Unearthed! in October 2021, part 1

This October 2021 instance of Unearthed! covers updates, some oldest things, animals and graves. There's also an exception to the show's moratorium on including coin hoards in unearthing episodes.

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Episode Transcript

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 is
time for Unearthed. Hooray uh if you are brand new

(00:23):
to the show. About four times a year, we take
a look at things that have been literally and figuratively
unearthed over the last few months. So even though this
is coming out later in October, UH, it does not
include things that have been unearthed in October. It's just

(00:44):
it ends at the end of September. UH. This episode,
because it's two parter, we're gonna have lots of updates
of previous episodes, some oldest things, animals. There were a
lot of animal finds this time around, and the graves
and the next time next episode will have the exclamations
and shipwrecks, and the books and letters and the edibles

(01:07):
and potables. A lot of long time favorite things are
going to be in that episode as well. So let's
get started, all right. So we've got a few updates
to kick us off. Craft store chain Hobby Lobby has
come up on Unearthed in and twenty first for agreeing
to pay a fine for having acquired historical and cultural

(01:30):
objects that had been brought into the US illegally, and
then for those items being repatriated to a rock, and
then most recently, for u S efforts to return one
particular object, which is known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet
to a rock. Some of these looted and stolen objects
were intended for display at the Museum of the Bible,

(01:51):
which is funded by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green, and
in earlier installments of Unearthed, we also talked about the
discovery that none of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in
that museum's collection were actually authentic. So, yes, we've talked
a lot about Hobby Lobby. The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet that's
been part of that latest round of news. Hobby Lobby

(02:13):
purchased that through Christie's auction House, and Christie's had documentations
saying that the tablets purchasing history was all above board,
but that documentation had been forged. That is something that
Christie's has maintained that it did not know when it
sold the tablet the Hobby Lobby. So the latest Hobby

(02:33):
Lobby update, the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was delivered to a
Rocky officials at a repatriation ceremony at the Smithsonian's National
Museum of the American Indian in September. It is one
of more than seventeen thousand other looted objects that the
US has agreed to return to a rock. That's a
lot of stuff, so much stuff. And when the headlines

(02:56):
first started floating around about all this, I was like,
didn't we talked about returning that already? Yes, we did,
but now it has been actually returned. Moving on, in August,
French President Emmanuel Macron announced that Josephine Baker would be
placed in the Pantheon this coming novem. The Pantheon became

(03:19):
a monument for the great men of France after the
French Revolution, and then Marie Curie became the first woman
to be honored there based on her own achievements. Josephine
Baker was born in the US but later moved to Paris,
where she became a spy for France during World War Two.
She will be the first black woman to be buried

(03:41):
at the Pantheon, and previous hosts of the show did
an episode on her in March. According to research published
in the journal Heritage Science. An iconic portrait of past
podcast subject Antoine Lovoisier and his wife mary Anne looked
much different in an earlier version. In the finished painting

(04:01):
is it's known today. The couple are dressed in relatively
simple clothing. He is in black and she is in white,
in a room with gray paneled walls. Antoine is sitting
at a table covered in a red drape, writing with
a quill and surrounded by scientific instruments. He's looking up
at his wife, who is standing over him, and she
is looking out at the viewer. They look very much

(04:23):
like a scientifically minded couple embodying the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yeah,
I wouldn't necessarily call their clothing in the setting austere,
but it's more restrained. Researchers used macro x ray fluorescence
spectroscopy and X ray spectrometry to see what was underneath

(04:45):
the finished painting, so what it looked like in earlier revisions,
and it appears that in an earlier version of the painting,
this couple is in much richer surroundings than more elaborate clothing,
including Marianne wearing a very large hat decorated with lots
of flowers and plumes, so this earlier version is more

(05:06):
of a depiction of Antoine Lavassier's role as a tax collector,
somebody who was moving in a lot wealthier and more
ostentatious rungs of society, rather than presenting him as an intellectual.
Our episode on Lavoisier was most recently a Saturday Classic.
In the Southern tomb in the funerary complex of King Joseph,

