Unearthed! in July 2025, Part 2

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of
our most recent quarterly installment of Unearthed. This part has

(00:24):
shipwrecks and edibles and potables.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
And books and letters.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
For the first time in a while, enough historically relevant
exhumations to actually have an exhumation category.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Woo. I feel like that hasn't happened in a long time.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Also, we as always we're starting off with just some
stuff that I thought was cool, but I always throw
together and call it potpoury. First DNA research done at
the request of Picures Pueblo has confirmed that nation's ancestral
ties to sites in and near Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.
This research involved comparison of DNA from sixteen people who

(01:06):
lived between the years thirteen hundred and fifteen hundred and
thirteen members of Picures Pueblo living today, as well as
oral history. So DNA research can be really controversial among
indigenous communities and for a lot of reasons. This includes
a longstanding practice of DNA research being conducted on ancestral

(01:30):
remains without the consent of the appropriate indigenous nations living today,
and also the use of DNA testing for people to
basically claim indigeneity when they don't have an actual cultural
connection to an indigenous tribe or nation.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
In this case, though.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Pueblo members and leaders wanted to use this as a
tool to hopefully have a greater say in what happens
in Shaco Canyon, including decisions around things like oil and
gas drilling, and also to try to bridge some gaps
in their oral histories. This was a collaborative study and
to be clear, its results do not invalidate any other

(02:12):
Pueblo nations connections to Chaco Canyon. That DNA research was
published in the journal Nature, and so was our next
piece of potpoury. Researchers working at a cave in Malta
have found stone tools, food waste, and hearts, including evidence
of cooking and eating marine animals and now extinct mammals.

(02:34):
This site dates back about eighty five hundred years, meaning
that people crossed about one hundred kilometers or about sixty
two miles of open water. This would be the oldest
known long distance seafaring, A lot longer ago than people
were believed to have taken these kinds of ocean voyages,
and especially remarkable considering that they were probably doing this

(02:57):
in dugout canoes. Researchers have been studying a rock that
was found in a rock shelter in central Spain in
twenty twenty two, and that rock has a distinctive red
dot roughly in the middle of one surface of it.
The rock is about eight inches long by four inches wide,
or twenty y ten centimeters, and this red dot is

(03:19):
made from ochre. It turns out that the red ochre
dot is a fingerprint, and it was probably made by
an adult male Neanderthal more than forty two thousand years ago.
The question is why, and one possible answer is that
the rock looks kind of like a face, with indentations
at one end that look like eyes and a ridge

(03:41):
leading down from between them that kind of resembles a
nose and another indentation for a mouth, So maybe that
Neanderthal put the dot there to add to that effect,
marking the end of the rock's nose. If that's the case,
this fingerprint is the most complete Neanderthal fingerprints who have

(04:01):
been discovered so far, and.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
If it's really like that.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
If that dot really is supposed to be the nose,
then it's one of the oldest known abstract representations of
a face. This also ties into questions about whether Neanderthals
could think abstractly and symbolically like we know modern humans
are primed to see patterns in things and primed to

(04:27):
see things like faces in the clouds, and we don't
really know if the same was true of Neanderthals. If
this person thought that this rock was a face, maybe so.
Moving on, archaeologists in the Czech Republic have found part
of a Roman soldier's wrist purse made of bronze, which
is about eighteen hundred years old. It's like a little

(04:49):
money box that soldiers used sliding it onto their forearm
like a Bengal. Only about a third of that purse
was found and no coins, but when intact it could
have about fifty silver denari. That was almost a full
year of pay for a common soldier. So this might
have belonged to an officer or to someone whose duties

(05:10):
required that they carry larger amounts of money. For some reason,
this area was not Roman territory at the time. This
purse would have been worn, but it was an area
Marcus Aurelius was hoping to take over. He did not
take it over. He later died and his successor boiled
all the troops out of there.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Our last little bit of potpourri.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Archaeologists believe they have figured out what an ornate Byzantine
era bucket discovered at Sutton Who was for Sutton Who,
of course, is the early English burial site in Suffolk, England,
but this bucket predates Sutton Whose use is a burial site.
It was probably made in what's now Turkya about one

