to the relevant departments to

(05:10):
figure out how to implement those instructions. To that end.
In May, the Secretary of the Interior issued Order thirty
four to thirty one, also titled Restoring Truth Insanity to
American History, and this order reiterated the administration's policy to
quote restore federal sites dedicated to history to Solomon uplifting

(05:32):
public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent
progress toward becoming a more perfect union, and unmatched record
of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. The Secretary's order
then gave directions to the heads of the government's land
management bureaus, including the National Park Service, on the concrete

(05:52):
steps to take to implement the executive order. These steps
include reviewing and reporting on changes to quote any public monuments, memorials, statues, markers,
or similar properties that had happened since January first of
twenty twenty, as well as reviewing those properties for quote
inappropriate content and removing content that is inconsistent with the

(06:16):
purposes of that executive order. The Secretary's order also instructed
the Land Management bureaus to post signs throughout each property
with QR code that links visitors to a form they
can fill out at a government website. The signs read
quote name of property belongs to the American people and

(06:37):
name of land Management Bureau. Wants your feedback. Please let
us know if you have identified one any areas of
the park area, et cetera, as appropriate that need repair,
to any services that need improvement. Three any signs or
other information that are negative about either past or living Americans,

(06:57):
or that fail to emphasize the beauty and abundance of
landscapes and other natural features. Just to spell this out
as just one example, there are now signs at places
like Man's in our National Historic Site, which was the
site of a concentration camp where the United States imprisoned

(07:19):
Japanese immigrants and their US citizen children during World War Two,
and those signs instruct visitors to report negative signage they
see at the park. We talked about these concentration camps
in our two part episode on Executive Order ninety sixty
six on February twelfth and fourteenth of twenty seventeen. Also,
there are so many people who work in interpretive roles

(07:42):
at parks and historic sites who have talked really publicly
about visitors finding things like any mention of slavery whatsoever.
At a site as cause for outrage. We have seen
this over the years. In our own email. On June

(08:03):
eighteenth of this year, the Organization of American Historians, which
is a professional society for the teaching and studying of
US history, issued a statement in response to this order,
saying that it quote represents a clear and troubling intrusion
into the integrity of historical presentation within the National Park Service.
That statement went on to say, quote, the directive demands

(08:25):
that the NPS revised educational materials, exhibits, and programs to
avoid what it calls ideological bias, language that in practice
seeks to sanitize complex histories of race, environment, gender and sexuality, immigration, indigeneity, labor,
and religion. The directive further undermines the NPS's long standing

(08:49):
mission to present inclusive, evidence based, and publicly accessible history.
The Organization of American Historians statement also responded directly to
that signage we just mentioned quote. National Parks have been
and remain enormously popular with Americans, and visitors to NPS
sites have always been free to voice their opinions about

(09:12):
programming and their experiences through the NPS website, comment cards,
and other mechanisms. This new directive is a manufactured crisis.
It evokes tactics of authoritarian regimes, not principles of a
democratic society. The oh also recommended its members make use
of those same forms to recommend improvements that will quote

(09:35):
make the histories told at NPS sites accurate, more inclusive,
and more democratic. The American Historical Association, which is a
professional association for historians, endorsed this statement. The OAH and
the AHA had also issued a joint statement in March
about the executive orders and policies that we talked about

(09:57):
last time, which was signed by nearly thirty professional and
academic associations connected to the field of history, including the
National Council on Public History and the World History Association.
Moving on to other updates, we have an episode on
Hatshepsuit that we ran as a Saturday Classic on April

(10:17):
twenty sixth. One of the things that we talked about
in that episode is that after Hatshepsuit's death, her successor,
Tutmosa the third whose name we have also heard pronounced
just Tutmos, had her name removed from the official list
of kings and ordered the destruction of statues and other
depictions of her. When her mortuary temple was rediscovered in

(10:39):
the nineteenth century, archaeologists didn't initially know who she was,
and once they started piecing that together, they concluded that
she must have been some kind of stereotypical wicked stepmother figure,
and that Tutmosa must have ordered this destruction out of
anger or vengeance. Historians and archaeologists started revising that view

(11:01):
in the nineteen sixties after egyptologist Charles nimbs pinpointed this
destruction as starting twenty years after hat Shepsu's death or
possibly even later, making it unlikely something that was motivated
out of fury. We gave some other possible reasons for
this destruction, including that there might have been concerns about

