Unearthed! Year-end 2022, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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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 B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is
time for Unearthed. This is our Unearthed installments to to

(00:22):
close out the year. We know it's when it's actually
coming out for folks who maybe are new to the
show or don't remember. This is when we talk about
things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the
last three months, so in this case it's October November
December of UH. Today we are going to talk about

(00:44):
a whole bunch of updates, so things we've talked about
before on the show, either on Unearthed or otherwise, as
well as a whole bunch of shipwrecks and a whole
bunch of repatriations. Just the updates shipwrecks and repatriations that
was enough for one whole episode. Um part two on Wednesday,
we'll be talking about the Edibles and the Potables and
the art and some animals and some other stuff, so

(01:08):
we can just get started right. So first, we've had
several updates about the search for victims of the Tulsa massacre,
which we first covered on the show in July. Investigations
continued at Oaklawn Cemetery in October and November of last year,
with crews finding thirty two total burials and exhuming the

(01:28):
remains of eight people so they could be examined. So
this is an ongoing process. It's kind of a multi
step thing. First, they are examining the burials themselves to
try to determine whether they were likely connected to the massacre.
From there, they decide which ones they should exume, and
then they need to examine the remains that have been

(01:49):
exhumed to try to identify them if possible. So while
investigators have found some burial sites and conducted some exhimations,
the investigations with this are still ongoing. Research published in
the journal The Holocene has proposed a new explanation for
how and when the person known as Utsy the Iceman
died and how his body came to be preserved in

(02:11):
the ice. The most widely accepted idea before this point
has been that Utsy died in the autumn more than
five thousand years ago, and that his body was quickly
buried in snow, where it essentially was freeze dried and
then encased under glacial ice. According to this idea, it
remained undisturbed for thousands of years before being found by hikers.

(02:35):
But this newly published research calls really all of that
in the question, suggesting that instead, based on the stomach
contents and analysis of plant material found around him, Utzy
really died in the spring, not the fall, so his
body would have been exposed to the elements all through
the summer rather than immediately being buried in the snow.

(02:58):
Radio carbon dating all to suggests that some of the
material found around him is newer than his body is,
so that suggests that he was not completely buried in
the ice that whole time, but instead was exposed at
various points that additional material than being frozen in there
with him later. So that's something that they think recurred

(03:19):
several times in the centuries between his death and his discovery.
This research to even suggests that Utsey did not die
in the place where his body was found, but that
in all of this melting and refreezing, his body was
pushed down from a higher elevation. So that initial description
of what might have happened to Utsey that I talked

(03:40):
about before this last explanation by Tracy. It's a pretty
unlikely series of events. It's often described as a series
of miracles, and back in a lot of researchers thought
that Utsey was fairly or even entirely unique, but this
new proposal suggests a process that's a lot less miraculous
and more commonplace, meaning that there could be other bodies

(04:03):
like Utsi's out there which will be found as global
temperatures continue to rise and glacial ice continues to melt.
There have also been other remains and artifacts exposed through
the melting ice in the decades since Utzy was found,
so it has already become clear that he's really not
quite one of a kind. Yeah, no shade to Utsy,

(04:25):
just saying not a totally unique in the entire world scenario.
Prior hosts of the show did an episode on Nutzy
in January, and then we have had a lot of
Utzy updates on various installments of Unearthed since then. He
also appears on an episode I have been working on
in the background for a long time, and we'll see

(04:46):
if I ever get my act fully together on it,
but fingers crossed, I'll look forward to it, and I
saur fossil, believed to have been collected by Mary Anning,
was excavated from southern England in eighteen eighteen. We most
recently ran Past Hosts episode on Mary Anning is a
Saturday Classic in September of This fossil is believed to

(05:09):
be the first complete ichths R fossil ever found, but
it was placed in the collections of the Royal College
of Surgeons in London and was destroyed there when the
city was bombed during World War Two, so the specimen
at that point was believed to have been totally lost,
aside from a scientific illustration that had been made in
the nineteenth century. But in and researchers found two different

