January 12, 2022 • 41 mins
In the second part of the year-end edition of Unearthed! the show covers necropolises and art, and edibles and potables, shipwrecks, and potpourri. But there are also a few last-minute additions to the list before the potpourri!
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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 E. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is
part two of our Unearthed, covering things that have been
literally and figuratively unearthed in the last quarter of one.
(00:26):
So in this installment of Unearthed, we were gonna We're
gonna have some necropolis is. There were just a lot
of those for some reason. Uh, some art, and some
edibles and potables and shipwrecks and of course the potpourri,
which is where I put the interesting things that I
thought were all really interesting, but I didn't have a
good way to categorize them thematically. Before we have the potpourri, though,
(00:48):
we have another category that's a lot like potpourri, and
that it's random and it is last minute additions because
when I planned out when we were doing this, I
did not realize that January third was a company holiday,
and that was the day that I was going to
look through everything that happened over the holidays and like
(01:09):
carefully weave it in to what was already written for
the episode. So no, I did not work yesterday and
instead came up with this new category this morning at
eight am. I Love It. A fundraising effort by the
UK Friends of the National Library has successfully prevented a
(01:29):
collection of manuscripts, documents and some of the Bronte siblings
tiny books from being split up and sold at auction.
These items have been collected in the nineteenth century by
William Law and his brother Alfred. In addition to some
of the Brontes tiny books, which have been the subject
of most of the headlines about this the collection also
includes works by Jane Austin, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.
(01:53):
Sir Leonard Levatnik matched donations to buy this collection, essentially
contributing half the money for it. The total purchase price
was more than fifteen million pounds and items from this
collection are going to be donated to relevant museums, including
the Bronte Parsonage Museum, Jane Austen's House and the National
(02:14):
Library of Scotland, among others. It's a really amazing collection.
I'm very glad they were able to to buy it
and put it in museums instead of having it sort
of dissipate to other collectors. And if this all sounds
a bit familiar, especially the part about the Bronte's tiny books.
We covered a similar fundraising effort in our first quarter
(02:35):
owners for and in my next Last Minute edition. Conservators
in Virginia have found two different cornerstone boxes in the
pedestal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The statue
part was removed from the site in September. The contents
of these two boxes are yet to be thoroughly analyzed,
(02:56):
but they're pretty typical of time capsules, although there was
no specified date for opening either of these two there
are things like newspapers and other documents and books and
coins and memorabilia, including some bullets. At the same time,
even though these are pretty typical things that we find
in these sorts of boxes, there are some mysteries. One
(03:17):
of the boxes was placed on October seven, and news
accounts from the time referenced some items that have not
been found in either box, one of them being a
photo of Abraham Lincoln and his coffin. There is an
illustration of Abraham Lincoln from one of them, but this
photo has not been found. And in our last Last
(03:39):
Minute edition, according to research by the Missing Prince's Project,
spearheaded by Philippa Langley. Edward the Fifth might not have
died in the Tower of London. Instead, Richard the Third
may have sent him to the village of Coldridge and
Devon in secret, where he lived under the name John Evans,
and the evidence submitted to back this up sounds a
(04:00):
little like a conspiracy theory. A lot of articles about
this have reference to the Da Vinci Code. John Evans
was new to the area, nobody had ever heard of him,
but in spite of that, he was given the title
Lord of the Manor and also oversaw the area's deer park.
He also commissioned artwork for a local church, including a
(04:21):
stained glass window depicting Edward the Five. It's one of
very few such depictions of Edward the Fifth, and it
was placed over the location where Evans wanted his tomb
to be placed. That tomb is engraved with the name
John EVAs rather than Evans, and it's empty. But the
(04:41):
team has speculated that this misspelling is intentional, with the
e V standing for Edward the five and the A
s possibly standing for a Latin term meaning in sanctuary. Uh.
It's it seems like the kind of thing you might
illustrate with a murder board. So that was our last
(05:04):
last minute edition and now we'll move on to the
potpourri stuff that I wrote before taking off for the holidays.
Four boomerangs were discovered in a creek bed during a
drought in Australia in ten and eighteen. Theyandrewanda Yawarawaka Traditional
Landowners and Aboriginal Corporation partnered with Australian Heritage Services, Flinders
(05:25):
University and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization to
learn more about them. Radio carbon dating revealed that they
were made between sixteen fifty and eighteen thirty, before Europeans
first entered the area. These are non returning boomerangs and
they were likely used for digging and for fire management
in addition to hunting and fighting, and they may have
(05:48):
had a religious use as well. Researchers re examining Soviet
era archaeological research have determined that a liar found in
southwest Kazakhstan is incredibly similar to unknown as the Sutton
Who liar, named after the Sutton Whose ship burial where
it was found. These two sites are four thousand kilometers apart,
(06:09):
and before this point, Sutton Whose style liars had not
been found outside of Western Europe. This suggests that this
style of liar may have been part of a more
wide ranging musical tradition in the early medieval period, rather
than something that was specific to Western Europe. Moving on
to sixth century graves excavated in Bavaria have included a
(06:31):
couple of unique finds. One of the graves belonged to
somebody who was between forty and fifty years old when
he died, and it included lots of weapons, including a
battle axe, a sword, a lance, and a shield. There
was also a bridle and a pair of spurs which
may have been used with a horse that was also
buried nearby, and there was a bag buried at the
(06:54):
man's feet which had mostly decomposed, but it seems to
have basically been a toiletrees bag egg. Its contents included
a pair of scissors and a shattered ivory comb. Once
that comb had been pieced back together, it was shown
to be decorated on both sides with hunting scenes. Combs
aren't uncommon as grave goods from this period, but they're
(07:16):
more likely to be made of something like wood, bone
or antler than ivory, and then on top of that
there are antelope like animals shown in these hunting scenes
that are not native to the region of Europe where
the grave was found. The other grave seems to have
belonged to a woman between the ages of thirty and
forty years old, and the goods buried with her included jewelry, food,
(07:39):
and a weaving tool. But there was also a bowl, and,
like the comb and the other grave, a bowl that
doesn't seem to have been local to the area. It's
a style known as African red slipwear. This kind of
pottery was carried through much of the Roman Empire, but
was made in Tunisia, and this is the first complete
bowl found in Germany. Has raised some questions to these
(08:02):
two people travel and bring these pieces back with them
where they gifts from far away. It's kind of a mystery.
Archaeologists in Norway have found a thirteen hundred year old
ski believed to be the mate of one that was
found about five ms away. In both of these skis
or would with bindings made from birch ropes and leather straps,
(08:24):
if indeed they are a pair and not skis from
two different pairs that were coincidentally close together, then they
are the best preserved pair of prehistoric skis found to date.
All the researchers believed that these two skis were a set,
they're not actually identical. It's possible that whoever was using
them made a new pair out of two different skis.
(08:46):
They also show evidence of a lot of repair, suggesting
that these skis were just too valuable to try to
replace if they were damaged. In our next item, it
has long been established that the Norse arrived in North
America long before Lumpus voyage, including building a settlement in
what's now Newfoundland, but it hasn't been clear when exactly
(09:07):
that happened. According to research published in the journal Nature,
it was in the year ten twenty one, making the
earliest known crossing of the Atlantic Ocean something that happened
a thousand years ago. This research involved three pieces of wood,
all of which showed evidence of being cut with metal tools,
and at the time the indigenous population of North America
(09:29):
did not have these sorts of metal tools. The woods
still had a rough edge from where it was cut,
and that's something that would have been worn away if
it had been brought a long distance across the ocean,
so that led researchers to conclude that this had been
cut down in North America. It was not sounding that
had been cut down elsewhere and then brought to North America.
(09:50):
The wood came from three different trees, and the dating
relied on a massive solar storm that happened in the
year Researchers can see evidence to this solar storm in
tree rings, and each of the three pieces of wood
had twenty nine growth rings after that solar storm. So
the North came to North America with metal tools in
(10:11):
ten twenty one, cutting down these three trees after they arrived.