(11:22):
the strength of the claims of Tutmoses's successor, a Menhotep,
the second to the throne, or that it was connected
to greater concerns about the appropriateness of a woman acting
as king. Research published in the journal Antiquity in June
casts further doubt on the idea that hostility was a
factor in the statue destruction, noting that a lot of

(11:45):
statues of Hatshepsuit are in relatively good condition, and many
of those that were broken were broken across the waist,
the neck, and the knees, and that's something that was
also done to the statues of other Egyptian kings, possibly
as part of a ritual deactivation of the statue and
the power associated with it. At the same time, the

(12:08):
paper's author, juny Wong of the University of Toronto gave
a statement to Live Science that included this quote, there
is no doubt that hat Chepsu did suffer a campaign
of persecution at many monuments throughout Egypt. Her images and
names have been systematically hacked out. We know that this
campaign of persecution was initiated by tutmost of the third

(12:31):
but we are not exactly sure why uh as is
so often the case on Unearthed. There was a lot
of reporting around this paper, and a lot of that
reporting frames it as conclusively resolving a long standing mystery.
But aside from the idea of ritually deactivating Egyptian statues,

(12:52):
a lot of what's in this paper is not actually
that different from what we talked about in the episode. Also, again,
this paper is only about the destruction of the statues,
not the other elements of it. That the paper describes
as quote the wider campaign of persecution enacted following her death.
We have more updates coming up, but first let's take

(13:14):
a quick sponsor break. Pompeii was covered on the show
in October of two thousand and nine, and we've had
a lot of updates about it on Unearthed. Most recently,
archaeologists excavating a tomb at the Portasarno Necropolis m Pompeii

(13:38):
found two nearly life sized relief sculptures next to each
other in a niche in a wall. One of these
sculptures depicts a woman wearing a tunic and a cloak,
along with earrings, rings, bracelets, and a pendant that shaped
like a crescent moon. She's holding what looks like a
laurel branch and a roll of papyrus, and then all

(14:00):
of this together means that the woman being depicted might
have been a priestess of series. The other statue next
to her is of a man wearing a toga, and
other than the fact that the toga suggests that he
was a Roman citizen, less has been speculated about him.
The depiction just as not as detailed or elaborate. It's

(14:22):
possible that these two were a married couple, but we
don't really know. This was unearthed last year, but it
wasn't reported on until this spring. In other Pompeii news,
archaeologists at Pompeii Archaeological Park have released a statement about
work at the House of Hele and Phrixus, named for
a fresco in the dining room of the home. Excavations

(14:44):
at the home suggest that during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius,
four people in the home attempted to take refuge in
a small room, which they barricaded with a bed frame
to keep out volcanic debris. At some point it probably
became obvious that they would have to flee if they
hope to survive, but by that point they were not
able to get out of the house. We do not

(15:07):
actually know who these people were, though they may have
been the owners of the home, or they could have
been people who tried to take shelter there after the
inhabitants had already fled. Something else that has made frequent
appearances on Unearthed does the Roman fort Vendolanda, south of
Hadrian's Wall in northern England. Volunteer diggers working there have

(15:28):
uncovered a sandstone relief carving that's believed to be the
Goddess Victory, which might have been part of a much
larger carving adorning one of the fort's barracks. Most likely
when it was created, this carving was very brightly painted,
and there's some research underway to see if there are
any traces of paint still there. Not really any traces

(15:50):
visible to the naked eye, but they might be at
the microscopic level. This carving is also planned to be
on display at Vendalanda in twenty twenty sees. A new
dig just started there earlier this month, so we may
have some more finds from this fort next time. Anthony Gaudi,

(16:10):
who we covered in a two part episode in January
of twenty fifteen, was declared venerable by the late Pope
Francis in April before Francis passed. This is the second
of four steps that are part of his potentially being
recognized as a saint. Gaudi's most famous architectural work, the
Basilica de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, is still under construction.