(05:27):
who we covered on the show in March, has been
open to the public after a restoration project. Although the
site is referred to as a tomb, Joseph's actual burial
place is a nearby step pyramid. We discussed that in
that episode of the show. This restoration work on the
tomb started back in two thousand and six. A lot

(05:48):
of the tomb is underground and this work involves stabilizing
and reinforcing the structure, installing lighting, and refurbishing the tiles, carvings,
and other decorative elements. And in our last update, history
Professor Cornelia Dayton of the University of Connecticut, who specializes
in legal history, has unearthed new information about past podcast

(06:10):
subject Phyllis Wheetley Peters and her husband John Peters, filling
in some gaps in the knowledge we've had about their lives.
As we talked about in that episode, we know virtually
nothing about Phillis's life before she was enslaved and taken
to Boston, and we also don't know much about her
life between her marriage and her death, and a lot

(06:31):
of what's been repeated about John Peters has been pretty
conjectural and in some cases really unkind. Dayton found details
that provide more specifics and contexts through eighteenth century legal papers.
This research was published as an open access paper, meaning
everyone can read it for themselves. It is titled Lost

(06:52):
Years Recovered John Peters and Phillis Wheetley, Peters and Middleton.
That's in the New England Quarterly, and Dayton has also
launched the Wheatly Peters Project to explore their lives while
they were living in Middletown, Massachusetts. That was between seventeen
eighty and seventeen eighty three. Our episode on Phillis Sweetly
came out on March five. So moving on, we now

(07:16):
have a few finds that are being described as the oldest.
First researchers in the Balkans have unearthed the oldest cosmetics
ever found in Europe, and there possibly even older than
the oldest known cosmetics from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. These
were in small six thousand year old ceramic bottles that

(07:37):
were first found in ten and a recent analysis has
shown that they contained traces of sara site also called
white lead, along with animal fat, beeswax, and plant oils,
so I'll suggest that this was a substance meant to
be used on the skin. The team also found long
sin stone tools nearby, which may have been used to

(07:58):
extract the substance from these tiny models. When we say tiny,
some of these measured just a couple of centimeters long.
They're so small that at first researchers wondered if they
might be some kind of a children's toy. Some of
them also had holes in their handles, suggesting they might
have been worn on a string, maybe as a necklace

(08:19):
in my head, which is completely incorrect. By the way,
these are the samples that the cosmetics lady left at
their house. I like it. It's like prehistoric avon um.
Researchers have found southern Italy's oldest genetic evidence of your
senior pestus. That's the bacterium that causes plague. This find

(08:42):
came from two individual graves dating back to the fourteenth
century at the cemetery of the Abbey of San Leonardo,
which was located along and important crossroads for pilgrims, traders,
and other travelers. Analysis showed that they were both male.
One was between thirty and thirty five years old and
other was about forty five. There were coins on both

(09:03):
of these bodies. They were hidden in the clothing of
one and they were in a bag that was tied
around the waist of the other. This is unusual because
it suggested that nobody had looked at these bodies very
carefully before they were buried. They probably would not have
buried them with lots of money on them. So the
conclusion was maybe these people had been sick and people

(09:25):
were afraid of becoming infected themselves. So DNA analysis on
the teeth of these two bodies did find you're sending
a pestis DNA a very similar strain to what has
been found in later victims of the Black Death from
various parts of Italy. So we definitely knew that plague
was around in Italy before this point, but this is
the first genetic evidence. Archaeologists in China have unearthed the

(09:50):
oldest known coin making facility in the world, one that
is older than previous finds in what's now Turkey and Greece.
The site is in Henon Province and was aided through
ash residues at the site, which suggested that it was
in use between six forty and five fifty b C.
It appears that this started out as a tool making
facility before they started using clay molds to fashion coins.