Next up, archaeologists in Utah have been excavating the site
of a town that housed Chinese workers during the building
of the Transcontinental Railroad. The town, known as Terrace, was
a temporary home to about five hundred people as the
railroad was being built, and then it was abandoned once
(10:33):
that stretch of the railroad was complete. At least some
of the buildings later burned down. In addition to finding
the remains of a building that had housed some of
the workers, archaeologists have found a medicine bottle, porcelain bowls,
writing instruments, and a seventeenth century Chinese coin. Next up,
Researchers in Pompeii have concluded that a recently unearthed room
(10:55):
was the living quarters for enslaved people, possibly an enslaved family.
The room is part of a much larger villa, but
it measures only about sixteen square meters where a hundred
and seventy square feet, and it seems to have functioned
as a sleeping and living space and as storage. The
stored items included what appeared to be parts of chariot harnesses,
(11:17):
and the room adjoins a space where the remains of
horses and the stable had been unearthed earlier in the year.
One of the three beds in the room is smaller
than the other, so it was possibly meant to be
used by a child. And then our last bit of
pot pourri. A team excavating a tomb in China's Nixia
(11:37):
region believe they had found the body of a grave robber,
since this body was found in a tunnel that had
been dug by looters, but examination of the remains has
revealed that he was probably a murder victim, with this
murder unrelated to the looting, who had been dumped into
the shaft later and left to die. The shaft was
(11:58):
dug sometime between the years anti five and two twenty CE,
but the remains date back only to the year six forty.
The shaft had also started to fill up with soil
again by the time this person died. Apart from all
of that, the skeleton shows signs of having been repeatedly stabbed.
This research was published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological
(12:21):
Sciences under the delightful title Hiding a Leaf in the
Forest Uncovering at hundred year old homicide case in a
two thousand year old cemetery. Next up, we have a
few necropolis is in this installment of unearthed first Archaeologists
have known about a rock cut tomb complex and what's
(12:43):
now Turkey for more than a hundred and fifty years,
but it's really been more recently that there has been
a thorough examination of this area. This site is part
of an ancient city known as Blondos, which was founded
during the time of Alexander the Great, and that makes
these tombs about eighteen hundred years old. This excavation project
started in and researchers have been stunned at just how
(13:07):
huge this necropolis is, they have found more than four
hundred rock cut tombs believed to have been used as
family burial chambers over multiple generations. Many of these are
heavily decorated, although these adornments have deteriorated over the years
and so far only twenty four murals are still visible. Unfortunately,
(13:28):
many of the tombs are easily seen from the surface
since they're cut into a cliff face, and as a consequence,
they have been looted or otherwise damaged over the previous centuries.
In the same complex, they have also found temples, a theater,
a public bath, and more, and there are believed to
be hundreds more burial sites that haven't been explored yet,
(13:50):
and analysis of those sites has of course not been
done yet. Next up, archaeologists in Pauline near Lake Geneva
have found new tombs in a necropolis there during monitoring
work ahead of construction. This site was first excavated in
the early twentieth century and is home to the oldest
Neolithic burials in Switzerland. These newly discovered burial sites were
(14:13):
fairly close to the surface and they are in poor condition,
with many of the slabs that cover the remains already broken.
Into pieces. The grave sites that were threatened by the
construction were rescued, but the ones outside of that area
were covered and preserved. And lastly, a late Roman necropolis
has been found under the wall of a grocery store
(14:35):
in Ris, northern France. This was first detected in excavated
this past fall. Most of the burials in this necropolis
are individual bodies and wood coffins that have been placed
in cut graves, really without a lot of grave goods. Uh.
And now we're gonna take a quick sponsor break before
we talk about some art. We have a lot of
(15:05):
stuff related to art. This time around, conservators have found
a previously unknown painting by Armenian American artist our Shield
Gorky under his painting The Limit, which he completed in
Gorky's daughter had long suspected that there was another work
of art underneath the Limit, but conservators have thought it
(15:27):
was just too risky to try to reveal it. Swiss
conservators MICHAELA. Ritter and Olivier Masson finally began working with
this piece during the pandemic, carefully removing the Limit, which
is a work on paper, from the canvas underneath, and
it turned out that yes, that underlying canvas did have
its own painting, one now known as untitled with the
(15:51):
parentheses Virginia Summer, which was most likely painted earlier in
ninety seven. It's possible that the artist meant for this
layerying of the two artworks to be temporary, sort of
using that canvas temporarily, and was going to remove the
paper painting, but he died in in a September fine
that didn't cross our radar until now. Johannes Vermier's Girl
(16:14):
reading a letter at an open window has been restored,
revealing a depiction of Cupid. Scholars have known Cupid was
there for about forty years, since it was visible in
an X ray of the piece, but they thought Vermier
had removed the depiction of Cupid himself while working on
the painting. But during this paintings restoration, the area where
(16:35):
Cupid was known to be did not react to solvents
the same way that the rest of the painting did.
The suggestive that the paint used to cover up Cupid
was a different type than had been used when painting
the rest of the work, possibly put there by someone
else who tried to make that cover up blend in
with the original I mean it worked for work. The
(16:59):
museum can veened a panel of Vermeer experts who decided
that the best course of action was to collect microscopic
samples from the painting to study them, confirming that the
paint covering the cupid had been applied years or even
decades after the rest of the work was complete. With
the experts okay, conservators removed the rectangle of painting that
(17:20):
had been added later. The depiction of Cupid is a
painting within a painting, and that same cupid is also
used in other Vermeer artworks, including young Woman standing at
a virginal and Girl interrupted at her music. This discovery
has also raised some speculations about other artworks in which
a subject is in front of a seemingly blank wall,
(17:42):
and whether that blank wall also has a covered over
depiction of Cupid. Moving on, curators at Norway's National Museum
we're using infrared reflectography to examine Edvard Monks Madonna as
part of a routine conservation checkup. They discus, ever, that
earlier sketches are still visible using this noninvasive technique, and
(18:04):
these sketches suggest that earlier drafts of the painting were
more conservative. In the final painting, a nude woman has
one of her arms stretched up above her head and
the other sort of tucked behind her lower back, in
a pose that definitely looks sensuous. But in the earlier
sketch that stretched up arms down along her side, and
(18:24):
it's a position that looks more RESTful than erotic. In
similar news, Rice Museum has announced the discovery of preparatory
sketches in Rembrandty two painting The Night Watch, which are
visible through macro XRF imaging. This discovery came during a
two year restoration project for that piece. And speaking of Rembrandt,
(18:46):
scientists in the Netherlands have figured out that they can
determine exactly when paintings from the Dutch Golden Age were
created based on the exact composition of their lead white pigments.
This is because conflicts like the English Civil Wars in
the eighty years were disrupted lead supplies, forcing artists to
adjust the amount of lead they were using in their paints.
(19:09):
Archaeologists working on the High Speed Real Project known as
HS two have under three Roman era busts while excavating
a Norman church in Stoke, Mandeville, They had expected to
find early English artifacts because the excavation site was home
to a medieval tower, but instead found these three much
older stone sculptures. Two had essentially been decapitated, with the
(19:32):
head and the torso both still present, and the third
was only the head. In addition to these three very
well preserved statues, they also found a hexagonal glass jug
with large pieces of the glass still intact. Based on
all of this, they believed this tower was built directly
on top of the site of what had been a
Roman mausoleum and which had other uses prior to that.
(19:55):
And In similar news, excavations in western Turkey have unearthed
the head of statues depicting Aphrodite and Dionysus moving on.
A sculpture spotted outside a home in St. Louis In
has been confirmed as Martha and Mary by the late
artist William Edmondson, who died in nineteen fifty one. This
(20:16):
sculpture had also been displayed at the Museum of Modern
Art in ninety seven. That was a solo exhibition, making
Edmondson the first black artist to have a solo show
at MoMA. It appears that Anthony Ablis, executive director of
the Metropolitan Opera acquired the statute sometime after that show,
and then his wife Sally, inherited it after he died.
(20:38):
Street artist Brian Donnelly, known as Cause, purchased this from
Bliss as a gift for the American Folk Art Museum.
The statue has since been cleaned and it will be
on display at the museum in early next up. Restorers
working at Calvally Old Hall in Yorkshire, England have found
floor to ceiling Tutor era paintings under some nineteenth century plaster.
