December 30, 2013 • 25 mins
What historical revelations revealed themselves in 2013? So many, we need two episodes to cover them all. From Viking jewelry to lost Doctor Who episodes and -- of course -- bodies in car parks, history showed up in some surprising places this year.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Jase Wilson. We are picking up past host tradition
today our annual look at at what has been unearthed
(00:23):
in the world of history, sometimes literally unearthed out of
the dirt, sometimes just stuff that's been found or discovered
or whatever. As has been the case for the last
couple of years, we have enough things to talk about
that we have two parts to this episode to run
today and two days from now. It's been a big year.
(00:45):
It seems like every other week at least there's some
big yes, new thing found, new thing discovered, new thing tested. Yes.
And so we're going to say, as we always do,
this is not an exhaustive list of everything. Yeah, And
if we get to the end of all this and
there's something that you wish we talked about, feel free
to tell us nicely. Uh, we've gotten some furious people
(01:06):
who are angry that we didn't mention a favorite thing before,
and and that makes our day a little sadder. But
we do especially want to point out that we've already
done whole episodes on some of this year's biggest fines
UM twenty confirmed that remains previously found below a car
park where there was of Richard the Third, so we
had a whole episode devoted to that back in March.
(01:30):
We also, thanks to the world of forensic anthropology, got
pretty clear confirmation that there was cannibalism going on during
the starving time in Jamestown and you can hear an
episode about that from back in May. Uh. And just
as a side note, that Richard the Third site is
also where the team found a stone car coffin that
we discovered this year contained a lead coffin inside of it,
(01:52):
which is another history mystery another time. UM. This year
we did also get some big news of something that
was actually unearthed a while back, and most notably, uh
that's one of those is almost fift pieces of artwork
that had been confiscated by Nazis and we're found in
a Munich flat in two thousand eleven that actually made
(02:13):
headlines this November and included works by such amazing artists
as Picasso and Matisse. So that was actually a previously
unearthed thing that we just became aware of this year. So,
like we said, not an exhaustive list. Today's episode we're
prutting things kind of into groups because there are a
(02:34):
lot of things to talk about. Today's episode has some
stuff that we just think is cool. Uh. We have
a bunch of things that were found under car parks
and thanks to the crossrail project in London. Uh. And
then our next episode will be everything from amateur discoveries
of stuff to everyone's favorite subject, exhumations. So so starting
(02:59):
with the not categorized but just super interesting and cool. Uh.
In October, archaeologists in London announced the find of a
limestone carving of an eagle that was found in a ditch.
And it's a Roman eagle. Although it was carved in
Britain and it's been called one of the best pieces
of Romano British art ever found. Its condition, in fact,
(03:19):
was so good that when the team first saw it
they were afraid that they had actually accidentally disturbed a
Victorian gravestone decoration, so a much later period item. Yes,
they thought it was something much newer than what it
actually was when they first saw it because it was
in such excellent condition. Uh. The only damage that it
has is a one of its wings is broken and
it's being supported now by a frame and it's being
(03:42):
supported because it is doing a six month tour at
the Museum of London. It was installed there just a
month after being pulled out of the ground and it
is estimated to be about two thousand years old. Yeah,
so when you think about that, and people thought it
was Victorian because it was so good, that's returning a
hundred and fifty years old versus actual age of two thousands.
So it's really in spectacular conditions and pretty remarkable that
(04:04):
it within a month of being found, it was already
in a museum. In the world of television history, Philip Morris,
who is executive director at Television International Enterprise Archive found
nine long lost episodes of the TV show Doctor Who
in a closet and a TV station in Nigeria. That
is so Doctor Who was extremely Doctor Who. They actually
(04:28):
found eleven episodes, but only nine of them are among
the missing hundred and six from the show's early years.
If you're not familiar with this part of TV history,
like now, archiving things and keeping copies and and you know,
having things to save for posterity is a pretty typical
part of television production, but that was not really the
(04:48):
case in the fifties. And sixties people didn't quite realize
that we might want to have some of this stuff later,
and so there are a lot of early episodes of
the BBC TV show Doctor Who that we don't really
have any known copies of. Um. There was actually another
article that circulated this year that claimed a hundred episodes
had been found, but that did not come from the
(05:10):
most reputable source in the world, and I could not
find actual confirmation that seemed legitimate to me. So we
do know that nine of them are no longer lost, hooray.
And in Nigeria, uh, we already know where the Queen
Anne's Revenge was, So that was black Beard's pirate ship.
In case there's anybody that did not know that. Uh.
(05:32):
It ran aground in the Beaufort Inlet in North Carolina
in seventeen eighteen, and that's well documented and its location
was confirmed back in eleven. But this year the Underwater
Archaeology branch of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
announced that it intends to salvage the entire thing. So
that is sort of unearthing to come. Yes, it's unearthing announcement.