(10:14):
The site is associated with the ancient city of Guangdong,
which was founded around eight hundred BC. Moving on to
our next topic. Several years ago, I sort of put
a moratorium on talking about coin hords on Unearthed because
there were just so many and unless there's something unusual

(10:35):
about a coin horde, they all they really start to
sound very similar. But there are a whole lot of
people who listened to the show now who were not
listening to the show back six or seven years ago
when I made that decision. Uh. And also, there were
so many coin hordes this time that it seemed like
a good opportunity to both showcase them and demonstrate why

(10:59):
I was ventually like, okay, no more, no more coin hords.
So in July, archaeologists working along the high speed rail
project known as HS two found a horde of hundreds
of coins in West London. These Roman era coins date
back to the first century BC, and they were found

(11:19):
thanks to a heavy rainstorm. The metal in the coins
caused a greenish blue discoloration in the soil. A metal
detectorist unearthed a horde of Viking coins on the Isle
of Man in April, but it didn't make headlines until July,
when the Isle of Man Coroner of Inquests declared this
horde to be a treasure. The horde contained eighty seven

(11:41):
silver coins, thirteen pieces of cut coins, and some other items.
This was actually the second Viking Age fine unearthed by
detectorates Cath Giles on the Isle of Man over the
span of about six months. Cath Giles seems to have
some good luck and skill with the metal detector Right
in July, archaeologists in Poland found more than one hundred

(12:04):
ninth century Carolingian deniers, which may have been hidden from
Viking raiders or collected as part of a ransom to
try to keep the Vikings from invading Paris. The Israel
Antiquities Authority announced the family on a camping trip, found
a horde of seventeen hundred year old coins on a
beach in August. These coins had been underwater for years

(12:26):
and they had coalesced into a mass that weighed about
six kilograms. In August, archaeologists in France announced the discovery
of twenty Roman denari in a pot or vase which
was hidden in a wall in the Ossitani region, and
in September, archaeologists in France announced the discovery of more
than two hundred gold coins during restoration work at a

(12:48):
house in Brittany. These date back to the seventeenth century,
during the reigns of Louis and fourteen. Archaeologists in the
United Arab Emirates found a horde of one thousand year
old silver coins which had been stored in an Abbysid
style pot. These coins bear the images of five different caliphs.
And lastly, amateur divers off the coast of Spain found

(13:11):
a horde of more than fifty hundred year old gold coins,
which were as many of the coin hordes are Roman.
And on that note, we will take a quick sponsor break.

(13:32):
There are so many animal finds this time around. First,
when archaeologists in Jerusalem found some shark teeth which were
mixed in with fish bones and pottery bits and other
materials that had been used to fill in a basement
almost three thousand years ago, they thought they were just
looking at food waste. Seems like a reasonable conclusion. But

(13:53):
when it was time for them to publish their paper,
one of the reviewers pointed out that one of the
teeth could not have come from a shark that people
living at that time might have eaten as food, because
it was from the Late Cretaceous period, from a shark
species that had been extinct for more than sixty million years.
So the team took another look, and they discovered that

(14:14):
all twenty nine of the shark teeth that they had
found in this infill were fossils. They all dated back
to the Late Cretaceous. It's not unusual at all for
people to use all kinds of material as infill. Previous
editions of on Earth have even included things like wrecked ships.
But it is still not entirely clear why these fossils

(14:35):
were gathered all in one place before being used that way.
The nearest location where similar fossils have been found is
about eighty kilometers away. These teeth don't have wear marks
to suggest that they were ever used as tools, and
they also don't have holes or other markings to suggest
that they were mounted or used as jewelry. One idea

(14:56):
is that they were just somebody's collection, which may be
the most likely scenario, but there's really no hard evidence
to back that up. There's also if it was someone's
collection who decided to use that person's shark tooth collection
as in phil they're like, Oh, that person's gone now
and this stuff is in our way. Let's listen. It's

(15:18):
going to happen to all my Star Wars stuff. I
know it's going to happen. Next up, a team led
by researchers from the University of York has been studying
seventeenth century canine feces to learn more about the lives
of sled dogs and the humans who worked with them.
This work was part of ongoing work at the New

