Unearthed! Autumn 2022, Part 2

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 V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is
part two of our autumn installment of Unearthed. Part one

(00:22):
was last week. If you're like, wait, what day of
the week is it? This is normally a two part
or on Monday and Wednesday. Well, we did it weird
this time. Uh, this time around, we have some repatriations
and some shipwrecks, some medical stuff. There was a whole
lot of Viking stuff. We're gonna start, as so often,
with the pot pourri done done dune. So Part two

(00:46):
of Unearth usually starts off with some stuff that we
had some hard times categorizing. That's what we're doing this
time around as well. First, one of the biggest news
stories of these three months involved research into seventeen eletans
that were found in a well in Norwich, England in
two thousand four. Radio carbon dating suggests that these people

(01:07):
died between eleven sixty one and twelve sixteen, and DNA
from six of the skeletons suggests that they had Oshkenazi
Jewish ancestry, so together they suggests that these were victims
of an anti Semitic massacre that was carried out by
Christian soldiers who were on their way to Jerusalem for
the Third Crusade in the year eleven ninety and then

(01:30):
this massacre also had connections to the blood libel or
that's the term for allegations against individual Jews or Jewish
people as a whole, involving murders and ritual uses of blood.
This idea is both widespread and false. It's like one
of the biggest anti Semitic conspiracy theories. The first documented

(01:54):
appearance of the blood libel was in Norwich in eleven
forty four, after a boy named William died and Jewish
people were accused of murdering him. This research was published
as an open access paper in the journal Current Biology,
and it also looks at the prevalence of genetic diseases
that continue to be associated with Oshkenazi Jewish ancestry. The

(02:18):
genomic sequencing involved in this research suggests that a population
bottleneck that contributed to these genetic traits took place prior
to the twelfth century, which is between four hundred and
six hundred years earlier than was previously believed moving on.
Archaeological work at the site of the Battle of Waterloo
started in but then it had to be paused at

(02:41):
the start of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Work has resumed
this year and researchers have found bones from amputated human limbs,
as well as the bones of three horses and what
maybe a complete skeleton. It's likely that all of these
were buried together quickly in an effort to deuced the
spread of disease at a nearby field hospital. Although thousands

(03:05):
of people were killed at the Battle of Waterloo, not
very many remains have been found. One prevailing idea is
that their bones were sold to make fertilizer. According to
a paper published in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology in June,
this may be the case, but further study is needed.
Next archaeologists in China's Shanshi Province have found a small

(03:26):
stone carving of a cocoon, probably a silkworm cocoon. This
is really small, only about two point eight centimeters long
and one point two centimeters wide, and it's probably around
fifty two hundred years old. This is one of a
lot of objects related to silkworms in some way that
have been found in the area over the last century,

(03:49):
and that includes some actual, well preserved cocoons. So this
all helps document the silk industry's early history. Massive and
deadly flooding struck eastern Tucky at the end of July.
One of the buildings that has faced extraordinary damage is
Apple Shop, which is a nonprofit cultural center that houses
a huge archive of apple Lachian literature, film art, photographs,

(04:14):
oral histories, diaries, records, and other irreplaceable items. About eight
percent of apple Shops film reels and audio and video
tapes have been affected by this flood. Apple Shop is
also home to a media institute whose headquarters were submerged
in the flood. At this point, recovery efforts involving all

(04:34):
these archival materials are still ongoing, and it will probably
take months or maybe even a year or more to
just get a thorough sense of exactly what has been
affected and what can be salvaged or restored. Apple Shop
is not the only organization to be affected by this flood.
Another is the Hindman Settlement School archives, which also include photographs, diaries, correspondents,

(04:58):
musical instruments, and other has oracle collections and our last
kind of random inclusion in this is that archaeologists working
at Vindo Landa have found a mouthpiece for a musical
instrument called a cornew buried under the floor of what
was the Officers Clubhouse. So a cor new is a
long horn that shaped in a single curve. Sometimes people

