9.10.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I. Today I will
be reading National Geographic magazine dated August twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of

(00:23):
the article I began last time, entitled Extreme Birding at
the End of the World by Tom Kleines. In between
the many hours of field work, the researchers enjoy moments
of play, ultimate frisbee, beach, volleyball, guitars, and bonfires under
the never ending twilight of Alaska summer nights. After three

(00:45):
seasons on the island, I can confidently say that the
place is sacred, says former crew leader Sierra Ni nisanie
E Pete. I think about it every day. The cool science,
the grueling physical days, and the lifeline friends I made.
Middleton humbles people in the best ways. Next The Buried
Treasure That Might Have Changed History by Julian Sancton. Two

(01:11):
thousand years ago, the Roman Army embarked on a far
flung hunt for silver. Thanks to a persistent dark yell
the gi buff we're now learning how close they came
to finding an empire altering fortune. The passage is easy
to miss. A paragraph long anecdote in the Annals by
the Roman historian Tacitus, It tells a story found nowhere

(01:33):
else about an unpopular legate forcing legionaries into a treacherous
mine at the frontier of the empire. It takes place
during the reign of Claudius eighty forty one through fifty four,
a time of furious expansion when Rome sought to swallow
up the border lands and their resources. The location mentioned

(01:54):
in the Tacitus pachsage is vague, described as in the
district of Mattium, just outside of Roman occupied Germania Superior,
but the goal is clear, to find more of a
metal that powered the realm. Silver trickled down from pratitious patricians, officers,
and soldiers to the rest of the economy in the

(02:14):
form of coins and ingots and jewelry. Coins were not
merely currency, stamped with the profile of the emperor, each
one served as a symbol of his power as it
circulated across the land. The bulk of Rome's mined silver
had until then come from Hispania modern days Spain and Portugal,
but prospectors had long sought other deposits across the dominion.

(02:37):
In Tacitus's stelling, the legionaries were worn out by the arduous,
dirty and dangerous task of mining, of digging out water
courses and constructing underground workings, which would have been difficult
enough in the open, let alone in the stifling darkness,
broken only feebly by the glow of oil lamps. To
voice their displeasure, the legionaries rode letter to the Emperor

(03:01):
asking him to recognize the efforts of their unpopular commander,
courteous Rufus, with triumphal honors. Such an acknowledgment, they hoped,
would permit Rufus to drop the largely fruitless effort. Eventually,
the search for silver was abandoned and the army's encampment destroyed.
Tacitus's story long intrigued classical scholars, who could find no

(03:23):
evidence nor any other mention of such an undertaking. Some
scholars dismissed it as a colorful but unverifiable aside. Alfred
Heart of the University of Liverpool, a specialist on Rome's
economy and mining operations, called it an example of so
called mirabelia, which are these kind of wondrous stories that

(03:45):
are being told just to regale readers. But a recent
discovery that as electrified the archaeological world suggests that Tacitus
was outlining a real episode. Rufus and his men indeed
searched for silver, it seems, but decamped before hitting the motherload.
We now know there was enough silver in the region
to have altered the course of the empire, but the

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enormity of their near miss would not become clear until
millennia later, after a persistently curious German hunter put all
the pieces together. On a crisp evening in April twenty sixteen,
a seventy two year old former paratrooper named Urgen Eigenbrut
was stalking bore in the hills around the historic spa

(04:29):
town of bod Ems in Rhineland Palatinate. He noticed an
unusual pattern in a grain field, two parallel yellowish strips
cutting across a blanket of green. Few other passers by
would have made anything of it. They were too wide
to have been trunk or tank tray tracks. Conspiracy theorists

(04:49):
might have suggested an extraterrestrial origin Eisenbrodt knew better. He
had served with the Blue Helmets in Somalia and as
a defense attache until eve, but since retiring from the
German military in two thousand three, he had turned his
attention to going zon closer to home. A far distant
in time, Eigenbrout had become fascinated with the archaeology and

(05:13):
history of the bad Ms environs, and had even led
a number of small scale excavations of the Lawn Valley
as a volunteer amateur. Though he was he recognized the
crop marks as the sure sign of a human made structure,
keeping in mind a core tenet of archaeology there are
no straight lines in nature. Something beneath the ground had

(05:35):
changed the density of the soil, causing the visitation at
the service to mature at a different rate. But what
to get a clear view? He asked his old friend
Hans Joachim de Roy, a retired frigate captain and fellow
history buff, to photograph the field from above with his drone.