(15:39):
Laktuk Archaeological Site and what's now Alaska Knektuk Incorporated, which
is an Alaska Native village corporation, was part of this
project along with the University of Copenhagen. The University of
Aberdeen and the University of British Columbia. The team studied
the proteins in frozen paleo feces to figure out what
the dogs eat, finding evidence that they consumed the muscles, bones,

(16:03):
and intestines of various species of salmon. One of the
samples also contained a canid bone fragments, suggesting that the
dogs consumed the meat of other dogs after they had died,
or at least not on their bones. Some of these
details are tricky to puzzle out, though an Arctic communities,
dogs generally rely on humans for their food throughout the winter,

(16:27):
and that's something that requires a lot of resources, So
getting a sense of the diets of working sled dogs
carries over to how humans used and allocated. There's resources,
especially during the colder months, but during the summer the
dogs may be fed less often or not at all.
That means that their diets are made up of foods

(16:47):
that they hunt or scavenge for themselves. So when looking
at this species, it's not necessarily clear that what the
dogs ate was something a person intentionally fed to them
or something that they hunted or scavenge. Um. We really
couldn't remember if the next thing is something we have
ever talked about before, because we have talked about an

(17:08):
assortment of different pigeons and several different lost battalions on
the show. But on October four, nineteen eighteen, during World
War One, a group of U. S troops later nicknamed
the Lost Battalion had been cut off from the rest
of their unit and surrounded by Germans. Soon they were
caught in crossfire and being shelled by American artillery. Because

(17:29):
they didn't realize they were there, Major Charles W. Whittlesey
tried to use pigeons to send messages about what was happening. Finally,
the battalion's last bird, which was a pigeon named Cheremi,
made it, but only after being seriously injured. The message
got through, though, and the Lost Battalion was relieved on
October seven. Cheremy survived these injuries and lived for about

(17:54):
another eight months, becoming something of a media sensation. A
tax that ermisted at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
History mounted the bird's remains in nine but there were
discrepancies in descriptions of whether Jeremy was male or female.
The Army Signal Corps referred to the bird as SHE,
while Smithsonian Records used HE. Articles written in nineteen nineteen

(18:18):
also disagreed with The Ladies Home Journal using HE and
American Legion Weekly using SHE. And of course, there's also
been some debate about whether this specific bird that wound
up in the Smithsonian's collection really is the same bird
that carried Major Wittlesey's message about the lost battalion. So
earlier this year, coinciding with the centennial of Cheremy being

(18:42):
put on display, the Smithsonian turned to DNA testing to
settle at least the question of the pigeons sex. So,
sex chromosomes in birds work a little differently than in humans,
and in humans, sex chromosomes are really just one part
of a complex process that involves other themes and hormones
and other factors. In birds, females typically have W and

(19:06):
Z chromosomes, while males have Z chromosomes only. Researchers looked
at Jeremy's chromosomes as well as those of four other
birds whose bodies were preserved at about the same time
and whose sex was already known, and their conclusion Jeremy
had only Z type chromosomes, so share I mean was
male Researchers at Iowa State University and u C Riverside

(19:31):
have looked into why humans have never domesticated the American
cotton tale rabbit. For comparison, there are all kinds of
domesticated breeds of European rabbit which can have very different traits,
but are all the same species. In particular, the team
looked at the use of rabbits in the city of
teot Wakan in what's now Mexico, where people clearly lived

(19:52):
with rabbits for more than a thousand years, feeding them,
housing them, using them as food or to feed to
carnivorous animals, and use in their fur, but never truly
domesticating them. So this team's conclusion is that it's all
about the rabbits social behavior, not the humans treatment of them.
European rabbits are social, they lived together in warrens in

(20:15):
a way that people can reasonably replicate for rabbits in captivity,
but American cotton sale rabbits are more solitary. They tend
to fight with each other if they are housed together,
and American cotton sales reproductive cycle also isn't as predictable
as it is for European rabbits, and that makes it
a lot harder for people to intentionally breed them. Researchers