(05:21):
described it as shaped like the letter G. So if
you're playing it, the body of the instrument curls down
from your mouth to roughly the hip level, and then
it curves back up behind you so that the end
with the bell on it is facing forward up above
your head. This mouthpiece is made from a copper alloy
and it dates back to sometime around the year one

(05:41):
twenty and curators that Vindo Luanda have described it as
incredibly rare. Also, the Vindolanda Trust, Newcastle University and games
development studio Creative Assembly have released a browser based Vinda
Landa adventure game that is free to play at Vanda
Luanda Adventure dot com. I really wanted to stop what

(06:03):
I was doing play this browser based game, and I
was like, stop, stop, get back to work. You gotta
get to god, get this finished. Moving on. Quite a
few repatriations have made headlines over the last few months.
We are not going to even talk about all of
the ones that I had bookmarked because there were so

(06:24):
so many, and we're going to start with some that
involved repatriations, involving ancestors being returned to their Indigenous and
Aboriginal communities. First, earlier this year, a committee at the
University of North Dakota and Grand Forks made just horrifying
and appalling discovery of ancestral remains in the university's collections,

(06:47):
some of them in cardboard boxes that didn't have any
identifying information on them. The university started reaching out to
indigenous tribes and nations to return these ancestors and objects
that are still in the diniversity's collections as well. So far,
thirteen different tribes have been contacted, and that number may

(07:07):
continue to grow. And to be clear, this is not
at all unique to the University of North Dakota in
Grand Forks. We have talked on the show before about
the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or nag PRO,
which was passed in nineteen nine. More than thirty years later,
there are still thousands and thousands of cultural and religious

(07:27):
items and ancestors in museums and other institutions all around
the United States. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
has also made some returns to Aboriginal nations in Australia.
There have been a few over the years. In this
particular case, these remains became part of the museum's collections.

(07:48):
In the early twentieth century. Two ancestors were returned directly
to the Narunga and Garner nations, with representatives from those
nations traveling to Washington you see to escort them back home.
Twenty three others are currently in the care of the
Australian government until they can determine exactly what nation they

(08:08):
belong to. In terms of artwork and other objects. Germany
physically returned to Benin bronzes to Nigerian authorities, while also
making Nigeria the owner of roughly eleven hundred objects in
four different German museums. As of when the announcement was
made at the start of July, those objects were still

(08:29):
in Germany. Those museums and the government of Nigeria still
need to negotiate their return. It's possible that the negotiations
will lead to some of the items staying in German
museums essentially on loan. The two items that were physically
returned as part of all this, we're both depictions of
a previous oba of the Kingdom of Benin and they

(08:51):
were selected as sort of representative samples of the larger collections.
So it's like these two things have been returned with
the promise of ongoing negotiations for those more than a
thousand others. The Hornaman Museum in London has also announced
that it will return seventy two items from the Kingdom
of Benin to Nigeria, the first time a government funded

(09:12):
institution in Britain has decided to do so. This includes
twelve brass plaques that are considered part of the Beniin bronzes,
as well as a variety of religious objects, in everyday
items and other pieces of artwork. The Victoria and Albert
Museum has returned part of a marble sarcophagus to Turkya.

(09:33):
The Sidamara sarcophagus dates back to about the year to
fifty and the part that was returned is known as
the head of Eras. It is just what it sounds like.
It is the head of a figure of Eras that
was on part of the sarcophagus. British military Consul General
Charles Wilson had found the sarcophagus in two and then

(09:56):
took the head of Eras back with him to London.
The sarcophagus with the returned head is now on display
at the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. Harvard University has returned to
pipe tomahawk belonging to Chief Standing Bear to the Ponka
Tribe of Nebraska. Standing Bear had given the pipe tomahawk

(10:16):
to Attorney John Lee Webster as a gift following their
victory in the federal court case of United States x.
Rail Standing Bear versus George Crook. This was an eight
seven landmark civil rights case that affirmed indigenous people's personhood.
Standing Bear's interpreter in this case was Suzette La Flesh,
also known as Bright Eyes, who was previous podcast subjects