(21:03):
These paintings basically served the purpose of wallpaper and depict
exaggerated vines and mythical animals. They seem to be based
on designs from the Golden House of Roman Emperor Nero.
It's possible that a nineteenth century owner of this manner
covered the paintings up with plaster to try to protect them,
so now conservators are at work figuring out the best
(21:25):
way to preserve them. Next up, a walk around family
Land in Rutland has led to the discovery of a
mosaic depicting scenes from Homer's The Iliad, which was part
of a Roman era villa complex. The complex seems to
have been built sometime between the third and fourth century.
This is the first mosaic in Britain that depicts the
Iliad and it's being investigated by the University of Leicester
(21:48):
in partnership with Historic England and Rutland City Council. And
in another accidental family find, members of the Sitwell family
have decided to auction off the family's artwork and other
objects from Weston Hall in Northamptonshire, England, and as all
these items were being collected in catalog they found a
forgotten work of art just wrapped up in bubble wrap.
(22:11):
It turned out to be a drawing by Italian painter
Giovanni Batista Tiapolo, who worked in the eighteenth century. This
is called a large group of Puncinelli. Puncinelli, we're buffoonish
stock characters from seventeenth century Comedia dell Arte and then
this depiction they are all eating njoki, which I just
(22:33):
find delightful. Aspert said, well bought this painting in nineteen
thirty six and then they just forgot about it. This
was sold at auction in November with a final bit
of a hundred thousand pounds. I think more painting should
feature large groups of people just happily eating, just eating,
(22:54):
just munching on stuff. Now it's time for swords, glorious swords.
A die her off the coast of Israel has found
a nine hundred year old sword on the seafloor, along
with other artifacts from about the same period. The sword
itself is believed to be an excellent condition, although it
is completely encrusted in marine life, so it is not
(23:14):
entirely clear exactly what's under there. Based on where it
was found, it may be a crusader sword. It was
in an area where ships took shelter. The sea floor
in this area is constantly shifting and revealing new fines,
so this diver, Shlomi Katson was afraid that the sword
would be buried again if it was just left there,
(23:35):
and so took it to the surface and reported it
to authorities. That is how we have lots of photographs
of this absolutely marine life encrusted sword. That's actually how
it's designed. It's not that would be amazing. Another sword,
a broken bronze age sword, has been found in southwestern Finland.
(23:56):
This is a rare fine. Only about two hundred bronze
age items have been found in Finland and swords and
knives are only a little more than ten percent of those.
The fragments were found in July by someone who was
using a newly purchased metal detector to check out his
childhood home, but to find wasn't announced until October. Although
this was found under the lawn of a family home,
(24:18):
it is not clear how the broken sword got there.
It's possible that it was in soil that was brought
in for construction years ago. He contacted Finland's National Board
of Antiquities after finding the first couple of clearly very
old sword pieces, and a more official excavation uncovered the rest.
Next up, we have a couple of fines related to animals.
(24:40):
According to research published in the journal Nature in October,
an interdisciplinary team of researchers has concluded that today's horses
were first domesticated and the Pontic Caspian steps in the
Northern Caucasus. This happened somewhere around b C and then
over the next few sent trees, these domesticated horses replaced
(25:03):
genetically distinct wild horses in Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia
and Siberia. This research involved genetic analysis of two hundred
seventy three horse specimens that lived from fifty thousand to
a little more than two thousand years ago. They analyzed
their genes and then compared the results to modern domesticated
(25:24):
horses living today. However, these were not the first horses
ever to be domesticated. That was in Betai, Central Asia
around thirty d b C. But those earlier horses aren't
the ancestors of today's domestic horses. Their descendants are a
feral Mongolian horse known as Zerowski's horse. Our next animal find.
(25:46):
Researchers in severe have tried to confirm Neanderthal hunting techniques
for a crow like bird called the chef. It seems
very likely that the Neanderthals used chefs as a food source.
They've been various finds of chuf bones that have tooth
marks and caves that show evidence of Neanderthal use, But
(26:07):
it also seemed like this would be a tricky animal
for Neanderthals to hunt. Thinking that Neanderthals might have used
nets and torches, researchers armed themselves with butterfly nets and
flashlights and went into caves and other dark spaces where
modern chuffs are known to roost at night, and they
found that the chuffs became confused when the researchers shined
(26:28):
flashlights at them. They wound up just flying into dead
end spaces where it was easy for people to just
scoop them right up. Is this how Neanderthals did it?
Who knows, but it does suggest one possible way. I
also just, you know, I don't want to be cruel
to animals, but I find the scenario kind of amusing.
If this is a Neanderthal technique for hunting, it confirms
(26:53):
once again has with many many other things we've talked
about on Earth, that they were pretty good at problem
solving and stuff. I feel almost every time I'm researching
these episodes, I find headlines that make it sound like
this is new information. Moving on. Archaeologists and the Hi
Duguay Archipelago off the northern coast of British Columbia have
(27:13):
found the tooth of a domesticated dog. It was confirmed
to be a dog too through its DNA and radio
carbon dating suggests that it lived thirteen thousand, one hundred
years ago. This is the oldest evidence of domestic dogs
discovered so far in the America's and it also suggests
that people were living on the archipelago about two thousand
(27:34):
years earlier than previously thought. The Haida Nation's oral histories
were also part of this work, and indigenous archaeologists who
were part of this work have described it as the
field of archaeology catching up to those oral histories. And lastly,
archaeologists have studied fish bones at four sites connected to
(27:54):
the Slawa Tooth First Nations community on what's now the
West coast of Canada. Researchers have concluded that for about
a thousand years that Sligh with Tooth we're using large
weirs to catch salmon, determining the salmon sex and releasing
most of the females. Bones found at village sites were
overwhelmingly those of male fish. European colonists ultimately destroyed these
(28:20):
indigenous fishing tools, and since then the salmon population in
this area has largely collapsed. Jesse Morin, archaeologists for that
Sleigh with Tooth nation, and an adjunct professor at the
University of British Columbia, was quoted in the Canadian Process
saying quote, people were harvesting the same sort of fish consistently,
probably from the same places. For one thousand years. Here
(28:43):
we are one hundred fifty years later, one hundred fifty
years worth of industrial harvesting, and we've really destroyed these resources.
After we take a quick sponsor break, we will move
onto some edibles and potables, some of which, uh, we're
also animal related. There's a little over app in those
two categories. Now we are moving on so one of
(29:12):
our favorite topics, which is the edibles and potables. According
to research published in the journal Current Biology on oct
workers that prehistoric salt mines in Austria drank beer and
ate blue cheese. Researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing
paleo feces in the mines, which has been preserved for
(29:32):
about dred years thanks to the conditions in the mind.
This is the earliest evidence found so far of both
beer drinking and blue cheese eating in Europe. In the
words of Kirsten Kaark of the Museum of Natural History, Vienna, quote,
it is becoming increasingly clear that not only were prehistoric
(29:53):
culinary practices sophisticated, but also that complex processed food stuffs
as well as the technique of fermentation, have held a
prominent role in our early food history. Next up. Researchers
at a site known as Jordan's River Dura Jatte have
found evidence that people were using complex fishing tools and
techniques as long as twelve thousand years ago. Excavations have
(30:16):
unearthed nineteen bone hooks and grooved pebbles that seem to
have been used as sinkers. They could be tricky to
study fishing technology because things like lines and nets are
usually made from fibers that decomposed, but there are fiber
residues on these hooks that suggests that they were used
with lines of some sort. There's also some variation in
(30:38):
the shapes of the hooks, including their barbs and how
they were connected to a line, suggesting that people were
using different hooks to catch different types of fish. There's
also some suggestion that these hooks were used along with
artificial lures. We already knew that people living in this
area twelve thousand years ago we're eating fish, but this
is the earliest evidence of their using things like hooks
(31:00):
and artificial lures to catch them. Archaeologists in Iraq have
found a commercial winery including stone cut basins dating back
to the eighth or seventh century BC, as well as
fourteen stone cut installations that were used for pressing the juice.