(05:56):
The ariel shot revealed that the parallel lines made a
right angle turn. The corner was rounded like a playing card.
Eisenbrodt's pulse quickened when he viewed the image, he had
seen depictions of such configuration before. There it was only
one thing it could be. The markings were the unmistakable
traces of the defensive double trenches Roman troops commonly dug

(06:19):
around military camps at the fringes of their empire. Eigenbrodt's
work had only just begun. He had to convince the
archaeologists of Rhineland Palatinate in Koblenz to do some digging,
and fortunately he did it like a pain in the ass,
said de Roy. It was like the work of Sissyphus
worn down by Eigenbrot. The state's archaeology department eventually agreed

(06:43):
to conduct a geomagnetic survey of the surrounding area on
what is known as the Erlich Plateau, measuring infinitesimal variations
in the Earth's magnetic field. The survey revealed several other
stretches of the double trench, confirming that had marked the
perimeter of a nineteen acre Roman encampment with fortifications of

(07:05):
soil and wood. Excavation of the Erlich Camp began in
twenty seventeen, led by the archaeologist Thomas Mauer and supervised
by Peter Heinrich of Rhineland State Museum in Trier and
Marcus Schultz of Gerta University in Frankfurt. They initially believed
the site to be from the time of Augustus twenty

(07:26):
seven b BC through a d fourteen, perhaps one of
countless temporary marching camps Roman troops erected while on the move.
Such camps have been found across Europe, often thanks to
Krop marks, but Frederick Auth, a doctoral student supervised by Schultz,
put it bluntly. As archaeological finds go, they were not

(07:47):
so spectacular. However, Eigenbrot wondered whether Erlich might not instead
have been a more noteworthy encampment. He was familiar with
the enematic passage from Tacitus. The mention of the Matisichi
was an early clue, as they were a Germanic tribe
who had settled near bod Ems. Eigenbrodt, who knew that

(08:12):
the surrounding area had long been mined for silver, grew
ever more convinced that the camp he had discovered was
related to the mining operation. Tacitus noted perhaps it was
where the disgruntled legionaries had been stationed. He thought to
the professional archaeologist, Eisenbrodt's hypothesis reflected the touching naivete of
a dambler. The archeologist told the enthusiast, this wasn't how

(08:35):
the discipline worked in real life. It's quite difficult to
connect archaeology and historical literature, ath said, and we tend
to be very careful to not overinterpret that literature, because
Tacitus has never seen Roman Germany. The hunter's undiminished enthusiasm
nourished the excavation, literally, as he kept the workers fed

(08:55):
with home made boar sausage. Those sausages are quite the
legend of the student's oath, recalled, I was giving a
talk in bot Ems, and my monetary compensation was actually
more sausages from sad Bore. The dig unearthed, among other artifacts,
a brass ring from a horse's harness, iron nails, and slag,
but precious little that might have allowed a precise date

(09:18):
for the site. The archeologist's best clue was a heavily
corroded bronze coin depicting a barely decipherable profile of Emperor Caligula,
evidently minted in Rome in thirty seven or thirty eight.
Then a coin of copper alloy from the subsequent Claudian
period was discovered at the bottom of a former well.

(09:39):
Coins could circulate for a long time, especially during Claudius's
reign when few were minted, making it difficult to narrow
down the time frame, But when combined with recovered shreds
of pottery, including plates and drugs characteristic of the mid
first century, the finds led the team to date the
early camp to the forties or Ela, in other words,

(10:01):
smack in the period Tacitus was writing about in the Annals.
Eigenbrodt's theory wasn't yet vindicated. The time frame of Erlich
may have aligned with Tacitus, but without evidence of a
contemporaneous Roman silver mine, it could have merely been an
intriguing coincidence. Finding such evidence would not be simple. The

(10:23):
area around bod Ems had been mined for various metals
from biblical times up until the Second World War, and
is consequently riddled with pits, shafts, and tunnels, several of
which are still accessible. Some of these pits may be
of Roman origins, says Schultz, but they were reshaped in
medieval times or during the last few centuries. In addition,

(10:45):
the region had been heavily bombed in the war, making
it difficult to distinguish craters from ancient minds. We're quite
glad that Eigenbrot was ex military, so he can tell
them apart set oth. Rather than ampt to find an
undiscovered mine in a landscape full of holes, Eigenbrought insisted
that the archaeologists shift their efforts to a nearby Roman