(05:54):
And next year we may have lots of beautiful pictures
of things that they will be pulling up out of
the water. Yes, they really intend to like bring every
single piece of wood up from the ocean floor. It
was exciting. I'm so excited to see how that project
plays out. And as as a manager of things that
house because that sounds expensive. Um And and our last
(06:16):
sort of uncategorized but just pretty cool announced back in July,
several pieces of Viking jewelry were found at a farm
site in Denmark. And this was a little incongruous, like
this is a pretty modest site that they were working at.
Um and these pieces were at least years old. Some
of them are made out of gold, and there was
(06:37):
a lot of debate about how exactly these very expensive
seeming gold pieces were found at a site that was
otherwise so modest. And the number one theory at this
point is that the Scaldings, who were the first Danish dynasty,
had a royal seat about six miles away from this site.
So while it wasn't a very rich set moment, it
(07:00):
may have played host two more notable persons from not
that far away, and that is how all these pieces
wound up. They're so cool. You may have heard this
year that they found some things under parking lot couples
like Parking Lot History Year. Yes, and it's not totally
surprising that so many things are being found under parking lots.
(07:20):
But here are a few things that were found under
parking lots. And we're not Richard the Third. Yeah, that
was the big, huge one, but there were several others.
So in March, a crew that was demolishing an old
parking lot found the tomb of a Night as well
as the foundations of a monastery built by King Alexander
the Second of Scotland. The monastery was founded in twelve
(07:41):
thirty but then destroyed during the Protestant Reformation, and the
Night's grave was marked with a sandstone slab carved with
a cavalry cross and sword, and a body believed to
be the Night was actually found nearby. So it was
several things unearthed in this one parking lot thing I
am looking for at some point, it may have happened already,
(08:02):
but I was not able to find it. A confirmation
that the body really was the Night and not another
unrelated body. Yeah, and whether we will ever identify the
identity of the Night, hopefully that could be next year's
on Earth. In May, archaeologists found a seventeen hundred year
old cemetery under a car park in Lester, England, and
(08:25):
that seemed to be interestingly the final resting place for
people of many faiths. They were buried in different positions
with different funerary rituals. They were about thirteen people buried
there and they date back about to the year three hundred.
It seems very fascinating. Its fascinating that so it sort
(08:46):
of makes it clear that there were people of many
faiths living there at the same time and that it
was socially acceptable for them all to be buried in together,
or maybe just necessary for some reason. Announced in October
in Scotland in eleventh century Viking parliamentary site site for
gathering known as the Thing, which was for making laws,
(09:06):
settling disputes and those sorts of things. Uh again under
a parking lot yep. And I am just delighted by
the fact that that this was called the Thing. It
probably comes from a thing bilier, which means the field
of the assembly. So this was like to picture the
horror thing, because that makes it funnier, it does. The
(09:30):
reason that this was notable was that it. Uh. There
had not been one of these sites found in that
part of Scotland before this point. Yeah, it kind of
expanded the territory that we thought they were having these
sorts of activities in. Yes, parking lots are not the
only things that are hiding many archaeological finds this year.
(09:51):
There's also Crossrail, which is this high frequency, high capacity
rail line that's in the works for London and the
surrounding area. And work on the Crossrail project has unearthed
all kinds of stuff. It started back in two thousand
and nine and has unearthed since then at least ten
thousand archaeological items. It's a lot. It is a lot
(10:11):
of stuff. So in March UH they unearthed a death
pit of probable Black Death victims and that was dug
up under Charterhouse Square and at the time it was
doug the pit would have been just outside the walls
of London. In August the project dug up a sixteenth
century gold coin and a huge amount of mesolithic flint.
(10:34):
They called this kind of a mesolithic tool factory. Um.
All of these would have been pieces of nine thousand
year old tools. And in October UH it was a
collection of twenty Roman skulls and pieces of pottery, and
people were bandying about the idea that these could be
remains from Budhica's rebellion, which we've talked about in the podcast.
(10:56):
But the pattern of clustering UH in where they were
found suggest that they were really just washed down stream
from a Roman burial ground. But they weren't so much
UH Budhica related as just displaced. Yeah. They kept finding
skulls bunched together where the river had a bend in it,
as though they had just washed downstream and then caught
(11:18):
there from the current. UM. And this last one is
not actually related to the crossrail. It's a completely different
subway UH excavation, and that's taking place in Rio, this
subway expansion, and Rio has unearth at least two hundred
thousand artifacts UH, a lot of them really impressively intact um.
(11:40):
And one of these unearthed this year is a toothbrush
believe to have belonged to Emperor Pedro the Second, who
ruled Brazil from to eight nine. The bristles of the
toothbrush are no longer intact, but the toothbrush itself is
still there. So cool and before we move on to
(12:00):
come in and talk about our sponsor. That sounds so
let's get back to what's been uncovered this year. This
we have several things that are bits of communication that
have been revealed, often in other texts. Conservators at the
National Portrait Gallery in London found this little piece of
art in a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh. That quote
(12:23):
reveals the depth of the explorer's devotion to Queen Elizabeth
the First UM. It's this little coded reference to the
moon and water within the context of this portrait. UH.
