Short Stuff: Brazilian Jars

In the 1970s big news was made when some underwater artifacts were found in a bay by Rio de Janeiro that would have rewritten history. Then it just kind of petered out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Producer Dave is out there somewhere in spirit, which means
it's short stuff. Hamona hammana plus tax plus what my
friend Mereth used to say, hammona hammana plus tax? Is
that not a thing? No? What's Hamona hammana mean? Hammona hammeda?

(00:26):
Is this kind of like an old val Vaudevillian thing.
I'm not exactly sure what it means or where it
came from, but I always associated with like old timey
vaudeville stuff. It. As I was saying Vaudeville, I was like,
oh god, I feel like maybe like Jackie Gleason or

(00:47):
Laurel and hard not Laurel and Hardy Abin Costello, maybe
from a minstrel show, right, Yeah, but yeah, I think
it's like a exclamation and of excitement or um looking
forward to something. All right, Well, I see Jackie Gleason
on the internet, so hopefully we're covered. You see Jackie

(01:09):
Gleason on the internet say okay, good good, let's just
get going. So yeah, this is a short stuff, Chuck,
and we're never going to be able to end this now. Um,
we're talking today about Brazil, the country that was first
landed as far as Europeans go, by a guy from
Portugal named Pedro Alvarez Cabral, right, And he landed there

(01:32):
in d and things went pretty poorly for the local
populations as a result. Yeah, and I think Cabral was
one of those people that Brazil had always celebrated as
the first European to show up there, and like, you know,
this is our person, and let's celebrate this person. And
then in the seventies something happened. I don't know where

(01:56):
you found. This is very interesting, but something happened to
kind of put that all in doubt. I found a
contemporary New York Times article about it. I don't remember how,
but I did, and I said, by God, this is
a gift from Zeus himself. So here's what was happening.
For a while. There were fishermen off of Guanabara Bay

(02:16):
near Rio who for years had been fishing and saying, hey,
we'll pull up our fishing nets a lot of times,
and we'll get these jars in our nets, and we
think this might just be like the local native tribes
used to offer these up um, you know, before Cabral
actually landed on the scene and maybe these are ancient,

(02:38):
who knows. And then in seventy six a man named
Jose two Shara was diving there brought two of them
to the surface and said, I think these are really
really really old. Yeah, and not just really old too,
because that could have been accounted for by the native tribes.
But they were in a shape that people hadn't seen before,

(02:59):
and uh to share, I brought them ashore and I
guess handed them over to the navy, I think, who
kept them um in a tank of sea water for
a very long time, um until they were they were
they caught the attention of a guy named Robert Marks,
who went on to become I don't know if he

(03:19):
was or not by this time. I think he was
fairly famous, but he wanted to become a world famous,
deeply renowned h underwater archaeologists. In fact, he's known as
the father of underwater archaeology. But he caught wind of
these jars being found and had to look at him,
or got his hands on some pictures of him. And
so these are not supposed to be here. These are

(03:41):
not some local Brazilian jar. These look a lot like
Roman emphora and Roman amphora were jars that were used
very famous like vase jars with the double handles at
the top um. They were used by Romans, Phoenicians and
Greeks back around on the turn of the last millennia.

(04:02):
And there's no good reason that these should be here
in this bay in Brazil. Yeah, so after first thinking
it might be a hoax, he did say, thinks they're real,
and let me get some other divers and go down
there and check out and see what's going on. And
about ninety ft down, sure enough, they found about two
hundred uh intact and broken amphora and they were he said,

(04:27):
they were kind of concentrated in an area about the
size of three tennis courts. And he's like sure, and
he said, there's no real there's no way that these
were planted here. He said, you know these things, some
of these were like five ft under the mud. We
had to dig him out with our hands out of
the mud. And there's just their barnacle encrusted. Some of