(10:39):
Susan La Flesh Pacott's sister. After Webster died, this pipe
tomahawk was sold to a private collector, and then it
changed hands several other times before eventually winding up in
the collection at Harvard. It was in the collection of
the Pebody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which has come
up on the show before Standing Bear as descendants. Other

(11:01):
members of the Ponca tribe, members of other indigenous nations,
and the Nebraska legislature had all been advocating for it
to be returned for more than a year. New Mexico's
Albuquerque Museum has returned a collection of items dating back
twenty d to twenty five hundred years to Mexico, including bowls, sculptures,
and a figurine. These items had been sitting in a

(11:24):
box in storage for about fifteen years, and they had
been donated to the museum, and the dealer who sold
them to that donor back in had cards tracing their
origins to roadside purchases in Mexico and dealers in New England,
but their prominence was very vague and it was basically
like came from one of these two places, but there's

(11:45):
no specifics. The Museum of the Bible in Washington, d c.
Has returned a gospel manuscript that was in its collections
to the Greek Orthodox Church. This manuscript had been looted
from a Greek monastery during World War One, and the
Museum of the Bible is also currently investigating its collections
stolen and in authentic artifacts have come up as part

(12:08):
of its collections. In previous installments of On Earth It's
there have been a number of these. And lastly, before
we take a break, the J. Paul Getty Museum in
Los Angeles has returned a group of nearly life sized
terra cotta figures known as Orpheus and the Sirens to Italy.
These figures date back to the fourth century BC, and

(12:28):
they were valued at roughly eight million dollars and considered
some of the most important items in the museum's collection. J.
Paul Getty bought these figures in nine six, but they
had been illegally excavated and exported from Italy. We're gonna
take a quick sponsor break and then we'll talk about
some diseases next. We have several discoveries or aided to

(13:00):
medicine and diseases. So first, computer assisted microtomography a k A.
A micro CT scan of a fossilized skull dating back
about a hundred thousand years suggests that the hunter gatherer
this skull belonged to experienced chronic ear infections and a
disease called labyrinthitis acificans, which caused this person's semicircular canals

(13:25):
to calcify. That meant they probably had both vertigo and
hearing loss. This person doesn't seem to have lived very
long beyond the onset of the illness, possibly only a
few months, although it's not fully clear whether this was
related to the disease or if the person simply wasn't
able to get enough food due to the effects of
their illness. Next herpies. Simplex virus one, the virus that

(13:50):
causes cold source, is extremely common, as many as three
point seven billion people. That's billion with the b people
around the world have it until Reese only. This virus
is believed to have existed for as long as fifty
thousand years, although the earliest direct genetic evidence of it
dated back to just New research suggests that HSB one

(14:14):
is much younger, maybe only five thousand years old, and
the studies authors suggests that it might have started to
spread along with migrations from the Eurasian steps more westward
into Europe, and that it might have spread as more
people were introduced to the social practice of kissing. OH.
Imaging w recton would be like shaking your fists going

(14:36):
I told you to be clear. The sample studied in
this research are not that old. The oldest viral DNA
sample that was part of this research dates back to
about fifteen hundred years ago. Instead, the researchers looked at
four DNA samples, the only four they found out of
three thousand archaeological finds. They studied and compared how the

(14:59):
virus had mutated over time. Then they used that analysis
to estimate the viruses earlier origins. Yeah, that doesn't mean
that only four of those three thousand people had cold sores.
That it's very tricky to get DNA from really really
old remains. Next researchers this actually has a bit about

(15:23):
along those same lines. Researchers studying a one thousand year
old set of skeletal remains have found the earliest documented
evidence of Klein filter syndrome, which occurs when a person's
sex chromosomes are x x y. This research involved DNA analysis,
which was pretty difficult because of the condition of the
DNA they were able to retrieve. It was like really

