Unearthed! in October 2021, part 2

Part 2 of our October 2021 coverage of items literally or figuratively unearthed covers exhumations, shipwrecks, books and letters, and edibles and potables. And it starts with potpourri - things that don't quite fit anywhere else.

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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. This is
part two of our autumn installment of Unearthed. We have

(00:21):
lots of many folks favorite things. Today we are going
to kick off, as we so often do, with things
that were interesting but hard to categorize. So I threw
them together and called it potpourri. And Potpourri starts with controversy.
In September, a paper called a tunguskas sized air burst

(00:42):
destroyed Tall el ha Mom, a Middle Bronze Age city
in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea, that was
published in the journal Scientific Reports. This paper makes the
case that a cosmic air burst caused by a comment
or meteorite destroyed the city around sixteen fifty BC. It
also notes debate about whether Tall el ham Mom may

(01:04):
have been the biblical city of Sodom, and the papers
authors considered whether the Biblical account of the destruction of
the city of Sodom may have come from oral traditions
about the destruction of Tall el Hammam. So this paper
argues that this was a massive incredibly destructive high temperature event,
shattering the bones of the people who were killed, melting

(01:26):
pottery and mud bricks, and creating a destruction layer really
rich in charcoal in the archaeological record. There have been
multiple Twitter threads by physicists, bioarchaeologists, and other experts questioning
or criticizing various aspects of this paper, like that there
really wasn't a lot of bone used in the research,

(01:47):
and that the researchers were not sure whether the bones
that were studied were human or animal, or that the
way the mud brick had fragmented is really typical in
other excavations of similar structures are not suggested to have
been destroyed in a massive air blast, or that pottery
being intermingled with mud brick isn't evidence that pottery was

(02:09):
violently blasted into the walls. Pottery pieces were commonly used
to help bind the brick. There's really a lot going
on here, and some of the people involved with writing
this paper definitely do believe that tal el Hamm is
the biblical city of Sodom, while a lot of the
papers critics definitely do not like. People were definitely coming

(02:32):
from a perspective in both the paper and the criticism,
and some of the critics have also concluded that this
paper was written specifically to support the idea that tal
el hamm was the city of Sodom, rather than drawing
conclusions based on where the evidence actually lad. There has
even been criticism of this paper from Biblical scholars and

(02:54):
archaeologists who focus specifically on the Bible, because if tal
el Hammam really was destroyed in an air blast that
happened as many as four hundred years after the destruction
of the city of Sodom is supposed to have happened. Uh.
This paper made a whole lot of headlines, and then
I kept finding more and more Twitter threads from people

(03:15):
who were like, Nah, it's honestly a level of uh
like criticism that I have more often seen associated with
like a television show that's purportedly about archaeology, rather than
about a paper published in a peer reviewed journal. Trauma

(03:38):
that should actually be the television show, is the argument
among experts. Moving on, archaeologists in Gloucestershire, working ahead of
a new development, have unearthed a number of objects, many
of them dating back to Roman times, including a statuette
believed to depict the goddess Venus. This piece is small,

(03:59):
it's just about seventeen centimeters tall and it's made of
pipe clay and it's in very good condition. It was
most likely worshiped as a religious icon, possibly at someone's
home altar. Other finds at the area include the foundations
of Roman era buildings. Archaeologists in the Orkney Archipelago have

(04:20):
unearthed two stone balls, each of them about the size
of a cricket ball, from a tomb there. This tomb
dates back to about thirty b C and it's currently
being lost to erosion and sea level rise. Earlier excavations
were carried out in the surrounding area back in the
nineteen eighties, but archaeologists have gone back to try to

(04:41):
find as much as they can before this whole area
is underwater. About five hundred similar balls have been discovered
in Scotland and they seem to be unique to Scotland.
Although there are several possibilities for how they were used,
the most common is that they were throwing weapons. In
terms of these two specific balls, one is intact, spherical

(05:02):
and polished and the other has split. Moving on, when
Europeans started arriving in North America in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. They of course brought lots of European goods
with them. They brought their own supplies as well as
trade goods and gifts, but for the most part, these
goods were not evenly dispersed through the indigenous communities that

(05:25):
Europeans came into contact with. Especially at first, Europeans tended
to give them to or trade them with people they
saw as being more elite. So today archaeologists tend to
find smaller numbers of European goods kind of clustered together
in context that are associated with indigenous people of higher status,