(05:36):
casts of it in two different collections, one at Yale
University's Peabody Museum and the other at Berlin's Natural History Museum,
and the cast in Berlin wasn't listed in the museum's records.
A paper on the discovery of these casts was published
in Royal Society Open Science in November, and it points

(05:57):
out that old casts like these can have historic and
scientific importance but are often overlooked. In this case, the
two casts have verified the accuracy of most of the
scientific illustration that still survived, while also showing a couple
of spots where the illustration didn't quite capture the specimen.
It also notes that there may still be other casts

(06:19):
of this same specimen in other museums collections. Yeah, it
was one of those things where people were like, that
looks familiar to me. Wait, it's something we thought had
been totally destroyed that we actually have this cast of
Moving on, In our previous installment of Unearthed, we talked
about the Summerton Man, that is a previously unidentified body

(06:42):
who had washed up in Australia. We talked about the
announcement that a pair of researchers had concluded that this
person was Carl Webb, known as Charles. So Police in
Australia have also been conducting their own investigation into the
Summerton Man's identity. They have not we're least their results
or confirmed this investigation, but one of the two researchers

(07:06):
involved in that investigation, Derek Abbott of Adelaide University, has
contacted members of the web family to try to find
more information about Charles and to just confirm this identification.
That conversation Unearthed to photo album containing family photos, including
a Charlie Webb, as well as a group photo of

(07:27):
the Swinburne Technical College Under sixteen football team, one of
whom is listed as ce Web. One family member also
underwent DNA testing to confirm a link to Charles Webb.
And another update to an earlier episode of an Earth.
In July, we talked about the discovery of a led
sarcophagus at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The sarcophagus was

(07:51):
found during work to rebuild the cathedral's spire following the
fire that damaged it very badly in twenty nineteen. So
there were actually two sarcophagu i found. There was only
one that was known when we talked about this. The
second was found also. There were statues, sculptures and other
items discovered. Both of these sarcophagu i have now been opened.

(08:14):
One was marked with a brass plaque saying that it
belonged to Antoine de la Porte, the canon of Notre
Dame Cathedral, who died in seventeen ten. The identity of
the other is not known, but has been nicknamed La Cavalier.
This is believed to be the body of an affluent
man in his thirties who died as long ago as
the fourteenth century. Based on where he was buried, he

(08:36):
would have been someone important, but other than that, not
much as known. Yeah, it's a little unclear whether anybody
will be able to figure out exactly who this was.
It kind of depends on exactly how old that body was,
because records before a certain point no longer exist. Moving on,
in we did a two part episode on Executive Order

(08:57):
ninety six and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during
World War Two. While researching the people who had been incarcerated,
Duncan Reigan Williams, director of the University of Southern California's
nso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, realized that
there was no complete, sort of master list of everybody

(09:19):
who had been imprisoned under this order, So he assembled
a team of researchers and volunteers to create one, compiling
and cross referencing records from all of the various camps.
The result is a sacred book called cho which is
a handbound, thousand page book containing one thousand, two hundred

(09:41):
eighty four names. This is the first attempt at a
comprehensive list of everyone the United States imprisoned in these camps.
The names are also displayed on a website arranged by
birth year. The book itself is currently on display at
the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California, a
where visitors are invited to view the book and to

(10:03):
use a special hanko or signature seal to stamp up
to six names in the book. Although a person doesn't
have to be a survivor of one of the camps
or a friend or relative of somebody who was incarcerated
there to stamp one of the names, this is a
process that they're hoping will help verify the names in
the book, so people have an opportunity to do things

(10:25):
like correct misspellings or add people in who might have
been omitted in spite of all the research that went
into this. Back in we did an episode on the
last Carolina parakeet and other endlings, or the last known
number of a species to live before it becomes extinct.
One of the ones we mentioned was the last Tasmanian