(16:33):
Construction started in eighteen eighty two, and the most recent
estimates suggest that it might be finished within a decade.
One major issue that still persists at this point is
that finishing a planned stairway will require evicting about three
thousand people from their homes in the areas adjacent to
the basilica and demolishing those residences. Prior hosts of the

(16:56):
show talked about the Vasa in their episode More Ship
Rate Stories Battleships in twenty eleven. The Vasa was a
Swedish warship that sank shortly after setting sail on its
very first voyage in sixteen twenty eight, but then it
was raised and preserved and is now housed at the
Vasa Museum in Stockholm. So we've talked about this ship

(17:17):
and several previous installments of Unearthed, including in twenty twenty
three when we talked about the vessel urgently needing a
new support structure. The museum opened in nineteen ninety, but
the support structure for the vessel was built in the
nineteen sixties and by now it was starting to sag.

(17:37):
Work on that has now begun as part of a
four year restoration project. The ship's new support will be
both lighter and stronger than the earlier one, as well
as more resistant to corrosion, and it will also put
less pressure on the ship itself. This is a multi
phase project involving the installation of exterior support cradles and

(17:58):
then an internal skeleton to reinforce the ship. The restoration
project is expected to be complete in time for the
four hundredth anniversary of the ship sinking that will take
place in twenty twenty eight. Next, the six Triple eight
Central Postal Directory Battalion was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal
in April. Congress voted to make this award back in

(18:21):
twenty twenty two, but due to some logistical delays, the
actual ceremony did not take place until April twenty ninth
of this year. We alluded to this ceremony in a
listener mail that I read earlier this year, but I
did not get into the specifics of what we were
talking about, because it just wasn't clear to me at
that point whether the ceremony, which had not happened yet,

(18:43):
whether that was supposed to be public knowledge yet. The
medal was presented to descendants of Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams Early,
who was the battalion's commanding officer, and there were more
than three hundred descendants of members of the Six Triple
Eight at the ceremony. Our episode on the Six Triple
Eight ran as a Saturday Classic on March twenty six,

(19:03):
twenty twenty two. Researchers in Australia have examined a set
of swords from the West African kingdom of Dahome. We
talked about this kingdom in our episodes on the Palaces
of a Beaume and the all female fighting Force colloquially
known as the Amazons on July twenty second and August
fifth of twenty fifteen. These swords are associated with the Amazons,

(19:27):
but they also have some design elements that are found
in swords from other parts of the world, including Europe,
North Africa, and the Middle East, so it hasn't been
clear whether these swords were locally made or whether they
might be imports. This team used an assortment of non
invasive testing methods including neutron tomography, powdered diffraction, full pattern analysis,

(19:50):
and diffraction residual stress measurements. Based on all of this work,
they concluded that these swords were locally made, possibly from
locally smelted ey iron, but that they did have some
influences or inspiration that came from European imports. This research
also suggests that the forging techniques that were used for

(20:10):
some of these swords was unique to the Kingdom. In
our Unearthed installment in the fall of twenty twenty two,
we talked about a burial site that had been discovered
in southern Germany. A child had been entombed at this site,
which was sealed so well that sediments were not able
to penetrate it and form layers around the contents inside,

(20:30):
so that meant that the site was well preserved, but
also extremely delicate. Archaeologists flash froze the entire interior of
the tomb with liquid nitrogen so they could remove the
entire block and transport it elsewhere without jostling or damaging
its contents, leading this child to be nicknamed the Ice Prints.

(20:51):
Research into this burial site has now been carried out. First,
the block had to be thawed in an environment that
was very carefully controlled for temperature and humidity. Researchers confirmed
that this child died toward the end of the seventh
century and was only about eighteen months old when that happened.
Based on the analysis of the remains. This child likely

(21:14):
died of sepsis following an ear infection, but the family
was probably wealthy and prominent. This child was dressed in
linen trimmed with silk, along with having leather shoes on,
and was laid to rest on furs. Silver and gold
accessories and jewelry were found in the gravesite as well.
There was also a short sword, a bronze basin, a comb,

(21:35):
a wooden bowl, a cup, and some food offerings. There
were also some animal bones in this grave site which
were initially thought to be from a dog, but it
turns out they were really from a piglet. Our episode
on the Nasca Lines in Peru ran as a Saturday
Classic in February of twenty twenty one. These etchings of animals, plants,

(21:56):
and geometric figures were created roughly two thousand years ago,
and they were named as a UNESCO World Heritage Site
in nineteen ninety four. In May, Peru's Ministry of Culture
announced a plan to cut the amount of protected land
around the Nascal Lines by about forty percent, as something
that led to concern and criticism due to fears that

(22:16):
it would leave the site more vulnerable to illegal mining operations,
which are already a known issue in the area. The
areas affected are not within the part that's been inscribed
by UNESCO, but experts who work with the Nascal lines
said that the areas that were being removed from the
protections contained some of the oldest and most delicate etchings.