(05:46):
or at least indigenous people that Europeans would have interpreted
as being of a higher status. That's not always the case, though.
Researchers in Mississippi have found a trove of more than
eighty middle objects that likely date back to Hernando de
Soto's expedition through what is now the southeastern United States
in the sixteenth century. In early fifteen forty one, De

(06:09):
Soto demanded that the Chickasaw Nation provide him with hundreds
of porters to help carry his expedition supplies. He also
demanded they supply him with women. This followed months of
escalating tensions between De Soto's expedition and the Chickasaw nation,
including De Soto's execution of two Chickasaw people. So on

(06:29):
March fourth, fifty one, Chickasaw archers attacked De Soto's encampment.
De Soto retreated and regrouped, but the Chickasaw attacked a
second time, ultimately driving De Soto out of the area
entirely in spite of the Chickasaw being heavily outnumbered. As
de Soto's force fled, they left behind all kinds of supplies,

(06:51):
including metal chains that De Soto had brought to shackle
indigenous people with, including captives and people that the Spanish enslaved.
There were also objects like axe heads, nails, and blades
which the Chickasaw recovered from the battlefield and repurposed for
their own use, including reshaping metal objects and tools to

(07:12):
more closely resemble their Chickasaw made counterparts. Those were often
made of bone, stone, or cane. In the words of
lead author Charles Cobb, quote, one of the most stunning
things we found is an exact iron replica of a
Native American stone selt or axe head. I've never seen
anything like this in the Southeast before the US government

(07:33):
removed the Chickasaw Nation from its traditional homeland to what's
now Oklahoma in eighteen thirty seven. This find was part
of archaeological work that started in Mississippi and twif at
a site called Stark Farms, and the research was co
funded by the Chickasaw Nation and it's Chickasaw Explorers Program.

(07:53):
Field work at Stark Farms was initially started in part
to provide an archaeology field work program for Chickasaw University students.
The objects that were described in this paper, which was
published in the journal American Antiquity in July, are being
repatriated to the Chickasaw Nation. All right, let's move on
to some more repatriations. In September, the Metropolitan Museum of

(08:17):
Art announced that it would be returning a tenth century
religious sculpture depicting Lord Shiva to Nepal. Researchers at the
ment realized there were some holes in the sculptures providence
and concluded that it had probably been stolen from Nepal
about fifty years ago. A collection of sixteenth century manuscripts

(08:37):
is being returned to Mexico from the United States after
researchers in Mexico noticed a pattern of colonial era documents
being offered up for sale at US auction houses. Of
Mexican authorities started an investigation after seeing this pattern. These
documents were stolen from Mexico's national archive, possibly in a

(09:00):
a stematic series of thefts. An investigation and repatriation process
was a joint effort involving the Mexican government, the U. S.
Attorney's Office in New York, and homeland security investigations. There
was a formal repatriation ceremony for these documents in September.
A pair of eighteenth century church doors was repatriated from

(09:21):
Japan to Cyprus in September. The panel doors featured paintings
of saints and religious scenes, and they were looted after
Turkey invaded Cyprus in nineteen seventy four. Legal efforts to
have the doors returned had started in the nineteen nineties,
but at first Japanese authorities maintained that they had been
bought in good faith and in our last repatriation before

(09:44):
we take a quick break, the Brooklyn Museum is repatriating
more than thirteen hundred pre Columbian artifacts to Costa Rica.
These have been part of a collection belonging to railroad
magnate Minor Keith, who owned banana plantations in Costa Rica.
When workers on the plantations found artifacts, Keith just kept them.

(10:07):
The museum bought some of the collection. In another part
of the collection was given to the museum as a gift.
Some of these repatriated objects are more than two thousand
years old. And now we'll pause for a quick sponsor break.