(04:49):
them have coral, and this coral was killed off like
thirty or forty years earlier. So there's no way these
were planted down there anytime. Recently. Yeah, he became pretty
convinced that it wasn't a hoax UM and his suspicions
were backed up by an expert that he enlisted from
U Mass named Elizabeth will who was an expert in

(05:11):
ancient Roman m f A, which is like that is
a that is a very specific um focus of study.
But she basically she looked at the type of them,
looked at their manufacturer, like the what they She got
her hands on some of the samples that to Shara
had brought up, I think UM and she said, not
only are these Roman m f A, I can tell

(05:33):
you exactly where they were made and roughly win and
she traced the design of these particular m for you
to a place called kas ko u a s s
Um in what is now present day Morocco, and the
Coas M four A of this design were being made
around the third century um CE, so about twelve hundred

(05:56):
hundred years before uh Pedro Alvarez Cabral showed up in Brazil.
And yeah, so Marx puts that together and says, all right,
I have a theory. He said, they used to have
boats back then and ships that could make you know
that certainly could have traveled over here from the Mediterranean,

(06:17):
and I think what might have happened is they were
blown off course maybe and they ended up kind of
shipwrecking after they anchored off Rio. Maybe there was a
big storm or something that drove this ship onto a reef,
and these jars just kind of ended up here, and
and no one knew that they were here until these
fishermen started pulling them up. Yeah, So I mean that's

(06:39):
a pretty good assumption, especially considering that these jars are
spread out over about a three tennis court size area
that's maybe the size of a Roman ships hold. Um.
And it's possible since they had seaworthy ships. But the
thing is, as if that were true, that would totally
rewrite history like it was how there used to be
vague legends about how Vikings made it to North America,

(07:02):
and um, we suddenly found that settlement, I can't remember
the name of it, Um that that was a Viking
settlement in North America that said unequivocally they had been
here before. This would basically be like that, But there
had been no legend before it. Knowing had any any
idea that the Romans had made it to Brazil in

(07:23):
the third century. UM. So this was a complete It
required a complete revision of history. Even if it was
just this tangential fleeting contact between one small group of
Roman sailors in um prehistoric Brazilian tribes. Uh, it's still
was a big deal to to find these things there.

(07:43):
All right, maybe we should take our break and come
back and talk about the response of Brazil right after this.

(08:04):
M alright, so Marx has this theory, he's got these jars.
The Brazilian government steps in and they don't say, this
is amazing, thank you. Why don't We're gonna have a

(08:25):
press conference and here's a podium and we want to
hear all about it. They said, you know what, you're
shut down. We're shutting down your operation. We don't like
the looks of this. Uh. He he started excavating, excavating again,
I think in eighty three or was that the first one, No,
that was the second time. The first time was when
he found him and said he found like a couple

(08:47):
of hundred of them and that they were spread out
over the tennis court. This is when he returned the
next year to really excavate the site in earnest and
he also found out that the navy, the Brazilian Navy
like literally covered this stuff but dumped a bunch of
fil dirt over the site and said, you know what,
we we think you're a plunderer. We want to keep
it from being plundered, and we covered it up, and

(09:10):
you're banned. You can't even come into our country anymore. Yes,
he was accused of having stolen artifacts from other sites
in Brazil and selling them on UH European auction houses,
essentially on the black market, but out in the open um.
They had just been basically stolen from Brazil. That's a
huge accusation to level against somebody. But apparently the Brazilian

(09:34):
authorities were convinced enough by it that they actually banned
him from Brazil and shut down all UH marine archaeological
excavations in the country. There was just all like a
blanket band on them because they had just been so
I guess rattled by the perceived theft of of relics.