And the message there is that Sir Walter Raleigh is
willing to have the Queen control him the way the
moon controls the tides. This patch of moon and seas
(12:46):
up in the upper left of the painting and it
was revealed not known to have been there before. During
an extensive restoration project that that is, restoring the whole portrait. UH.
European scientists used advanced multi spectral imaging to reveal previously
washed away writing in medieval manuscripts this year. I think
this is so incredibly cool. UH. One of these is
(13:08):
a manuscript that's housed in Jerusalem today. It's pages are
books of the Greek Old Testament, but underneath our passages
from Euripides and Aristotle as well with other works. And
they've used this same process on the manuscript from Paris,
which is a fifth century commentary on Aristotle. Yeah, that's
kind of multiple documents in one. Yeah. Well, and when
(13:30):
you look back into history to the time periods when
paper was really expensive and needed to be washed away
and reused. Um, the fact that now we can kind
of go back and piece together what what was originally
on those pieces of paper is pretty cool. It's really cool.
It also reminds me of when literary scholars will look
(13:51):
at like the strikeouts and erasures and things people's original
uh original drafts of their work. Yeah, except this has
a lot more science. Also this year at the s
l a C National Accelerator Laboratory, scientists use X rays
to reconstruct a s aria from an opera by Luigi Cherubini,
(14:18):
which the composer had in kind of a fit of fury,
blacked out completely with carbon. The trick to doing this
because the paper itself was invisible to the X rays,
but not the notes that he wrote on the paper. Um,
they had to figure out which notes belonged on which
side of the page. So in addition to using X
(14:40):
rays to get a picture of what all the notes were,
they then turned to analyzing his handwriting and weeding out
the notes on each side of the page based on
which way the lines on the notes slanted. So cool.
Has anybody heard it? Yes? You you can now hear it.
And it's beautiful. And we don't know why he wanted
(15:00):
to destroy it. I think he was angry and temperamental,
as many creative people are. I say this as a
creative person who is sometimes deleting all of my own
work in a fit of anxiety. I don't know what
you're talking about. I don't either. I never destroy anything.
I destroy all the things. Uh, not so much reconstructed,
(15:22):
but it is writing related. In June, federal officials and
representatives from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington announced
that they had found the Rosenberg Diary, which was written
by Alfred Rosenberg, who was a friend and confidante of
Adolf Hitler and a notorious member of the Nazi Party,
and he would have had firsthand knowledge of a lot
(15:43):
of what Hitler was orchestrating. So this document may very
well uncover new information about this period of history, and
in the words of US Holocaust Memorial Museum Director Sarah J. Bloomfield, quote,
as we build the collection of record on the Holocaust,
having material that documents the actions of both perpetrators and
(16:04):
victims is crucial to helping scholars understand how and why
the Holocaust happened. So cool, that is, I think the
most horrifying thing discovered in all our discoveries is really important.
It's kind of one of those things where the bad
guys there's always a cloak of like mystery around them,
(16:25):
not even specifically these, but any It's like there's never
enough documentation of, like, but why were you doing this? Yeah? Well,
and especially as the specter of Holocaust denial kind of
arises up, having primary sources of what was really happening
is increasingly important to dispel that as false. Um. And
(16:47):
also I think as we get farther and farther removed
from that time of history, it becomes more and more
difficult for people who did not live through it to
conceive of that ever having happened in the first place. Yeah,
And so having things like the Rosenberg Diary can help
put that into better context for people and now we
move on from the that very tragic topic. We didn't
(17:09):
our favorite thing. We didn't want to end on on
the most tragic topic with this particular episode. We've got
a few things that were unearthed this year that have
to do with food. In August, a team of researchers
led by University of York archaeologist Hayley Saul published a
paper in Plos one that looked at food deposits left
(17:31):
in prehistoric pottery from what is now Denmark and Germany.
So in all this charred residue from inside these pottery
fragments and sometimes on the outside too, they found residues
that are consistent with the modern garlic mustard seed. So
the garlic mustard seed does not have a lot of
nutritional value, it is not feeling, it is not like
(17:54):
full oft. But what it does have is a lot
of flavor. And this is the first direct evidence that
prehistoric Europeans used spice to make their food taste better. Yeah,
I'm probably not a surprise. Everyone loves deliciousness, right. Well,
we also have some evidence of animals who do things
to their food to make it taste better, So it's
(18:15):
not super surprising that early early Uh, back in history
people did the same thing. Yeah, but still really cool
to have evidence of that. Also that same month, in August,
the University of Lester announced that it had unearthed the
recipe for the first chilled chocolate treats in Britain. Uh.