(15:45):
fragile and kind of incomplete, but the skeleton itself was
very well preserved. So they also analyzed the skeleton for
physical traits that are associated with klient filter syndrome. This
included the shape of the person's lower jaw, and that
is a trait known as maxillary prognathism. Next, we've talked

(16:05):
about various research about parasite infections throughout history, and most
of the time it kind of boils down to ye
people had parasites. But according to research that was announced
in August, medieval clergy may have been more likely to
have intestinal parasites than lay people living in the same area,
even though in general members of the clergy had better

(16:26):
hygiene and often had more sophisticated systems for managing their
bodily waste. This research involved examining the soil around the
pelvis is of human remains at burial sites looking for
evidence of parasite eggs, and there were parasite eggs in
significantly more grave sites that belonged to monks and fryers
than at the other grave sites. So one possible reason

(16:50):
for this would be that men living in monasteries and
fraries grew their own food and also used their own
waste as fertilizer. Were those crops, which then would have
basically spread any parasitic food born stuff around among them? Yeah? Right? Gross.

(17:12):
I put gross there in the outline yuck. There are
also some contrary opinions on this. In many orders, monks
took vows of poverty and were expected to live off
of charitable donations, not food that they grew themselves, so
it's also possible that people were donating lower quality meat
that they didn't want to eat to the monks. Also gross,

(17:35):
just a different kind the outcoming either way, uh not
nots and in some more parasite news. Research published in
the journal Nature Communications in July has looked at archaeological
evidence of whipworm infections using fossilized feces from Viking settlements

(17:57):
in Denmark and elsewhere. Whip Worms still exists today, and
while it's mostly not an issue in wealthier countries, it
affects as many as five hundred million people in other
parts of the world. This research was kind of looking
at trends in the infections around all of these different
places through fossilized Viking poop. Those Viking whip worms are

(18:20):
a good segue to some more Viking stuff, of which
there was a preponderance. First, two different metal detectorists, independently
of each other, found three pieces of a Viking sword
hilt in Stavanger, Norway. The blade has not been found,
but the hilt is ordinately decorated in gold and silver,
with both geometric patterns and animal themes. Only about twenty

(18:43):
of this type of sword have been found in Norway.
It's being conserved at the Museum of Archaeology at the
University of Stavager. Speaking of the Museum of Archaeology at
the University of Stavanger, the museum recently received a donation
of jewelry belonging to a Viking woman, including brooches and
a string of more than fifty beads. Some of those

(19:05):
beads were foiled in silver and gold. It is possible
that this is jewelry that should have been in a
boat grave that the museum examined in nineteen fifty five.
This was a woman's grave that contained an axe, a heckel,
a shield boss, scissors, and an iron weaving sword. But

(19:27):
the jewelry that they would have expected to have been
in this grave based on what they had seen a
similar burial sites that was gone. If so, what a
wild coincidence that somebody donated this jewelry that the museum
expected to find in nineteen and did not bum bum bum.

(19:48):
There is another surprising Viking find, and that is a
box of costume jewelry that was sold at auction which
turned out to contain a gold ring dating to the
Viking Age. The buyer, realizing they had something unique, contacted archaeologists.
This was probably a man's ring based on its size,
but it's still not clear where it came from. It

(20:09):
was just in a box. And then even though they
think that's when it came from, like it's dated to
that period, like, we don't really have a lot of
very comparable rings to compare it to. A hiker in
Sweden stumbled over a brooch while setting up their tent,
and then this brooch turned out to be about twelve
hundred years old. So when archaeologists went back to the

(20:31):
site where this tent had been put up to try
to investigate it further, they found another brooch and also
evidence of a cremation burial. There are other Viking era
graves that have been found in this general area, but
this is actually the first one that's believed to have
belonged to a woman. Research published in July concludes that

(20:52):
high status Vikings were beaver for as a mark of status.
Beavers do not live in Denmark, so beaver for probably
would have been seen as a luxury item. The team
concluded that the first they were looking at were from
beavers based on protein analysis because the samples that they
had no longer contained usable d n A. And lastly,

(21:14):
archaeologists from Secrets of the Ice and the Museum of
Cultural History and Oslo have found an iron arrowhead dating
back to the Viking era. They found this arrowhead during
an exploratory survey and they had undertaken that to look
for objects that may have been exposed by melting ice.
Secrets of the Ice has come up on unearths before.