(09:54):
The thing is is, you know, if if um Robert
Marx had been anybody else, just some dude, it would
have um, you know you you it would have been
easy to buy that that had happened. But he really
had a good reputation, especially by the end of his
life in two thousand nineteen. Right, Yeah, he was knighted
in three countries. He Uh. He wrote the UNESCO Laws

(10:17):
about underwater archaeological digs, and he was a book writer.
I think he's kind of the the granddaddy of underwater archaeology.
He was very much not a plunderer of things. So
it seemed like Brazil was being a jerk. It does.
So that seems like a bit of a twist that
they would literally cover up this history rewriting site. And

(10:42):
at the time, in that New York Times article, I
think Robert Marks suspected that it was because they were
so venerating of cabral Um that they couldn't stand the
idea of somebody, some other Europeans having beaten him there
by hundreds of years. The thing is, it's entirely possible
that the Brazilians didn't cover up that site, and that

(11:06):
there wasn't two hundred of those amphora, and that there
was no Roman galley that sunk in Brazil. Uh, there's
a it's possible none of this happened at all. Yeah,
I mean, this is the real cool twist here, is
in there was a diver or a free diver name
a Medico Santarelli, and America said, Hey, you know all

(11:31):
this hullabaloo about these M for a, these are mine,
These are replicas, and I buried these out there to
try and age them. Dropped sixteen of these things out
there to age them, and that's what they are. Yeah.
He'd spent some time in rome Um and had kind
of fallen for M four A. They were his thing,

(11:53):
kind of like how some people collect different outfits to
put on their concrete geese that they keep out in
the front yard. This guy was into amphoury like that
the thing is is okay? So Americo Santarelli claimed that
those were his M four A. After this world famous
underwater archaeologists had declared that there were two hundred of

(12:14):
them buried five ft beneath the muck that a U
mass expert had declared that they were made from Coassu
in Morocco in the third century. Um. This guy says, no,
they were mine, and there were only sixteen of them,
and I dropped them there in the sixties. Yeah, that's
the one thing I couldn't reckon with. Were there not
two hundred? Was that just b s. Here's the thing,

(12:35):
it's kind of like the end of the Usual Suspects.
If you go back and look at all of the
evidence we have, almost almost all of it is coming
out of Robert Marx's mouth. He's the one who saw
the two D M. Four A. He's the one who
said that they were spread out over a few tennis
court sized fields. He's the one who said they were
encrusted by barnacles. He's the one who's sang in a

(12:58):
barbershop quartet and skok Illinois. That's exactly right. And when
you go back and you look at this, you say, well,
wait a minute, there's there's not really much other evidence.
There's that to back up this idea that he has,
aside from him saying all this stuff. And I think
the most telling thing about how they actually were Americo
Santarelli's sixteen and four that he dropped in the Bay

(13:20):
to age Um is that Robert Marks has kind of
dropped the whole thing that nothing. There's like, the whole
thing goes cold after that. Yeah, isn't that weird? It
is very weird. He even wrote a book in that
was about prehistoric contact between Europe and the America's And
as far as I know, he didn't mention the jars

(13:41):
in the bay in Brazil, and that's that's that, as
far as I'm concerned. You know, I think since we
mentioned Usual Suspects, we should shout out friend of the show,
Kevin Pollock, one of the stars of Usual Suspects in
a role where he gets to play the rare heavy
And Kevin has a great in prov comedy showing your
network called Alchemy This. Yeah, that is a great show.

(14:04):
And actually he has a cameo in our book too.
I can't remember what part we talked about, but there's
one of one of the footnotes is about the live
show in l A where he brought us water because
we said we were thirsty. He brought us water up
on stage. That's right. And he also played the role
of Christopher walk In in my movie Crush April Fool's
Interview a couple of years ago that delighted a lot

(14:25):
of people and angered few. Hey man, if you're delighting
and angering at the same time, you're doing something right.
So hats off to both of you for the love. Pollock, good,
good dude, good dude. Um. Well, I think that's it, right.
You got anything else about Kevin Pollock or Brazilian jars? No,
I want to get my hands on one of these. Well,
just start diving and you will find one in Brazil

(14:48):
off the coast of Rio uh. And since I said
that everybody that means short stuff is out, stuff you
should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
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