(10:31):
Next up, we have a couple of things that aren't
exactly discoveries, but they are papers that have come out
over the last few months, and they relate to how
researchers approached the kind of work that we talked about
on these episodes and the language that we used to
talk about it. We've talked about discoveries made through remote
sensing and noninvasive imaging technologies quite a few times, especially

(10:55):
in the more recent installments of An Earth. This can
be a particularly useful method because it allows researchers to
get a sense of what's under the ground or to
get a clearer picture of the landscape without actually disturbing
the area. But we haven't really talked about the ethics
of this kind of work, and that's something that's discussed
in a paper that was published in the journal Archaeological

(11:18):
Perspection in July. Basically, while it's true that things like
drone photography, satellite imagery, and light detection and ranging or
light are those are all considered non invasive, using them
doesn't eliminate the need for researchers to approach their work
and the communities that they're studying in a respectful and

(11:38):
ethical way. In the words of Penn State doctoral student
Dylan Davis, quote, remote sensing is a tool, and it
can be used for great things, or it can be
used in ways that are extremely harmful. If you do
not communicate what you are trying to do with these
technologies with local communities, especially indigenous communities who may have
been there for hundreds or thousands of years, the research

(12:01):
you put together could tell a narrative that implicates them
in something they're not responsible for. The papers authors also
note that the use of remote sensing doesn't absolve researchers
of the need to get permission from indigenous communities to
study their sacred spaces, even if they're not physically entering
those spaces. Researchers using these technologies should also be aware

(12:25):
of how their research could impact communities who are living
in or connected to the spaces that are being studied
through remote imaging and for the other paper. Something else
that we've talked about in several previous episodes of the
show is that race is socially constructed. Race and racism
have had and continue to have real and dramatic effects

(12:47):
on the world and on people's lives, but they're not
actually based on biology. That can make it difficult to
talk about research in a precise and accurate way, especially
when that research is on the physical remains of people
whose identities we don't necessarily know. In some cases, researchers
have tried to frame their work in terms of people's

(13:08):
places of origin rather than racial categories. So, as a
hypothetical example, a researcher describing remains that were found in
a burial site might say that they were people of
African descent rather than saying that they were black, in
an effort to be more precise, but this may not
be accurate either. Research published in the journal Biology examined

(13:32):
the papers that were published in the journal of forensic
sciences between two thousand nine and twenty nineteen. So the
focus here was on forensic anthropology, but the same concepts
exist in other fields as well. Researchers evaluated papers that
referenced things like ancestry and race to see if their
authors were using their terminology consistently, and they weren't. In

(13:56):
the words of lead author and Ross, quote, inconsistent term
anology opens the door to confusion, misunderstanding, and misuse within
the discipline. And the teape also found that researchers descriptions
of remains as having an African, European or Asian origin
also were not always correct, and in some cases these

(14:17):
places of origin were basically being used as synonyms for race,
rather than actually correctly saying where a person had come from.
There aren't necessarily any easy answers here, not within a
field like forensic anthropology, or even within something like our podcast,
which is meant for a general audience made up of
people from a variety of backgrounds. In the paper itself,

(14:40):
the authors conclude, quote, we need a fundamental, structural and
thoughtful shift in our paradigm, beginning with hypotheses driven by
meaningful questions and careful selection of informative characters for investigation.
We need a return or rather beginning to investigating real
human biological variation. Next up, we have a couple of

(15:02):
exhimations to talk about. The body of Father Patrick Ryan
was exhumed in July. Father Ryan was a Catholic priest
who died in eighteen seventy eight after contracting yellow fever
while caring for people during a yellow fever epidemic. Once
his coffin was opened, officials detected the presence of arsenic,
which was used pretty often an embalming fluid at the time.

(15:24):
Hazardous materials specialists had to be brought in to transfer
the remains to a newly built casket. A processional carried
the casket to the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul
in Chattanooga, where it was re entombed. Father Ryan has
been given the title Servant of God and his work
is being investigated and researched. In the process of his
possibly being named a saint and our other exhimation this

(15:47):
time around, Historians, history enthusiasts and others in Ireland have
called for the body of Irish Republican leader Michael Collins
to be exhumed. Collins was shot and killed in August
of nineteen two when the convoy he was traveling in
was ambushed. It's generally known that his assailants opposed the
Anglo Irish Treaty of December ninety one, which Collins had

(16:11):
helped negotiate, but beyond that there was no formal inquiry,
so very little is known about exactly what happened or
who actually pulled the trigger. Advocates for exuming his remains
hope that it would yield some new information about his death.
All right, lots of favorites here in Shipwrecked time last

(16:33):
year we talked about a seventeenth century flout discovered in
the Gulf of Finland. Divers had found this wreck while
looking for ships from World War One and World War
Two based on markings on its transom, which were a
picture of a swan and a year. This flout has
now been identified as the Swan built in sixteen thirty six.