(05:55):
hundred years before making its way to Sutton Who. Pieces
of this bucket, which is known as the Bromeswell bucket,
have been found since nineteen eighty six, adorned with a
hunting scene. Once enough of those pieces were assembled, it
was clear that there was also an inscription in Greek
reading use this in good health, master Count for many

(06:17):
happy years. It was believed that this bucket may have
been a diplomatic gift to whatever count was being a
referenced there, and it's possible that the bucket was brought
back to England as a spoil of war. There have
been ongoing questions about what this bucket was doing at
Sutton Who The base of the bucket was unearthed more

(06:41):
recently and that made it possible for researchers to examine
what the bucket had actually contained, and it turns out
that it contained cremated human and animal remains. So it
appears that this vessel was used as a cremation vessel,
probably for somebody who was important in the Sutton Hue community.
It's not yet known what kind of animal they were

(07:03):
cremated along with, but it is possible that it was
a horse. Was there any mention of the possibility that
this could have been brought to England and then used
as a cremation vessel? Maybe not as its initial intent?
That is what I think they are saying. Yes, like

(07:24):
that someone else just repurposed it. Yeah, okay, that that
is the impression that I am getting from it. It's
a sort of more than has been concluded about the
bucket than before. Gotcha time for shipwrecks, starting off with
one with a car on it. In April, scientists with

(07:44):
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we're using a remotely
operated vehicle to explore the USS yorktown when they spotted
a car in the aft hangar deck. The Yorktown was
sunk during the Battle of Midway during World War II,
and the wreck was discover in nineteen ninety eight. It's
not clear why there was a car on board. Based

(08:07):
on what researchers have seen of this car, it seems
to be a nineteen forty or forty one Ford Super
Deluxe Woody, and its front plate contains the word ship
service and Navy, as well as some other word that's illegible.
It's possible that this was a car that officers of
the ship would use while the ship was in port.

(08:29):
It's also possible that maybe the car was taken on
board the ship for some kind of repair. It does
appear to have been a civilian model car, though not
one that was made for the military. After the York
Town was torpedoed during the Battle of Midway, Captain Elliott
Buckmaster ordered the crew to jettison as much heavy equipment

(08:51):
as possible to try to keep the ship afloat. It
is not clear why they did not drive or throw
that car into the ocean. Mysteries Archaeologists in Barcelona have
been working at a site that's going to be home
to a new scientific research complex, and they have found
the hull of a medieval ship believed to date back
to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. What remains of the

(09:15):
ship consists of about thirty wooden ribs held together by
wooden pegs and iron nails. The plan is to eventually
remove and conserve this ship, but for now it's been
recovered to preserve the moisture in the wood because it's
been water logged for years. It would fall apart almost
instantly if it were simply dug up and allowed to

(09:36):
dry out. It's been dubbed Chewta della one because the
site where this excavation is going on is near Barcelona's
Chewutadella Park.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
I went to that park when we were in Barcelona.
I think I did as well.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
There was one day with a lot of walking about
that was not part of our regular scheduled stuff. I
went there on the early day that we arrived, so
that I can one can hope, not be terribly jet
lagged while everyone else was around. Next, researchers working off
the coast of South Australia believe they have found the

(10:08):
wreck of the cutting Villain de Tweed, a Dutch merchant
ship that sank in a storm in eighteen fifty seven.
Sixteen of the twenty five crew aboard died when the
ship sank, but that death toll could have been a
whole lot worse. Just days before this, the ship had
dropped off about four hundred Chinese miners. This was during

(10:30):
a gold rush. It took a while for teams to
become confident that this is the Conning Willem de Tweed.
Earlier dives had spotted some wreckage back in twenty twenty two,
but the sand in this part of the ocean is
extremely fine and it hampers visibility when it's disturbed at all.
Divers compared it to being in a blizzard. This time,