(11:09):
site that had been known about for a long time,
the remains of a small fortification on a barren hilltop
less than a mile and a half away called Bluskof
literally bear Head. The site had been the subject of
an eighteen ninety seven study by retired lieutenant Colonel Otto Dam, who,
like Eigenbrot, had thought he'd found the elusive silver mine

(11:33):
mentioned by Tacitus. Dom concluded that Bluskov had indeed been
a smelting facility if he dated back to the end
of the second century, far too late for Tacitus. At
Eigenbrodt's urging, auth took another look at Bluskof. He found
that Dom's nineteenth century publication was pretty much full of errors,

(11:55):
showing feufines and methodologically sloppy, with far more archaeological rigor
and technology unknown in Dom's day, including lidar to map
the underground. Outh led a new excavation that unearthed a
pair of coins from the time of Claudius or earlier,
and none from the following reign of his adopted son Nero.

(12:18):
The coins confirmed it the large Erlich Camp and the
smaller Bluskoff outpost were in fact contemporaneous and most likely related.
What's more, the Bluskoff structure lay in an area now
known to be a rich source of silver. Roman prospectors
probably would have used several ques in the landscape to
determine that Bluskov could be a fruitful place to mine.

(12:42):
The larger Erlich Camp most likely served as the main
Roman base in the area, which supplied the legionaries who
worked to the Blushkoff mine and manned the outpost. Based
on this suspicion, Outh brought Eisenbrot to the tunnel that
pierced through Bluskof Hill along with Roman mining specialist Marcus Helfert,

(13:03):
who confirmed it was almost certainly of Roman origin. This
was enough for the archeologists to admit that Eigenbrot had
been right all along. These were likely the places Tacitus
was writing. About Several weeks into the Blushkov excavation, auth
and his team made a discovery that corroborated yet another
passage from Roman history. In one pit, nearly six feet down,

(13:28):
athen As team found what looked like the spiky backbone
of a prehistoric monster. They cleared the reddish earth around it,
revealing a series of sharpened wooden stakes jutting out at
staggered angles and embedded in the bottom of a trench
that once surrounded the outpost, designed to thwart any would

(13:48):
be attackers. The obstacle appeared analogous to a defense Julius
Caesar had described in his writings on the War and
Gaul a century before the Bluskov fort built. Whoever entered
within them were likely to impale themselves on very sharp steaks.
Caesar's troops called the spikes chipi Oth and his colleagues

(14:10):
would call the version they found pila posata, or trench steaks.
Such dangerous devices are believed to have surrounded camps around
the Roman world, but they have never been found in
situ before or since. Just as thrilling as the discovery
of the steaks was the miracle of their preservation for
too millennia. The dense, oxygen poor soil had remained just

(14:33):
moist enough to keep the stakes water logged and structurally stable.
The Pila fosata were extracted in twenty nineteen and may
have been conserved, according to auth just in time. Increasingly
dry soil, he said, would have caused the wood to
finally begin decaying, eventually destroying this precious testament to Roman

(14:54):
ingenuity and ruthlessness. One can imagine the murderous spikes protecting
the camp indefinitely. The empire not abandoned its mining effort.
The likely confirmation of Tacitus account raised the question how
much silver had rufous Men missed. Oth's study of Blushkov
revealed that the Romans got tantalizingly close to a source

(15:15):
of silver bearing ore that may have rivaled the richest
minds of Hispania, the so called emser gangzug or ems Vane,
which spans ten miles from the north of bod Ems
to the Rhine River. It is estimated that more than
two hundred metric tons of silver were extracted in the
modern era before mining operations in bod EM's were finally shuddered.

(15:39):
In the last weeks of World War II. If they
had known about the silver, and if they had found
the right spot, Auth noted, the Romans would have had
the opportunity to exploit the bod Ms silver for around
two hundred years until they abandoned their possessions on this
side of the Rhine. Altogether, Roman forces had a secure
hold on jru Germania Superior, but not on Blushkov itself.