(10:45):
tiger or thili sign, who died at Hobar Zoo in
Australia in ninety six Although the animals skeleton and skin
were preserved and given to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery,
they later disappeared. Eventually people concluded that they must have
been thrown away, but after somebody found an unpublished taxidermists report,

(11:08):
the museum conducted a search and they wound up finding
the skin and skeleton in a cupboard in the museum's
education department. Because this was in very good condition, staff
had used it as part of traveling educational exhibits, sort
of like we need to take an example to show people,
this is the best one we have, so it's what
we'll take with us, not realizing exactly what it was

(11:32):
and that it was the last style a sign. So
now this is on display at the museum. And for
our last update, the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath,
England has acquired a handwritten copy of Caroline Herschel's memoir
which contains material that was removed when it was edited
and published. This will be going on display at the
Herschel Museum of Astronomy, which is housed in the Hershel's home.

(11:55):
This was an important acquisition for the museum. Most of
Caroline's own documents and personal papers are still held by
the Herschel family, so they're not necessarily available for the
public to see, and most of the items that are
on display at the museum are on loan rather than
being owned by the museum. This is only the second

(12:16):
artifact directly connected to Caroline that the museum has been
able to purchase, although acquiring more items for the museum's
permanent collection is one of its priorities. Our episode on
Caroline Herschel came out as a Saturday Classic in March
of twenty nineteen, and now we're going to take a
quick sponsor break before we get onto the shipwrecks. Today,

(12:46):
we have about a jillion shipwrecked discoveries uh and also
some research done at at shipwreck sites that were previously
known about, but this research is new. First researchers in
the North at Sea have been trying to figure out
whether wartime shipwrecks are polluting the water there and whether

(13:06):
that pollution means that these wrecks should be removed. In
this case, they focused on the V two John Mahn
German ship that was sunk by the Royal Air Force
in February of two. Based on their research yes this
particular wreck is leaking toxic chemicals into the water, including nickel, copper,

(13:27):
and arsenic, as well as chemicals found in fossil fuels
and explosives. The amounts of the substances are at this
point fairly small, although polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or p h s,
which are found in fossil fuels, are altering the ecosystem
around the ship, and this is one of many wartime
shipwrecks in the area. Other ships may present bigger problems

(13:52):
next up. After being on hold due to the COVID
nineteen pandemic, dives and excavations have resumed at the site
of the HMS Arabis, which was one of the ships
that was lost during Captain John Franklin's attempt to navigate
the Northwest Passage. That attempt started in eight Researchers have

(14:12):
recovered more than two hundred and seventy five artifacts, including
an embossed leather folio with a quill tucked inside. Although
it is not yet known whose folio this was or
what was written inside of it. Divers discovered this as
the most remarkable find of the season. Because of the
conditions of the Arctic waters where these ships went down.

(14:34):
Diving is possible only in the summer and using special
equipment to help keep divers warm. Divers didn't visit the
other ship, the HMS Terror, during last summer's dives, because
it is in much deeper water, so archaeologists consider it
to be more secure than the Arabis. You know, they're
prioritizing the Arabis since it's a little bit more threatened.

(14:57):
The team conducted fifty six dives during this very narrow
diving window, and they focused a lot of their efforts
on the steward's pantry on the ships that they brought
up a lot of tableware. Next, in the late nineteenth century,
an unusual ship design was developed almost exclusively to move
freight around the Great Lakes. It's called the whale back.