(10:52):
searchers used a marine magnetometer to look for signs of
iron underwater, and they found some iron components that they
believe came from the ship. They have found a concentrated
area of iron that approximately matches the dimensions of the
Conning Willem de Tweed, and no other large concentrations of
iron that might be some kind of ship. They are,

(11:13):
of course hoping to follow up on this with future dives.
I like that they basically looked for this with a
big old magnet. Next, an autonomous underwater vehicle has been
used to find and photograph the USSF one, which is
a submarine that sank during a training exercise in nineteen seventeen,

(11:34):
killing all nineteen people aboard. This search effort was also
partly a training mission, allowing the trainees to get some
experience operating remote vehicles and carrying out underwater archaeological projects.
This submarine is being described as remarkably intact considering how
long ago it sank, and the imagery that was captured

(11:57):
during this mission has been used to create a three
D digital model of it. We talked about the discovery
of the wreck of the Spanish Galley in San Jose
in twenty fifteen, and it has made several appearances on
on Earth since then, and none of that reporting really
made it sound like there was any doubt regarding the
ship's identity. Turns out this was more of a hypothesis,

(12:19):
and headlines that came out in mid June of this
year are describing the wreck as just now confirmed thanks
to analysis of the coins on board. This research was
published in the journal Antiquity and notes that there have
been four non invasive investigations of the wreck since twenty fifteen,
and that the coins and Chinese porcelain aboard the vessel

(12:40):
suggests that it sank in the early eighteenth century. This
includes irregularly shaped coins known as cobs, which were minted
in seventeen oh seven. The San Jose sinking was documented
and it happened in seventeen oh eight, so all of
this backs up this identification. When I got into this
part of the research, I was like, what do you

(13:01):
mean confirmed. We've been talking about this shipwreck for a decade.
Earlier this year, the French Navy was conducting some routine
underwater surveying and monitoring when they spotted something unusually large
on the sonar and it turned out to be a shipwreck.
This is the deepest one ever discovered in French waters.

(13:23):
An underwater vehicle sent down to the wreck captured pictures
of hundreds of ceramic pots on board. France's Department of
Underwater and Submarine Archaeological Research sent another vehicle to follow up,
and it reported that this wreck appears to be about
five hundred years old. Authorities have noted that this wreck

(13:43):
was protected thanks to its depth. If it were in
shallower water. It might have been looted or salvaged by now,
but it didn't fully protect it from litter. Because one
of the images of the site contains what very much
looks like a modern day beer can. What it might
not be beer, but it looks like beer to me.

(14:05):
We'll take a sponsor break and then segue into some
edibles and potables. Now we have some edibles and potables. First,
excavations at a waste deposit at Prague Castle have unearthed

(14:27):
the oldest vanilla pod in Europe, which dates to somewhere
between the early sixteenth and mid seventeenth centuries.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
Obviously, that's not.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
The oldest vanilla pod in the world, since vanilla is
native to Mesoamerica and not to Europe. But this vanilla
pod dates back to a time when trade between Europe
and the Americas was largely dominated by Spain and Portugal,
and there just wasn't a large commercial network established for
the sale and distribution of vanilla. So it's not completely

(14:59):
clear exactly what ruth these pods would have taken to
get from the Americas to Prague, other than generally saying
spice trade. The timing of this on this edition of
Unearth is Uncanny because I just got a book about
the history of vanilla. Uh oh, I love this Listen,
we love vanilla.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Here at this house.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Regardless, though a vanilla pod would have been extremely rare
and probably seen as exotic and quite valuable. While it
was probably acquired through spice merchants, it may have been
used for something like alchemical experiments rather than delicious cuisine.
The reign of Rudolph the Second took place during the
time the vanilla pod dates to, and he had an

(15:40):
interest in science and alchemy. We covered Rudolph on the
show on November thirteenth, twenty thirteen. Next according to research
published in the journal Plus one, it took thousands of
years to domesticate grape vines in Italy, with that process
taking place between about one thousand BCE and about six