(16:53):
Divers also took measurements and photos to make a photogrametric
three D model of the wreck, and they're hoping to
use all of this information to track down more about
the ship. In the written record, a shipwreck in the
Southern Irish Sea, previously believed to be a submarine, has
been identified as the HMS Mercury, which was a mine
sweeper during World War Two that had originally been a

(17:16):
ferry and it sank in nineteen forty after being damaged
one of the minds that it was trying to clear exploded.
The mine had gotten caught in the vessel sweeping gear
and exploded underneath the vessel. This work was carried out
by maritime archaeologists at Bournemouth University and scientists at Bangor
University School of Ocean Sciences. It's part of ongoing work

(17:39):
to try to identify hundreds of rex in the Irish Sea.
Archaeologists working in the Adriatic Sea have confirmed that a
shipwreck discovered there a few years ago is both the
oldest and the best preserved ship in the area, and
it's a somewhat surprising find as well. It's in water
that is only about two and a half meters deep,

(18:00):
but it was not spotted until just a few years ago.
Slovenian archaeologist Milan Eric found it by accidents while anchoring
a boat in Croatia and research started on it back
in This is a wooden merchant vessel that dates back
to about the second century BC. Research on the vessel

(18:20):
required the team to dam off the surrounding area because
the sand the vessel was resting in was so loose
that it kept refilming behind them as they were trying
to dig it out. Once excavation and conservation are complete,
the wreck is planned to be housed in the Loan
Museum and our last shipwreck. Authorities in Finland have retrieved

(18:42):
a carved wooden lion's head from a shipwreck on the seafloor.
This is pretty unusual and Finland shipwrecks are protected. Normally,
artifacts are documented through photography and measurements are taken, but
otherwise everything stays underwater, sort of similar to that first
shipwreck that we talked about, the seventeenth century Flout, but

(19:02):
in this case, the lion's face had fallen off the
beam that would have been used to operate the ship's anchors.
This beam was called a cathead because it was often
decorated with the face of some kind of cat. This
face had been attached back in two thousand five when
divers visited the site, but when they went back this
year it had fallen off, and so the decision was

(19:23):
made to bring it up. All right, Now we're going
to move on to some other things that are sunken
or just otherwise underwater, but for the most part these
are not shipwrecks. So first up, underwater teams have been
working at the sunken city of Toni's Heracleon. The city
was initially built on the Nile Delta about twenty seven
hundred years ago, on small pieces of land connected by

(19:44):
bridges and ferries. At one point, it was Egypt's largest port,
but it eventually sank due to a combination of factors
including earthquakes, tidal ways, and liquid faction of the land
that it was resting on. Parts of the city disappeared
around the second century BEAST and then the rest around
the eighth century C. The remains of the city were

(20:05):
discovered around the year two thousand, and At this point,
only about three percent of the area has been explored.
Recent finds at the site include a military vessel which
apparently sank while being loaded with huge stone blocks in
the second century b c. E Divers also found wicker
baskets filled with fruits, particularly with doom, which is a

(20:27):
fruit of an African palm tree. These baskets appear to
date back to the fourth century b c e. And
they may have been part of a funerary offering. The
baskets were found in the same general area as a
large burial mound that was also home to Greek funerary offerings.
A Roman road was found submerged in part of the

(20:47):
Venice Lagoon known as Traporti Channel. This doesn't just illustrate
one of the areas of the lagoon that used to
be accessible by land, it also suggests that there were
Roman settlements in the area centuries before the city of
Ennis was established. This research was conducted using sonar and
they found evidence of twelve structures that would have been

(21:07):
aligned along this road. One of the structures may have
been a dock, suggesting that this road was situated on
a sandy ridge that lay at the time along the lagoon,
but now it's under it. Researchers from the University of
Burn have dated underwater piles in Lake Orid in the Balkans,
believed to be the oldest lake in Europe. This research

(21:30):
involved the underwater remnants of about eight hundred piles, which
would have supported the houses and other structures built on
the lake. These piles are exceptionally well preserved thanks to
the lack of oxygen at the bottom of the lake,
and the oldest date back to the middle of the
fifth millennium BC, but this site seems to have been
used for thousands of years, with settlements essentially being built