(22:38):
Then in June, the government of Peru announced that it
was dropping that plan and leaving the protected area unchanged.
It did not abandon the idea of changing the borders
of the protected area, though. The Peruvian Ministry of Culture
also said that a panel was being convened including archaeologists, academics,

(22:58):
and members of international organisations including UNESCO, to evaluate future
plans for zoning and land use in the area. And
our last update, we covered Greenwood, Oklahoma, known as Blackwall
Street and its nineteen twenty one destruction by a white
mob in an episode that we ran as a Saturday

(23:19):
Classic on November ninth, twenty nineteen. We have also talked
about the search for the grave sites of victims of
this massacre on multiple installments of Unearthed. Now, the city
of Tulsa has announced a one hundred five million dollar
reparations plan called Road to Repair It was announced by
Monroe Nichols, Tulsa's first black mayor, during the city's first

(23:41):
Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day. During his address, Nichols noted
that the economic harms caused by the massacre were compounded
by other issues, including the building of a highway and
the practice of redlining, which is something else we have
talked about on the show in a two parter in
October of twenty fifteen. As of June twelfth, when the

(24:02):
last reporting on this happened, there were two known survivors
of the massacres still living, both of them more than
one hundred and ten years old. They had previously sought
compensation under Oklahoma laws, but those efforts were ultimately dismissed
by the state Supreme Court last year. This repatriation plan
does not involve direct cash payments to either of them. Instead,

(24:26):
it is focused on creating a private charitable trust to
address the impacts of the attack on Tulsa's black communities,
which are still present today. It's proposed to include a
twenty four million dollar fund for housing and housing assistants
meant to counteract the generational impact of the loss of

(24:46):
all of those lives and homes and businesses. There's also
a sixty million dollar historic preservation fund and twenty one
million dollar fund for things like scholarships, small business grants,
and land acquisition and development. It's all planned to be
part of this That last part of the funding will
also be used to pay for the ongoing efforts to

(25:07):
find and identify victims of the massacre. Funds have to
be raised for this trust and it is hoped for
that to be completed over the next year. Art is
on the horizon, but first we're gonna pause for a
sponsor break. Now we've got a number of art related fines. First,

(25:36):
work on a bedroom at a hunting lodge called the
Ashes in Inglewood Forest in Cumbria, England has revealed Tudor
arrow wall paintings under some old plaster. These are black
and white paintings. They depict strange animals and kind of
weird foliage. This was pretty common for wall paintings at
the time. One description of the wall paintings of this

(25:59):
air calls them quote an unnatural or unorderly composition for
delight's sake, which I love. Even with that unnatural, unorderly
composition in mind, though, experts have described the combination of
motifs in these particular paintings as unusual. Based on when

(26:24):
the house was built, it's likely that these paintings were
created during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First. While
these specific wallpaintings are a new find, it's not entirely
surprising that they were there. Similar paintings have been found
in other parts of the lodge during earlier work going
back to the nineteen seventies. At the same time, though

(26:44):
not many Tutor era wallpaintings survive at this point, particularly
in this part of England, the UK Department for Culture,
Media and Sport has granted additional protections to the lodge
and its surrounding buildings. In other wall painting news, digs
out a Roman villa on the Mediterranean coast of Spain

(27:05):
have unearthed a wall painting dating back to the second
century CE, but this wall has collapsed, so archaeologists have
found this painting in about four thousand pieces. While conservators
are trying to reassemble this painting, it is a painstaking process.
One of the panels that they've separated the pieces out
for has eight hundred and sixty six pieces and as

(27:28):
of the news reporting on this in late April. Only
twenty two of those pieces had been put back together
into one thing, and they formed a floral garland with
birds and a painted molding along the top. In twenty
twenty three, a park supervisor on a climbing trip in
Itachiaya National Park in Brazil spotted some previously unknown cave art,

(27:51):
and the find was just announced to the public earlier
this year. It is still very very early in the
process of studying this art. It is believed to be
between two thousand or three thousand years old, but experts
are not sure about that yet. There's also an ongoing
search to try to find other cave art in the area,
since in this part of the world caves and rock

