April 20, 2022 • 35 mins
This second part of our spring Unearthed! two-parter covers some listener-favorite categories: edibles and potables, books and letters, shipwrecks, and a bit of potpourri.
Research:
- AFP. “Chile's National Museum Of Natural History To Return Easter Island 'Head'.” Archaeology News Network. 2/21/2022. https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2022/02/chiles-national-museum-of-natural.html
- AFP. “Nigeria Returns Two Stolen Benin Bronzes To Traditional Royal Palace.” Archaeology News Network. 2/21/2022. https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2022/02/nigeria-returns-two-stolen-benin.html
- Agence France-Presse. “17 Pre-Columbian Artifacts Returned to Mexico.” VOA News. 2/21/2022. https://www.voanews.com/a/pre-columbian-artifacts-returned-to-mexico/6451918.html
- Alex, Bridget. “Archaeologists uncover oldest ochre workshop in East Asia.” Science. 3/2/2022. https://www.science.org/content/article/archaeologists-uncover-oldest-ochre-workshop-east-asia
- Amaral, Brian. “Australian researchers defend finding of Captain Cook’s ship in R.I.: ‘Right where we said it was’.” Boston Globe. 2/4/2022. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/02/04/metro/right-where-we-said-it-was-finding-captain-cooks-ship-ri-waters-makes-waves-among-researchers/?event=event12
- Associated Press. “More possible victims of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre found in mass grave.” AL.com. 3/3/2022. https://www.al.com/news/2022/03/more-possible-victims-of-1921-tulsa-race-massacre-found-in-mass-grave.html
- Australian National University. “Mysterious, giant stone jars found in India.” Phys.org. 3/30/2022. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-mysterious-giant-stone-jars-india.html
- Barras, Colin. “Ancient smells reveal secrets of Egyptian tomb.” Nature. 3/31/2022. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00903-z
- BBC. “Bedfordshire A428 dig: Evidence of Roman beer production found.” 3/30/2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-60932382
- Bower, Bruce. “Ancient seafarers built the Mediterranean’s largest known sacred pool.” Science News. 3/16/2022. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sacred-pool-ancient-seafarers-phoenicians-largest-mediterranean
- Bower, Bruce. “The world’s oldest pants stitched together cultures from across Asia.” Science News. 2/18/2022. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/pants-oldest-ancient-horseman-asia-culture-origin
- Burke, Minyvonne. “Wreckage of 207-year-old whaling ship found on seafloor of Gulf of Mexico.” 3/23/2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wreckage-207-year-old-whaling-ship-found-seafloor-gulf-mexico-rcna21189
- Cambridge University Press. “Oldest known drinking straws identified.” Phys.org. 1/19/2022. https://phys.org/news/2022-01-oldest-straws.html
- CBS/AFP. “U.S. returns gold treasure looted from 1746 shipwreck and skull stolen from Parisian catacombs to France.” 3/4/2022. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-returns-gold-treasure-skull-to-france/
- Cramer, Maria. “Scotland Apologizes for History of Witchcraft Persecution.” New York Times. 3/9/2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/world/europe/scotland-nicola-sturgeon-apologizes-witches.html
- Deutsches Archaologisches Institut. “4000 year old boat salvaged near the ancient city of Uruk.” 3/28/2022. https://www.dainst.org/en/dai/meldungen/-/asset_publisher/nZcCAiLqg1db/content/4000-jahre-altes-boot-bei-der-antiken-stadt-uruk-notgeborgen
- Dijkstra, Mischa. “Ancient art and genetics combine to reveal origin of world's most expensive spice.” EurekAlert. 3/8/2022. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/945749
- El-Aref, Nevine. “The Largest Embalming Cache Ever Found In
Mark as Played
Transcript
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 I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This is
part two of our Unearthed episode for the first three
months of two where we talk about things that have
(00:23):
been literally and figuratively unearthed. This time around, we have
some edibles and potables. You have some shipwrecks, got some
other stuff. We're going to start off with that catch
all category of pot poury for some things that I
found and that we're interesting but did not have success
categorizing into a unified hole. So the first of those.
(00:46):
In March, Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, apologized on behalf
of the government for the nation's witch hunts that took
place between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearly four thousand
people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland during those centuries,
the vast majority of them women. Many of the accused
were tortured, and about two thirds of them were executed.
(01:10):
In a statement before Parliament, Sturdon said, in part quote,
as first Minister on behalf of the Scottish government, I
am choosing to acknowledge that egregious historic injustice and extend
a formal posthumous apology to all those accused, convicted, vilified,
or executed under the Witchcraft Act of fifteen sixty three.
Next up, archaeologists in Switzerland believe they have found the
(01:33):
remains of one of the last Roman gladiator arenas ever constructed.
This find came during construction of a new boat house.
This arena was shaped like an oval and located in
an abandoned quarry, and the team believes it was built
in the fourth century. In addition to its relative recency,
this would have been on the very outskirts of the
(01:53):
Roman Empire. Finds at the site include two large gates,
the stadium's walls, which of evidence of being plastered, and
evidence of wooden grand stands. In another Roman find, there
are flat bottomed conical pots that were widely used in
the Roman Empire, and there's been some debate about what
they were used for. According to research published in the
(02:17):
Journal of Archaeological Science reports at least some of them
were used as chamber pots, which they determined thanks to
the presence of whip worm eggs and residues that were
on the insides of the pots. Uh if you go
look this up, I will just say I found the
way they described those residues particularly gross. We have talked
(02:39):
about evidence of intestinal parasites in various contexts before on Unearthed,
but this is the first time that they have been
found inside of these Roman ceramic vessels. In anthropologist Alfred
Kroeber wrote that the makmam alone E tribe was quote
extinct for all practical purposes. A conclude san that the
(03:00):
tribes members stridently resisted. The maechma Alonei Tribal Council eventually
embarked on a collaborative research project to trace living members
genetic links to their ancestors in the San Francisco Bay area.
This followed the announcement of a proposed educational facility that
was likely to uncover human remains belonging to maechma Aloney ancestors.
(03:24):
The resulting study was published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, and it found clear genetic connections
between eight present day tribal members and twelve people from
two settlements who lived between the years four nine d
b C and thirteen forty five CE. So this confirms
the Maechma Aloney tribes ancestral connections to what's now the
(03:46):
San Francisco Bay area, and it challenges conclusions from other
archaeological research that used language patterns and artifacts to suggest
that they arrived in the area much more recently, more
like between the five dred and one thousand UM Malecma
Maloney family histories and government and church records had also
(04:07):
contradicted that conclusion that they were more recent in the area.