These recipes were gathered by the Earl of Sandwich, not
(18:37):
the inventor of the sandwich, that was his great great
grandson in sixteen sixty eight. And this was a concoction
of chocolate and snow. Similar to our ice cream podcast,
we talked about things that started with snow and then
we're made into frozen, delicious treats. Yes, we should also
probably call his great great grandson the purported inventor of
the sandwich. Yeah, we had to be careful with that one. Yeah,
(19:00):
it's also a restaurant. The Earl of Santon not related
to either of those people, except in the borrowing of
a name. Yes. Also in October, researchers at the University
of Buckingham announced that they had found charred bones of
frog legs at a dig not far from Stonehenge. These
bones were from somewhere between UH sixty two b C
(19:24):
and b C and this makes them the oldest evidence
of frog legs used as food anywhere in the world,
and it predates the first evidence of eating frog's legs
in France, where supposedly the practice originated. Also at the
site were bones of fish, bore, deer, and other animals
(19:46):
that would have lived in the area at the time. Uh.
I am fond of frog's legs. I am too. I
have a love hate adds with it. I'm kind of
a carnivore by nature, but as you know, I'm also
crazy animal lady, So I'm perpetually writing this way of
what I'm comfortable with, and then I eat the meat anyway. Uh,
And I do love frogs legs. There's some French in
(20:09):
my family background and we grew up eating them. And yes,
they're really good. Yes. I don't know if I've told
you this story of one of the periods of my
life when I was a vegetarian, and it ended when
I was at a work function at which quail and
frog's legs were being served and I decided to have
some of each of that. So yes, Food Discoveries this
(20:31):
year is where we are going to stop off with
this particular half of this episode. Today we're going to
have lots more next time, I do want to give
a special shout out to the History Blog at the
history blog dot com, which is where I see a
lot of these stories first. They are quick, Yes, They're
like they're hovering on the data center of the Internet
(20:52):
to find anything historical and really fast to report it. Yeah.
I have a lot of things that I keep up
with in an RSS reader of a very sites and
reports and things like that, but very often the place
that I see at first is at the History Blog.
So thank you for doing that. So now that we
have gotten good and hungry, do you also have some
listener mail for us? Yes? And if you even mentioned
(21:12):
ice cream pay This is from Catherine, who says, Dear
Tracy and Holly, I wrote to you pretty recently about
ice cream in Montana, but as soon as I saw
the title of yesterday's episode, I knew I would have
to write again. This is about our Hessian's episode. Again,
very popular with the listeners. Yes, uh, and I was
(21:33):
quite fond of that episode. I'm find people enjoyed it.
At my elementary school back in the nines, there was
a tradition that every spring, the entire fifth grade would
go down to the public land behind the school in parentheses,
a swappy, partly wooded areas surrounding a creek and re
enact a war from American history. Was sort of a
rite of passage leading up to the quote continuation ceremony
(21:55):
celebrating our departure from middle school. The fifth graders would
train to prepare for months in advance, and so on
the big day, the whole thing would be professionally shot
on video so it could be edited together into a
short historical documentary for parents to purchase. I love that.
I love that everything about that. Yes, I especially loved
that it's a continuation ceremony and not a graduation. Uh.
(22:19):
That's not a judgmental of me, and it probably was,
so I let to continue with Catherine's actual letter. Most
years it was a reenactment of the Civil War, but
when my cohorts turn came, the school administrators had decided,
for one reason or another, that we would re enact
the Revolutionary War instead. I was assigned the role of
Hessian flag bearer, which kind of cheased me off at
(22:41):
the time because it meant I didn't get to carry
one of the muskets all the other kids got, which
would quote shoot puffs of flour, which is okay, that's darling.
Back to the letter again. At that time too, I
had never heard of the Hessians, and all I knew
about them was I was told we were German or
scenaries and that we all had to wear when I
(23:02):
thought we're pretty silly looking hats. I guess I always
had it in the back of my head that there
was probably a lot more to it than that, but
the Hessians never really came up again in my public
school history class classics in any significant way. Thank you
for giving me a better understanding off you are supposed
to be running around by the creek in my little
German uniform. Sincerely, Katherine. Can I just tell you when
(23:24):
we first got that message in my head? Uh, Catherine
grew up in a Wes Anderson film. It seems so
abundantly clear to me. It really does, now that you
point that out. I had not thought of that. I
love this letter. It's thank you so much, Katherine. I
was also extremely glad that the email that we've got
(23:45):
about our Hessian's episode has been people enjoying it. Yeah.
I enjoyed recording that one. I think the most of
any episode we have done, and then when I listened
to it, I enjoyed listening to it the most episode
we've done, so I was very excited that other people
seem to enjoy it also, So thank you, Thank you
again for writing Katherine. If you would like to write
(24:07):
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slash history class stuffed and on Twitter at miss in History.