(15:17):
Although some of these vessels were later moved and used
in other bodies of water, only forty four of them
were ever made, and all but two of those were
made for use in the Great Lakes. The name comes
from its appearance, looking a little bit like the back
of a whale. They're shaped almost like a cigar, with
the ends curved slightly upward and ending in a blunted
off shape almost like a pig snout. Barged one nine

(15:41):
was a whale back ship that collided with another vessel
during a storm on October nineteen o two. Although the
crew managed to evacuate to that other ship, Barged sank.
A remote operated vehicle captured the first images of the
vessel on the floor of the lake into one, and
its identification was announced late last year. This was the

(16:06):
last as yet undiscovered wreck of a whale back ship,
so of all the ones that had wrecked, this was
the only one that until now we didn't know exactly
where it was. A wreck known as the Scuff Doh
was found by a diver off the coast of Sweden
in two thousand three, and although investigations were conducted in
the years that immediately followed, a new analysis of the

(16:27):
ship and its cargo was just published last year, and
this research has formed sort of a snapshot of maritime
trade in Northern Europe during the fifteenth century. For example,
the ship was made of timber that was cut down
between fourteen thirty seven and fourteen thirty nine, while the
trees that it was carrying as cargo date to fourteen

(16:47):
forty to fourteen forty three. So it seems like this
ship went down not long after it was built. The
cargo included pieces of copper that had been mined in
two regions of what's now Slovakia. There were bricks from
Poland and Poland was also probably the source of the timber.
Quicklime came from the island of Goodland in Sweden. Together,

(17:11):
the various types of cargo identified and their origin points
suggests that the ship was departing from the Hanseatic League
port known as Goadant now Danzig, probably bound for Bruge.
I just thought it was interesting has provided like one
snapshot of this interconnected trade network and other news. Meisa
is the largest lake in Norway and it serves as

(17:34):
a source of drinking water for about a hundred thousand people,
but it has also been used as a munitions dump.
So researchers started a project to survey the floor of
the lake and to map all of the dump sites
using high resolution sonar, ultimate goal being to clean up
the lake. In the process of this mapping, they also
found what appears to be an extremely well preserved shipwreck.

(18:00):
Very little is known about the wreck at this point.
It is estimated as dating back to somewhere between thirteen
hundred and eighteen fifties, so that is quite a time span. Uh.
That's called hedging your bets on the gas. It is
extremely well preserved, apart from a little bit of corrosion
in some of the nails used in its construction. One

(18:21):
reason all of this seems pretty vague is that there
were attempts to send a remotely operated vehicle to capture
images of the wreck, which might have helped learn more
about it, but that had to be scrubbed due to weather.
So researchers are hoping to try again next year, maybe
get some pictures and clear some things up and in
similar we don't know what this might be. News Nantucket

(18:43):
residence Matthew Pelka found what appears to be the remains
of a shipwreck while out on the beach in early December.
The area in and around the island of Nantucket is
home to a lot of shipwrecks, but at this point
there's not a clear sense of which one this might be.
There's some speculation that it might be the remains of
a nineteenth or early twentieth century vessel used to ferry

(19:05):
cargo to and from the island, rather than something that
was meant for longer voyages. Regardless, just stumbling over the
decaying timbers of a wreck ship while out on a
local beach seems like it would be quite the experience. Yes,
just sort of like, is that a is that a
shipwreck looks kind of like part of a ship? Uh.

(19:26):
Two more medieval cogs have been discovered in a lake
in Sweden, this time during construction of a railway tunnel.
They've been nicknamed Barberg skugg In one and two after
their location, which was found near Barberg. Cogs have come
up on several installments of Unearthed, and this is the
third cog that we have talked about from But this

(19:50):
type of ship is actually pretty rare. Only seven of
them have been found in Sweden, only thirty or so
have been found in all of Europe. Um. I had
this moment where I was like, I keep reading about
how rare these ships were, but I feel like we've
been talking about them a lot, so finding two of
them together is pretty unusual. Both cogs have been dated

(20:12):
to the fourteenth century using tree ring analysis of the
timbers that were used to build them. Also in Sweden,
maritime archaeologists have found the Uplet, which was the sister
ship to the seventeenth century warship Vassa. The Vasa sank
on its first voyage in Sight and was covered by
previous host of the show in the eleven episode More