In addition to this research originally being initiated by the
tribal community, including approving the study design for the genomics research,
tribal members were actively involved in the field work that
was part of this project, including being the primary excavators
any time burial sites were being uncovered. In the words
(04:30):
of study co author Brian Bird Quote, this was a
rare collaborative, community engaged research project, with tribal members and
archaeologists working side by side for more than a year
of field work, resulting in a tremendous repatriation of knowledge
to the descendant community. We're going to talk about this
whole idea a little bit more in the behind the
(04:51):
scenes on Friday. Uh For now, though, we will move
on to some edibles and potables, which are always one
of my favorite categories. According to research published in the
journal Antiquity, some hollow rods that were believed to be
poles for a canopy or maybe some kind of scepter,
might really be five thousand year old drinking straws. This
(05:14):
conclusion is thanks to the discovery of barley residue on
the inside of one of the straws. There are eight
of these. They're pretty long, about a meter long each,
and some of them are decorated with bull figuring. So
the idea is that these very long straws were probably
used to drink beer from communal bulls. I feel like
(05:35):
every t bar that has done like the big large
terreen of cocktail with big straws into it, it was
just re enacting this without knowing it. Moving on, we
know that people have been using the pigment from wild
saffron for at least fifty thousand years. It appears in
(05:58):
cave paintings and what's now a rock. Saffren is also
mentioned in Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian texts, but unlike wild saffron,
domesticated saffron can't reproduce on its own it requires human
help to separate out its underground corms, which are like
little plant bulbs. So there's been some questions when was
(06:18):
saffron both a pigment and a spice, when was that domesticated?
And according to research published in the journal Frontiers Implants Science,
saffron was first domesticated much more recently, about seventeen hundred
years ago in Greece. Researchers came to this conclusion by
looking at Minoan artwork that seems to depict domesticated saffron,
(06:39):
as well as doing research into the plant's genome. Researchers
have found evidence that broomcorn millet was grown in Mesopotamia
much earlier than was previously thought. Millet is typically a
summer crop, but it also needs some rainfall to thrive,
and mesopotamia summers were typically very dry, so millet was
(06:59):
believed to have and introduced only after large scale irrigation
systems were built in the mid first millennium BC. But
a team from Rutgers University has looked at microscopic plant
remains from an archaeological site called Kanamassi, and they found
evidence of millet dating back to before those irrigation systems
(07:20):
were built, so this suggests that local people might have
worked out their own methods for doing irrigation and sustaining
summer crops rather than just following the lead of the
more massive irrigation projects. It seems like we have had
a whole lot of wineries on the last few installments
of an Earth. But this time archaeologists working ahead of
(07:40):
a road project in Bedfordshire, England, have found evidence of
a malting oven and charred spelt grains that have been
allowed to germinate, which were likely used in the brewing
of beer. This oven was found on the site of
a farmstead that's believed to have been used before and
during the Roman era. What they haven't found, at least
not yet, is a facility which would have been needed
(08:02):
to brew them malted grain into beer. Yeah, it's probably
what the grain was used for, but in terms of
where they were doing that, not sure yet. Moving on
back in nineteen o six, the Italian Archaeological Mission found
the tomb of Ka, an architect and his wife Merit
that was near lux Or, and at the time it
(08:23):
was pretty common for archaeologists and researchers to open jars
and other vessels that they found a little bit like
the unwrapping of the mummies that we talked about in
Part one. The team in this case, though, kept the
various mpora and other containers that they found in this
too mostly sealed up, and a lot of them are
still sealed up. So to find out what they contained,
(08:46):
researchers from the University of Pisa have used their smell
I love this me too. They did this by placing
sealed jars and open vessels in sealed plastic bags. After
a few days, they used a mass spectrometer to identify
the volatile molecules that had collected in the bags. They
were able to identify some compounds from two thirds of
(09:09):
the objects they tried to test. They found molecules that
were associated with beeswax, dried fish and fruit, and our
last food fines before we take a quick break. Archaeological
work in San Francisco has unearthed evidence that people were
eating imported Atlantic cod during the gold Rush in the
eighteen fifties. They came to this conclusion after studying eighteen
(09:32):
cod bones and figuring out whether those fish had been
caught from the waters around San Francisco or from somewhere else.
Five of the bones were from Atlantic cod. They were
probably salted and dried before being transported across North America.
This was not entirely surprising. There are invoices and newspapers
(09:53):
from the time that mentioned Atlantic cod, but this is
some physical evidence of the fish itself. This find came
about during archaeological work that was working alongside construction, something
that comes up all the time on on Earth, but
we've never really talked about what that work is like.
Kale Brunner, who worked at the site, described it this way.
Quote compliance work is challenging in a lot of ways
(10:15):
because you don't really get a lot of control over
the excavations, and this case was kind of an extreme
example of that. The field work conditions were overwhelming, and
I was the only archaeologist on site. They were fortunately
only excavating dirt in one location at a time, so
I only had one piece of machinery to be watching,
but we were hitting archaeologically significant material constantly. It was
(10:40):
two years essentially of monitoring that kind of activity and
documenting as rapidly as possible everything that was being uncovered.
We're going to take a quick sponsor break before we
get us some books and letters like the Edibles and Potables.
(11:03):
The books and letters are one of the favorite categories
of mine, and we have a few of those this
time around. First, the University of Lester's Dickens Code project
has been trying to decipher various materials that Charles Dickens
either wrote or dictated in a shorthand system based on britigraphy.
This system combines abbreviations and symbols, and it can be
(11:26):
pretty complex on its own. To make things more complex,
Dickens also changed the system as he was using it.
In the University of Lester offered a prize of three
hundred British pounds to anybody who could decipher a one
page letter that was in the collection of the Morgan Library.
(11:47):
More than one thousand people entered this contest and the
winner was technical support specialist Shane Baggs, who deciphered more
symbols than any other entrant. The second place winner was
cognitive science student Ken Cox. The letter in question pertains
to a dispute between Dickens and The Times of London,
which had rejected an advertisement that Dickens had wanted to run.
(12:11):
Yeah this is even though they named two winners. It
was a collaborative work in a lot of ways, like
there were Reddit communities where people talked about with this
with each other. The university also did a lot of
deciphering workshops online for people who were interested in that
kind of stuff. This project is still ongoing. There's still
more stuff that Dickens wrote that's not decoded. There are
(12:31):
still decoding challenges and resources available. That this prize itself
was I think a one time thing, though. Marcello Bolognari
at the State Archive of Venice has found a will
that suggests that Marco Polo had a previously unknown daughter,
and Yeas and ye C's will was written on July seven,
(12:52):
nineteen and asked her father Marco to deliver it to
the priest notary Pietro Paiano. She named her father, her
husband Nicoletto, and another relative named Stefano as executors. We
really do not know much about and yes a other
than she's a previously unknown daughter of Marco Polo. It
(13:13):
is likely though, that she was dying when she wrote
her will. In addition to those executors that she mentioned,
she also mentions three children, Barbarella, Papin and Franccino. She
also mentions the children's tutor and their grandmother and the
family maid. And yes, it would have been born before
(13:33):
Marco Polo's marriage to do Nata Badoor, with whom he
had three known daughters. But we don't know whether and
yes it was born out of wedlock, or whether Marco
had been married to her mother and perhaps was widowed.
Many question marks. Yeah, but pretty cool that now we
know about a daughter that we didn't know about before.