(20:38):
on the Pacific Northwest coast have studied evidence of sea
otter prevalence in the area, something that connects to the
way First Nations people's managed both shellfish and their predators
during the Late Holocene era, and which is still relevant
to indigenous peoples who live in the area today. See
Honors were nearly eliminated from the area due to the

(20:58):
fur trade, but their number rebounded after they were protected
under conservation laws in both the US and Canada, but
that has made it difficult for indigenous peoples to use
shellfish as a food source because the increasing sea otter
population eats the shellfish before they come grow big enough
for humans to effectively use them as food. Indigenous communities

(21:20):
who live in this part of North America have maintained
that for centuries, they managed both the shellfish population and
the population of their predators, including sea otters. This included
hunting sea otters to lower their population in areas where
people were living, and also keeping the otters out of
areas that contained important shellfish beds. Researchers confirmed this by

(21:44):
comparing muscle shell sizes from six archaeological sites to shell
sizes in areas where sea otters do and don't live today,
and they found that the ancient muscle shells were comparable
to today's muscles from locations where there aren't many sea utters. Basically,
if there are lots of sea otters, the muscles don't
get as big because, as we said, the otters eat

(22:06):
them before they have a chance to the shot Healsuck
and Wakino First Nations provided logistical support in this research,
and some indigenous leaders from those nations also shared knowledge
that informed this study and in our last animal signed
researchers believe people in New Guinea may have been collecting

(22:27):
casuary eggs and raising the birds after they hatched as
long as eighteen thousand years ago, thousands of years before
people domesticated chickens or geese, and in the words of
lead author Christina Douglas, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African
Studies at Penn State, quote, this is not some small foul.
It is a huge ornary, flightless bird that cannavissarate you.

(22:50):
So doing this would have required people to find the
castawary nests and remove the eggs just before it was
time for them to hatch, and then intense only cracked
the eggs open so that the chicks would imprint on
human beings rather than on a mother bird. Although people
would also boil eggs that were close to hatching and

(23:11):
then eat the embryo inside, most of the eggshells in
this study did not have any signs of burning or
being cooked, meaning that most likely they were indeed cracked
open to retrieve the living chickenside not to be used
as food. Thinking about food and eggs, do you want
to take a quick sponsor break before we come back

(23:31):
for this last segment, let's do next up. We have
several fines that are related to graves and grave sites. First,
some children playing in a sandbox in Poland found a

(23:52):
burial site dating back to some time between eleven hundred
and seven hundred BC. This site included human remains as
well as pottery. A lot of the pottery had been broken,
probably during the construction of this play area that the
sandbox was in, according to locals. A nearby archaeological site
was discovered years ago during construction of a pond and

(24:15):
a fence for a farm, but the map used to
market its location was not particularly precise. It is possible,
although not yet confirmed, that these two sites are related.
The news coverage that I found of this didn't say
what the children's reaction was when they found human remains
in their sandbox. I mean, it depends on the kid, right,

(24:36):
I really think it does. Some kids are ghoulish Halloween
children from day one, and others grew into it. Back
in nine, a crew digging for a water pipe in
Finland found a very old sword, and that discovery led
archaeologists to a grave site. The gray site was nearly

(24:59):
a thousand and years old, but it was not entirely
typical of similar graves in the area. It appeared to
contain one set of remains dressed in clothing that was
typical of women at the time, but the person had
also been buried with a sword, something that was more
associated with men's graves. Interpretations varied on whether that first

(25:19):
sword that was found was also part of this same grave.
This also seemed to be someone who was buried with
a lot of care, maybe someone wealthy. They were buried
in furs and feather bedding, and the sword, which had
no hilt was inlaid with silver. You know, they're not
sure if it was intentionally without a hilt, or if
the hilt had maybe been wooden and had rotted away.