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(24:29):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Jase Wilson. We are picking up past host tradition
today our annual look at at what has been unearthed
(00:23):
in the world of history, sometimes literally unearthed out of
the dirt, sometimes just stuff that's been found or discovered
or whatever. As has been the case for the last
couple of years, we have enough things to talk about
that we have two parts to this episode to run
today and two days from now. It's been a big year.
(00:45):
It seems like every other week at least there's some
big yes, new thing found, new thing discovered, new thing tested. Yes.
And so we're going to say, as we always do,
this is not an exhaustive list of everything. Yeah, And
if we get to the end of all this and
there's something that you wish we talked about, feel free
to tell us nicely. Uh, we've gotten some furious people
(01:06):
who are angry that we didn't mention a favorite thing before,
and and that makes our day a little sadder. But
we do especially want to point out that we've already
done whole episodes on some of this year's biggest fines
UM twenty confirmed that remains previously found below a car
park where there was of Richard the Third, so we
had a whole episode devoted to that back in March.
(01:30):
We also, thanks to the world of forensic anthropology, got
pretty clear confirmation that there was cannibalism going on during
the starving time in Jamestown and you can hear an
episode about that from back in May. Uh. And just
as a side note, that Richard the Third site is
also where the team found a stone car coffin that
we discovered this year contained a lead coffin inside of it,
(01:52):
which is another history mystery another time. UM. This year
we did also get some big news of something that
was actually unearthed a while back, and most notably, uh
that's one of those is almost fift pieces of artwork
that had been confiscated by Nazis and we're found in
a Munich flat in two thousand eleven that actually made
(02:13):
headlines this November and included works by such amazing artists
as Picasso and Matisse. So that was actually a previously
unearthed thing that we just became aware of this year. So,
like we said, not an exhaustive list. Today's episode we're
prutting things kind of into groups because there are a
(02:34):
lot of things to talk about. Today's episode has some
stuff that we just think is cool. Uh. We have
a bunch of things that were found under car parks
and thanks to the crossrail project in London. Uh. And
then our next episode will be everything from amateur discoveries
of stuff to everyone's favorite subject, exhumations. So so starting
(02:59):
with the not categorized but just super interesting and cool. Uh.
In October, archaeologists in London announced the find of a
limestone carving of an eagle that was found in a ditch.
And it's a Roman eagle. Although it was carved in
Britain and it's been called one of the best pieces
of Romano British art ever found. Its condition, in fact,
(03:19):
was so good that when the team first saw it
they were afraid that they had actually accidentally disturbed a
Victorian gravestone decoration, so a much later period item. Yes,
they thought it was something much newer than what it
actually was when they first saw it because it was
in such excellent condition. Uh. The only damage that it
has is a one of its wings is broken and
it's being supported now by a frame and it's being
(03:42):
supported because it is doing a six month tour at
the Museum of London. It was installed there just a
month after being pulled out of the ground and it
is estimated to be about two thousand years old. Yeah,
so when you think about that, and people thought it
was Victorian because it was so good, that's returning a
hundred and fifty years old versus actual age of two thousands.
So it's really in spectacular conditions and pretty remarkable that
(04:04):
it within a month of being found, it was already
in a museum. In the world of television history, Philip Morris,
who is executive director at Television International Enterprise Archive found
nine long lost episodes of the TV show Doctor Who
in a closet and a TV station in Nigeria. That
is so Doctor Who was extremely Doctor Who. They actually
(04:28):
found eleven episodes, but only nine of them are among
the missing hundred and six from the show's early years.
If you're not familiar with this part of TV history,
like now, archiving things and keeping copies and and you know,
having things to save for posterity is a pretty typical
part of television production, but that was not really the
(04:48):
case in the fifties. And sixties people didn't quite realize
that we might want to have some of this stuff later,
and so there are a lot of early episodes of
the BBC TV show Doctor Who that we don't really
have any known copies of. Um. There was actually another
article that circulated this year that claimed a hundred episodes
had been found, but that did not come from the
(05:10):
most reputable source in the world, and I could not
find actual confirmation that seemed legitimate to me. So we
do know that nine of them are no longer lost, hooray.
And in Nigeria, uh, we already know where the Queen
Anne's Revenge was, So that was black Beard's pirate ship.
In case there's anybody that did not know that. Uh.
(05:32):
It ran aground in the Beaufort Inlet in North Carolina
in seventeen eighteen, and that's well documented and its location
was confirmed back in eleven. But this year the Underwater
Archaeology branch of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
announced that it intends to salvage the entire thing. So
that is sort of unearthing to come. Yes, it's unearthing announcement.
(05:54):
And next year we may have lots of beautiful pictures
of things that they will be pulling up out of
the water. Yes, they really intend to like bring every
single piece of wood up from the ocean floor. It
was exciting. I'm so excited to see how that project
plays out. And as as a manager of things that
house because that sounds expensive. Um And and our last
(06:16):
sort of uncategorized but just pretty cool announced back in July,
several pieces of Viking jewelry were found at a farm
site in Denmark. And this was a little incongruous, like
this is a pretty modest site that they were working at.