(21:53):
on top of one another. The remains of these pile
dwellings are the only ones from the Neolithic period in
this region to be so well preserved, and research done
in the area suggests that this was home to Europe's
first farmers. Let's take a real quick sponsor break before
we move on to some royal residences. Like I said

(22:23):
before the break, we've got a couple of fines now
that are related to royal residences. First, the Nara National
Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Japan has excavated a
ruin from the Hejokio Palace that they believed to have
been the residence of Emperor cocin So, the female emperor

(22:44):
who ruled in the eighth century. They unearthed the footprints
of a rectangular structure that was dotted with about fifty pits.
These pits would have held the pillars that supported the structure.
They believe that this structure was in use for about
twenty years and a team from the Royal Agricultural University

(23:04):
and Wessex Archaeology have found an Early English cave house
dating back to about the ninth century. The cave is
cut from sandstone with windows and supporting pillars, and there's
some speculation that it belonged to King Ardwolf, who ruled
Northumbria until eight oh six and was later canonized as St. Rdulf.
He was buried not far away from the cave house

(23:26):
after his death. Moving on to some books and documents,
in ten Michael Richardson from the University of Bristol's Special
Collections Library found seven parchment pieces from a very old
manuscript telling the story of Merlin the Magician. These had
been used as binding materials for four other volumes that

(23:49):
were published around the turn of the sixteenth century. It's
not clear exactly why these fragments were used as binding material,
but it was incredibly commend to repurpose parchment and paper
from books and other materials once they were considered old
or obsolete or otherwise no longer needed, reduced, reused, recycle uh.

(24:12):
These fragments are from an early thirteenth century Old French
sequence known as the Vulga Cycle or the Lancelot g
Reel cycle, and it's possible that they were one of
the inspirations for Sir Thomas Mallory's Lemore d'artur. It's also
possible that Mallory's work is what led to these pieces
of parchment being thought of as better suited for the
scrap pile than for reading. Anymore, they may have been

(24:34):
seen as more or less obsolete in light of Mallory's
work being available. These fragments were dated to the early hundreds,
and the text itself was probably written between twelve twenty
and twelve twenty five, so this is one of the
earliest known copies of this text. In July, an English
translation of this material was published as The Bristol Merlin

(24:57):
Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment. In addition to
the translation, this book includes full color images of the
seven parchment fragments. According to researchers at Yale University, a
map known as the Vinland Map, which is supposedly a
fifteenth century map detailing the northeastern coast of North America,
it's really a twentieth century fake. Yale first announced the

(25:21):
discovery of the map in nineteen sixty five, and from
there people started pointing to it as evidence that the
Norse arrived in North America well before Christopher Columbus's two voyage.
There were definitely Norse settlements on what's now Newfoundland that
predated Columbus's voyage, so the maps in authenticity does not
undo all of that. It also appears that this map

(25:44):
was intentionally created to be deceptive. It was made from
pages that were repurposed from a fifteenth century volume called
the Speculum Historiale and had a Latin inscription on the
back written over book binders and stractions about how to
bind that volume. This overwritten note contained some instructions for

(26:05):
binding the map into the Speculum Historiale. It's likely that
the forged map was drawn on the Speculum Historiale's blank
in sheets, and then those were removed and bound into
another volume that was a copy of the Tartar Relation.
Both of these volumes were ultimately in the Yale collection,
and researchers had access to both of them for as

(26:27):
long as they needed to do this research. There were
already questions about the maps authenticity Before this point, and
earlier research had suggested that modern inks were present in
at least some parts of the map, but this research
examined all of the inc used on the map, finding
that it contained a form of titanium dioxide that was
not used commercially until the nineteen twenties. They didn't find

(26:51):
evidence of the substances that would have been in fifteen
century inks like iron, sulfur or copper, and last up
in the documents and books. A signer's copy of the
Declaration of Independence, which was found in an attic in Scotland,
was sold at auction in July, with the buyer paying
more than four million dollars for it. This copy had

(27:14):
originally been presented to signer Charles Carroll, and from there
it was passed down through family in Scotland before being
found by Edinburgh based auctioneers Lion in Turnbull. This is
one of two hundred and one copies that were commissioned
by John Quincy Adams, who at the time was Secretary
of State, and printed by William Stone, with only forty