The winery is near an area where archaeologists have been
(31:21):
examining stone cut reliefs carved into irrigation canals. The reliefs
depict sacred animals and kings in prayer, probably commissioned by
the same kings who paid for the canals to be built,
as both a symbol of religious devotion and a reminder
of who had funded the irrigation project. And Archaeologists have
also found a massive early medieval wine factory in Israel.
(31:46):
This was another facility that was used to make wine
on a large commercial scale. This one has five wine presses,
four large warehouses for storing and aging the wine, and
facilities for making and firing the and four eights that
were used to store the wine. There are also large
vats and a treading floor where the grapes were crushed underfoot.
(32:08):
A spokesperson from the Israeli Antiquities Authority estimated that this
winery could have produced two million liters of wine per year.
A golden amethyst ring has also been found not far
from this site. It dates back to at least the
seventh century, and there's some speculation that it may have
been worn for hangover prevention. The amethyst has traditionally been
(32:32):
regarded as having anti hangover properties. Moving on, archaeologists in
Germany have found a seventy nine year old, badly charred
cake in the town of Lubec. The British Royal Air
Force bombed this town on March twenty Nino and the
freshly unwrapped cake was buried and burned as the building's
(32:55):
upper floors collapsed over it and caught fire. Even though
this hake is badly burned, its nutty filling was preserved
pretty well in this fire. This has planned to be
conserved and eventually put on public display. And lastly, in
Edibles and Potables, Polish archaeologists have found a unique kitchen
(33:16):
were set at the site of a Roman legionary camp
in Bulgaria. These pieces were made of very high quality
clay and they seem to represent a full array of pots, lids, bowls,
and cups, as well as glasses that look like today's
pine glasses. The team plans to conserve and analyze this
cookwear set to determine what was cooked and stored in
(33:36):
the vessels. It is likely that at least some of
it was seafood, since there were also oyster shells found nearby.
And now we're going to move on to another favorite category,
which is shipwrecks. Volcanic and tectonic activity near the Ogasawara
Island chain in Japan has lifted the sea floor around
the island of eot known in English as Eo Jima,
(34:00):
revealing a fleet of World War Two era ships. These
are Japanese ships that American forces sank after the Battle
of Eo Jima, hoping that the wreckage would form a
breakwater to help create a harbor. That did not work,
but in photos of this you can see that there
the ships are arranged in a way that was purposeful.
(34:22):
Next up, the US revenue cutter Bear sank during a
storm in nineteen sixty three. It had been decommissioned and
tied to a wharf in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and it
was in the process of being towed to Philadelphia. But
before that point it had a long history at sea.
It started out as a vessel for seal hunting in
eighteen seventy four. The US government bought it a few
(34:45):
years later to use for rescue work. Since it had
been built to be able to navigate icy waters. Its
work as a relief vessel included being part of the
rescue fleet of the Greeley Expedition in eighteen eighty one.
It operated as a relief ship during the nineteen eighteen
flew pandemic, and was finally decommissioned in ninety nine. For
a time after that it was used as a floating
(35:06):
museum in Oakland, California, and then as a film set.
Then the Bear was recommissioned during World War Two and
sent back to the Arctic to patrol. During that time,
it helped capture a Norwegian ship that the German military
was using to gather and report information about weather conditions
in the North Atlantic. Various people and groups have been
(35:28):
searching for the wreck of the Bear since the nineteen seventies.
In sonar mapping of a sixty two square mile it's
about a hundred and sixty square kilometers area of seafloor
revealed two sunken ships. In September of this year, investigators
returned to the area with a remote operated vehicle and
identified one of those ships as the Bear. We also
(35:50):
have a couple of canoes, a maritime archaeologist from the
Wisconsin Historical Society spotted what she thought was a log
in Lake Mendota and Wisconsin, but it turned out to
be the oldest intact boat ever found in the state.
It's believed to be about twelve hundred years old and
was probably made by the Effigy Mound builders, who are
(36:12):
the ancestors of today's ho Chunk Nation. It is so
well preserved that the archaeologists initially thought this was the
Boy Scout project from the nineteen fifties. Archaeologists decided to
raise the canoe from the floor of the lake since
it was likely to be destroyed by micro organisms if
it was left where it was. It is currently undergoing
(36:33):
a preservation process with the hope that it can be
put on public display. Ho Chunk Tribal Historic Preservation Officer
Bill Quackenbush told reporters that he would collaborate with the
Wisconsin Historical Society on the canoes preservation. The other canoe
was found in a sonode or a freshwater sinkhole in
southern Mexico. It's believed to be about a thousand years old,
(36:56):
and it's the first complete canoe of its type ever
found It's possible that the Maya used this canoe to
gather water or to make offerings in the Sonodi. This
is one of many many objects that have been unearthed
during work on a railway that's being built to connect
multiple sites across the Yucatan Peninsula. This is a controversial project.
(37:17):
It's meant to bring tourists from the beaches on the
coast to historic and cultural sites and smaller towns farther inland.
But there are a lot of archaeological sites along the
path of the train, with more being discovered as work
goes on. Archaeologists working ahead of the train construction have
found hundreds of sites encompassing thousands of structures. The potential
(37:38):
archaeological and environmental impacts of the train project have both
drawn a lot of criticism. And now we have a
random final thing for the end of this episode. So
for our last find of it's actually something that was
first found in a glacier climber stumbled onto a box
(37:58):
from an Air India passenger jet that had crashed on
January nineteen sixty six. This plane was one of two
planes that crashed into mom Block in the middle of
the twentieth century and climbers in the area often find
various things from each of them. In this case, this
box turned out to contain emeralds and sapphires. This climber
(38:21):
turned the box into authorities who tried to track down
the survivors of whoever this box had belonged to. That
effort was unsuccessful, and in December it was announced that
the climber would get to keep half of the gemstones.
The other half is going to the village of Shemony
near the crash site, where they will become part of
(38:42):
the collection of the Shemony Crystals Museum. According to news coverage,
the climber, who has not been named, will be selling
off his half and using some of the money to
renovate his apartment. And that's our Unearthed, concluding the year
of so many things were on Earth, so many and
then so many things that we didn't even talk about
(39:03):
in this I have a listener mail from Ava to
take us out, and Ava wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I've been listening to the podcast for a while now,
but have never felt so compelled to write into any
show as I did when I listened to the Nutcracker episode.
I hold a Doctor of Musical Arts degree and violin performance.
(39:24):
And while it is true that each winter we are
all one more Nutcracker closer to death, the Nutcracker is
one of the big influences and why I have chosen
the career path I have and hold the degrees that
I do. As a child, attending the Houston Ballets production
of The Nutcracker was a holiday tradition for my family,
and I even danced as a tiny apricot in the
(39:44):
background of the sugar plum very sequence in my ballet
school's production one year when I was young. Although I
went to school for music, I didn't know until listening
to the episode why the Nutcracker is such a Christmas
mainstay in our culture. Disney's Fantasia also played a huge
part in creating my musical path in life, and just
partly because of the Nutcracker and Right of Spring sequences
(40:06):
in that movie that I eventually ended up begging my
parents for violin lessons. I would even love to hear
a future episode on Stravinsky's Right of Spring, as it
has an amazingly interesting dance, musical, and social history behind it,
much like Kakovsky's Nutcracker. Thank You for providing a well
researched and insightful approach to topics that we sometimes take
(40:27):
for granted or overlook completely. As a small thank you,
I have attached pictures of my kiddies socks, Tuxedo cat, Pip,
Torty and Coco, great Tabby. Thanks again, Ava, Thank you
for this email, Ava, it really warmed my heart. No,
we mentioned people uh really being influenced by the Nutcracker
and UH and the Disneys Pantasia, but hearing from someone
(40:48):
directly turned that into a career path really warmed my heart. Also,
it's been a long time since I listened to this
episode and I don't remember how much it gets into
the greater history of the right of Spring, but previous
hosts Sarah and Bablina did an episode on the Right
of Spring riot back on June. I can't remember if
(41:10):
we've ever done a Saturday Classic with that, but if not,
maybe we will at some point. So thank you again,
Ava for this email and for the cat pictures. They're adorable.