(13:54):
For our last find in books and letters. Ecologists have
developed models that helped them estimate how many rare species
have been lost based on the survival rates of animals
that are still here, and an international team of researchers
has used that same basic idea to try to figure
out how many medieval manuscripts have survived until today. Their
(14:16):
conclusion was that more than nine of medieval European manuscripts
containing narrative literature has been lost. This actually lines up
with some earlier estimates that used other methods to approach
the same question. This project also involved estimating how many
works have been written in six languages Dutch, French, Icelandic, Irish, English,
(14:40):
and German, and according to their estimates works in some
languages may have fared better than in others. They estimated
that less than thirty nine percent of works in English
have survived, but seventy seven percent and eight of Icelandic
and Irish works did, respectively. One possible reason is that
tended to be more copies of each work in both
(15:02):
Iceland and Ireland, meaning that the work itself was more
likely to survive as the manuscripts containing it were destroyed
or lost or their paper was recycled for some of
their purpose. Possible reasons for the lower survival rates of
works in English, especially works of fiction and English, included
the dissolution of the monasteries and a perception that works
(15:24):
in English weren't as notable or high quality as works
in other languages. The Norman Conquest may have played a
role as well, because when the team looked at works
of fiction that were written in Norman French alongside works
that were written in English, the survival numbers were more
comparable to what they saw in some other languages. This
(15:44):
was published in the journal Science under the title Forgotten
Books The Application of Unseen Species Models to the Survival
of Culture. Moving on to art and architecture. Archaeologists in
Croatia who have been working at a hotel construction site
have found a partial statue believed to depict the goddess Venus.
(16:06):
It's about eighteen hundred years old and made of marble,
and the part that has survived, or at least that
they found at this point, stretches from about the knees
to just below the ribs. I found pictures of this
a little creepy to look at, uh When it was intact,
this was probably about two meters tall, and it's believed
(16:26):
that it used to stand on a pedestal in a villa.
Fragments of what may have been the statues base were
found nearby, and this seems to have been a pretty
wealthy person's villa. Other finds at the site include a
sewage canal, a mosaic covered wall, pottery, luxury tableware, and
marble flooring. In other venus news, although this is a
(16:49):
different type of venus, researchers may have figured out the
origin of an eleven centimeter figuring of a woman known
as the Villendorf Venus, named after Villendorf, Austria, where it
was found in nineteen o eight. This figuring is about
thirty thousand years old, and it is made from olite,
which isn't found in the area. After making high resolution
(17:10):
tomographic images of the figurine and using micro computed tomography
to look at its interior, they concluded that it likely
came from northern Italy, although they're similar material that doesn't
quite match up as well in parts of Ukraine. Their
findings suggested the venus or the material it was carved from,
traveled either around or over the Alps to get from
(17:32):
Italy to Austria, demonstrating just how mobile people could be
thirty thousand years ago. There's a whole category of figurines
from this time period that usually are depictions of women.
They're grouped together as venuses. Next up, art historian Christopher
(17:52):
Wright bought a painting in London for sixty five pounds
in nine seventy, believing that it was a copy of
a painting by Flemish Baroque artist and Tune van Dyke.
New research, though, has suggested that it might actually be
the real thing and not a copy. The work in
question is a portrait of Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of
(18:14):
Austria and a friend who saw it suggested that Wright
might want to have it evaluated after noticing that the
hands and the painting had been painted particularly well. That
was something that suggested that it might really be Van
Dyke's own work and not a copy. This identification has
come after a three year study and restoration of the artwork,
(18:35):
but it's still considered to be tentative. It's not confirmed yet.
For our last find, archaeologists have found what maybe the
oldest ochre workshop in East Asia. This site dates back
about forty thousand years and it includes evidence of a fire,
nearly four hundred stone artifacts and chunks of ochre. Although
(18:56):
we've usually talked about ochre in connection with rock paintings
and other artwork, it's not entirely clear what this particular
ochre may have been used for. Paleolithic people's may have
also used it as a sunscreen or an insect repellent,
or even as an ingredient in making adhesives. Now moving on,
we have four different finds that were all made from stone. First,
(19:20):
a team from the University of Aberdeen has found a
large stone covered in Pictish symbols. This is one of
about two hundred known Pictish symbol stones that probably dates
back to the fifth or sixth century. A lot of
the stones that have been unearthed so far were unearthed accidentally,
like a farmer uncovered it while plowing, which means that
(19:42):
the area around the stone has usually been pretty heavily
disturbed by the time archaeologists have gotten there. In this case, though,
they found this stone as part of an organized study
that started after noninvasive imaging suggested that there might be
evidence of a settlement in this area. There's a lot
more for archaeologists to be able to go through in
(20:03):
that earth that hasn't been disturbed yet, so this slab
now has been taken to a conservation lab in Edinburgh
for further study. Back in archaeologists found a round carved
stone in East Yorkshire, but to find wasn't announced until
February of this year. This was carved from chalk and
it's roughly shaped like a drum. It resembles three other
(20:26):
similar carvings, known as the Folkton Drums, which were found
about fifteen miles away back in nine so this carving
is about five thousand years old. It was found alongside
the remains of three children and there are three small
holes carved into the top of this thing that they're
calling a drum. Researchers believe there's three holes may somehow
(20:49):
represent the three children that this was apparently buried with.
Research into the children's remains is still ongoing, including determining
whether they are related to one another. A lot of
pictures of the include a bone pin that was found
in the same place that looks almost like a drumstick.
(21:09):
It's not a drumstick. If you feel like at pictures
it makes it look like this was literally a drum
that people played like an instrument. It's it's a carved
rock that is shaped a lot like a snare drum.
In other news, researchers have documented sixty five large sandstone
jars across four sites in Assam, India. These jars are
(21:30):
probably at least years old, and they resemble jars that
have been found in Laos and Indonesia. The region of Laos,
known as the Plane of Jars, has thousands of them.
Systematic research into these jars in India started in about
and research published in March Documents a survey that was
done in Although researchers worked with local communities to find
(21:54):
these jars, the people who are living in the area
today are not the same ethnic group as the people
who would have made these jars more than two thousand
years ago. There's a lot that is still unknown about them.
Local people have described finding jars that still contained what
looked like cremated remains, so it's possible that they had
a funerary purpose. And our last stone item before we
(22:17):
take a break, archaeologists in Oman have found a four
thousand year old stone board game. The slab is carved
into a grid and it has holes that people may
have used to keep their game pieces in. That's the
like the most logical use for the little holes. We're
going to take a quick sponsor break and then be
(22:38):
back with some shipwrecks. We're gonna close out this installment
of Unearthed with a whole bunch of shipwrecks that were
not Shackleton's Endurance, because we talked about that already first.