(16:04):
They retreated west over the Rhine around two sixty two,
centuries before the fall of the Western Empire. It is
tempting to imagine how such a silver bonanza could have
extended the reach or duration, or even hastened the decadence
of Rome. Such counterfectuals are a perennial parlor game for historians,

(16:24):
speculative as they may be. Had the legionaries succeeded in
extracting all the silver that lay beneath their sandals, it
would not have sufficed to fund the whole Roman Empire
for centuries, but it certainly would have made a difference,
said Auth. He cautioned that the silver bearing ore was
likely too deep for Roman technology of the time. The

(16:45):
Roman authorities would have had no reason to linger in
an area, if they didn't find a resource they could
easily exploit. If we don't succeed effectively, Schultz summarized Roman thinking,
then we drop it and go elsewhere. Yorgen Eigen and
Wrought died of a heart attack in twenty twenty three,
less than a week after a flurry of breathless press
reports focused on the irony of the overlooked silver and

(17:09):
mother load. He lived to bask for a few short
days in the glory of his contributions to archaeology and history.
Just as the Romans had two thousand years before. He
had gazed upon the land with an eye for the
wealth that lay beneath. But unlike them, he had found
what he'd been looking for. A difficult, dangerous job, mining

(17:30):
at Blushkov was carried out by Roman soldiers who were
accustomed to foraging materials and building forts, but not the
backbreaking work of digging underground, filled with threats from floods,
noxious fumes, lack of air, and cavens. Mining was typically
the work of civilian laborers silver processing in the Roman era,

(17:50):
mining workers used iron tools to chip away pieces of rock,
which were taken out, crushed, washed, sordid and roasted before smelting.
If gallery walls were especially hard, laborers could build fires
to weaken their surface smelting. Next, the metal ore and
charcoal were placed in a furnace bellows pumped in air,

(18:11):
causing the temperature to rise and melt the lead, which
flowed out into a mold coupilation. The lead was placed
in a couple and heated to more than eighteen hundred
degrees fahrenheit one thousand degrees celsius. The metals separated as
lead was oxidized, impurities were absorbed, and silver was collected.

(18:33):
Next television. When Jaws hit theaters fifty years ago this summer,
filmmaker Laurent Bossureau was a thirteen year old budding cinophile
in suburban Paris whose obsession with Laden de la Maire
The Teeth of the Sea set him on his career path.
My bedroom was basically wadewall Jaws, says Bossureau, whose new

(18:55):
national geographic documentary Jaws at fifty The Definitive Inside Store
features a wide range of voices weighing in on the
film's impact. We hear from Stephen Spielberg, of course, also
Hollywood types from director Guillermo del Toro, to actress Emily
Blunt and locals on Martha's vineyard, where the movie was shot.

(19:16):
Most surprising are the scientists who say they see Jaws
driving interest in sharks and marine habitats today, years after
provoking trophy hunts, that this movie can still be celebrated
in inspire careers, not only in film, but in ocean
and shark conservation. Bozerro says, I can't think of any
other film that has that kind of power. Next article

(19:41):
is from National Geographic History magazine Epidemics. A constant plague
to Rome from its founding to its imperial heyday, Rome's politics, religion,
and eventual decline were shaped by the ravages of disease.
The plague that spread across the Eastern Mediterranean in AD
four five forty two was unlike any scene before. It

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was a pestilence by which the whole human race came
near to being annihilated, wrote the Byzantine historian Procopius, a
calamity impossible to express in words. A human race. Procopius meant,
of course, the world he knew, the Eastern Roman empires
centered around Constantinople today's Istanbul. But the horror that abused

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Procopius's account was no exaggeration. The plague of Justinian, as
it became known, was likely bubonic plague, whose sufferers developed
swollen lymph nodes and vomited blood. It killed more than
twenty five million people in the region. Since the rise
of Rome as a republic over a millennium before and
its rapid growth as an intercontinental empire after the first

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century A, d Romans had always lived closely with deadly epidemics.
For Roman leaders, plague was as feared as civil war
or a natural disaster. Outbreaks of pestilence devastated the economy
and triggered widespread famines, civil unrest, and political turmoil. Plague
would later be a key contributory factor to the Western

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Roman Empire's collapse in the mid fifth century and just
after Dustinian, the waning of power in the East punishment
from the gods founded after the expulsion of the last
Roman kings in five O nine BC, the Roman republic
was repeatedly battered by epidemics. Historians rely on two principal
sources for early Roman history, written by Livy and Dionysius

(21:35):
of Halicarnassus. Both were writing in the early Empire under
Emperor Augustus, who supported efforts to chronicle the history of
the Long Roman Republic. In Book ten of Roman Antiquities,
Dionysus of Halicarnassus described the terrible consequences of an outbreak
during the eighty second Olympiad calculated to be four fifty

(21:58):
one BC. All the enslaved people in half the citizens
of Rome died. The plague raged for a year, wiping
out whole families, either from illness or the secondary effects
of famine. When it abated the following year, official acts
of thanksgiving were made by the Roman authorities in the
hope that pestilence would not return. A few years later,