(28:12):
shelters with artwork are not usually found in isolation, so
that is very early in the process as well. Hopefully
it will come up again on a future on Earth. Yeah.
I just I like that a park supervisor just happened
to be doing non work things and was like, oh,
rock art here. Uh, I should tell somebody issue that

(28:34):
everybody know. Next, renovation work on the plaster facade of
a building near the Rialto Bridge in Venice has uncovered
a previously unknown mural that dates back to the sixteenth century.
These kinds of murals on the exteriors of buildings were
very common in Venice around this time, but very few

(28:55):
of them have survived until today because of Venice's high
humanity levels and very salty air, as well as you know,
the passage of time other construction and renovation projects that
destroyed many of them. This mural depicts three allegorical figures
whose meaning has not been deciphered yet. It's been described

(29:16):
as an example of lost heritage, but it was also
in very poor condition when it was found, including fading
of the colors and pitting of the surface. Conservation work
has been ongoing, with experts working to identify and recreate
its original colors and elements. Next, the Bronte Parsonage Museum

(29:37):
has acquired a painting by Emily Bronte, who was of
course better known for her novel Weathering Heights. She created
the painting called The North Wind in eighteen forty two
while she was studying at a boarding school in Brussels.
It's based on an engraving from Finden's illustration of the
Life and Works of Lord Byron. This is a portrait

(29:58):
depicting a woman with curly brown hair, and that hair
seems to be flowing in the wind. She similarly has
a wind blown blue caper on her shoulders. While Emily
Bronte is known to have taken art lessons while living
in Brussels, there are many pieces by her surviving today.
After a bidding war, the museum bought the painting at

(30:19):
auction for thirty two thousand pounds, thus roughly forty two
thousand dollars, which was more than ten thousand pounds above
the pre auction estimates. The painting is going to be
conserved and then placed on display at the museum. While
we're on the subject of the Brontes, the birthplace of
Anne Branwell, Charlotte and Emily in Bradford, England, before the

(30:42):
family moved to the parsonage, has been restored and opened
as a public museum, and there is also a plan
for people to be able to stay there in the
bedrooms as overnight guests. Are you booking your trip, Well,
I wanted to, but when I tried to get information
about when that will actually be possible, I did not

(31:02):
find a concrete explanation. You just plan ahead it'll be great.
According to research published in the Journal of Astronomical History
and Heritage, the Milky Way may be depicted in an
ancient Egyptian artwork and it may have had some kind
of connection to the sky goddess Nout. This research examined

(31:23):
depictions of Newt found on ancient Egyptian coffins. Newt is
often depicted as a nude woman adorned with stars or
solar discs arched over the earth god who is her
brother whose name is either Geb or Jeb. I'm not
one hundred percent sure, but on one of the coffins,
Nut's body has an undulating black curve adorned with stars.

(31:45):
This paper interprets this dark star studded curve as possibly
representing the Milky Way and the dark band of dust
around it. And lastly, work done by a London based
dentist has added a new layer to the interpretation of
Leonardo da Vinci's famous Vitruvian man. That's the one of

(32:06):
a nude male figure superimposed with his arms and legs
in two different positions, situated within a circle and a square.
This is a representation of idealized body proportions, but Leonardo
da Vinci didn't explain the ratios behind what he depicted.
In a paper published in the Journal of Mathematics in

(32:26):
the Arts, Rory mac sweeney notes that there's an equilateral
triangle formed by the figure's legs, something that Leonardo also
referenced in his text. Sweeney connects that triangle to Bonwell's triangle,
which is a concept from dental and facial anatomy. That's
an equilateral triangle formed by the mandibular condiles at the
point where the middle bottom teeth meet. Incorporating this triangle

(32:50):
into the calculations helped produce a ratio of one point
sixty four to one point sixty five between the side
of the square and the radius of the circle. That
is very close to the number one point sixty three three,
which is often found in nature, especially in very efficient
structures like hexagonal close packed crystals. It's also close to

(33:12):
ratios that are part of the human cranium. Bonwell's triangle
was described by William Gibson Arlington Bonwell in eighteen sixty four,
more than three hundred and fifty years after the creation
of the Vitruvian man. So if there really is a
connection here, this triangle may be something that Leonardo da