(21:35):
That's basically their whole thing is like looking for things
that has been revealed as ice melts. This is a
three bladed arrow and it's a little broader that is
typical for Viking combat arrowheads, like you would need a
narrower arrowhead to to pierce somebody that was wearing mail.
Uh So there's like a little bit of unanswered questions

(21:56):
around what this arrowhead might have been used for nick stuff.
We have some art the Griffith Center for Social and
Cultural Research and Australian Research Center for Human Evolution has
been working with an Ingai traditional owners to study and
interpret rock art at a rock shelter known as Marawanga.
They've identified ten clusters of designs that seem to have

(22:18):
been created in an intentional ordered sequence, which members of
the Aboriginal community have identified as a Seven Sisters dreaming sequence.
The dreamtime is a term that anthropologists coined to describe
the worldview and cultural and religious oral traditions of Aboriginal
peoples in Australia, which is also used by contemporary Aboriginal

(22:38):
people when discussing these ideas in English. So far, this
is the only known rock shelter that has one continuous
narrative depicted along its entire length. Next, the Victoria and
Albert Museum has been conserving an eighteenth century portrait and
also the silk waistcoat that the portrait subject was wearing

(23:00):
when it was painted, which I just thought was really cool.
The painting is by Marco Benefiel and it depicts Edward
Curtis of Mardike House who's wearing this brocade waistcoat with
the sleeves of his outer jacket also faced in the
same material that so it's got like a little matching
sleeve facing and waistcoat on the brocade includes both a

(23:23):
stylized shell pattern and pink roses with yellow leaves. The
Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the painting and the waistcoat
at the same time, but the outer jacket that's being
worn in the portrait does not seem to have survived
so dreamy. Restoration work on Vermier's The Milkmaid has revealed

(23:43):
original elements of the picture that the artist later painted over,
including a jug holder on the wall and a fire
basket at the milkmaid's feet. Unlike the last time we
talked about uncovered items in a Vermier painting, these don't
seem to have been things that were painted over decades later,
but evidence of an earlier draft in his artistic process.

(24:04):
All this conservation work has been going on in advance
of a landmark exhibition planned at the Rooks Museum next year. Yeah,
I had a I was like, why do we keep
having Vermeer stuff? Oh, because it's amazing. Ready for this
whole bing thing. The Cincinnati Art Museum and the University
of Cincinnati have been working together to determine whether a

(24:25):
decorative tassel that was part of a dancing horse sculpture
in the museum's collection is an authentic part of the artwork.
This terra cotta horse is about dred years old and
then the tassel gave it kind of a unicorn like appearance.
While the tassel looked like it was made of the
same material that the rest of the horse was, researchers

(24:46):
at the university and determined that it was made of plaster,
not terra cotta, totally different material and it was held
on there with animal glue. The area under the glue
was smooth, and that suggested that this was a later
addition and not like a repair of an original tassel
that had been broken off. So conservators have removed it

(25:07):
and now looks like a horse instead of a unicorn.
I put a sticker on it and to cap off
our artwork. Several mosaics have been unearthed over the past
few months. A team from the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill has uncovered many mosaics at the site
of an ancient Jewish synagogue in Lower Galilee. This year's

(25:29):
discoveries include the first known depictions of Deborah and jail
who are described in the Book of Judges and the
mosaic showing a hair, a fox, a leopard, and a
wild boar eating wild grapes. These mosaics are about sixteen
hundred years old. Also, a team at the ancient city
of Sedra in modern Turkia has found a floor mosaic