(25:41):
Early interpretations of this grave site included that it had
really been the grave of two people, one a man
and one a woman, but that the man's remains hadn't
been found yet, or that that one person was a
woman and was buried in the grave with the sword
as an indication that she had been a leader or
maybe even a warrior. But new research in the European

(26:03):
Journal of Archaeology comes to a different conclusion. DNA analysis
revealed that the person's sex chromosomes were x x Y,
also known as klein Felter syndrome. We don't really know
what this person's body looked like. Klein Felter syndrome doesn't
necessarily look the same from one person to another, and
the remains in that grave were skeletal, but the researchers

(26:26):
concluded that the person's gender identity might not have fit
into a binary model, something we don't really have a
way to confirm at this point. But the items that
were placed in the grave and the care with which
the person was buried do suggest that they were very
highly respected in their community. Next up, back in, a
crew working at a golf course and Lincolnshire, England found

(26:48):
a Bronze age coffin. A team of archaeologists and archaeology
students happened to be doing field work in the area
and they came to assist. Historic England announced the results
of re ceercha into this find in September. The coffin
had been made from a hollowed out oak tree and
an axe was placed in it along with the person

(27:08):
being buried. The acts in particular is a rare find,
since both the wooden halft and the stone heads survived.
The coffin is about four thousand years old, and it's
one of only about sixty five similar coffins found in Britain.
Preservation work is ongoing for both the coffin and the axe,
something that is time consuming because both of those items

(27:29):
were water logged. We have talked about people buried together
on the show before this time. A burial found this
year in Shanshi Province seems to be that of a
couple who were buried together and intentionally posed in a
loving embrace. This fine dates back to some time between
the fourth and sixth centuries, and it's believed to be

(27:51):
the first burial of its kind discovered in China. There
are at least two other joint burials from the same
period that have been discovered in China, but not with
this apparently intentional positioning. This fine was written up in
a paper titled Eternal Love Locked in an Embrace and
sealed with a ring a Sindbay couple's joint burial in

(28:13):
north Way era, China that was in the International Journal
of Osteoarchaeology. Back researchers found a Byzantine warrior skull in
the grave of a five year old child who was
buried at a fort. It's not known whether the warrior
and the child were connected to each other in some way,
or if the child's grave was just a convenient place

(28:34):
to bury the head. The warrior had likely been killed
and decapitated when the Ottoman army took the fort roughly
six d fifty years ago, and their friends or family
probably didn't have access to the rest of the body
and had to bury that head in secret. Paper about
this burial site was published back in but a paper

(28:55):
in the Journal Mediterranean archaeology and archaeometry in set Timber
looked at this skull, specifically that the warrior had successfully
recovered from having a badly broken jaw. The jawbone had
been broken into, but somebody had stabilized the bone as
it healed by threading wire around this person's teeth. Based

(29:18):
on the lack of discoloration around the teeth from the wire,
it was probably made of gold. This basic technique was
described in writings that were attributed to Hippocrates that were
written centuries before this warrior's injury was treated based on
the condition of the jaw. This warrior lived for another
ten years after the jaw bone break, moving from graves

(29:41):
to gravestones. In August, an auctioneer planning in a state
auction discovered that a marble slab that had been used
to make fudge it was actually a gravestone. I feel
like that's a business model right there. It's really not
clear exactly how the gravestone came into the family's possession.
The woman who was using it was still living but

(30:02):
had Alzheimer's and her family was going through her belongings
after she had been moved into long term care. The
gravestone belonged to Peter J. Weller, who had died in Lansing, Michigan,
in eighteen forty nine. A little less than thirty years later,
his grave had been moved from Oak Park Cemetery to
Mount Hope Cemetery, and for some reason, the gravestone did

(30:26):
not make the move along with the body. When the
family and the auctioneer realized that they had his gravestone,
they contacted Friends of Lansing's Historic Cemeteries for help. Although
the organization was not able to find any living relatives
of Peter Weller, they did discover that he had two
daughters and a daughter in law buried at Mount Hope Cemetery.

(30:47):
They have now restored his gravestone and returned it to
the cemetery and restored his daughter's headstones as well. The
daughter in law stone had already been restored, and our
last thing to discuss us in this first part of
our Autumn Unearthed. The Colombian Harmony Cemetery was a black
cemetery established in Washington, d C. In eighteen fifty nine.