(27:35):
eight of them known to still exist today. It is
the last copy known to be in private hands. The
buyer was the family of George E. Norcross, the Third,
who planned to preserve the document before putting it on
display at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. Next up,
we have three different fines, all of which are trees

(27:57):
that they are three completely different types of trees. First,
research into the family tree of Leonardo da Vinci has
traced twenty one generations of the family, including five family
branches and fourteen living descendants. The tree begins with Leonardo's ancestor, Michelle,
born in thirteen thirty one, and traces the family's lineage

(28:20):
through nearly seven hundred years. This work has been going
on for the last decade. This research contributes to an
affiliated project, the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, which is
an international project with a goal of determining whether remains
reported to be Leonardo's really are his. This work could
also help confirm whether artwork attributed to Leonardo really was

(28:43):
his creation by evaluating any DNA the artist left behind
while working on it. And our second tree, an excavation
in China's Sichuan Province has unearthed a shoe culture sacred
tree made of bronze. This tree is truly a shin
dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century BC, and
it's also really really intricate. There are flowers, fruits, and

(29:06):
a solar wheel ornament branching off of a trunk that
is held up by a three legged base. It is
so large and complex, and there were so many other
ivory artifacts and other items in the same area that
it took four months to fully excavate it. At some
point experts will probably try to reassemble it, but right

(29:28):
now the priority is excavating the other sacrificial pits that
are part of this complex. There have also been other
bronze sacred trees excavated from these pits, and it is
possible that they all belong to one connected piece and
our third tree find Researchers at the Tree Ring Laboratory
at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory are studying the

(29:52):
United States old growth forests by examining the joists and
beams that were cut from those old growth for pists
and used to build New York City. In this case,
they're the ones that were used to build Terminal Warehouse
in Chelsea in eight one, which were removed during renovations
in twenty nineteen. This work has been spearheaded by Edward Cook,

(30:14):
head of the Tree Ring Lab, whose other research included
studying the timber used to make old houses and a
wooden sloop. The timbers they found at Terminal Warehouse include
long leaf pine that was at least one fifty years
old when it was cut, with most of the trees
having been cut down in eight when the warehouse was built,

(30:35):
or not long before then. The oldest of the trees
had sprouted all the way back in fifteen twelve, and
most of them had started growing sometime in the early
seventeenth to mid eighteenth century. The team compared these timbers
to previous research into long leaf pines they're growing today,
including stands in the southeastern United States, and they found

(30:58):
that the likely source for these specific timbers was eastern Alabama,
not far from the Georgia border, maybe even into Georgia.
Of course, the oldest would frame buildings in New York
used timber that was way closer to New York, but
by the nineteenth century most of those forests had been
cut down and New York builders were using wood that

(31:19):
came from a lot farther south. They might have even
figured out exactly where this lumber came from, suggesting that
sample lumber company near Holland's, Alabama was a candidate. Alright,
we're ending this installment of uneartht on the edibles and potables.
First to find near Newport, Pembrokeshire suggests that people in

(31:39):
Wales we're farming dairy as long ago as thirty one
b c e. Decorated pieces of pottery found there contain
residues of dairy fat, possibly buttered or cheese, but researchers
suggested the most likely source is yogurt. This is the
earliest evidence of dairy farming in Wales. I find this
next one both fascinating and kind of gross. Researchers in

(32:06):
Denmark have analyzed the gut contents of a bog body
known as Tall and Man. They found barley, porridge, flax seeds,
and a small amount of fish which had been cooked
in a clay pot to the point of being slightly burned.
I feel kind of and unless this was you know,
what folks actually liked eating, I feel kind of sad

(32:28):
that Tall and Man's last meal was kind of burned.
The team, though, so that these gut contents were so
well preserved that they could probably recreate the recipe for
this meal if they wanted. Isotope studies into the remains
of people who died in the seaside town of Herculaneum
when Vesuvius erupted in sevent have added more detail to

(32:50):
what researchers already knew about their diets. Earlier archaeological work
had uncovered evidence of fish, shellfish, olives, cherries, peaches, lentils,
and beans, but these isotopic studies suggested that nearly a
quarter of the protein in these people's diets came from fish.
That's about three times more than the typical diet of

(33:10):
people living in the area today, and more than ten
percent of their calories came from olive oil. That lined
up with previous estimates that Romans diets contained about twenty
liters of olive oil annually. Some of the news coverage
of this research made me laugh really hard, because instead

(33:30):
of framing it like what we just said, it was
more like, Uh, people in the ancient Roman town of
Herculaneum ate a lot of fish in olive oil. And
I was like, no, really, really, are you telling me
people on a coastal town in a place that is
known for its olives, or eating fish and olive oil.