Um and these pieces were at least years old. Some
of them are made out of gold, and there was
(06:37):
a lot of debate about how exactly these very expensive
seeming gold pieces were found at a site that was
otherwise so modest. And the number one theory at this
point is that the Scaldings, who were the first Danish dynasty,
had a royal seat about six miles away from this site.
So while it wasn't a very rich set moment, it
(07:00):
may have played host two more notable persons from not
that far away, and that is how all these pieces
wound up. They're so cool. You may have heard this
year that they found some things under parking lot couples
like Parking Lot History Year. Yes, and it's not totally
surprising that so many things are being found under parking lots.
(07:20):
But here are a few things that were found under
parking lots. And we're not Richard the Third. Yeah, that
was the big, huge one, but there were several others.
So in March, a crew that was demolishing an old
parking lot found the tomb of a Night as well
as the foundations of a monastery built by King Alexander
the Second of Scotland. The monastery was founded in twelve
(07:41):
thirty but then destroyed during the Protestant Reformation, and the
Night's grave was marked with a sandstone slab carved with
a cavalry cross and sword, and a body believed to
be the Night was actually found nearby. So it was
several things unearthed in this one parking lot thing I
am looking for at some point, it may have happened already,
(08:02):
but I was not able to find it. A confirmation
that the body really was the Night and not another
unrelated body. Yeah, and whether we will ever identify the
identity of the Night, hopefully that could be next year's
on Earth. In May, archaeologists found a seventeen hundred year
old cemetery under a car park in Lester, England, and
(08:25):
that seemed to be interestingly the final resting place for
people of many faiths. They were buried in different positions
with different funerary rituals. They were about thirteen people buried
there and they date back about to the year three hundred.
It seems very fascinating. Its fascinating that so it sort
(08:46):
of makes it clear that there were people of many
faiths living there at the same time and that it
was socially acceptable for them all to be buried in together,
or maybe just necessary for some reason. Announced in October
in Scotland in eleventh century Viking parliamentary site site for
gathering known as the Thing, which was for making laws,
(09:06):
settling disputes and those sorts of things. Uh again under
a parking lot yep. And I am just delighted by
the fact that that this was called the Thing. It
probably comes from a thing bilier, which means the field
of the assembly. So this was like to picture the
horror thing, because that makes it funnier, it does. The
(09:30):
reason that this was notable was that it. Uh. There
had not been one of these sites found in that
part of Scotland before this point. Yeah, it kind of
expanded the territory that we thought they were having these
sorts of activities in. Yes, parking lots are not the
only things that are hiding many archaeological finds this year.
(09:51):
There's also Crossrail, which is this high frequency, high capacity
rail line that's in the works for London and the
surrounding area. And work on the Crossrail project has unearthed
all kinds of stuff. It started back in two thousand
and nine and has unearthed since then at least ten
thousand archaeological items. It's a lot. It is a lot
(10:11):
of stuff. So in March UH they unearthed a death
pit of probable Black Death victims and that was dug
up under Charterhouse Square and at the time it was
doug the pit would have been just outside the walls
of London. In August the project dug up a sixteenth
century gold coin and a huge amount of mesolithic flint.
(10:34):
They called this kind of a mesolithic tool factory. Um.
All of these would have been pieces of nine thousand
year old tools. And in October UH it was a
collection of twenty Roman skulls and pieces of pottery, and
people were bandying about the idea that these could be
remains from Budhica's rebellion, which we've talked about in the podcast.
(10:56):
But the pattern of clustering UH in where they were
found suggest that they were really just washed down stream
from a Roman burial ground. But they weren't so much
UH Budhica related as just displaced. Yeah. They kept finding
skulls bunched together where the river had a bend in it,
as though they had just washed downstream and then caught
(11:18):
there from the current. UM. And this last one is
not actually related to the crossrail. It's a completely different
subway UH excavation, and that's taking place in Rio, this
subway expansion, and Rio has unearth at least two hundred
thousand artifacts UH, a lot of them really impressively intact um.
(11:40):
And one of these unearthed this year is a toothbrush
believe to have belonged to Emperor Pedro the Second, who
ruled Brazil from to eight nine. The bristles of the
toothbrush are no longer intact, but the toothbrush itself is
still there. So cool and before we move on to
(12:00):
come in and talk about our sponsor. That sounds so
let's get back to what's been uncovered this year. This
we have several things that are bits of communication that
have been revealed, often in other texts. Conservators at the
National Portrait Gallery in London found this little piece of
art in a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh. That quote
(12:23):
reveals the depth of the explorer's devotion to Queen Elizabeth
the First UM. It's this little coded reference to the
moon and water within the context of this portrait. UH.