If you would like to send us an email, we're
at History Podcast at I Heart radio dot com and
we're all over social media at missed in History, So
we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you
(41:30):
can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio
app and anywhere else you 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 i
heart 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 E. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is
part two of our Unearthed, covering things that have been
literally and figuratively unearthed in the last quarter of one.
(00:26):
So in this installment of Unearthed, we were gonna We're
gonna have some necropolis is. There were just a lot
of those for some reason. Uh, some art, and some
edibles and potables and shipwrecks and of course the potpourri,
which is where I put the interesting things that I
thought were all really interesting, but I didn't have a
good way to categorize them thematically. Before we have the potpourri, though,
(00:48):
we have another category that's a lot like potpourri, and
that it's random and it is last minute additions because
when I planned out when we were doing this, I
did not realize that January third was a company holiday,
and that was the day that I was going to
look through everything that happened over the holidays and like
(01:09):
carefully weave it in to what was already written for
the episode. So no, I did not work yesterday and
instead came up with this new category this morning at
eight am. I Love It. A fundraising effort by the
UK Friends of the National Library has successfully prevented a
(01:29):
collection of manuscripts, documents and some of the Bronte siblings
tiny books from being split up and sold at auction.
These items have been collected in the nineteenth century by
William Law and his brother Alfred. In addition to some
of the Brontes tiny books, which have been the subject
of most of the headlines about this the collection also
includes works by Jane Austin, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.
(01:53):
Sir Leonard Levatnik matched donations to buy this collection, essentially
contributing half the money for it. The total purchase price
was more than fifteen million pounds and items from this
collection are going to be donated to relevant museums, including
the Bronte Parsonage Museum, Jane Austen's House and the National
(02:14):
Library of Scotland, among others. It's a really amazing collection.
I'm very glad they were able to to buy it
and put it in museums instead of having it sort
of dissipate to other collectors. And if this all sounds
a bit familiar, especially the part about the Bronte's tiny books.
We covered a similar fundraising effort in our first quarter
(02:35):
owners for and in my next Last Minute edition. Conservators
in Virginia have found two different cornerstone boxes in the
pedestal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The statue
part was removed from the site in September. The contents
of these two boxes are yet to be thoroughly analyzed,
(02:56):
but they're pretty typical of time capsules, although there was
no specified date for opening either of these two there
are things like newspapers and other documents and books and
coins and memorabilia, including some bullets. At the same time,
even though these are pretty typical things that we find
in these sorts of boxes, there are some mysteries. One
(03:17):
of the boxes was placed on October seven, and news
accounts from the time referenced some items that have not
been found in either box, one of them being a
photo of Abraham Lincoln and his coffin. There is an
illustration of Abraham Lincoln from one of them, but this
photo has not been found. And in our last Last
(03:39):
Minute edition, according to research by the Missing Prince's Project,
spearheaded by Philippa Langley. Edward the Fifth might not have
died in the Tower of London. Instead, Richard the Third
may have sent him to the village of Coldridge and
Devon in secret, where he lived under the name John Evans,
and the evidence submitted to back this up sounds a
(04:00):
little like a conspiracy theory. A lot of articles about
this have reference to the Da Vinci Code. John Evans
was new to the area, nobody had ever heard of him,
but in spite of that, he was given the title
Lord of the Manor and also oversaw the area's deer park.
He also commissioned artwork for a local church, including a
(04:21):
stained glass window depicting Edward the Five. It's one of
very few such depictions of Edward the Fifth, and it
was placed over the location where Evans wanted his tomb
to be placed. That tomb is engraved with the name
John EVAs rather than Evans, and it's empty. But the
(04:41):
team has speculated that this misspelling is intentional, with the
e V standing for Edward the five and the A
s possibly standing for a Latin term meaning in sanctuary. Uh.
It's it seems like the kind of thing you might
illustrate with a murder board. So that was our last
(05:04):
last minute edition and now we'll move on to the
potpourri stuff that I wrote before taking off for the holidays.
Four boomerangs were discovered in a creek bed during a
drought in Australia in ten and eighteen. Theyandrewanda Yawarawaka Traditional
Landowners and Aboriginal Corporation partnered with Australian Heritage Services, Flinders
(05:25):
University and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization to
learn more about them. Radio carbon dating revealed that they
were made between sixteen fifty and eighteen thirty, before Europeans
first entered the area. These are non returning boomerangs and
they were likely used for digging and for fire management
in addition to hunting and fighting, and they may have
(05:48):
had a religious use as well. Researchers re examining Soviet
era archaeological research have determined that a liar found in
southwest Kazakhstan is incredibly similar to unknown as the Sutton
Who liar, named after the Sutton Whose ship burial where
it was found. These two sites are four thousand kilometers apart,
(06:09):
and before this point, Sutton Whose style liars had not
been found outside of Western Europe. This suggests that this
style of liar may have been part of a more
wide ranging musical tradition in the early medieval period, rather
than something that was specific to Western Europe. Moving on
to sixth century graves excavated in Bavaria have included a
(06:31):
couple of unique finds. One of the graves belonged to
somebody who was between forty and fifty years old when
he died, and it included lots of weapons, including a
battle axe, a sword, a lance, and a shield. There
was also a bridle and a pair of spurs which
may have been used with a horse that was also
buried nearby, and there was a bag buried at the
(06:54):
man's feet which had mostly decomposed, but it seems to
have basically been a toiletrees bag egg. Its contents included
a pair of scissors and a shattered ivory comb. Once
that comb had been pieced back together, it was shown
to be decorated on both sides with hunting scenes. Combs
aren't uncommon as grave goods from this period, but they're
(07:16):
more likely to be made of something like wood, bone
or antler than ivory, and then on top of that
there are antelope like animals shown in these hunting scenes
that are not native to the region of Europe where
the grave was found. The other grave seems to have
belonged to a woman between the ages of thirty and
forty years old, and the goods buried with her included jewelry, food,
(07:39):
and a weaving tool. But there was also a bowl, and,
like the comb and the other grave, a bowl that
doesn't seem to have been local to the area. It's
a style known as African red slipwear. This kind of
pottery was carried through much of the Roman Empire, but
was made in Tunisia, and this is the first complete
bowl found in Germany. Has raised some questions to these
(08:02):
two people travel and bring these pieces back with them
where they gifts from far away. It's kind of a mystery.
Archaeologists in Norway have found a thirteen hundred year old
ski believed to be the mate of one that was
found about five ms away. In both of these skis
or would with bindings made from birch ropes and leather straps,
(08:24):
if indeed they are a pair and not skis from
two different pairs that were coincidentally close together, then they
are the best preserved pair of prehistoric skis found to date.
All the researchers believed that these two skis were a set,
they're not actually identical. It's possible that whoever was using
them made a new pair out of two different skis.
(08:46):
They also show evidence of a lot of repair, suggesting
that these skis were just too valuable to try to
replace if they were damaged. In our next item, it
has long been established that the Norse arrived in North
America long before Lumpus voyage, including building a settlement in
what's now Newfoundland, but it hasn't been clear when exactly
(09:07):
that happened. According to research published in the journal Nature,
it was in the year ten twenty one, making the
earliest known crossing of the Atlantic Ocean something that happened
a thousand years ago. This research involved three pieces of wood,
all of which showed evidence of being cut with metal tools,
and at the time the indigenous population of North America
(09:29):
did not have these sorts of metal tools. The woods
still had a rough edge from where it was cut,
and that's something that would have been worn away if
it had been brought a long distance across the ocean,
so that led researchers to conclude that this had been
cut down in North America. It was not sounding that
had been cut down elsewhere and then brought to North America.
(09:50):
The wood came from three different trees, and the dating
relied on a massive solar storm that happened in the
year Researchers can see evidence to this solar storm in
tree rings, and each of the three pieces of wood
had twenty nine growth rings after that solar storm. So
the North came to North America with metal tools in
(10:11):
ten twenty one, cutting down these three trees after they arrived.