(25:50):
depicting the mythological hero Heracles, and a Palestinian farmer in
Gaza found a huge Byzantine era floor mosaic depicting birds
and animals while planting olive trees. Yeah. I like that
one because the guy was like, I planted these olive
trees and they didn't root. What has happened? And it
turned out there was this giant. We're gonna take a

(26:16):
quick break and come back with some edibles and potables. Okay,
we have just a few edibles and potables this time around. First,
ongoing work at the Cicara Necropolis and Egypt has uncovered

(26:39):
several blocks of white cheese. This cheese dates back to
sometime between SI and b C, during the dynasty. I
have various curiosities about, like what the look and texture
of this cheese is now, and I did not find
good answers delicious. Archaeologists working north of Moravia and the

(27:03):
Czech Republic have unearthed an entire medieval kitchen. Their finds
there include an oven, a hearth, ceramic vessels, and a
wooden spoon. Some of the pots were intact with their
lids still on, with several looking as though they had
just been cleaned and left to dry on the hearth.
These probably date back to about the fifteenth century, from

(27:24):
a house that probably belonged to a relatively affluent family,
although since the home was near the town walls, it
probably was not one of the richest families in the area. Next,
in the ancient Mediterranean, a plant known as Sylphion or
Sylphium was prized as a food source and a medicine
and an aphronsiac. In the first century Planning the Elder

(27:47):
claimed that the last surviving stalk of this plant had
been given to the Emperor Nero, who had eaten it.
Researchers in Turkeyo, though, believe they may have found living
descendants of this plant in the form of Ferula drudiana,
which is a plant with a gen thing like root

(28:07):
that produces very bright yellow flowers. This is not the
first plant put forth as a possibility for the long
lost Sylfian or a related descendant plant. There have been
at least three other candidates proposed since the early nineteenth century.
While some researchers say that this one seems promising, others

(28:28):
point out that it was discovered hundreds of miles away
from where Sylfian was historically described as growing. Next, research
involving seven thousand samples of animal fat residues for more
than five hundred sites around Europe suggests that Europeans developed
the ability to digest milk into adulthood in response to

(28:49):
things like disease and famine. The ability to digest milk
even after being weaned is known as lactase persistence, and
it went from being a pretty uncommon genetic trait to
one that was pretty widespread in Europe over just a
few thousand years, which sounds like a long time, but
it's a pretty short time from an evolutionary standpoint. Earlier

(29:13):
hypotheses have focused mainly on milk's nutritional benefits, like the
idea that people who were getting more calcium or other
nutrients from milk had an advantage over people who didn't,
which led people with lacta's persistence to survive longer. But
this work suggests that people often had to drink milk
because of a shortage of other types of food, and

(29:35):
in times of famine or disease, the problems that come
along with drinking milk while lactose intolerant, like crams and diarrhea,
became life threatening instead of just uncomfortable and inconvenient. And lastly,
a dig in Bulgaria has found the ancient equivalent of
a refrigerator. This is a large chamber lined in ceramic

(29:56):
slabs dating back to the first century. This was at
the site of a military camp and still contains some
animal bones that showed evidence of cooking, as well as
a small part of a bowl and some pieces of charcoal.
It's possible that that bowl and charcoal was really part
of a sensor that was used to burn materials to

(30:16):
keep pests out of that bridge. We are closing out
this installment of unearthed with shipwrecks. A thirteenth century shipwreck
located off the coast of Dorset, England has been added
to England's National Heritage List. This wreck is called the
Mortar Wreck, named for the mortars that were part of
its cargo. In addition to the mortars, which were used

(30:37):
to grind grain into flour, the ship was also carrying
cooking pots, mugs, and carved grade stones made from Purbeck limestone.
The ship was carrying uncarved stone as well. This is
England's oldest known protected wreck that has a surviving hull,
and shipwrecks of this age in general are really rare

(30:57):
in the waters around England. It was discovered a couple
of years ago, but now it is being threatened by
shifting currents that have cleared away some of the sand
that was protecting parts of the hull. A team doing
routine measurements in the Trava River in Germany discovered one
has turned out to be a four hundred year old shipwreck.