(22:58):
In February, the Australian National Maritime Museum announced that a
shipwreck at underwater archaeological site r I two three nine
four is His Majesty's Bark Endeavor, which Captain James Cook
took to the South Pacific in the eighteenth century after
Cook's voyage, the ship was sold and later on the
(23:21):
British Royal Navy used it to transport Hessian mercenaries during
the American Revolution. It was renamed the Lord Sandwich and
it later became a prison ship, and in seventeen seventy
eight the British scuttled it and twelve other ships in
an attempt to black Newport Harbor in Rhode Island. Various
(23:41):
divers and underwater archaeologists have thought this wreck was the
Endeavor for years, but when the Australian National Maritime Museum
made its announcement, researchers from the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology
Project immediately expressed doubts. Researcher Cathy Abbess, who works with
the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, also said the Australian
(24:01):
Museum's announcement was a breach of the contract it had
in place with the archaeology Project. Meanwhile, a researcher with
the museum said that contract had expired back in November. Yeah,
there were a lot of news articles about this report
and then also a lot of news articles about the
argument about the report. It is not the first time
(24:22):
that doubts have been raised about wreckage that had been
identified as coming from the Endeavor, though part of a
ship's stern post that was sent to space aboard the
Space Shuttle Endeavor later turned out to definitely be from
a totally different ship. Whoops, the face that you made
was amazing. Um. This dispute seems to be unresolved as
(24:48):
of when we're recording this. This is also an example
of how some recks can be challenging to identify. Shackleton's
Endurance had the name Endurance clearly visible, which made it
pretty obvious, but only about of this wreck is still there,
so the identification is based on the location and size
of the wreck. A comparison of surviving pieces to records
(25:09):
of the Endeavor and would samples that suggests that it
was built in Europe, not the United States. Moving on,
marine archaeologists working off the western coast of Sweden have
found the previously unknown wreckage of a medieval cog that
is a style of ship that was common after about
the twelfth century. This is believed to be one of
(25:32):
the oldest cogs found so far in Europe. According to
analysis of the tree rings and the lumber, it was
made from oaks that were cut down between twelve thirty
three and twelve forty. Seams in between the ship's planks
were sealed with moss, which was pretty typical for this
type of vessel. There's also some evidence that there was
(25:52):
a fire aboard. That's not clear what the cause of
the fire was, but it may have been a factor
in why this boat sank. Researchers have been studying sheep, pig,
and cow bones from shipwrecks off the coast of Western
Australia to try to learn more about how they've changed
through long term exposure to the sea. They've studied bones
(26:12):
from four underwater archaeological sites, one being the wreck of
the Batavia, which we have talked about on the show before.
The bones the team has been studying have been submerged
in the water or buried in sediment for more than
a hundred years, and it's hoped that what they've learned
can be applied to the study of bones from other
wrecks in the future. So far, they've identified a set
(26:33):
of what they've called geochemical fingerprints that helped trace the
changes that happened to skeletal remains over time. They've also
studied how single celled organisms dissolved the spaces inside submerged bones,
and they've analyzed how bones can be eroded by things
like bacteria and barnacles. According to research published in a
(26:55):
Journal of Archaeological Science, reports, timbers from a shipwreck that
was unearthed in a storm in eighteen sixty three are
probably from a ship known as the Sparrow Hawk, which
was driven aground during a storm in sixteen twenty six.
The Sparrow Hawk has been believed to be the source
of these timbers for quite some time, based on where
on Cape cod the wreckage was found and how historical
(27:18):
documents described the location of the wreck, but this is
the most conclusive evidence so far to back that identification.
Up Tree ring data and radiocarbon dating suggests that the
timbers used to build the boat were cut down in
southern England between fifteen fifty six in sixteen forty six.
The timbers are currently in storage at Pilgrim Hall Museum
(27:39):
in Plymouth, Massachusetts. A recovery operation is ongoing in Majorca
at a site known as the se Fontinelle Wreck. This
ship think about sevent dred years ago, probably while it
was anchored in the Bay of Palma, and it was
carrying a load of m for a that were filled
with things like olive oil and why and fermented fish sauce.
(28:02):
And then it was mostly buried in the sand until
about three years ago when it emerged during a storm.
Since this wreck was covered up for most of that time,
most of the cargo has remained untouched and is in
pretty good condition. The inscriptions are still visible on some
of the jars. In March, it was reported that divers
had brought up about three hundred amphora and other objects,
(28:25):
including a leather shoe, an oil lamp, a cooking pot,
and one of only a handful of Roman carpenter's drills
that has been found in the region. But team is
at work trying to figure out how to recover the
wreck itself, which is only about fifty meters off of
a popular beach. Wreckage of a two hundred seven year
old whaling ship called the Industry has been found in
(28:47):
the Gulf of Mexico. The ship sank in a storm
on May eighteen, thirty six. This is the only whaling
vessel to have been lost in the Gulf of Mexico
between the seventeen eighties and the eighteen seventies. Yeah, a
lot of vessels were lost during those years, but not
necessarily in this spot. And according to news reporting from
(29:08):
the time, another whaling vessel rescued the crew, who later
returned to Westport, Massachusetts. And if that town name sounds familiar,
it maybe because that was the home of previous podcast subject,
Paul Cuffey. Cuffey's son William was a navigator on the
industry and his son in law, Pardon Cook, was one
of the ship's officers. We got several notes from listeners
(29:32):
about this one. Archaeologists in Iraq have excavated a four
thousand year old boat near the ancient city of Uruk.
The boat was made from plant material like wood, palm leaves,
or reads, which is then totally covered in bitumen. The
plant material is gone now only its imprints are left
behind in the bitumen, but the bitumen covering is still there.
(29:53):
It's the cool way to make a boat, right, I
like it's This boat is about seven meters long and
one point four meters wide, and part of it had
been exposed through erosion. Nearby traffic was making that erosion
worse and that's what led to the decision to excavate
and preserve the boat. It has been taken to the
(30:14):
Iraq Museum in Baghdad with the goal of preserving it
and eventually putting it on display. And now for something
shipwreck adjacent. The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers has
been deepening the Savannah River Channel at Savannah Harbor, and
as part of that process they have pulled twelve Revolutionary
War eric cannons up from the floor. That's in addition
(30:36):
to three that were previously hauled up about a year ago.
At first, it was believed that these three cannons might
have been from the HMS Rose, which the British scuttled
to try to block the Savannah River Channel during the
Revolutionary War, but the research later confirmed the rows had
been sunk further upstream and that its cannons had been
(30:56):
removed first. So work is still ongoing to try to
match these particular cannons to any specific wreck and on
one last sort of random thing to end on, an
international interdisciplinary team has analyzed a pair of three thousand
year old trousers found in China's to Rim Basin. These
were found on a naturally mummified body known as the
(31:19):
turfin man, and they have been described as the world's
oldest pants. It turns out that a lot went into
making them. Making these pants required three different weaving techniques,
one that reinforced the knees, another that created a thicker waistband,
and a third that gave the crotch and seats some stretch.
The pants are also decorative, covered in zigzag stripes and
(31:42):
geometric patterns. All this together suggests that the weavers who
were dressing the turf and man had far reaching connections
through nomadic herders and traders. Similar weaving and decorative patterns
are found in far flung parts of Asia at about
the same time. Yeah, if you're imagining that that law
long ago, people's pants would involve just like hacking something together.
(32:05):
He looked like they were very functional, very specifically designed
to be well suited to somebody who rode on a
horse a lot of the time. Uh, pretty cool, They
are cool. It's I um. I think of them very
similar to the way you see like sometimes they're called
(32:25):
tech pants or skate pants today, where it's like there
will be a little extra quilting in areas where you
may hit things, or like I think This would be
a great, um, fun and weird project if you wanted
to do a little historical stitching make your version of
Turf and Man's Pants. Sounds good to me. It's on
my list us. That's our Unearthed for this quarter of
(32:51):
the year. We will be back towards the summertime with
some more. In the meantime, I have some listener mail.