(16:02):
hundred CE. The domestication of grapes in Asia and some
other parts of Europe's already been pretty extensively studied, but
there has not been as much attention on the western Mediterranean.
This research involved analyzing more than seventeen hundred grape seeds
from twenty five archaeological sites. The seeds that were from

(16:24):
before one thousand BCE all had the hallmarks of wild
grape seeds. Then over the centuries there were more and
more seeds that were more similar to modern domesticated grapes,
although still with a lot of variety among them. Sites
dating from the year seven hundred and later had lots
of grape seeds, with virtually all of those seeds closely

(16:44):
resembling modern seeds. In addition to suggesting that this was
a very gradual process, it also suggests that growers continued
to mix wild and cultivated vines for centuries, experimenting with
different combinations and varieties. Archaeologists working at Kuloba Mound in
Turkya found a loaf of bread at a fifty three

(17:06):
hundred year old house. This is the first time a
nearly intact loaf of bread has been found at this site,
where archaeological work has been going on for about thirty years.
Usually when they find some kind of baked goods, it's
crumbs or maybe some amounts of unbaked dough rather than

(17:26):
a mostly intact baked loaf. This bread was made from
wild emmor wheat as well as lentils, and the dough
was fermented before it was baked. This loaf has been
put on display at the Escasshe Archaeological Museum, and the
museum also commissioned bread made from the same recipe from

(17:47):
that municipality's public bakery. The bakery uses a grain that's
similar to emmer wheat, as well as lentil flour, lentils
and bulgar. This bread comes in packaging that has information
about the Kluoba Mound, and it's been very popular, with
the bakery selling out of its stock every day. I
don't think I could love this story more. I would

(18:09):
buy this bread in a second, Yeah, instantly. Next, research
in the Roman city of Palencia on the island of
Majorca suggests that fried thrushes, which have long been established
as a delicacy that was served in fancy banquets, were
also a favorite of working class people. This comes from

(18:30):
a study of animal bones in a cesspit that was
connected with a taberna, which was kind of like a
Roman fast food restaurant or food kiosk.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
There were pig bones and.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
Seashells in the cesspit, as well as lots and lots
of thrushbones, most likely thrushes that were served at lavish
banquets were fattened up and prepared very elaborately, while the
ones that were sold out of this taburna were probably
just caught in nets during their migration and then spatchcocked
and fried. Speaking of birds, according to research published in

(19:03):
the journal IBIS International Journal of av and Science, people
living in northern Morocco about fifteen thousand years ago feasted
on a large bird known as the great bustard during
funerary rituals, as well as burying these birds with the dead.
This was part of research into today's great bustards, which
are critically endangered. They're only about seventy of them living

(19:27):
in two small areas in Morocco, and they're genetically distinct
from Great bustards living in Spain. Doctor Joan H. Cooper,
lead author on this paper, has expressed hope that confirmation
of the Great bustard's presence in Morocco and their clear
cultural importance historically, will help spur action to preserve the
tiny population that's still living today. Next, archaeologists from Dartmouth College,

(19:52):
at the request of Menominee tribal authorities, have been studying
indigenous farming methods in Michigan's Upper penninsul This is a
forested area with a cold climate and a short growing season.
Using drones and remote sensing technologies, they have found evidence
of one of the most complete ancient agricultural sites in

(20:14):
the eastern United States, with a lot of that site
still intact. This field system was in use by about
the tenth century, and it continued to be used for
about six hundred years. It has raised ringed garden beds
and one of the foods that was grown here was maize.
That's a plant that was native to a much warmer climate,

(20:35):
so it probably would have been tricky to grow here,
as well as beans and squash, and of course those
are often described as the three sisters. This system is
much larger than was previously believed, about ten times larger,
and part of it extends beyond the survey area that
was part of the study. Archaeologists estimate they've mapped only

(20:55):
about forty percent of the site. Next, research published in
the Old Frontiers in Nutrition presents a hypothesis that our
early ancestors were smoking meats to prolong their shelf life
as long as a million years ago. The author's argument
is that we don't have a lot of evidence for