And the message there is that Sir Walter Raleigh is
willing to have the Queen control him the way the
moon controls the tides. This patch of moon and seas
(12:46):
up in the upper left of the painting and it
was revealed not known to have been there before. During
an extensive restoration project that that is, restoring the whole portrait. UH.
European scientists used advanced multi spectral imaging to reveal previously
washed away writing in medieval manuscripts this year. I think
this is so incredibly cool. UH. One of these is
(13:08):
a manuscript that's housed in Jerusalem today. It's pages are
books of the Greek Old Testament, but underneath our passages
from Euripides and Aristotle as well with other works. And
they've used this same process on the manuscript from Paris,
which is a fifth century commentary on Aristotle. Yeah, that's
kind of multiple documents in one. Yeah. Well, and when
(13:30):
you look back into history to the time periods when
paper was really expensive and needed to be washed away
and reused. Um, the fact that now we can kind
of go back and piece together what what was originally
on those pieces of paper is pretty cool. It's really cool.
It also reminds me of when literary scholars will look
(13:51):
at like the strikeouts and erasures and things people's original
uh original drafts of their work. Yeah, except this has
a lot more science. Also this year at the s
l a C National Accelerator Laboratory, scientists use X rays
to reconstruct a s aria from an opera by Luigi Cherubini,
(14:18):
which the composer had in kind of a fit of fury,
blacked out completely with carbon. The trick to doing this
because the paper itself was invisible to the X rays,
but not the notes that he wrote on the paper. Um,
they had to figure out which notes belonged on which
side of the page. So in addition to using X
(14:40):
rays to get a picture of what all the notes were,
they then turned to analyzing his handwriting and weeding out
the notes on each side of the page based on
which way the lines on the notes slanted. So cool.
Has anybody heard it? Yes? You you can now hear it.
And it's beautiful. And we don't know why he wanted
(15:00):
to destroy it. I think he was angry and temperamental,
as many creative people are. I say this as a
creative person who is sometimes deleting all of my own
work in a fit of anxiety. I don't know what
you're talking about. I don't either. I never destroy anything.
I destroy all the things. Uh, not so much reconstructed,
(15:22):
but it is writing related. In June, federal officials and
representatives from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington announced
that they had found the Rosenberg Diary, which was written
by Alfred Rosenberg, who was a friend and confidante of
Adolf Hitler and a notorious member of the Nazi Party,
and he would have had firsthand knowledge of a lot
(15:43):
of what Hitler was orchestrating. So this document may very
well uncover new information about this period of history, and
in the words of US Holocaust Memorial Museum Director Sarah J. Bloomfield, quote,
as we build the collection of record on the Holocaust,
having material that documents the actions of both perpetrators and
(16:04):
victims is crucial to helping scholars understand how and why
the Holocaust happened. So cool, that is, I think the
most horrifying thing discovered in all our discoveries is really important.
It's kind of one of those things where the bad
guys there's always a cloak of like mystery around them,
(16:25):
not even specifically these, but any It's like there's never
enough documentation of, like, but why were you doing this? Yeah? Well,
and especially as the specter of Holocaust denial kind of
arises up, having primary sources of what was really happening
is increasingly important to dispel that as false. Um. And
(16:47):
also I think as we get farther and farther removed
from that time of history, it becomes more and more
difficult for people who did not live through it to
conceive of that ever having happened in the first place. Yeah,
And so having things like the Rosenberg Diary can help
put that into better context for people and now we
move on from the that very tragic topic. We didn't
(17:09):
our favorite thing. We didn't want to end on on
the most tragic topic with this particular episode. We've got
a few things that were unearthed this year that have
to do with food. In August, a team of researchers
led by University of York archaeologist Hayley Saul published a
paper in Plos one that looked at food deposits left
(17:31):
in prehistoric pottery from what is now Denmark and Germany.
So in all this charred residue from inside these pottery
fragments and sometimes on the outside too, they found residues
that are consistent with the modern garlic mustard seed. So
the garlic mustard seed does not have a lot of
nutritional value, it is not feeling, it is not like
(17:54):
full oft. But what it does have is a lot
of flavor. And this is the first direct evidence that
prehistoric Europeans used spice to make their food taste better. Yeah,
I'm probably not a surprise. Everyone loves deliciousness, right. Well,
we also have some evidence of animals who do things
to their food to make it taste better, So it's
(18:15):
not super surprising that early early Uh, back in history
people did the same thing. Yeah, but still really cool
to have evidence of that. Also that same month, in August,
the University of Lester announced that it had unearthed the
recipe for the first chilled chocolate treats in Britain. Uh.