(33:34):
Vinci observed hundreds of years before it was described by dentists.
All right, it's time for adult content. So we're closing
out part one of Unearthed with what Tracy is calling
adult content, meaning a little more risque than the beer
and wine finds that we often talk about on on Earth.
So if you listen with younger folks, this might be

(33:55):
something to prescreen. And as Tracy mentioned at the top,
going at the end of the episodes, so you could
just stop it right here if you want. First. Researchers
from the University of Florida have published work in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that suggest that
an ancient civilization in the Andes Mountains in Peru, dating

(34:16):
back about two thousand years before the Inca Empire, used
hallucinogens to help maintain the social order. This conclusion came
from the study of tubes that were made from hollow
bones and were found at a prehistoric ceremonial site. Analysis
of the interiors of these tubes found traces of nicotine,
which of course would have come from a wild relative

(34:38):
of tobacco and vilcabine. Residue, which is a source of
the hallucinogen DMT. These tubes were found in private rooms
that would have held only a few people at a time.
In the words of study co author Daniel Contreras, quote,
taking psychoactives was not just about seeing visions. It was
part of a tightly controlled rich uu, likely reserved for

(35:01):
a select few, reinforcing the social hierarchy. Next, researchers working
with the Bayu tapestry have been trying to determine whether
there is a greater meaning behind the penises depicted on
the embroidery. According to George Garnett, a professor of medieval
history at Oxford University, there are ninety three penises on

(35:22):
the embroidery, and eighty eight of them belong to horses
and five to human men. Three of the horse penises
are larger than all the rest, one belonging to the
horse of Duke William aka William the Conqueror, which is
the biggest. The horse of Harold Godwinson, the Anglo Saxon
king of England, has the next largest penis, and then

(35:45):
the horse of Odo of Bayu, William's half brother, is
the third largest. The condition is that the size of
the penises of these horses is an indicator of these
three men's relative importance. The human genitilia is shown in
figures along the embroidery's border, and all of them are
on men who are engaged in sexual activity, and it's

(36:08):
all activity that would have been seen as shameful or taboo.
Garnett has connected these depictions to stories and fables that
are all about deceit, betrayal, and shame. His conclusion is
that there's something of a code meant to suggest that
the historical events being illustrated in the rest of the
tapestry are suspect. That means the tapestry likely wasn't commissioned

(36:32):
by Odo of Bayeux, often cited as the most likely
person to have commissioned the embroidery, because Odo would not
have wanted those elements of shame and deceit to be
a part of it. Past hosts put on an episode
on this tapestry, which again is really an embroidery, on
July twenty seventh, twenty eleven, and it has made several
appearances on Unearthed. I think this is the first time

(36:55):
we have talked about any penises on there. I feel
like it's name checked a lot in historical talk, and
there is not very frequently a mention of any of
the the more adult parts of it. Yeah. This, I
don't remember if it was the paper or if it
was like interviews related to the paper, but it was
pointed out that most of the discussion has been more

(37:17):
about how later people working with this textile like tried
to minimize the size of them to be a little
more discreet. I love it. Moving on. Back in the
nineteen nineties, excavations ahead of a construction project unearthed a

(37:38):
fourteenth century brothel in Belgium. During this work, a burial
site was also uncovered, one of a baby about three
months old. This raised questions of whether this baby might
have been the victim of infanticide, but recent analysis of
this has come to a different conclusion that the baby
had been well nourished and well care for during its

(38:01):
short life, including probably being breastfed, and that it likely
died of a disease. Researchers did not find evidence of
a number of bacterial illnesses, so it's possible that the
cause of death was viral. It's not entirely clear why
this baby wasn't buried in a cemetery, but there is
some speculation that his mother just wanted him nearby, so

(38:23):
she buried him near the hearth where he would be
warm and safe. This also suggests that at least some
women doing sex work were able to keep their own
children nearby and to care for them in their infancy.
And lastly, for today's episode, in November of last year,
curators at the Reichs Museum acquired a nineteenth century condom,

(38:46):
likely made from a sheep's appendix and decorated with a
very body image that some people would also interpret as
sacrilegious since it involves a nun and male clergy in
a sexual situation. Condom might have been a souvenir condom
from a brothel. This was the first condom to ever