(20:34):
Shipwreck Stories Battleships. The Applet was built by the same
shipbuilder as the Vassa and was launched a year later,
with both ships having pretty similar dimensions and construction. The
Applet was an active service during the Thirty Years War,
and the active service continued until sixteen fifty eight and
then a year after that, during the Second Northern War,

(20:57):
it was intentionally sunk along with seven other ships. This
is an attempt to block off a strait that could
be used to attack Stockholm by sea. Just in case
you're thinking, wait, the Uplet sounds familiar somehow. In Unearthed
in July, we talked about the discovery of a wreck
that was at first believed to be the Opplet, but

(21:18):
that turned out to be two other rex the Apollo
and Maria, and other news. A nearly intact seventeenth century dress,
which was probably a wedding dress, was pulled from a
shipwreck off the Widden Islands in the Netherlands. Back and
it was put on public display for the first time
this past November at the Museum cop Skill. This dress

(21:41):
was one of a lot of garments and other textiles
that were part of this rex cargo, but it really
took a while for conservators to figure out what exactly
it was. Some of this was because of the time
that it had been in the water, like the damage
that it had faced on being submerged, but it also
had to do with the nature of the garment itself.

(22:02):
The various parts of this dress would have been pieced
together by a maid while the wearer was being dressed,
so it wasn't like one dress that you would just
pick up and it's a whole thing. There were lots
of different pieces to be put together. Yeah, if you've
ever looked at like particularly you know Rococo era addresses,
you see that some pieces literally get pinned together while

(22:23):
you're getting dressed. This is not a pull on situation, no.
Uh So in this case, conservatives believe that this was
a wedding dress in part because the fabric is woven
with a pattern of silver pieces known as a love
not This would have made it very expensive, so it
probably belonged to a very wealthy person or a member
of the nobility, and in our last fine, which is

(22:47):
more shipwreck adjacent than really about shipwrecks. Documentary film crew
looking for the submerged remains of World War two era
aircraft found a piece of the Space Shuttle Challenger off
the eastern host of Florida. Divers pretty immediately realized what
it was because of the recognizable pattern of tiles that

(23:07):
acted as a heat shield during a shuttle's re entry
into the atmosphere. If you are younger than Holly and I.
The Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff on January, on what
was supposed to be its tenth flight and the first
flight of an American civilian in space. NASA confirmed this find,
which is one of the largest single pieces of the

(23:30):
Challenger that has been found, in a statement in November.
So let's take a break and then we will dive
into repatriations next. We have quite a number of repatriations

(23:50):
to talk about, some of them in a fair amount
of detail. In November, members of the Oglala Sioux and
Cheyenne River Sioux tribes traveled to Bury, mass the two
sits to take custody of more than a hundred and
fifty items, including weapons, clothing, pipes, and other belongings. These
had been in the collection of the Founders Museum in

(24:11):
Barry for more than a hundred years. A lot of
these items are from the collection of Frank Route, who
was the nineteenth century traveling shoe salesman who lived in Berry.
He was a collector of Indigenous artwork and cultural items,
and he kind of made a showcase out of his
collection and then donated it to the town library in Eo.

(24:33):
Route purchased some of these items while traveling from people
who were selling things that they had made or owned
to tourists, but some are also directly connected to the
eighteen ninety Wounded Knee massacre. Route bought them from someone
who had been contracted to clear the massacre site after
it was over. According to tribal members who were present

(24:54):
at the ceremony where these items were returned, they will
be stored at the Ogala Lakota College as these communities
decide what to do with everything. Everything has been authenticated,
but there are still some questions to be resolved, like
if anything needs to be returned to a specific family
and how to most respectfully treat anything that was connected

(25:17):
to the massacre. Members of multiple Lakota tribes, including descendants
of Woundedknee survivors, have been trying to have these items
returned for decades. This is one of many collections that
became more widely known after the Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was passed in nine Efforts

(25:39):
to have these items returned have been going on at
least since the early nineteen nineties, with one early proposal
being for the museum to return the original items while
indigenous communities made replicas to serve as replacements. A group
of Woundednee descendants traveled to Bury this past April to
visit the museum and again asked for the item's return.