(21:16):
early humans and other hommeted ancestors like intentionally using fire
more than about four hundred thousand years ago. But there
are sites that are older than that where there's evidence
of fire existing, but not along with the charred meat
or bones or things that you would expect if that
fire was being used for cooking something. So the hypothesis

(21:39):
here is that early humans were using fire, but only
sometimes to smoke the meat of very large mammals in
large quantities so that it could be preserved, not on
like a more day to day basis, to cook individual meals.
In this case, the fire would have also served the
dual purpose of keeping predators away from that meal as

(22:01):
it was being smoked. Uninteresting hypothesis, indeed not really an
experiment to establish whether that hypothesis is correct. Research published
in the journal Science Advances has reported the earliest evidence
of rice in the Pacific Islands found in an ancient
cave site in Guam. This most likely would have been

(22:22):
transported east from the Philippines, about twenty three hundred kilometers away,
roughly three thousand, five hundred years ago. It's not clear
whether this rice was used for food or for ritual purposes,
but it would have been difficult to grow in the area.
This find is also being used to support the idea
that the first people to arrive in Guam and nearby

(22:42):
islands had traveled there intentionally, that they were not simply
blown off course, since they had brought culturally meaningful plants
like rice with them. Again, there's a growing body of
evidence of people, especially in the Pacific, taking longer voyages
than was thought by the field of archaeology. Earlier than

(23:06):
we thought that started happening, that's come up, I feel
like in the last two or three years of unearthed,
especially next archaeologists working outside of Hella, Germany, have found
what is described as a fat factory, a place where
Neanderthals processed large quantities of bone to get at the
marrow and the nutrients inside of them. This came from

(23:29):
analysis of roughly one hundred and twenty thousand bone fragments
and about sixteen thousand flint tools at this site, along
with evidence of fiery use there. This process involved smashing
bones with stone hammers and then boiling them for several hours,
then skimming the fat from the surface of the liquid.
This is a time and labor intensive process and one

(23:51):
that requires lots of fuel to keep those fires burning.
So archaeologists speculate that Neanderthals tried to make this process
more efficient by bringing animals they had hunted to a
designated place to do this all at once, rather than
processing every animal carcass when and where it was hunted. Yeah,
unlike the earlier Neanderthal and fire thing, this is more

(24:15):
of a study to research whether a hypothesis was true,
whereas the other one is just the hypothesis part, which
I do find very interesting. Again, lastly, researchers at ele
Cacante Rock Shelter in Honduras have been working to trace
how humans have domesticated and used avocados over thousands of years.

(24:40):
This rock shelter is home to an array of fossilized
plants and other organic materials, and it's in a part
of the world where the climate often means that plant
matters is not preserved very well. There are about eleven
thousand years worth of avocado seeds and rhines at this site,
and that has a lot researchers to see how indigenous

(25:02):
farmers cultivated avocados so that they would grow larger fruit
with a thicker skin, a process that took centuries. So
these changes improved the yield of the avocado plants and
then also made the avocados easier to transport without damaging them.
I am very happy that this took place, because avocados

(25:23):
are delicious. Yeah, I'm like, blessings upon these ancient farmers.
We live so far away from where they are native.
We are going to take one more quick sponsor break
before we get into our last section of on Earth,
which is going to kick off with books and letters.
We're getting to everyone's favorite exhumations now with books and letters.

(25:53):
It was not at all unusual for books to be
bound in animal hide during the medieval period, but researchers
working with a set of volumes at Clairvaux Abbey in
France noticed that the hide did not look like it
had come from an animal that would typically have been
used for that purpose. That they would have expected to

(26:13):
see things like bore or deer hide, but this didn't
look like either of those. Using DNA studies and electrostatic
zoarchaeology mass spectrometry or e zooms, as well as some
other technologies, they confirmed that many of these volumes were
bound in seal skin, specifically harbor seals and harp seals.