It's from Jenna. It's about an episode that how we researched,
but it's about something that I said, so it's sort
of is a bridge. Uh. Jenna wrote, Hello, Tracy and Holly.
I recently wrote about Caesar Salad, and I have another
(33:12):
story that will hopefully give you a chuckle. Like many.
I also read Tests of the Derbervilles in my sophomore
high school class. Every person in the class read it
and discussed it, but we hated it so much, and
we're apparently convincing enough in our opinions that the teacher
removed it from the curriculum for the next year. I
don't remember much about it except that I disliked it
(33:33):
and thought Tess was a flat uninteresting character. Hopefully Tracy
isn't too jealous of our success. Here's more picks of
my cats because they're the best, and I know how
much you guys love many panthers. Best Jenna p. S.
I was just at Disney World and thought of you guys,
especially Holly while on the Haunted Mansion. Until death do
us part um. Thank you, Jennifer this. The subject line
(33:55):
of this email was test of the Dunkervilles, which made
me laugh a lot. Um And also, man, I I
love that this class was able to convince a teacher
to make a change to the curriculum, because I still
am like, what what was I supposed to get out
of reading tests at the Durbervilles in the tenth grade
(34:16):
that could not have been achieved by reading something that
maybe felt more relevant to a tenth grader in northwest
North Carolina in or whatever year that was. Uh So, anyway,
thanks so much for this, and thank you for the
(34:36):
cat pictures. I just sort of feel like anytime somebody
sends us pictures of their of their black cats, their
cats and my cats are friends. I just like mentally,
in my in my head, my cats are friends with
all other black cats. So thank you for that. Um.
(34:59):
If you would to write to us about this or
any other podcast or at History podcast at i heeart
radio dot com. You can also follow us on social
media where at Missed in History. That's where you'll find
find us on Facebook, Twitter, pintereston Instagram. You can subscribe
to our show on the I heart Radio app or
(35:21):
wherever you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This is
part two of our Unearthed episode for the first three
months of two where we talk about things that have
(00:23):
been literally and figuratively unearthed. This time around, we have
some edibles and potables. You have some shipwrecks, got some
other stuff. We're going to start off with that catch
all category of pot poury for some things that I
found and that we're interesting but did not have success
categorizing into a unified hole. So the first of those.
(00:46):
In March, Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, apologized on behalf
of the government for the nation's witch hunts that took
place between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearly four thousand
people were accused of witchcraft in Scotland during those centuries,
the vast majority of them women. Many of the accused
were tortured, and about two thirds of them were executed.
(01:10):
In a statement before Parliament, Sturdon said, in part quote,
as first Minister on behalf of the Scottish government, I
am choosing to acknowledge that egregious historic injustice and extend
a formal posthumous apology to all those accused, convicted, vilified,
or executed under the Witchcraft Act of fifteen sixty three.
Next up, archaeologists in Switzerland believe they have found the
(01:33):
remains of one of the last Roman gladiator arenas ever constructed.
This find came during construction of a new boat house.
This arena was shaped like an oval and located in
an abandoned quarry, and the team believes it was built
in the fourth century. In addition to its relative recency,
this would have been on the very outskirts of the
(01:53):
Roman Empire. Finds at the site include two large gates,
the stadium's walls, which of evidence of being plastered, and
evidence of wooden grand stands. In another Roman find, there
are flat bottomed conical pots that were widely used in
the Roman Empire, and there's been some debate about what
they were used for. According to research published in the
(02:17):
Journal of Archaeological Science reports at least some of them
were used as chamber pots, which they determined thanks to
the presence of whip worm eggs and residues that were
on the insides of the pots. Uh if you go
look this up, I will just say I found the
way they described those residues particularly gross. We have talked
(02:39):
about evidence of intestinal parasites in various contexts before on Unearthed,
but this is the first time that they have been
found inside of these Roman ceramic vessels. In anthropologist Alfred
Kroeber wrote that the makmam alone E tribe was quote
extinct for all practical purposes. A conclude san that the
(03:00):
tribes members stridently resisted. The maechma Alonei Tribal Council eventually
embarked on a collaborative research project to trace living members
genetic links to their ancestors in the San Francisco Bay area.
This followed the announcement of a proposed educational facility that
was likely to uncover human remains belonging to maechma Aloney ancestors.
(03:24):
The resulting study was published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, and it found clear genetic connections
between eight present day tribal members and twelve people from
two settlements who lived between the years four nine d
b C and thirteen forty five CE. So this confirms
the Maechma Aloney tribes ancestral connections to what's now the
(03:46):
San Francisco Bay area, and it challenges conclusions from other
archaeological research that used language patterns and artifacts to suggest
that they arrived in the area much more recently, more
like between the five dred and one thousand UM Malecma
Maloney family histories and government and church records had also
(04:07):
contradicted that conclusion that they were more recent in the area.
In addition to this research originally being initiated by the
tribal community, including approving the study design for the genomics research,
tribal members were actively involved in the field work that
was part of this project, including being the primary excavators
any time burial sites were being uncovered. In the words
(04:30):
of study co author Brian Bird Quote, this was a
rare collaborative, community engaged research project, with tribal members and
archaeologists working side by side for more than a year
of field work, resulting in a tremendous repatriation of knowledge
to the descendant community. We're going to talk about this
whole idea a little bit more in the behind the
(04:51):
scenes on Friday. Uh For now, though, we will move
on to some edibles and potables, which are always one
of my favorite categories. According to research published in the
journal Antiquity, some hollow rods that were believed to be
poles for a canopy or maybe some kind of scepter,
might really be five thousand year old drinking straws. This
(05:14):
conclusion is thanks to the discovery of barley residue on
the inside of one of the straws. There are eight
of these. They're pretty long, about a meter long each,
and some of them are decorated with bull figuring. So
the idea is that these very long straws were probably
used to drink beer from communal bulls. I feel like
(05:35):
every t bar that has done like the big large
terreen of cocktail with big straws into it, it was
just re enacting this without knowing it. Moving on, we
know that people have been using the pigment from wild
saffron for at least fifty thousand years. It appears in
(05:58):
cave paintings and what's now a rock. Saffren is also
mentioned in Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian texts, but unlike wild saffron,
domesticated saffron can't reproduce on its own it requires human
help to separate out its underground corms, which are like
little plant bulbs. So there's been some questions when was
(06:18):
saffron both a pigment and a spice, when was that domesticated?