(33:51):
What uh any the reasons was a lot more specific
and interesting than that, And also there was some suggestion
that people diets varied according to their gender, with men
generally eating more cereals and seafood than women did. This
was not universally true among every single set of remains

(34:11):
that they studied, and it's also not clear exactly what
might have led to this difference. It could have been
something as simple as men being more directly involved in
fishing and eating some of their catch to sustain themselves
while they were at it. Moving on to a potable
researchers in China have found evidence of some of the
earliest known beer consumption, probably done as part of rituals

(34:35):
to honor the dead. This came from a study of
nine thousand year old pots from a mound that contained
two human skeletons, as well as pits containing pottery vessels.
Some of the vessels were painted and may also be
some of the earliest known painted pottery in the world.
Seven of the vessels found at the site were long
necked pots that were known to be used to drink

(34:57):
alcohol in later eras. So to confirm that these earlier
pots were also used for the same purpose, researchers tested
the residues inside them. They found starches, molds, and yeast
which lined up with residues from fermenting beer. In this case,
the beer was probably made from fermenting rice, grain and tours.

(35:19):
And for our last food find and our last find
for this installment of Unearthed, remember that Thermapoleon we talked
about last year, that hot food Kiosk and Pompeii that
was decorated with pictures of mallards, a rooster and a
dog and a dog that I was worried about, but
everybody said it was okay. Well, it opened to the
public for viewing in August, so we can all go

(35:42):
see the dog and know that he was protecting the food. Yes,
once international travel is a little safer than it seems
to be right now. Uh So that's our Unearthed for October.
We'll be back with some more of this. I am
anticipating that the Year and Unearthed will probably not be

(36:03):
the very very first two episodes in January, just because
of how at this moment it looks like our year
end time off is going to fall, so same thing happened.
I feel like this year probably happened again. So do
not fret if the very first episode of January is
not unearthed and you're really looking forward to it, it
will be along there coming it is uh. And I

(36:27):
have an email from Lizzie uh. And this is another
email about Alistair Crowley. Uh. Lizzie wrote to say, hello,
my dear historians, always delighted to have a new episode.
And I had my finger on the trigger to write
you over bodium, but then you went even more local
to me. And this is something I know from local lore.

(36:49):
Mr Alistair Crowley is said to have cursed our dear
town of Hastings. I believe he was educated here for
a while, and this might have even been where he
was ill as a child. In any case, just to
go with the way it's told, and not to site
sources or look anything up, just to serve up oral
history folklore to you direct from Hastings. He left, traveled

(37:12):
all over the world, had all of his hedonistic adventures
and wizard battles and what have you, only to end
up back in dear old Hastings, an old and sick man.
When he died here he declared something to the effect
of once you stay in Hastings, you die there. I
interpret it as something more akin to talking about his

(37:33):
own condition, But he was so frightening to people. I
can imagine talking of this curse could easily go from
talking about himself feeling cursed, maybe as a result of
one of those magic battles. Who knows or what have
you too. It's seeming to be a declaration on the
town itself. The town is really lovely, and I can
imagine people would return here to live in retirement, so

(37:55):
who knows. I certainly haven't escaped it yet. The sad
thing is there was a pub on the site of
the home he died in, but it was recently demolished
and leave a small gatehouse building remains and maybe the
side of his death, and the pub was in the
main house, set further back from the road, and just
enjoyed the notoriety for its marketing. I've heard a lot
of accounts of it, and despite being something of a

(38:17):
folklore scholar and really enjoying digging into the history of
other places and stories, this one is so close to home,
as in my roots to and from places I will
literally go past that building very regularly. I rather enjoy
keeping it all a mystery and living in this folkloric moment. Anyway,
I thought this might give you a smile to the
people of Hastings still talk about his curse regularly, and
his memory very much lives on here. Lizzie, I love

(38:41):
this story. I would also probably be reluctant to go
try to dig up whether a particular piece of local
lore was really a true thing or not. Uh if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast where History podcast i heart radio dot com.

(39:01):
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(39:22):
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