Next up, archaeologists in Utah have been excavating the site
of a town that housed Chinese workers during the building
of the Transcontinental Railroad. The town, known as Terrace, was
a temporary home to about five hundred people as the
railroad was being built, and then it was abandoned once
(10:33):
that stretch of the railroad was complete. At least some
of the buildings later burned down. In addition to finding
the remains of a building that had housed some of
the workers, archaeologists have found a medicine bottle, porcelain bowls,
writing instruments, and a seventeenth century Chinese coin. Next up,
Researchers in Pompeii have concluded that a recently unearthed room
(10:55):
was the living quarters for enslaved people, possibly an enslaved family.
The room is part of a much larger villa, but
it measures only about sixteen square meters where a hundred
and seventy square feet, and it seems to have functioned
as a sleeping and living space and as storage. The
stored items included what appeared to be parts of chariot harnesses,
(11:17):
and the room adjoins a space where the remains of
horses and the stable had been unearthed earlier in the year.
One of the three beds in the room is smaller
than the other, so it was possibly meant to be
used by a child. And then our last bit of
pot pourri. A team excavating a tomb in China's Nixia
(11:37):
region believe they had found the body of a grave robber,
since this body was found in a tunnel that had
been dug by looters, but examination of the remains has
revealed that he was probably a murder victim, with this
murder unrelated to the looting, who had been dumped into
the shaft later and left to die. The shaft was
(11:58):
dug sometime between the years anti five and two twenty CE,
but the remains date back only to the year six forty.
The shaft had also started to fill up with soil
again by the time this person died. Apart from all
of that, the skeleton shows signs of having been repeatedly stabbed.
This research was published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological
(12:21):
Sciences under the delightful title Hiding a Leaf in the
Forest Uncovering at hundred year old homicide case in a
two thousand year old cemetery. Next up, we have a
few necropolis is in this installment of unearthed first Archaeologists
have known about a rock cut tomb complex and what's
(12:43):
now Turkey for more than a hundred and fifty years,
but it's really been more recently that there has been
a thorough examination of this area. This site is part
of an ancient city known as Blondos, which was founded
during the time of Alexander the Great, and that makes
these tombs about eighteen hundred years old. This excavation project
started in and researchers have been stunned at just how
(13:07):
huge this necropolis is, they have found more than four
hundred rock cut tombs believed to have been used as
family burial chambers over multiple generations. Many of these are
heavily decorated, although these adornments have deteriorated over the years
and so far only twenty four murals are still visible. Unfortunately,
(13:28):
many of the tombs are easily seen from the surface
since they're cut into a cliff face, and as a consequence,
they have been looted or otherwise damaged over the previous centuries.
In the same complex, they have also found temples, a theater,
a public bath, and more, and there are believed to
be hundreds more burial sites that haven't been explored yet,
(13:50):
and analysis of those sites has of course not been
done yet. Next up, archaeologists in Pauline near Lake Geneva
have found new tombs in a necropolis there during monitoring
work ahead of construction. This site was first excavated in
the early twentieth century and is home to the oldest
Neolithic burials in Switzerland. These newly discovered burial sites were
(14:13):
fairly close to the surface and they are in poor condition,
with many of the slabs that cover the remains already broken.
Into pieces. The grave sites that were threatened by the
construction were rescued, but the ones outside of that area
were covered and preserved. And lastly, a late Roman necropolis
has been found under the wall of a grocery store
(14:35):
in Ris, northern France. This was first detected in excavated
this past fall. Most of the burials in this necropolis
are individual bodies and wood coffins that have been placed
in cut graves, really without a lot of grave goods. Uh.
And now we're gonna take a quick sponsor break before
we talk about some art. We have a lot of
(15:05):
stuff related to art. This time around, conservators have found
a previously unknown painting by Armenian American artist our Shield
Gorky under his painting The Limit, which he completed in
Gorky's daughter had long suspected that there was another work
of art underneath the Limit, but conservators have thought it
(15:27):
was just too risky to try to reveal it. Swiss
conservators MICHAELA. Ritter and Olivier Masson finally began working with
this piece during the pandemic, carefully removing the Limit, which
is a work on paper, from the canvas underneath, and
it turned out that yes, that underlying canvas did have
its own painting, one now known as untitled with the
(15:51):
parentheses Virginia Summer, which was most likely painted earlier in
ninety seven. It's possible that the artist meant for this
layerying of the two artworks to be temporary, sort of
using that canvas temporarily, and was going to remove the
paper painting, but he died in in a September fine
that didn't cross our radar until now. Johannes Vermier's Girl
(16:14):
reading a letter at an open window has been restored,
revealing a depiction of Cupid. Scholars have known Cupid was
there for about forty years, since it was visible in
an X ray of the piece, but they thought Vermier
had removed the depiction of Cupid himself while working on
the painting. But during this paintings restoration, the area where
(16:35):
Cupid was known to be did not react to solvents
the same way that the rest of the painting did.
The suggestive that the paint used to cover up Cupid
was a different type than had been used when painting
the rest of the work, possibly put there by someone
else who tried to make that cover up blend in
with the original I mean it worked for work. The
(16:59):
museum can veened a panel of Vermeer experts who decided
that the best course of action was to collect microscopic
samples from the painting to study them, confirming that the
paint covering the cupid had been applied years or even
decades after the rest of the work was complete. With
the experts okay, conservators removed the rectangle of painting that
(17:20):
had been added later. The depiction of Cupid is a
painting within a painting, and that same cupid is also
used in other Vermeer artworks, including young Woman standing at
a virginal and Girl interrupted at her music. This discovery
has also raised some speculations about other artworks in which
a subject is in front of a seemingly blank wall,
(17:42):
and whether that blank wall also has a covered over
depiction of Cupid. Moving on, curators at Norway's National Museum
we're using infrared reflectography to examine Edvard Monks Madonna as
part of a routine conservation checkup. They discus, ever, that
earlier sketches are still visible using this noninvasive technique, and
(18:04):
these sketches suggest that earlier drafts of the painting were
more conservative. In the final painting, a nude woman has
one of her arms stretched up above her head and
the other sort of tucked behind her lower back, in
a pose that definitely looks sensuous. But in the earlier
sketch that stretched up arms down along her side, and
(18:24):
it's a position that looks more RESTful than erotic. In
similar news, Rice Museum has announced the discovery of preparatory
sketches in Rembrandty two painting The Night Watch, which are
visible through macro XRF imaging. This discovery came during a
two year restoration project for that piece. And speaking of Rembrandt,
(18:46):
scientists in the Netherlands have figured out that they can
determine exactly when paintings from the Dutch Golden Age were
created based on the exact composition of their lead white pigments.
This is because conflicts like the English Civil Wars in
the eighty years were disrupted lead supplies, forcing artists to
adjust the amount of lead they were using in their paints.
(19:09):
Archaeologists working on the High Speed Real Project known as
HS two have under three Roman era busts while excavating
a Norman church in Stoke, Mandeville, They had expected to
find early English artifacts because the excavation site was home
to a medieval tower, but instead found these three much
older stone sculptures. Two had essentially been decapitated, with the
(19:32):
head and the torso both still present, and the third
was only the head. In addition to these three very
well preserved statues, they also found a hexagonal glass jug
with large pieces of the glass still intact. Based on
all of this, they believed this tower was built directly
on top of the site of what had been a
Roman mausoleum and which had other uses prior to that.
(19:55):
And In similar news, excavations in western Turkey have unearthed
the head of statues depicting Aphrodite and Dionysus moving on.
A sculpture spotted outside a home in St. Louis In
has been confirmed as Martha and Mary by the late
artist William Edmondson, who died in nineteen fifty one. This
(20:16):
sculpture had also been displayed at the Museum of Modern
Art in ninety seven. That was a solo exhibition, making
Edmondson the first black artist to have a solo show
at MoMA. It appears that Anthony Ablis, executive director of
the Metropolitan Opera acquired the statute sometime after that show,
and then his wife Sally, inherited it after he died.
(20:38):
Street artist Brian Donnelly, known as Cause, purchased this from
Bliss as a gift for the American Folk Art Museum.
The statue has since been cleaned and it will be
on display at the museum in early next up. Restorers
working at Calvally Old Hall in Yorkshire, England have found
floor to ceiling Tutor era paintings under some nineteenth century plaster.