And according to research published in the journal Frontiers Implants Science,
saffron was first domesticated much more recently, about seventeen hundred
years ago in Greece. Researchers came to this conclusion by
looking at Minoan artwork that seems to depict domesticated saffron,
(06:39):
as well as doing research into the plant's genome. Researchers
have found evidence that broomcorn millet was grown in Mesopotamia
much earlier than was previously thought. Millet is typically a
summer crop, but it also needs some rainfall to thrive,
and mesopotamia summers were typically very dry, so millet was
(06:59):
believed to have and introduced only after large scale irrigation
systems were built in the mid first millennium BC. But
a team from Rutgers University has looked at microscopic plant
remains from an archaeological site called Kanamassi, and they found
evidence of millet dating back to before those irrigation systems
(07:20):
were built, so this suggests that local people might have
worked out their own methods for doing irrigation and sustaining
summer crops rather than just following the lead of the
more massive irrigation projects. It seems like we have had
a whole lot of wineries on the last few installments
of an Earth. But this time archaeologists working ahead of
(07:40):
a road project in Bedfordshire, England, have found evidence of
a malting oven and charred spelt grains that have been
allowed to germinate, which were likely used in the brewing
of beer. This oven was found on the site of
a farmstead that's believed to have been used before and
during the Roman era. What they haven't found, at least
not yet, is a facility which would have been needed
(08:02):
to brew them malted grain into beer. Yeah, it's probably
what the grain was used for, but in terms of
where they were doing that, not sure yet. Moving on
back in nineteen o six, the Italian Archaeological Mission found
the tomb of Ka, an architect and his wife Merit
that was near lux Or, and at the time it
(08:23):
was pretty common for archaeologists and researchers to open jars
and other vessels that they found a little bit like
the unwrapping of the mummies that we talked about in
Part one. The team in this case, though, kept the
various mpora and other containers that they found in this
too mostly sealed up, and a lot of them are
still sealed up. So to find out what they contained,
(08:46):
researchers from the University of Pisa have used their smell
I love this me too. They did this by placing
sealed jars and open vessels in sealed plastic bags. After
a few days, they used a mass spectrometer to identify
the volatile molecules that had collected in the bags. They
were able to identify some compounds from two thirds of
(09:09):
the objects they tried to test. They found molecules that
were associated with beeswax, dried fish and fruit, and our
last food fines before we take a quick break. Archaeological
work in San Francisco has unearthed evidence that people were
eating imported Atlantic cod during the gold Rush in the
eighteen fifties. They came to this conclusion after studying eighteen
(09:32):
cod bones and figuring out whether those fish had been
caught from the waters around San Francisco or from somewhere else.
Five of the bones were from Atlantic cod. They were
probably salted and dried before being transported across North America.
This was not entirely surprising. There are invoices and newspapers
(09:53):
from the time that mentioned Atlantic cod, but this is
some physical evidence of the fish itself. This find came
about during archaeological work that was working alongside construction, something
that comes up all the time on on Earth, but
we've never really talked about what that work is like.
Kale Brunner, who worked at the site, described it this way.
Quote compliance work is challenging in a lot of ways
(10:15):
because you don't really get a lot of control over
the excavations, and this case was kind of an extreme
example of that. The field work conditions were overwhelming, and
I was the only archaeologist on site. They were fortunately
only excavating dirt in one location at a time, so
I only had one piece of machinery to be watching,
but we were hitting archaeologically significant material constantly. It was
(10:40):
two years essentially of monitoring that kind of activity and
documenting as rapidly as possible everything that was being uncovered.
We're going to take a quick sponsor break before we
get us some books and letters like the Edibles and Potables.
(11:03):
The books and letters are one of the favorite categories
of mine, and we have a few of those this
time around. First, the University of Lester's Dickens Code project
has been trying to decipher various materials that Charles Dickens
either wrote or dictated in a shorthand system based on britigraphy.
This system combines abbreviations and symbols, and it can be
(11:26):
pretty complex on its own. To make things more complex,
Dickens also changed the system as he was using it.
In the University of Lester offered a prize of three
hundred British pounds to anybody who could decipher a one
page letter that was in the collection of the Morgan Library.
(11:47):
More than one thousand people entered this contest and the
winner was technical support specialist Shane Baggs, who deciphered more
symbols than any other entrant. The second place winner was
cognitive science student Ken Cox. The letter in question pertains
to a dispute between Dickens and The Times of London,
which had rejected an advertisement that Dickens had wanted to run.
(12:11):
Yeah this is even though they named two winners. It
was a collaborative work in a lot of ways, like
there were Reddit communities where people talked about with this
with each other. The university also did a lot of
deciphering workshops online for people who were interested in that
kind of stuff. This project is still ongoing. There's still
more stuff that Dickens wrote that's not decoded. There are
(12:31):
still decoding challenges and resources available. That this prize itself
was I think a one time thing, though. Marcello Bolognari
at the State Archive of Venice has found a will
that suggests that Marco Polo had a previously unknown daughter,
and Yeas and ye C's will was written on July seven,
(12:52):
nineteen and asked her father Marco to deliver it to
the priest notary Pietro Paiano. She named her father, her
husband Nicoletto, and another relative named Stefano as executors. We
really do not know much about and yes a other
than she's a previously unknown daughter of Marco Polo. It
(13:13):
is likely though, that she was dying when she wrote
her will. In addition to those executors that she mentioned,
she also mentions three children, Barbarella, Papin and Franccino. She
also mentions the children's tutor and their grandmother and the
family maid. And yes, it would have been born before
(13:33):
Marco Polo's marriage to do Nata Badoor, with whom he
had three known daughters. But we don't know whether and
yes it was born out of wedlock, or whether Marco
had been married to her mother and perhaps was widowed.
Many question marks. Yeah, but pretty cool that now we
know about a daughter that we didn't know about before.
(13:54):
For our last find in books and letters. Ecologists have
developed models that helped them estimate how many rare species
have been lost based on the survival rates of animals
that are still here, and an international team of researchers
has used that same basic idea to try to figure
out how many medieval manuscripts have survived until today. Their
(14:16):
conclusion was that more than nine of medieval European manuscripts
containing narrative literature has been lost. This actually lines up
with some earlier estimates that used other methods to approach
the same question. This project also involved estimating how many
works have been written in six languages Dutch, French, Icelandic, Irish, English,
(14:40):
and German, and according to their estimates works in some
languages may have fared better than in others. They estimated
that less than thirty nine percent of works in English
have survived, but seventy seven percent and eight of Icelandic
and Irish works did, respectively. One possible reason is that
tended to be more copies of each work in both
(15:02):
Iceland and Ireland, meaning that the work itself was more
likely to survive as the manuscripts containing it were destroyed
or lost or their paper was recycled for some of
their purpose. Possible reasons for the lower survival rates of
works in English, especially works of fiction and English, included
the dissolution of the monasteries and a perception that works
(15:24):
in English weren't as notable or high quality as works
in other languages. The Norman Conquest may have played a
role as well, because when the team looked at works
of fiction that were written in Norman French alongside works
that were written in English, the survival numbers were more
comparable to what they saw in some other languages. This
(15:44):
was published in the journal Science under the title Forgotten
Books The Application of Unseen Species Models to the Survival
of Culture. Moving on to art and architecture. Archaeologists in
Croatia who have been working at a hotel construction site
have found a partial statue believed to depict the goddess Venus.
(16:06):
It's about eighteen hundred years old and made of marble,
and the part that has survived, or at least that
they found at this point, stretches from about the knees
to just below the ribs. I found pictures of this
a little creepy to look at, uh When it was intact,
this was probably about two meters tall, and it's believed
(16:26):
that it used to stand on a pedestal in a villa.