(39:06):
become part of the Reichs Museum collection. There was actually
no way to catalog a condom into the collection before this,
and it became part of an exhibit on nineteenth century
sex work called Safe Sex, which started earlier this year.
This led the Catholic foundation Civitas Christiana to protest outside

(39:27):
the museum and to start a petition to have the
condom removed. We will have more unearthed on Wednesday. Do
you have listener mail today? I do, I have listener mail.
I did not intentionally look for an episode about national
parks after our conversation about national parks at the beginning
of the episode, but that's kind of where we are

(39:49):
in the catching up on listener email, and it's you know,
makes it particularly relevant. So this is from Sarah. Sarah wrote,
High Ladies, writing to U from the Big Meadows Lodge
at Shenandoah National Park. While I've loved every podcasting release
since I started listening ten plus years ago, your recent

(40:09):
episode on Skyline Drive and Shenandoah was particularly timely, as
my husband took me here for my grad school graduation
present and we saved the episode for our drive in.
Given the complicated history of the park's founding you shared,
I was very interested to see how the park would
tell its own story. I am pleased to report that

(40:30):
the visitors center we frequented does not disappoint. There exhibits
are transparent about eminent domain forcing people out of their homes,
the racial segregation in the park's early years, and the
current challenges to the local ecosystems wrought by pollution and
climate change. I also spoke with a lovely ranger who
told me about the one hundred plus cemeteries throughout Shenandoah,

(40:53):
many of which are overgrown and inactive. Is that the
right word dormant? Retired? But others still have family members
and the valleys who visit frequently and even plans to
be buried there themselves. Learning their stories and those of
the indigenous peoples here has been a valuable reminder that
these parks have their own histories for many people and
cultures that are far deeper than my own little national

(41:16):
park's passport stamp. Finally, the ranger told me how his
own home in Alabama has been seized by eminent domain
for a highway when he was a teenager, and he
used his grandparents' address to be able to attend the
final two years at the school heat attendant since he
was a child. Ironically, his grandfather had participated in the
Civilian Conservation Corps as a young man. I wonder if

(41:40):
a history of Eminent domain might perhaps be one for
the episode ideas list. Thank you for ali Do, and
I especially appreciate how you have contextualized your episodes recently
with current events, making each that much more relevant to
our everyday lives. In lieu of my own sweet kitty
as pet tax, pleasease enjoy the attached shot of some

(42:02):
of the residents at Pittsburgh Squealers, a pig rescue and
rehabilitation center near us in the Pittsburgh area. They enjoyed
so many pets during our recent group visit, even as
they mistook our fingers for carrots. Cheers, Sarah. PS. We
also replayed your episode on John Brown's Raid on this

(42:24):
trip as we stopped at Harper's Ferry on our drive
to Shenandoah. Thank you for helping us appreciate the complexities
of that site before we even got out of the car.
Oh my goodness, Peace. Two pigs, A black pig and
a white pig more like gray maybe. Uh boy, do

(42:45):
they look excited to be greeting visitors. Pittsburgh Squealers. What
a great name, Pig Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, What a
great thing to have. These pigs look fairly small. If
I had to guess, I would think that they might
be that like pet pigs, not farm pigs that people

(43:07):
maybe got and found that they could not adequately deal with.
That is just my guess lois still maybe so they're
littl they're relatively speaking, they're about knee high. I would
like to see one eating a plate of spaghetti, maybe

(43:28):
wearing a tiny hat. Thank you so much for this email, Sarah.
Uh fortuitous that it happened to align with another discussion
of the National Park Service at the top of this episode.
That pair of episodes about Skyline Drive and Shenandoah and
then the Blue Ridge Parkway were kind of a love
letter to the National Park Service. I might have said

(43:50):
that already while also trying to acknowledge the more complicated
parts of their history. I don't know if we could
do a history of eminent domain because I have not
really thought about whether that would be like a local
to the US episode or like a more global episode.
I don't actually know how eminent domain works in other places,

(44:12):
or if it does work in other places. I also, though,
have had a family member who was part of an
eminent domain dispute involving the widening of a road. There
are a lot of things that exist in the United
States because of eminent domain, including a lot a lot
of parks and roads just as examples. So thank you again.

(44:34):
Sarah for this email. I hope your trip was great, man.
I hope you get to just love on these pigs
as often as you want. If you'd like to send
us some notes about this or any other podcasts for
a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere
else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed

(45:01):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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