(31:18):
Most of the cargo was still there as well, including
about one fifty barrels. Those barrels contained quicklime, which was
used to make mortar for building. It's not yet known
why the ship sank, but it's possible that it ran
aground during a tight turn in the river and was
just too badly damaged to remain afloat. Dives to photograph
and study the racks started in late and it is

(31:41):
not yet clear what's going to happen to the wreck.
It's possible that it could be removed from the river
and preserved sort of shipwreck adjacent. Local lore around the
Virginia Barrier Islands has maintained that the Chincka teg ponies
that live on the islands are descended from horses that
survived as shipwreck sometime around seventeen fifty and swam to

(32:02):
the island when the ship went down, But another argument
has been that they were descended from runaway livestock that
were brought to the island much later. Research published in
July suggests that the shipwreck story may be the right one,
thanks to DNA research linking these horses to a fossilized
horse tooth found in the Caribbean at the site of

(32:23):
the city of Puerto Real and the island of Espaniola.
Both this fossilized tooth and the horses also have connections
to bronze age ponies from Spain. This horse tooth is
also surprising on its own. There's lots of evidence of
cows in and around Puerto Real, but horses were a
lot less common, so rare that this tooth was originally

(32:45):
thought to be a cows tooth instead of horses. Fishers
off the coast of the Netherlands hauled up a carved
wooden head in one of their nets, likely a figurehead
from a warship dating back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century,
possibly from the eight Ors War. This figurehead is in
the shape of a man's head wearing a Frygian cap.

(33:05):
The crew of the fishing ship nicknamed it Berry, the
second time in this two parter of an Earth where
the crew working with something gave it a nickname. Most likely,
this figurehead wound up buried in sediment at the bottom
of the seafloor, otherwise marine organisms probably would have eaten
through it. It does look like it's in very good condition.

(33:27):
The crew kept the head in an eel tub after
they pulled it out of the water, so that it
would not dry out and start to decompose before they
could make it back to shore. A shipwreck found off
the coast of Patagonia, maybe the whaling ship Dolphin, which
set sail from Rhode Island in eighteen fifty and never returned.
The remains of the wreck started to emerge from the

(33:48):
sediment in two thousand four, and although researchers thought it
might be the Dolphin, confirming that I D was a
challenge in The team decided to analyze the tree rings
from the ups timbers, and those rings suggested that the
wood was from white oak and old growth yellow pine trees,
and that the last of them were cut in eighteen

(34:09):
forty nine. Most likely, the oak came from Massachusetts, while
the pine came from somewhere in the southeast. This identification
is not confirmed yet, but the tree rings do suggest
that this ship would have been built along the same
time as the Dolphin was. It's kind of like a

(34:29):
circumstantial connection at this point. In nine twelve, the s
S Massaba tried to warn the RMS Titanic of the
iceberg that the Titanic later hit, causing the purportedly unsinkable
ship to go down on its first voyage. While the
Titanic did receive the message, the message never made it
to the main control room. The Massaba continued to operate

(34:52):
for another six years before being struck by a German
torpedo during World War One. Twenty people aboard died when
it inc A team using multi beam sonar has now
positively identified the wreck of the Massada in the Irish
Sea during a sweep of the area that also pointed
to the remains of more than two hundred and seventy

(35:14):
resse rex are all detailed in a newly released book
titled Echoes from the Deep. Okay, so this next thing
is not a whole shipwreck, but something that may point
to one. A crew in the Southern North Sea, off
the coast of England has recovered a large anchor that's
likely somewhere between six hundred and two thousand years old.