Fragments of what may have been the statues base were
found nearby, and this seems to have been a pretty
wealthy person's villa. Other finds at the site include a
sewage canal, a mosaic covered wall, pottery, luxury tableware, and
marble flooring. In other venus news, although this is a
(16:49):
different type of venus, researchers may have figured out the
origin of an eleven centimeter figuring of a woman known
as the Villendorf Venus, named after Villendorf, Austria, where it
was found in nineteen o eight. This figuring is about
thirty thousand years old, and it is made from olite,
which isn't found in the area. After making high resolution
(17:10):
tomographic images of the figurine and using micro computed tomography
to look at its interior, they concluded that it likely
came from northern Italy, although they're similar material that doesn't
quite match up as well in parts of Ukraine. Their
findings suggested the venus or the material it was carved from,
traveled either around or over the Alps to get from
(17:32):
Italy to Austria, demonstrating just how mobile people could be
thirty thousand years ago. There's a whole category of figurines
from this time period that usually are depictions of women.
They're grouped together as venuses. Next up, art historian Christopher
(17:52):
Wright bought a painting in London for sixty five pounds
in nine seventy, believing that it was a copy of
a painting by Flemish Baroque artist and Tune van Dyke.
New research, though, has suggested that it might actually be
the real thing and not a copy. The work in
question is a portrait of Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of
(18:14):
Austria and a friend who saw it suggested that Wright
might want to have it evaluated after noticing that the
hands and the painting had been painted particularly well. That
was something that suggested that it might really be Van
Dyke's own work and not a copy. This identification has
come after a three year study and restoration of the artwork,
(18:35):
but it's still considered to be tentative. It's not confirmed yet.
For our last find, archaeologists have found what maybe the
oldest ochre workshop in East Asia. This site dates back
about forty thousand years and it includes evidence of a fire,
nearly four hundred stone artifacts and chunks of ochre. Although
(18:56):
we've usually talked about ochre in connection with rock paintings
and other artwork, it's not entirely clear what this particular
ochre may have been used for. Paleolithic people's may have
also used it as a sunscreen or an insect repellent,
or even as an ingredient in making adhesives. Now moving on,
we have four different finds that were all made from stone. First,
(19:20):
a team from the University of Aberdeen has found a
large stone covered in Pictish symbols. This is one of
about two hundred known Pictish symbol stones that probably dates
back to the fifth or sixth century. A lot of
the stones that have been unearthed so far were unearthed accidentally,
like a farmer uncovered it while plowing, which means that
(19:42):
the area around the stone has usually been pretty heavily
disturbed by the time archaeologists have gotten there. In this case, though,
they found this stone as part of an organized study
that started after noninvasive imaging suggested that there might be
evidence of a settlement in this area. There's a lot
more for archaeologists to be able to go through in
(20:03):
that earth that hasn't been disturbed yet, so this slab
now has been taken to a conservation lab in Edinburgh
for further study. Back in archaeologists found a round carved
stone in East Yorkshire, but to find wasn't announced until
February of this year. This was carved from chalk and
it's roughly shaped like a drum. It resembles three other
(20:26):
similar carvings, known as the Folkton Drums, which were found
about fifteen miles away back in nine so this carving
is about five thousand years old. It was found alongside
the remains of three children and there are three small
holes carved into the top of this thing that they're
calling a drum. Researchers believe there's three holes may somehow
(20:49):
represent the three children that this was apparently buried with.
Research into the children's remains is still ongoing, including determining
whether they are related to one another. A lot of
pictures of the include a bone pin that was found
in the same place that looks almost like a drumstick.
(21:09):
It's not a drumstick. If you feel like at pictures
it makes it look like this was literally a drum
that people played like an instrument. It's it's a carved
rock that is shaped a lot like a snare drum.
In other news, researchers have documented sixty five large sandstone
jars across four sites in Assam, India. These jars are
(21:30):
probably at least years old, and they resemble jars that
have been found in Laos and Indonesia. The region of Laos,
known as the Plane of Jars, has thousands of them.
Systematic research into these jars in India started in about
and research published in March Documents a survey that was
done in Although researchers worked with local communities to find
(21:54):
these jars, the people who are living in the area
today are not the same ethnic group as the people
who would have made these jars more than two thousand
years ago. There's a lot that is still unknown about them.
Local people have described finding jars that still contained what
looked like cremated remains, so it's possible that they had
a funerary purpose. And our last stone item before we
(22:17):
take a break, archaeologists in Oman have found a four
thousand year old stone board game. The slab is carved
into a grid and it has holes that people may
have used to keep their game pieces in. That's the
like the most logical use for the little holes. We're
going to take a quick sponsor break and then be
(22:38):
back with some shipwrecks. We're gonna close out this installment
of Unearthed with a whole bunch of shipwrecks that were
not Shackleton's Endurance, because we talked about that already first.
(22:58):
In February, the Australian National Maritime Museum announced that a
shipwreck at underwater archaeological site r I two three nine
four is His Majesty's Bark Endeavor, which Captain James Cook
took to the South Pacific in the eighteenth century after
Cook's voyage, the ship was sold and later on the
(23:21):
British Royal Navy used it to transport Hessian mercenaries during
the American Revolution. It was renamed the Lord Sandwich and
it later became a prison ship, and in seventeen seventy
eight the British scuttled it and twelve other ships in
an attempt to black Newport Harbor in Rhode Island. Various
(23:41):
divers and underwater archaeologists have thought this wreck was the
Endeavor for years, but when the Australian National Maritime Museum
made its announcement, researchers from the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology
Project immediately expressed doubts. Researcher Cathy Abbess, who works with
the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, also said the Australian
(24:01):
Museum's announcement was a breach of the contract it had
in place with the archaeology Project. Meanwhile, a researcher with
the museum said that contract had expired back in November. Yeah,
there were a lot of news articles about this report
and then also a lot of news articles about the
argument about the report. It is not the first time
(24:22):
that doubts have been raised about wreckage that had been
identified as coming from the Endeavor, though part of a
ship's stern post that was sent to space aboard the
Space Shuttle Endeavor later turned out to definitely be from
a totally different ship. Whoops, the face that you made
was amazing. Um. This dispute seems to be unresolved as
(24:48):
of when we're recording this. This is also an example
of how some recks can be challenging to identify. Shackleton's
Endurance had the name Endurance clearly visible, which made it
pretty obvious, but only about of this wreck is still there,
so the identification is based on the location and size
of the wreck. A comparison of surviving pieces to records
(25:09):
of the Endeavor and would samples that suggests that it
was built in Europe, not the United States. Moving on,
marine archaeologists working off the western coast of Sweden have
found the previously unknown wreckage of a medieval cog that
is a style of ship that was common after about
the twelfth century. This is believed to be one of
(25:32):
the oldest cogs found so far in Europe. According to
analysis of the tree rings and the lumber, it was
made from oaks that were cut down between twelve thirty
three and twelve forty. Seams in between the ship's planks
were sealed with moss, which was pretty typical for this
type of vessel. There's also some evidence that there was
(25:52):
a fire aboard. That's not clear what the cause of
the fire was, but it may have been a factor
in why this boat sank. Researchers have been studying sheep, pig,
and cow bones from shipwrecks off the coast of Western
Australia to try to learn more about how they've changed
through long term exposure to the sea. They've studied bones
(26:12):
from four underwater archaeological sites, one being the wreck of
the Batavia, which we have talked about on the show before.