(26:00):
So NAGRA doesn't directly apply to this particular museum. This
law is focused on federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funds,
and the Founders Museum and Barry is a small collection
that's housed within the Woods Memorial Library and it doesn't
receive federal funds. The Very Museum Association and Barry Library

(26:22):
Association did, however, consult with a NAGPRA specialist on how
to return these items. Those consultations started earlier in After
all this, there were still more than one items in
the museum's collection that likely belonged to an indigenous nation,
so the process is still ongoing to determine how those

(26:44):
items should be returned. Next. Colgate University returned about fifteen
hundred items to the Oneida Nation in November. These items
are from a collection that the university acquired in nineteen
fifty nine and had been housed at the Long Year
Museum of Cultural Anthropology. These had been collected by Herbert Bigford,

(27:05):
Senor between n and nineteen fifty seven. These were belongings
that had been buried with people in sights around up
state New York. News reports describe Bigford as an amateur
archaeologist and as secretary for an organization whose members went
on so called digging tours in the summertime. This is

(27:26):
part of an ongoing process involving the university and the
Onita Nation to return objects that started in the nineteen nineties.
And just as a side note here, I really do
not know anything about Herbert Bigford Senior. I don't know
what relationship he had with the Oneita people, if any,
or what kind of archaeological training he had, if any,
or what kind of standards this organization he was part

(27:48):
of had for their so called digging tours, if any again.
But there is a long, long history of non indigenous
people in North America just feeling entitled to go dig
up the graves of Indigenous people and keep whatever they want.
This has been going on for centuries. There are written
accounts from like literally some of the earliest colonists in

(28:09):
North America. It is still going on. So we have
talked a lot on the show about the fields of
archaeology and anthropology and museums and other institutions sort of
examining their acquisition practices and their collections and making formal
efforts to repatriate culturally important items and belongings. But there
is also this whole other aspect of just ordinary random

(28:33):
people who have no institutional connection, who are private citizens
acting on their own, who like the things they have taken,
haven't necessarily made their way into an institution that might
be going through this kind of process. And speaking of
institutions revisiting their practices, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and

(28:54):
Ethnology at Harvard University has announced its intent to return
a collection of hair sample taken from seven hundred Indigenous children,
which has been in the museum's collection for more than
eighty years. Anthropologist George Edward Woodbury collected this hair from
Indigenous children who were attending government run boarding schools between

(29:15):
nineteen thirty and ninety three. So the reaction from Indigenous
communities to this announcement was largely one of just heartbroken,
horror and outrage. These schools, the boarding schools, they have
a painful and deeply traumatic legacy. We've talked about them
on the show a number of times. They were an
act of cultural genocide and hundreds of children died while

(29:37):
attending them. So and many Indigenous nations. Hair also has
a very special cultural and religious significance, and that means
the idea that vulnerable children's hair was being taken from
them at these schools and then kept in a museum
that was just particularly violating. In November twenty five, items

(29:58):
returned to the Organized Village of Cake from George Fox
University in Oregon. These items had been identified in when
Frank Hughes, a member of the Cake Village Council, was
working at the university as NAG pre coordinator. The items
include a mask, woven baskets, and head dresses, some of
which may have been given to visitors as gifts, but

(30:20):
some of which were probably taken by missionaries in the
late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. One piece, in particular
is a wooden mask that was used to identify territory
and it could only have been removed if someone cut
it off the tree that it was on the organized
village of cake Is in Alaska, which I neglected to
put in that paragraph. And this was a sort of

(30:42):
surprising thing because Um Hughes obviously knew that he was
going to be looking at items that needed to be
returned to various nations, did not expect that there was
going to be something from his tribe where he lives
to be part of that. Um moveing on to repatriations
to nations that are located outside of the United States,