(31:10):
Some pretty prominent people were buried there, including past podcast
subject Maryanne shad Carry, who was a writer a lawyer
and an activist, and Elizabeth Keckley, who had been enslaved
from birth but purchased her own freedom in eighteen fifty
five and later became Mary Todd, Lincoln's dressmaker. More than
thirty five thousand people were ultimately buried at Columbian Harmony Cemetery.

(31:35):
In the nineteen sixties, the cemetery was closed and all
of the bodies buried there were moved to Maryland, in
part to make way for a metro station, But the
gravestones were not moved with the bodies. They were sold
or given away, and most of them were lost. Then
in twenty sixteen, Virginia Senator Richard Stewart discovered some of
them on property that he had purchased. They had been

(31:58):
used to control erosion a along the Potomac River. This
is obviously an appalling situation, and in August fifty five
of those gravestones were moved to National Harmony Memorial Park
in Prince George's County, Virginia, where they will be part
of a memorial garden. Restorative justice nonprofit called the History,

(32:19):
Arts and Science Action Network has also been looking for
the living descendants of the people whose gravestones. These are
to research their histories. Virginia has approved a four million
dollar expenditure to recover and restore the headstones and to
create a memorial to the people who were originally buried
at the Columbian Harmony Cemetery. More work on this project

(32:41):
is expected this fall, and that is where we are
going to leave off for this installment of On Earth,
and we will pick up with lots more stuff on Wednesday.
Do you have a listener mail in the meantime? I do.
This is from Laura and it's about our Alistair Crowley episode,
and Laura wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy, it was very

(33:03):
exciting to hear your recent episode on Alistair Crowley. I
will confess that I knew very little about him before
this episode, other than that he was an owner of
the Boleskin House, which I happened to visit a few
years ago on a trip to Scotland. I thought you
might find it interesting to know that the house has
a nearby cemetery where the Fraser clan of Outlander fame

(33:25):
has their family burial plots. Right near the Fraser gravestones
is a small shed which is rumored to have been
used for black magic rituals. Of course, we stuck our
heads in and took some pictures. There were some symbols
on the walls of the shed, but I truly couldn't
tell if they had been there for decades, where if
a recent visitor had made them. I found it to
be a delightful mashup of magic lore, outlander history, and

(33:48):
a bonus of loch Ness as the backdrop. My friend
and I only happened to discover this place because of
our Airbnb host, who wanted to make sure we took
the most interesting drive to our next station. I truly
appreciate the insight of locals on road trips. Later that day,
we also happened to see our first white, Harry cou
the only white when we saw during the trip a

(34:10):
photo of this cow is attached. We had been looking
to see Harry COO's the whole trip, and I happened
to spot this one on a hill while we were
driving past. I made sure to do a quickie turn
and go back for a photo. Thank you for you
your work on stuff you miss in history class. I
love learning from you both, and it's clear to me
as a listener how much effort and attention you put
into your work, Laura. So thank you Laura for this

(34:31):
email number one. This picture of the Harry cou Uh.
If you have not seen Harry Coo, it is a
very a cow with very long hair, which you know
it doesn't resemble most of the cows that I have seen,

(34:53):
uh in my life. Um. It reminded me a bit
of when I was in i Sland back some years ago. Um.
There are feral sheep in Iceland and we saw one,
I think only one the whole time we were there.
That looked like something out of a Miyazaki movie. And

(35:13):
like the look of its face and the like the sheer.
Uh Like it wasn't a like a densely packed well,
it looked more hairy like this like this cow does. Anyway,
it reminded me a bit of that. Also, Moleskan House
a word that I could swear I either looked up

(35:34):
or heard someone say. But if I did that, they
were wrong because we said it wrong on the show. Uh.
So again, thank you Laura for sending all of these pictures.
I could just look at this Harry coop all day. Uh.
If you would like to write to us about this
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