(21:03):
These paintings basically served the purpose of wallpaper and depict
exaggerated vines and mythical animals. They seem to be based
on designs from the Golden House of Roman Emperor Nero.
It's possible that a nineteenth century owner of this manner
covered the paintings up with plaster to try to protect them,
so now conservators are at work figuring out the best
(21:25):
way to preserve them. Next up, a walk around family
Land in Rutland has led to the discovery of a
mosaic depicting scenes from Homer's The Iliad, which was part
of a Roman era villa complex. The complex seems to
have been built sometime between the third and fourth century.
This is the first mosaic in Britain that depicts the
Iliad and it's being investigated by the University of Leicester
(21:48):
in partnership with Historic England and Rutland City Council. And
in another accidental family find, members of the Sitwell family
have decided to auction off the family's artwork and other
objects from Weston Hall in Northamptonshire, England, and as all
these items were being collected in catalog they found a
forgotten work of art just wrapped up in bubble wrap.
(22:11):
It turned out to be a drawing by Italian painter
Giovanni Batista Tiapolo, who worked in the eighteenth century. This
is called a large group of Puncinelli. Puncinelli, we're buffoonish
stock characters from seventeenth century Comedia dell Arte and then
this depiction they are all eating njoki, which I just
(22:33):
find delightful. Aspert said, well bought this painting in nineteen
thirty six and then they just forgot about it. This
was sold at auction in November with a final bit
of a hundred thousand pounds. I think more painting should
feature large groups of people just happily eating, just eating,
(22:54):
just munching on stuff. Now it's time for swords, glorious swords.
A die her off the coast of Israel has found
a nine hundred year old sword on the seafloor, along
with other artifacts from about the same period. The sword
itself is believed to be an excellent condition, although it
is completely encrusted in marine life, so it is not
(23:14):
entirely clear exactly what's under there. Based on where it
was found, it may be a crusader sword. It was
in an area where ships took shelter. The sea floor
in this area is constantly shifting and revealing new fines,
so this diver, Shlomi Katson was afraid that the sword
would be buried again if it was just left there,
(23:35):
and so took it to the surface and reported it
to authorities. That is how we have lots of photographs
of this absolutely marine life encrusted sword. That's actually how
it's designed. It's not that would be amazing. Another sword,
a broken bronze age sword, has been found in southwestern Finland.
(23:56):
This is a rare fine. Only about two hundred bronze
age items have been found in Finland and swords and
knives are only a little more than ten percent of those.
The fragments were found in July by someone who was
using a newly purchased metal detector to check out his
childhood home, but to find wasn't announced until October. Although
this was found under the lawn of a family home,
(24:18):
it is not clear how the broken sword got there.
It's possible that it was in soil that was brought
in for construction years ago. He contacted Finland's National Board
of Antiquities after finding the first couple of clearly very
old sword pieces, and a more official excavation uncovered the rest.
Next up, we have a couple of fines related to animals.
(24:40):
According to research published in the journal Nature in October,
an interdisciplinary team of researchers has concluded that today's horses
were first domesticated and the Pontic Caspian steps in the
Northern Caucasus. This happened somewhere around b C and then
over the next few sent trees, these domesticated horses replaced
(25:03):
genetically distinct wild horses in Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia
and Siberia. This research involved genetic analysis of two hundred
seventy three horse specimens that lived from fifty thousand to
a little more than two thousand years ago. They analyzed
their genes and then compared the results to modern domesticated
(25:24):
horses living today. However, these were not the first horses
ever to be domesticated. That was in Betai, Central Asia
around thirty d b C. But those earlier horses aren't
the ancestors of today's domestic horses. Their descendants are a
feral Mongolian horse known as Zerowski's horse. Our next animal find.
(25:46):
Researchers in severe have tried to confirm Neanderthal hunting techniques
for a crow like bird called the chef. It seems
very likely that the Neanderthals used chefs as a food source.
They've been various finds of chuf bones that have tooth
marks and caves that show evidence of Neanderthal use, But
(26:07):
it also seemed like this would be a tricky animal
for Neanderthals to hunt. Thinking that Neanderthals might have used
nets and torches, researchers armed themselves with butterfly nets and
flashlights and went into caves and other dark spaces where
modern chuffs are known to roost at night, and they
found that the chuffs became confused when the researchers shined
(26:28):
flashlights at them. They wound up just flying into dead
end spaces where it was easy for people to just
scoop them right up. Is this how Neanderthals did it?
Who knows, but it does suggest one possible way. I
also just, you know, I don't want to be cruel
to animals, but I find the scenario kind of amusing.
If this is a Neanderthal technique for hunting, it confirms
(26:53):
once again has with many many other things we've talked
about on Earth, that they were pretty good at problem
solving and stuff. I feel almost every time I'm researching
these episodes, I find headlines that make it sound like
this is new information. Moving on. Archaeologists and the Hi
Duguay Archipelago off the northern coast of British Columbia have
(27:13):
found the tooth of a domesticated dog. It was confirmed
to be a dog too through its DNA and radio
carbon dating suggests that it lived thirteen thousand, one hundred
years ago. This is the oldest evidence of domestic dogs
discovered so far in the America's and it also suggests
that people were living on the archipelago about two thousand
(27:34):
years earlier than previously thought. The Haida Nation's oral histories
were also part of this work, and indigenous archaeologists who
were part of this work have described it as the
field of archaeology catching up to those oral histories. And lastly,
archaeologists have studied fish bones at four sites connected to
(27:54):
the Slawa Tooth First Nations community on what's now the
West coast of Canada. Researchers have concluded that for about
a thousand years that Sligh with Tooth we're using large
weirs to catch salmon, determining the salmon sex and releasing
most of the females. Bones found at village sites were
overwhelmingly those of male fish. European colonists ultimately destroyed these
(28:20):
indigenous fishing tools, and since then the salmon population in
this area has largely collapsed. Jesse Morin, archaeologists for that
Sleigh with Tooth nation, and an adjunct professor at the
University of British Columbia, was quoted in the Canadian Process
saying quote, people were harvesting the same sort of fish consistently,
probably from the same places. For one thousand years. Here
(28:43):
we are one hundred fifty years later, one hundred fifty
years worth of industrial harvesting, and we've really destroyed these resources.
After we take a quick sponsor break, we will move
onto some edibles and potables, some of which, uh, we're
also animal related. There's a little over app in those
two categories. Now we are moving on so one of
(29:12):
our favorite topics, which is the edibles and potables. According
to research published in the journal Current Biology on oct
workers that prehistoric salt mines in Austria drank beer and
ate blue cheese. Researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing
paleo feces in the mines, which has been preserved for
(29:32):
about dred years thanks to the conditions in the mind.
This is the earliest evidence found so far of both
beer drinking and blue cheese eating in Europe. In the
words of Kirsten Kaark of the Museum of Natural History, Vienna, quote,
it is becoming increasingly clear that not only were prehistoric
(29:53):
culinary practices sophisticated, but also that complex processed food stuffs
as well as the technique of fermentation, have held a
prominent role in our early food history. Next up. Researchers
at a site known as Jordan's River Dura Jatte have
found evidence that people were using complex fishing tools and
techniques as long as twelve thousand years ago. Excavations have
(30:16):
unearthed nineteen bone hooks and grooved pebbles that seem to
have been used as sinkers. They could be tricky to
study fishing technology because things like lines and nets are
usually made from fibers that decomposed, but there are fiber
residues on these hooks that suggests that they were used
with lines of some sort. There's also some variation in
(30:38):
the shapes of the hooks, including their barbs and how
they were connected to a line, suggesting that people were
using different hooks to catch different types of fish. There's
also some suggestion that these hooks were used along with
artificial lures. We already knew that people living in this
area twelve thousand years ago we're eating fish, but this
is the earliest evidence of their using things like hooks
(31:00):
and artificial lures to catch them. Archaeologists in Iraq have
found a commercial winery including stone cut basins dating back
to the eighth or seventh century BC, as well as
fourteen stone cut installations that were used for pressing the juice.
The winery is near an area where archaeologists have been
(31:21):
examining stone cut reliefs carved into irrigation canals. The reliefs
depict sacred animals and kings in prayer, probably commissioned by
the same kings who paid for the canals to be built,
as both a symbol of religious devotion and a reminder
of who had funded the irrigation project. And Archaeologists have
also found a massive early medieval wine factory in Israel.