(31:05):
six artifacts have been returned to turkeya from the United
States that happened on October. These included items that were
seized from two different auction houses and one private collector,
and they included life sized statues, including a bronze statue
of Roman emperor Lucius Verus, and there was also a
Roman era sarcophagus that was returned as part of this

(31:29):
The Netherlands has repatriated two hundred twenty three pre Hispanic
artifacts to Mexico, part of an ongoing effort by the
Mexican government to reclaim its cultural heritage from other nations.
The oldest of these pieces date back to the thirteenth
century b c. And they are from cultures from around
most of what's now Mexico. These items are now with

(31:51):
Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History for analysis and conservation.
The University of Cork has now plans to return artifacts,
including a wooden sarcophagus and mummified remains, to Egypt. That
return is supposed to happen in The sarcophagus and the
remains were both donated to the university, and other items,

(32:14):
including a set of four knopic jars, are also among
these items that are being returned, but it is less
clear how they became part of the university's collections. A
set of ancient seals is being returned to Iraq from
the United States after they were listed in an online
auction site. In These items had been looted from the

(32:36):
Iraq Museum in Baghdad in two thousand three, following the
US invasion of Iraq. Four of them are cylinder seals,
which made an impression when rolled across the surface. Three
of them are stamps. They are just a few of
the hundreds of thousands of items that were stolen from
Iraq in the wake of that invasion. Next up, Pope

(32:58):
Francis has announced a plan to return three pieces of
the parthen On to Greece. These items have been held
in the Vatican City Museums, and in response to this announcement,
the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports called for the
return of the many similar items that are currently being
held by the British Museum. Those are known as the
Parthenon Marbles or the Elgin Marbles. We covered them as

(33:20):
a two part episode back in and we have a
few updates that are all related to the Beni bronzes
and other items taken from the Kingdom of Benin. We've
previously talked about Germany's announcement of a plan to return
more than one thousand items to Nigerian authorities. That process
is underway now, with ninety two sculptures being delivered to

(33:42):
Nigeria by the city of Cologne. Cambridge University has also
announced a plan to return one hundred sixteen artifacts to
Nigeria from its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. As we
talked about in more detail in our episode on the
Benin Bronzes. One of the complex cities of all of
this is that the Kingdom of Benin still exists, but

(34:03):
not as an internationally recognized political entities. So most of
the time are items that are being returned are going
to Nigeria, which is the nation that exists to day
in the same general area that the Kingdom of Benin occupied.
We have also talked about the Smithsonian's announcement of a
plan to return to Benien bronzes that are in its collection.

(34:25):
An organization called the Restitution Study Group has filed suit
against the Smithsonian to try to stop that effort. The
organization's argument is that returning these items to Nigeria prevents
the descendants of enslaved people now living in the US
from being able to access parts of their heritage. However,
at this point, twenty nine items that we're in the

(34:46):
Smithsonian's collections have already been transferred to Nigeria with nine
others remaining on long term loan. So that is where
we will end Unearthed in two part one. We will
have more stuff on Wednesday before listener mail. I have
a quick correction. When we were doing our episode on

(35:07):
Irving Berlin, we talked about the Marx Brothers movie The
Coconuts um and made a random side comment. We were
talking about how this movie, as many Marx Brothers movies were,
was like more a vehicle for their comedic chaos than
like something driven by a plot, right, um, And there

(35:27):
was a side comment about who poked who in the eye.
And we have gotten a number of emails from people
who have pointed out that the Marx Brothers comedy did
not generally involve poking one another in the eye. That
was something more associated with the Three Stooges. Um. So,
the Marx Brothers did have like some physical comedy and

(35:48):
some slapstick, but they also had a lot of wordplay
and a lot of like physical humor. Sometimes when you're
watching a Marx Brothers movie, it's like there's a verbal
joke that goes around around in circles until it becomes
really absurd. Um. So yeah, we made an example that
had more to do with a different comedy group simultaneously.