(22:20):
it did. The grim Psycho was repeated, and the authorities
came under pressure to act. Lacking a modern understanding of
the role of microorganisms in the origin and spread of plagues,
their causes were attributed to moral and supernatural forces. A plague,
it was decided, was the punishment that the gods inflicted

(22:40):
on the city because it had failed to maintain the
paxt deorum, the peace between gods and humans dependent on
following religious rituals with the utmost rigor. The city of
Rome in a sudden visitation of divine displeasure was ravaged
by disease. Livy wrote in his account of one of
the fifth century Bass pestilences, this belief in causation could

(23:03):
have cruel consequences. In four seventy two BC, for instance,
a wave of infectious illness proved especially deadly for pregnant women.
Dionysius described how the root cause of the disaster was
deemed to be the loss of the virginity of Urbinia,
was a vessel virgin sworn to chastity and service to

(23:25):
vesta goddess of the hearth. As punishment, Urbinia was buried alive.
The plague abated. When a new epidemic swept through Roman
three ninety nine BC, the senators devised a ritual of
religious atonement to be performed in the capitolium. According to Livy,
this rite, known as the Lecternium, was a banquet offered

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to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. In three sixty five BC,
as plague raged again, the Lysisternium failed to appease the gods.
According to Livy, Roman statesmen recalled a ceremony in which
a pestilence had once been allayed by the driving of
a nail by a dictator. Lucius Manlius Imperiosus, was consequently

(24:12):
appointed as a temporary dictator to re establish the peace
with the gods. He drove the ritual nail into the
wall at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The pestilence
apparently ceased. Despite the widespread belief in the divine causes
of epidemics, some Roman writers reflected on the practical first
century b C. Philosopher Lucretius believed as seas was spread

(24:36):
through seeds in the air. The Augustine writers were aware
of the role of poor hygiene in prolonging an epidemic.
In his account of a fifth century b C. Plague,
Dionysius asserted that the pestilence did not quickly abate because
of the way in which they cast out the bodies
into the river. Livy also linked on sanitary conditions to transmission.

(24:59):
During an election, he wrote, the city filled with people
from the countryside, increasing the virulence of the disease. This
conflux of all kinds of living things distressed the citizens
with its strange smells and mere contact. Spread the infection
plague on the empire. Although accounts of plagues were to
Libyan Dionysius, part of the fabric of Rome's republican history.

(25:24):
Epidemics also deeply marked the imperial period. The idea of
Rome's imperial greatness played major emphasis on the civilizing influence,
in part by spreading the building of washing facilities fed
by aqueducts. Imperial Rome boasted hundreds of public baths and
two hundred public toilets. Rome officials understood the link between

(25:48):
hygiene and health, while also acknowledging that the gods played
a role. Statues were placed near public conveniences to ward
off pestilence. Neither gods nor baths, however, could have the
epidemics that scourged the later Empire. Although aqueducts brought clean water,
another key piece of imperial infrastructure, the road system, facilitated

(26:10):
the rapid spread of disease with the movement of goods, troops,
and merchants. At the end of the second century AD,
the Antennine plague killed up to five million people. It
hampered operation of the Roman army, who had brought the
disease into the Empire. Roman troops returning from battles in
Asia picked up the infection likely carried from China by

(26:31):
merchants along the trading routes of the Silk Road. Described
by the Roman Greek physician Galen, who witnessed its ravages,
The Antennine plague struck its victims with coughing, internal bleeding,
and ulceration. Epidemiologists think it and Cyprian plague of the
next century were caused by smallpox or measles, but the

(26:53):
exact ailment has not yet been identified. The effect of
recurrent epidemics led to a lower population, contributing to a
series of cycles that reduced the empire's tax base, agricultural output,
and military force, among other factors. Epidemics played an important
role in the eventual collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

(27:15):
In the mid fifth century, the center of Roman power
shifted east to Constantinople, the upper center of the Justinian
plague that to Procopius felt like the death of the
human race. Many factors led to Byzantine decline, but the
ravages of the Justinian plague lowered the empire's preparedness when
the Great Armies of the Islams swept in triumph through

(27:37):
the Byzantine lands in the seventh century, epidemics and pandemics
continued to cause catastrophic upheaval even after the seventeenth century,
when scientists discovered disease causing microorganisms. This concludes readings from
National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marcia.

(27:59):
Thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and have a
great day.