These recipes were gathered by the Earl of Sandwich, not
(18:37):
the inventor of the sandwich, that was his great great
grandson in sixteen sixty eight. And this was a concoction
of chocolate and snow. Similar to our ice cream podcast,
we talked about things that started with snow and then
we're made into frozen, delicious treats. Yes, we should also
probably call his great great grandson the purported inventor of
the sandwich. Yeah, we had to be careful with that one. Yeah,
(19:00):
it's also a restaurant. The Earl of Santon not related
to either of those people, except in the borrowing of
a name. Yes. Also in October, researchers at the University
of Buckingham announced that they had found charred bones of
frog legs at a dig not far from Stonehenge. These
bones were from somewhere between UH sixty two b C
(19:24):
and b C and this makes them the oldest evidence
of frog legs used as food anywhere in the world,
and it predates the first evidence of eating frog's legs
in France, where supposedly the practice originated. Also at the
site were bones of fish, bore, deer, and other animals
(19:46):
that would have lived in the area at the time. Uh.
I am fond of frog's legs. I am too. I
have a love hate adds with it. I'm kind of
a carnivore by nature, but as you know, I'm also
crazy animal lady, So I'm perpetually writing this way of
what I'm comfortable with, and then I eat the meat anyway. Uh,
And I do love frogs legs. There's some French in
(20:09):
my family background and we grew up eating them. And yes,
they're really good. Yes. I don't know if I've told
you this story of one of the periods of my
life when I was a vegetarian, and it ended when
I was at a work function at which quail and
frog's legs were being served and I decided to have
some of each of that. So yes, Food Discoveries this
(20:31):
year is where we are going to stop off with
this particular half of this episode. Today we're going to
have lots more next time, I do want to give
a special shout out to the History Blog at the
history blog dot com, which is where I see a
lot of these stories first. They are quick, Yes, They're
like they're hovering on the data center of the Internet
(20:52):
to find anything historical and really fast to report it. Yeah.
I have a lot of things that I keep up
with in an RSS reader of a very sites and
reports and things like that, but very often the place
that I see at first is at the History Blog.
So thank you for doing that. So now that we
have gotten good and hungry, do you also have some
listener mail for us? Yes? And if you even mentioned
(21:12):
ice cream pay This is from Catherine, who says, Dear
Tracy and Holly, I wrote to you pretty recently about
ice cream in Montana, but as soon as I saw
the title of yesterday's episode, I knew I would have
to write again. This is about our Hessian's episode. Again,
very popular with the listeners. Yes, uh, and I was
(21:33):
quite fond of that episode. I'm find people enjoyed it.
At my elementary school back in the nines, there was
a tradition that every spring, the entire fifth grade would
go down to the public land behind the school in parentheses,
a swappy, partly wooded areas surrounding a creek and re
enact a war from American history. Was sort of a
rite of passage leading up to the quote continuation ceremony
(21:55):
celebrating our departure from middle school. The fifth graders would
train to prepare for months in advance, and so on
the big day, the whole thing would be professionally shot
on video so it could be edited together into a
short historical documentary for parents to purchase. I love that.
I love that everything about that. Yes, I especially loved
that it's a continuation ceremony and not a graduation. Uh.
(22:19):
That's not a judgmental of me, and it probably was,
so I let to continue with Catherine's actual letter. Most
years it was a reenactment of the Civil War, but
when my cohorts turn came, the school administrators had decided,
for one reason or another, that we would re enact
the Revolutionary War instead. I was assigned the role of
Hessian flag bearer, which kind of cheased me off at
(22:41):
the time because it meant I didn't get to carry
one of the muskets all the other kids got, which
would quote shoot puffs of flour, which is okay, that's darling.
Back to the letter again. At that time too, I
had never heard of the Hessians, and all I knew
about them was I was told we were German or
scenaries and that we all had to wear when I
(23:02):
thought we're pretty silly looking hats. I guess I always
had it in the back of my head that there
was probably a lot more to it than that, but
the Hessians never really came up again in my public
school history class classics in any significant way. Thank you
for giving me a better understanding off you are supposed
to be running around by the creek in my little
German uniform. Sincerely, Katherine. Can I just tell you when
(23:24):
we first got that message in my head? Uh, Catherine
grew up in a Wes Anderson film. It seems so
abundantly clear to me. It really does, now that you
point that out. I had not thought of that. I
love this letter. It's thank you so much, Katherine. I
was also extremely glad that the email that we've got
(23:45):
about our Hessian's episode has been people enjoying it. Yeah.
I enjoyed recording that one. I think the most of
any episode we have done, and then when I listened
to it, I enjoyed listening to it the most episode
we've done, so I was very excited that other people
seem to enjoy it also, So thank you, Thank you
again for writing Katherine. If you would like to write
(24:07):
to us, you can. We're at History Podcast at Discovery
dot com or also on Facebook at Facebook dot com,
slash history class stuffed and on Twitter at miss in History.
Are tumbler is at missed in history dot tumbler dot com,
and we are pinning things away on Pinterest. If you'd
like to learn a little bit more about what we
have talked about today and comes to our website. Put
the word archaeology in the search bar and you will
(24:29):
find the article how archaeology Works. You can do all
of that and a whole lot more at our website,
which is how stuff Works dot com for more on
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