(36:11):
Though there has been a very dismissive tone in some
of these emails, making it sound like the Three Stooges
were just slapstick with nothing else involved, when the Three
Stooges comedy could also be very subversive and also be
like very pointed in terms of social commentary. I found

(36:34):
this not just in the emails that we got, but
also more broadly on the Internet. There are a lot
of people who seem very angry that people sometimes confuse
the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges um and make
it sound like the Three Stooges were just slapping each
other with no rhyme or reason, when really it was
like part of something that wove in a lot of

(36:55):
often social commentary and satire, and not just like poking
each other in the eye with nothing else happening on screen.
Right one, I will say, when I realized this when
someone sent us the first correction, I was morbidly embarrassed because, dude,
I wore Gratio Marx glasses to my wedding. But that

(37:17):
is the product of us trying to get a lot
of episodes ready at the end of the year. But
the other thing related to what you were just saying
is that it is a little bit I don't know
if dismaying is the right word. I grow chagrin when
people um act as though that comparison and that confusion
I think happens a lot, which is why people will
get frustrated by it. But my other thing is like,
it's not an insult to confuse someone with the Three Stooges.

(37:42):
They are I pokey at times, but like as you said,
there's a lot of very smart They're using the construct
of them being buffoons to really lampoon a lot of
people without them realizing it at the time because they thought, oh,
there three dufices, right, right, So I'm sorry we I

(38:04):
don't know if confused one for the other is right, Like,
I'm sorry we we, in an unscripted moment, gave a
wrong example of what we were trying to say. I
don't really think we besmirched the name of the Marx
Brothers by invoking the Three Stooges, because I don't think
the Three Stooges need to be dismissed out of hand

(38:26):
as purposeless violence, which is sort of how some of
these things have characterized them. So I also have an
actual email. Uh and this email it's from all the
way back in November because it's related to our previous
installment of on Earth, and I meant to read it
before now and I forgot. This is from Hannah, and

(38:47):
Hannah said Dear Tracy and Holly. As always, I enjoyed
the seasonal Unearthed episodes. Coincidentally, Part two aired a few
days after I participated in a three day conference about
the Jews of medieval England. It was a rich and
diverse workshop, bringing together researchers to discuss topics from tax
and court records to manuscript glasses, from material culture and architecture,

(39:09):
to curating museum exhibitions and methodology. Over dinner, I asked
Dr Dean Irwin for his opinion on the recently published
article about the possible identification of the skeletons found in
the well in Norwich as Jews who fell victim to
violence in the twelfth century. Dr Irwin shared with me
his skepticism of this conclusion, and that from his familiarity

(39:31):
with the historical records, it is more likely that the
remains are those of people who were recent immigrants to
the area from the continent, and not of members of
the well established local Jewish community. The disappearance of local
people whose presence was documented by the crown for taxation
purposes would not have gone unnoticed in the legal records

(39:51):
of the time, Yet no fine or other recourse is recorded.
Hannah included UH linked to Dr Irwin's remarks and went
on to say, I found this discussion of fascinating example
of how our reading of history is ongoing and how
many factors contribute to trying to achieve a more insightful
understanding of the past, incorporating cutting edge DNA technology or

(40:12):
medieval archival documents. Thank you again for continue to create
one of my favorite podcasts. UH. And that again was
from Hannah Um, So thank you so much for this email.
I am sorry that I neglected it to read it
back when it when it originally came to us. UM.
I found this really interesting, not just because of it

(40:34):
adding another dimension to that discovery that we talked about,
but also because this comes up a lot. I think
when there's new DNA research sometimes historians will say, hey,
but we actually already had some written documentation about this
that either confirms what the DNA research said or totally

(40:54):
raises questions about whether that's actually the case or not.
So I found this to be an interesting example of
how DNA research and written historical records are both part
of understanding all of this. UM so thank you again
to Hannah for sending this email. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast
or a history podcasts that I heart radio dot com.

(41:17):
We're also all over social media I miss in History,
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Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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(41:40):
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Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

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