(26:35):
It speculated that these hides were chosen for their color.
These books were bound by Cistercian monks, who were known
for their use of the color white. These book bindings
look brown today, but when they were originally made, they
would have been white or light gray. These seals, of course,
do not live anywhere near this abbey, so these monks

(26:57):
must have traded for them. The DNA recas search that
was part of this study suggests that the harbor seal
skins came from Scandinavia and Scotland, and that the harp
seals came from Iceland or Greenland. All of these places
would have been connected through the Hanseatic League. It's possible
that these mugs did not know what kind of animal

(27:17):
these skins came from. There aren't many references to seals
in medieval literature outside of the places closer to where
those animals actually lived, and the few that do exist
depicted them as a four legged animal with a head
like a wolf. Honestly kind of delights me that the
pictures of these did not look anything like what the

(27:40):
animals look like. Next the cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory at
Cambridge University Library has digitally unfolded a thirteenth century manuscript
that had been repurposed as part of the bindings of
a sixteenth century property record. This allowed experts to study
and analyze what that manuscript contained without physically unfolding it,

(28:05):
which probably would have damaged it and possibly could have
destroyed it. Turns out it is part of the French
Sweet Volga du Merlin or Merlin, part of the medieval
Lancelot Grail cycle. The text that this manuscript contains is
a rare continuation of the King Arthur legend that exists

(28:25):
in only about forty known manuscripts today. This process involved
high resolution multi spectral imaging CT scanning and hundreds of images,
some of them taken using mirrors, prisms and other tools,
which were then assembled into a fully openable three the
reproduction of the document. We've talked about a couple of

(28:48):
digital unfolding projects on Unearthed before, and I always love them.
I love that we are getting more and more ways
to look at things that we could not have opened.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Otherwise.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
Speaking of digital recreations, the University of Leeds has fully
digitized the oldest known English language book about cheese, which
dates to the sixteenth century. This is a twelve page
handwritten book called a Pamphlet compiled of Cheese, containing the differences, nature,

(29:24):
qualities and goodness of the same pamphlet in that title
is spelled Pamflyt, which is delightful. Scans of this book
and a transcript of the contents are both available at
the University of Leeds Library on the website. You can
go look them up if you want. Food historian Peter

(29:46):
Breers has described this as probably the first comprehensive academic
study of a single food stuff to be written in
the English language. According to research published in the Journal Shakespeare,
William Shakespeare may I've had more of a relationship with
his wife Anne Hathaway than is commonly believed. He's often

(30:06):
portrayed as basically abandoning her at Stratford upon Avon to
go become an actor and a playwright in London, but
this research suggests that a letter first on Earth in
nineteen seventy eight addressed to a good Missus Shakespeare may
have been a letter to Anne. This letter notes the
death of a man named mister Butts, who had previously

(30:27):
asked mister Shakespeare for money to cover the care of
mister Butts's son John. This letter asks if Missus Shakespeare
might pay her husband's debts. So it is not conclusively
proven that the Shakespeares connected to this letter are William
and Anne, but there were only four married couples named

(30:48):
Shakespeare in London at the time. This letter was also
found in a book that was printed by Shakespeare's neighbor,
Richard Field. Field also published some of Shakespeare's work. There
was connection there, so all of this is kind of circumstantial.
But if this really was a letter to Anne Hathaway,
it does suggest that she had ongoing contact with her husband,

(31:11):
and even that she lived with him in London at
some points, and that she was part of his social
and financial circle. People would think that if they wrote
to her about something relating to her husband, they might
get a favorable response. Next, researchers in China are using
poetry to track the decline of the finless porpoise in
the Yansee River. The finless porpoise is the only known

(31:34):
freshwater porpoise in the world, and today there are only
about eighteen hundred of them remaining. But since the number
and range of these porpoises has only been systematically tracked
for a few decades, researchers haven't had a thorough sense
of how large their population used to be or where
in the river they have lived. This new research, published

(31:55):
in the journal Current Biology under the title Ranged Contraction
of the Yankie Finless Porpoise Inferred from Classic Chinese poems
comb through databases of historical Chinese poetry and found more
than seven hundred references to these porpoises. About half of
those references mentioned where someone had seen them. Based on