The bones the team has been studying have been submerged
in the water or buried in sediment for more than
a hundred years, and it's hoped that what they've learned
can be applied to the study of bones from other
wrecks in the future. So far, they've identified a set
(26:33):
of what they've called geochemical fingerprints that helped trace the
changes that happened to skeletal remains over time. They've also
studied how single celled organisms dissolved the spaces inside submerged bones,
and they've analyzed how bones can be eroded by things
like bacteria and barnacles. According to research published in a
(26:55):
Journal of Archaeological Science, reports, timbers from a shipwreck that
was unearthed in a storm in eighteen sixty three are
probably from a ship known as the Sparrow Hawk, which
was driven aground during a storm in sixteen twenty six.
The Sparrow Hawk has been believed to be the source
of these timbers for quite some time, based on where
on Cape cod the wreckage was found and how historical
(27:18):
documents described the location of the wreck, but this is
the most conclusive evidence so far to back that identification.
Up Tree ring data and radiocarbon dating suggests that the
timbers used to build the boat were cut down in
southern England between fifteen fifty six in sixteen forty six.
The timbers are currently in storage at Pilgrim Hall Museum
(27:39):
in Plymouth, Massachusetts. A recovery operation is ongoing in Majorca
at a site known as the se Fontinelle Wreck. This
ship think about sevent dred years ago, probably while it
was anchored in the Bay of Palma, and it was
carrying a load of m for a that were filled
with things like olive oil and why and fermented fish sauce.
(28:02):
And then it was mostly buried in the sand until
about three years ago when it emerged during a storm.
Since this wreck was covered up for most of that time,
most of the cargo has remained untouched and is in
pretty good condition. The inscriptions are still visible on some
of the jars. In March, it was reported that divers
had brought up about three hundred amphora and other objects,
(28:25):
including a leather shoe, an oil lamp, a cooking pot,
and one of only a handful of Roman carpenter's drills
that has been found in the region. But team is
at work trying to figure out how to recover the
wreck itself, which is only about fifty meters off of
a popular beach. Wreckage of a two hundred seven year
old whaling ship called the Industry has been found in
(28:47):
the Gulf of Mexico. The ship sank in a storm
on May eighteen, thirty six. This is the only whaling
vessel to have been lost in the Gulf of Mexico
between the seventeen eighties and the eighteen seventies. Yeah, a
lot of vessels were lost during those years, but not
necessarily in this spot. And according to news reporting from
(29:08):
the time, another whaling vessel rescued the crew, who later
returned to Westport, Massachusetts. And if that town name sounds familiar,
it maybe because that was the home of previous podcast subject,
Paul Cuffey. Cuffey's son William was a navigator on the
industry and his son in law, Pardon Cook, was one
of the ship's officers. We got several notes from listeners
(29:32):
about this one. Archaeologists in Iraq have excavated a four
thousand year old boat near the ancient city of Uruk.
The boat was made from plant material like wood, palm leaves,
or reads, which is then totally covered in bitumen. The
plant material is gone now only its imprints are left
behind in the bitumen, but the bitumen covering is still there.
(29:53):
It's the cool way to make a boat, right, I
like it's This boat is about seven meters long and
one point four meters wide, and part of it had
been exposed through erosion. Nearby traffic was making that erosion
worse and that's what led to the decision to excavate
and preserve the boat. It has been taken to the
(30:14):
Iraq Museum in Baghdad with the goal of preserving it
and eventually putting it on display. And now for something
shipwreck adjacent. The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers has
been deepening the Savannah River Channel at Savannah Harbor, and
as part of that process they have pulled twelve Revolutionary
War eric cannons up from the floor. That's in addition
(30:36):
to three that were previously hauled up about a year ago.
At first, it was believed that these three cannons might
have been from the HMS Rose, which the British scuttled
to try to block the Savannah River Channel during the
Revolutionary War, but the research later confirmed the rows had
been sunk further upstream and that its cannons had been
(30:56):
removed first. So work is still ongoing to try to
match these particular cannons to any specific wreck and on
one last sort of random thing to end on, an
international interdisciplinary team has analyzed a pair of three thousand
year old trousers found in China's to Rim Basin. These
were found on a naturally mummified body known as the
(31:19):
turfin man, and they have been described as the world's
oldest pants. It turns out that a lot went into
making them. Making these pants required three different weaving techniques,
one that reinforced the knees, another that created a thicker waistband,
and a third that gave the crotch and seats some stretch.
The pants are also decorative, covered in zigzag stripes and
(31:42):
geometric patterns. All this together suggests that the weavers who
were dressing the turf and man had far reaching connections
through nomadic herders and traders. Similar weaving and decorative patterns
are found in far flung parts of Asia at about
the same time. Yeah, if you're imagining that that law
long ago, people's pants would involve just like hacking something together.
(32:05):
He looked like they were very functional, very specifically designed
to be well suited to somebody who rode on a
horse a lot of the time. Uh, pretty cool, They
are cool. It's I um. I think of them very
similar to the way you see like sometimes they're called
(32:25):
tech pants or skate pants today, where it's like there
will be a little extra quilting in areas where you
may hit things, or like I think This would be
a great, um, fun and weird project if you wanted
to do a little historical stitching make your version of
Turf and Man's Pants. Sounds good to me. It's on
my list us. That's our Unearthed for this quarter of
(32:51):
the year. We will be back towards the summertime with
some more. In the meantime, I have some listener mail.
It's from Jenna. It's about an episode that how we researched,
but it's about something that I said, so it's sort
of is a bridge. Uh. Jenna wrote, Hello, Tracy and Holly.
I recently wrote about Caesar Salad, and I have another
(33:12):
story that will hopefully give you a chuckle. Like many.
I also read Tests of the Derbervilles in my sophomore
high school class. Every person in the class read it
and discussed it, but we hated it so much, and
we're apparently convincing enough in our opinions that the teacher
removed it from the curriculum for the next year. I
don't remember much about it except that I disliked it
(33:33):
and thought Tess was a flat uninteresting character. Hopefully Tracy
isn't too jealous of our success. Here's more picks of
my cats because they're the best, and I know how
much you guys love many panthers. Best Jenna p. S.
I was just at Disney World and thought of you guys,
especially Holly while on the Haunted Mansion. Until death do
us part um. Thank you, Jennifer this. The subject line
(33:55):
of this email was test of the Dunkervilles, which made
me laugh a lot. Um And also, man, I I
love that this class was able to convince a teacher
to make a change to the curriculum, because I still
am like, what what was I supposed to get out
of reading tests at the Durbervilles in the tenth grade
(34:16):
that could not have been achieved by reading something that
maybe felt more relevant to a tenth grader in northwest
North Carolina in or whatever year that was. Uh So, anyway,
thanks so much for this, and thank you for the
(34:36):
cat pictures. I just sort of feel like anytime somebody
sends us pictures of their of their black cats, their
cats and my cats are friends. I just like mentally,
in my in my head, my cats are friends with
all other black cats. So thank you for that. Um.
(34:59):
If you would to write to us about this or
any other podcast or at History podcast at i heeart
radio dot com. You can also follow us on social
media where at Missed in History. That's where you'll find
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to our show on the I heart Radio app or
(35:21):
wherever you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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