(35:36):
It's large enough that it probably would have come from
a vessel weighing between five hundred and six hundred tons.
All of the dating on it is not confirmed yet.
It's possible that it was a Roman vessel, and if so,
it would have been from one of the largest ships
in the Roman merchant fleet. This was actually pulled out
of the water in one but just announced in September

(35:58):
and last. We've previously talked about a shipwreck off the
coast of Rhode Island that maybe Captain Cook's Endeavor. In August,
it was announced that would from the wreck shows evidence
of a worm like mollusk known as shipworm. There's still
some debate about whether this ship really is the Endeavor,
and also whether the possibility that it could have been

(36:21):
should have been announced the way that it was. This
was a whole deal when it first was announced, but
the evidence of shipworm in the wood has led to
calls for what's left of the wreck to just be
aggressively preserved. So much Unearthed this year was a lot.

(36:41):
I have a thought about a recurring thing that maybe
should be its own category going for me, Yeah, I'll
talk about it already. Have listener mail for us, I do.
I have listener mail from Carol who wrote to us
with something to include an unearthed and then I forgot
to write it down, and then I was looking for

(37:03):
listener mail to read and went, I'll should read that
because I should have put this in this episode. This
is I said from Carol. Carol wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy,
Hello from Canada. This article came across my news feed
this morning. I thought it would share it with you
as something for the next Unearthed installment in case you
haven't seen it yet. And the headline of this article

(37:24):
is why a small British museum went out of its
way to repatriate Hida nation artifacts and this is about
how as that headline suggests, a small British museum connected
with the hide Guai Museum in British Columbia to repatriate
indigenous artifacts that were in their possession, along with the

(37:45):
growing movement to reclaim artifacts as the form of healing
and reconciliation. So I read through this article and it
it talks about basically how the museum had these items
in their collection but had very little information about where
they had come from, and so it took a lot
of effort to pinpoint what nation they needed to go

(38:05):
back to you and then to return it to the
to the Haida Gwai Museum. Um Carol then moves on
to say now for lunar beavers. Months back in May,
I was listening to the Margaret Lucas Cavendish episode. When
you began describing her blazing world and the anthropomorphic creatures

(38:26):
including birdman, I immediately thought lunar beavers and the birdman
and the great moon Hoax. I wonder whether the creator
of the moon Hoax drew inspiration from Margaret. The connection
certainly had me laughing at the thought. Thank you, Holly
and Tracy, you bring me Joy. I find myself smiling
about something in every episode, whether it's ridiculous moments and

(38:47):
the story or your commentary. Actually a lot of it
is your commentary. I enjoy your perspectives and both of
your personalities. I feel your people I would really enjoy
spending time with and thank you for shaping my perspectives.
I very much appreciate your willingness to say we don't
really know in reference to historical information. I've come to
have a more critical mind when reading the news and

(39:07):
references to the past, asking myself do they know for sure?
Thank you. It reminds me that there is beauty in
mystery and in the not knowing. So Carol also included
pictures of kitty cat. Uh this cat's name is Momo. Um. Yes,

(39:28):
Momo is extremely cute. Um Momo is is orange and
white and is shown with this little tiger and Carol's
son moved to a city far away and really missed
the cat and uh so Momo was very chilled out, relaxed,
relaxed cat. Um, but can sound really vocal and so

(39:50):
they recorded Momo having a conversation and purring and like
inserted them into the stuffed tiger so when you hear
when you squeeze the tiger, you can hear this sounds
so that the cat usually makes. And so this was
a present for Carol's Sun last Christmas, and I found
that whole idea to be incredibly adorable. It reminds me

(40:10):
a little bit of when Patrick and I were dating
and Leave Leave living in two different states, and we
had this app that would let us put our thumb
on the screen and the other person could put their
thumb on the screen, and we're putting her thumbs on
the screen at the same time. It's very cute. Uh So, anyway,
thank you so much Carol for sending this. I had

(40:31):
not seen this article and then I forgot to bookmarkt
along with the bookmarks to go into on earths, So
I'm glad I got to read this email to include this. Also,
if you would like to send us a note about
this for an either podcast or history podcast that I
Heart radio dot com and we're all over social media
and missed in history, so you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,

(40:53):
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the I Heart Radio app or a realty you'll like
to get podcasts stuff you missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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