(32:17):
this work, researchers estimate that the range of the finless
porpoise has decreased by sixty five percent since the Tang Dynasty,
which spanned from six eighteen to nine oh seven CE.
The vast majority of that decline happened in the tributaries
and lakes that are connected to the river, and just

(32:37):
looking at those bodies of water, the porpoises have lost
more than ninety percent of their range. While this decrease
was gradually going on for centuries, it really plummeted over
the last century, largely due to human activity, including the
building of a dam in nineteen forty six Harvard Law
School bought what it thought was an unofficial thirteen twenty

(33:00):
seven copy of the Magna Carta for twenty seven dollars
and fifty cents. It was described as quote somewhat rubbed
and damp stained, but after seeing digitized images of the document,
Professor David Carpenter of King's College, London started analyzing it,
eventually collaborating with Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia,

(33:22):
and they eventually concluded that it dates from King Edward
the first reissue of the Magna Carta in thirteen hundred,
and is an official copy. This conclusion comes from its
similarities to the format and handwriting used on the other
copies that are known from the year thirteen hundred, and
the fact that it adheres exactly to the thirteen hundred

(33:43):
text that makes it one of only seven surviving documents
from that reissue. It also makes it worth a lot
more than twenty seven dollars and fifty cents, even adjusted
for inflation and at our last book related find Researchers
at the University of Saint Andrew's have developed a tool

(34:03):
that can be used to detect poisonous substances in historical
books like arsenic, which was often used with copper to
make an emerald green pigment that was also used in wallpapers.
A lot of the time, it's possible to handle and
examine books that have these pigments in them without having
any kind of negative health effects, but for people who

(34:25):
are doing ongoing research or just trying to maintain collections
that have a lot of these pigments, there can be
health risks. This has led some libraries to restrict the
access to some of their collections kind of out of
an abundance of caution, but also with the reality that
they're covered in a pigment that is full of arsenic.

(34:47):
The University Collections department worked with the School of Earth
Sciences to make an instrument that shines different wavelengths of
light at the book and measures how much light is
reflected back emerald green as a distinct pattern of reflections.
So this can allow staff to quickly screen books for
this toxic pigment. And now we will move on to exhamations.

(35:10):
And as we said earlier, it's been a while since
there have been enough historically relevant exhumations to have a
whole section of them for unearthed. First In nineteen seventy one,
a train derailed near Salem, Illinois, injuring more than one
hundred and fifty people and killing eleven. One of those
eleven victims was never identified, but Henry Morton, a journalism

(35:32):
student at the University of Missouri, has been working to
change that. After Morton's research into this derailment, the Salem
City Council approved the exhumation of the unidentified body with
the hope of identifying who this is. Funds for the
project were donated by the DNA DOE Project and the
Salem Tourism Board. The graven question was exhumed in June,

(35:57):
and it turned out that multiple people had been buried
in it. As of the research into this episode, it
was not clear how many people definitely at least two
and possibly three, and it's also not clear whether one
victim of the derailment was buried in a grave with
at least one other person, or if there were really
more than eleven people who were killed and these are

(36:18):
all victims of the crash. It will probably be several
weeks at the very least before DNA test results are
available to hopefully clear some of this up. Yeah, maybe
an update in a future Unearthed next. Back in twenty eighteen,
we talked about the Bonsecour Mother and Baby Home in
tomb Ireland, which was a home for unmarried women and

(36:41):
their babies that was run by an order of Catholic
nuns until nineteen sixty one. In twenty fourteen, local historian
Catherine Corlis had uncovered the fact that seven hundred and
ninety six children had died at this home. There were
death certificates, but not burial records for most of them.

(37:03):
In twenty eighteen, it had been announced that the site
of a mass grave at the former home would be
fully excavated, with all of the bodies exhumed and if possible,
returned to surviving family members. We've had a couple of
updates about that since then, but this time in June,
eleven years after Corlis's report on the home and seven

(37:26):
years after the decision to excavate, work actually began at
the site. This work is expected to take at least
two years, and lastly, for the exhamation news. Today, Poland
and Ukraine are allied against Russia, but these two neighboring
nations have a history that has been at times incredibly contentious.