(31:46):
This was another facility that was used to make wine
on a large commercial scale. This one has five wine presses,
four large warehouses for storing and aging the wine, and
facilities for making and firing the and four eights that
were used to store the wine. There are also large
vats and a treading floor where the grapes were crushed underfoot.
(32:08):
A spokesperson from the Israeli Antiquities Authority estimated that this
winery could have produced two million liters of wine per year.
A golden amethyst ring has also been found not far
from this site. It dates back to at least the
seventh century, and there's some speculation that it may have
been worn for hangover prevention. The amethyst has traditionally been
(32:32):
regarded as having anti hangover properties. Moving on, archaeologists in
Germany have found a seventy nine year old, badly charred
cake in the town of Lubec. The British Royal Air
Force bombed this town on March twenty Nino and the
freshly unwrapped cake was buried and burned as the building's
(32:55):
upper floors collapsed over it and caught fire. Even though
this hake is badly burned, its nutty filling was preserved
pretty well in this fire. This has planned to be
conserved and eventually put on public display. And lastly, in
Edibles and Potables, Polish archaeologists have found a unique kitchen
(33:16):
were set at the site of a Roman legionary camp
in Bulgaria. These pieces were made of very high quality
clay and they seem to represent a full array of pots, lids, bowls,
and cups, as well as glasses that look like today's
pine glasses. The team plans to conserve and analyze this
cookwear set to determine what was cooked and stored in
(33:36):
the vessels. It is likely that at least some of
it was seafood, since there were also oyster shells found nearby.
And now we're going to move on to another favorite category,
which is shipwrecks. Volcanic and tectonic activity near the Ogasawara
Island chain in Japan has lifted the sea floor around
the island of eot known in English as Eo Jima,
(34:00):
revealing a fleet of World War Two era ships. These
are Japanese ships that American forces sank after the Battle
of Eo Jima, hoping that the wreckage would form a
breakwater to help create a harbor. That did not work,
but in photos of this you can see that there
the ships are arranged in a way that was purposeful.
(34:22):
Next up, the US revenue cutter Bear sank during a
storm in nineteen sixty three. It had been decommissioned and
tied to a wharf in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and it
was in the process of being towed to Philadelphia. But
before that point it had a long history at sea.
It started out as a vessel for seal hunting in
eighteen seventy four. The US government bought it a few
(34:45):
years later to use for rescue work. Since it had
been built to be able to navigate icy waters. Its
work as a relief vessel included being part of the
rescue fleet of the Greeley Expedition in eighteen eighty one.
It operated as a relief ship during the nineteen eighteen
flew pandemic, and was finally decommissioned in ninety nine. For
a time after that it was used as a floating
(35:06):
museum in Oakland, California, and then as a film set.
Then the Bear was recommissioned during World War Two and
sent back to the Arctic to patrol. During that time,
it helped capture a Norwegian ship that the German military
was using to gather and report information about weather conditions
in the North Atlantic. Various people and groups have been
(35:28):
searching for the wreck of the Bear since the nineteen seventies.
In sonar mapping of a sixty two square mile it's
about a hundred and sixty square kilometers area of seafloor
revealed two sunken ships. In September of this year, investigators
returned to the area with a remote operated vehicle and
identified one of those ships as the Bear. We also
(35:50):
have a couple of canoes, a maritime archaeologist from the
Wisconsin Historical Society spotted what she thought was a log
in Lake Mendota and Wisconsin, but it turned out to
be the oldest intact boat ever found in the state.
It's believed to be about twelve hundred years old and
was probably made by the Effigy Mound builders, who are
(36:12):
the ancestors of today's ho Chunk Nation. It is so
well preserved that the archaeologists initially thought this was the
Boy Scout project from the nineteen fifties. Archaeologists decided to
raise the canoe from the floor of the lake since
it was likely to be destroyed by micro organisms if
it was left where it was. It is currently undergoing
(36:33):
a preservation process with the hope that it can be
put on public display. Ho Chunk Tribal Historic Preservation Officer
Bill Quackenbush told reporters that he would collaborate with the
Wisconsin Historical Society on the canoes preservation. The other canoe
was found in a sonode or a freshwater sinkhole in
southern Mexico. It's believed to be about a thousand years old,
(36:56):
and it's the first complete canoe of its type ever
found It's possible that the Maya used this canoe to
gather water or to make offerings in the Sonodi. This
is one of many many objects that have been unearthed
during work on a railway that's being built to connect
multiple sites across the Yucatan Peninsula. This is a controversial project.
(37:17):
It's meant to bring tourists from the beaches on the
coast to historic and cultural sites and smaller towns farther inland.
But there are a lot of archaeological sites along the
path of the train, with more being discovered as work
goes on. Archaeologists working ahead of the train construction have
found hundreds of sites encompassing thousands of structures. The potential
(37:38):
archaeological and environmental impacts of the train project have both
drawn a lot of criticism. And now we have a
random final thing for the end of this episode. So
for our last find of it's actually something that was
first found in a glacier climber stumbled onto a box
(37:58):
from an Air India passenger jet that had crashed on
January nineteen sixty six. This plane was one of two
planes that crashed into mom Block in the middle of
the twentieth century and climbers in the area often find
various things from each of them. In this case, this
box turned out to contain emeralds and sapphires. This climber
(38:21):
turned the box into authorities who tried to track down
the survivors of whoever this box had belonged to. That
effort was unsuccessful, and in December it was announced that
the climber would get to keep half of the gemstones.
The other half is going to the village of Shemony
near the crash site, where they will become part of
(38:42):
the collection of the Shemony Crystals Museum. According to news coverage,
the climber, who has not been named, will be selling
off his half and using some of the money to
renovate his apartment. And that's our Unearthed, concluding the year
of so many things were on Earth, so many and
then so many things that we didn't even talk about
(39:03):
in this I have a listener mail from Ava to
take us out, and Ava wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I've been listening to the podcast for a while now,
but have never felt so compelled to write into any
show as I did when I listened to the Nutcracker episode.
I hold a Doctor of Musical Arts degree and violin performance.
(39:24):
And while it is true that each winter we are
all one more Nutcracker closer to death, the Nutcracker is
one of the big influences and why I have chosen
the career path I have and hold the degrees that
I do. As a child, attending the Houston Ballets production
of The Nutcracker was a holiday tradition for my family,
and I even danced as a tiny apricot in the
(39:44):
background of the sugar plum very sequence in my ballet
school's production one year when I was young. Although I
went to school for music, I didn't know until listening
to the episode why the Nutcracker is such a Christmas
mainstay in our culture. Disney's Fantasia also played a huge
part in creating my musical path in life, and just
partly because of the Nutcracker and Right of Spring sequences
(40:06):
in that movie that I eventually ended up begging my
parents for violin lessons. I would even love to hear
a future episode on Stravinsky's Right of Spring, as it
has an amazingly interesting dance, musical, and social history behind it,
much like Kakovsky's Nutcracker. Thank You for providing a well
researched and insightful approach to topics that we sometimes take
(40:27):
for granted or overlook completely. As a small thank you,
I have attached pictures of my kiddies socks, Tuxedo cat, Pip,
Torty and Coco, great Tabby. Thanks again, Ava, Thank you
for this email, Ava, it really warmed my heart. No,
we mentioned people uh really being influenced by the Nutcracker
and UH and the Disneys Pantasia, but hearing from someone
(40:48):
directly turned that into a career path really warmed my heart. Also,
it's been a long time since I listened to this
episode and I don't remember how much it gets into
the greater history of the right of Spring, but previous
hosts Sarah and Bablina did an episode on the Right
of Spring riot back on June. I can't remember if
(41:10):
we've ever done a Saturday Classic with that, but if not,
maybe we will at some point. So thank you again,
Ava for this email and for the cat pictures. They're adorable.
If you would like to send us an email, we're
at History Podcast at I Heart radio dot com and
we're all over social media at missed in History, So
we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you
(41:30):
can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio
app and anywhere else you 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 i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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