(37:48):
And violent, and that has continued to affect their relationship
to one another today, even as they are allies against
the common enemy. During World War Two, a nationalist group
called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army massacred Polish civilians in areas
that are considered Western Ukraine today but at the time

(38:11):
were Eastern Poland. Eventually, Ukraine and Poland started cooperating on
projects to exhume Polish people from what's now Ukrainian territory,
but then in twenty seventeen, the government of Ukraine issued
a moratorium on these exhumations. This was after several Ukrainian

(38:31):
Insurgent Army monuments and memorials were destroyed in Poland. Ukraine
and Poland have now established a joint Polish Ukrainian Working
Group and have begun cooperating on issues related to this.
In April, Ukrainian and Polish researchers worked together to exhume
Polish victims of the nineteen forty five Volan massacre, which

(38:53):
was perpetrated by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. At that time,
the region was occupied by Germany. Poland's Minister of Culture
and National Heritage has also announced that exhumations are expected
to take place in what used to be Zvoiska, Poland
later this year, where an estimated one hundred and twenty
Polish soldiers were killed in combat against Nazi Germany in

(39:15):
nineteen thirty nine. Zboiska is now part of the city
of Viv, Ukraine. And we will end this installment of
Unearthed with one short psa. If you're visiting the Giant's
Causeway in Northern Ireland, please do not jam coins into it.
Coins degrade very quickly there because of the salty air,

(39:35):
and as they do they expand, which puts pressure on
the basalt columns that make up the causeway. This is
the thing people have been doing, and decaying coins are
also leaving streaks of various metals on the rocks there.
Conservation specialists have done a test project to remove the
coins in one part of the causeway, which was successful,

(39:58):
so it's hoped that a bigger project can be taken
on to take care of the rest of the site.
Giant's Causeway is both a National Nature Reserve and a
UNESCO World Heritage Site. And that was the end of
our Unearthed for this quarter. We'll talk about various things
on Friday. I am sure, and I have another National
Park related listener mail fabulous. This is from Amelia, and

(40:22):
Amelia said, Hi ladies, I already had a trip planned
when your episode came out. My partner loves going on
drives and I love National parks, so I thought a
trip to Shenandoah was the perfect weekend away for his birthday.
We drove the whole length of Skyline Drive and he
pulled into all the overlooks that had information boards for me.

(40:44):
My favorite overlook was at a little stand where you
placed your phone and took a picture and uploaded it
to Crotologue to show the time lapse of the ecological changes.
There is a link to this website here in the email,
I'm attaching pictures of us with our four legged child, Zella,

(41:06):
a ten year old Staffy mix who loves car rides
just as much as we do, and my photo for
the time laps Amelia Number one. I did not know
that this existed until we got this email. It is
that Pass Mountain overlook. This currently, as of this minute

(41:26):
on July fifteenth, twenty twenty five, there are nine thousand,
six hundred and twenty photos from nine thousand fifty nine contributors,
and if you hit play on it, it gives you
all of these pictures from folks phone going from September
thirtieth of twenty twenty all the way until now, So

(41:47):
super super cool. If you google the words Pass Mountain
Overlook chronologue, it'll take you right to it, so that
is super duper cool. Also, very cute dog, a white
dog making a kind of simultaneously to me happy face,
and I think maybe just wants to jump down and

(42:08):
start running around. That's the impression that I get. Boy
do I love the idea of a drive that suits
one partner and all of the historical signs that suits
the other partner for a trip together. Super good, very
lovely thing to do for a birthday. And what a

(42:29):
great picture of the mountains from this overlook in Shenandoah
National Park. Thank you again, Amelia for this email. If
you would like to send us a note about this
or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com and you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get

(42:50):
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

The Breakfast Club

Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Unearthed! in July 2025, Part 2