January 4, 2016 • 35 mins
More of the 2015 news items of historical significance! The second part of this topic includes firearms, letters, blackboards, sculpture and of course, mass graves and exhumations.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Oh, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson. Today. It is Part two of Unearthed,
and it is our annual roundup of stuff that literally
(00:21):
and figuratively got unearthed this year. Part one of our
annual roundup included three big subjects and they were Egypt,
past podcast updates, and shipwrecks. And so today is a
lot more of a hodgepodge. One note that I would
like to give before we started, I originally had multiple
(00:41):
stories in here that we're about people armed with metal
detectors who found whole hordes of Viking coins. This happened
on both sides of the North Sea. It happened a
bunch of different times. I realized that they all sounded
exactly the same, and this podcast episode was becoming very long.
So what I basically want to do is just shout
(01:02):
out to all the amateur archaeologists because the same theme
came up again and again that they all called in
the pros the minute they realized that they had something significant,
which is awesome. Uh. It means that there are now
a lot of uh really old coins that are in
museums now for everybody to be able to learn from
and be educated on. This was also true of the
(01:23):
folks who found a couple of Bronze age axes using
a metal detector. They contacted the authorities, and the find
ultimately wound up doubling the number of discovered axes from
that particular time period to a total of ten. So
big applause, Yeah, big applies to the folks who go, hey,
(01:45):
this coin looks valuable. Maybe I should contact someone who
can do this a little more thoroughly than I can
with my limited experience and knowledge. Indiana jets to be
proud those things belong to museums. Uh oh, we're going
to start out with this one. As you know, Tracy,
when she puts these together, she groups them into similar
(02:06):
like groupings as much as possible. And this one is
going to start with things that are not remotely safe
to leave lying around. So in January, news broke that
National Park Service employees had found a Winchester Model eighteen
seventy three repeating rifle leaning up against the juniper tree.
The rifle was manufactured and shipped in eighteen eighty two,
(02:28):
but otherwise we don't know who bought it when it
was left by the tree, or why. At the time
it was made, though it was a very popular firearm
and was nicknamed the Gun that Won the West. It
does appear that it was there against the tree for
quite some time because the wooden stock had cracked due
to exposure to the elements, the barrel itself had gotten rusted.
(02:49):
The whole thing had kind of faded and weathered enough
that it's kind of surprising that anyone thought against the tree.
A couple of the pictures like, you gotta know it's
there to reel eyes. There is a gun against the tree,
and the National Park Service staff passed that find along
to conservators. Also in the realm of things that you
(03:11):
just should not leave lying out, archaeologists have been bringing
a lot of stuff up from the wreckage of Blackbeards
ship the Queen Ann's Revenge. A lot of them are
medical implements. A lot of the medical implements look extremely scary.
One of these is a urethral syringe, and this was
used to inject mercury into the urethra the whole at
(03:33):
the end of the penis probably as a treatment treatment
for syphilis, and it looks as terrifying, as you might
imagine based on the words that just came out of
my mouth. That will make you tense up, whether you
have a penis or not. That is attention making terror uh.
But then moving on to the category of books, letters,
(03:55):
and art. Uh. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town's herculaneum
and Pompeii were buried. All of the graffiti, the bodies
and artifacts that were there were preserved by the volcanic ash,
and that is common knowledge at this point. But another
thing preserved and left largely untouched until now was the library.
Herculaneums library, buried in the year seventy nine, was unearthed
(04:18):
by archaeologists in seventeen fifty two. So the trouble was
that until very recently it was basically impossible to try
to read any of the scrolls that were buried along
with the rest of the town's was so impossible that
in the eighties researchers decided to stop trying and leave
it for future generations because basically all of the efforts
(04:40):
that they had made up until that point destroyed the
scrolls without actually being able to read anything on them. However,
it is later now and the future generation is officially
this one, and the method that's used is called X
ray phase contrast tomography. It's also a brief it it
as XPCT, and basically, this technique looks at the tiny,
(05:04):
tiny difference between the thickness of plain papyrus in the
thickness of papyrus with ink on top of it, and
using this, researchers were able to piece together writing from
an unrolled fragment and hope that the same methods will
be able to have a look at the entire library.
They published their initial findings in the journal Nature Communications,
(05:25):
the much much easier to read category. Crews are placing
blackboards at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City found an
entire other set of blackboards, still with writing and lessons
on them under the ones they were taking down. These
old chalkboards have been covered over with new ones, but
not erased beforehand in nineteen seventeen. They include drawings and
(05:47):
multiplication wheel, musical notes, and writing. It seems like maybe
they might have been covered up around Thanksgiving time, because
all of the lessons include stuff about Thanksgiving, and that
particular story actually made the rounds twice this year, once
when the Washington Post picked up the story from local
news and again when another website we will not name
(06:08):
republished them all again uncredited and so they were brand new.
Do not do that. It is plagiarism. So uh. In
a sadder note that people have asked us to talk
about on the show as a whole episode, and I
have not really figured out how we might handle that.
Bank employees stumbled across a note and other papers from
(06:30):
Baroness Mary bet Sarah, who died along with Crown Prince
Rudolph of Austria in January eight nine. At the time
of their deaths, she was seventeen and he was thirty,
And although their deaths have always been described as a
murder suicide, her notes, which had been deposited in the
bank in n and we're previously believed to have been destroyed,
(06:52):
are essentially suicide notes. So any non clarity about whether
she was a willing participant in this whole death basically
obliterated with these notes. So moving on to our next discovery.
While cleaning out their house, the family members of Victor Rothschild,
(07:13):
who worked with m I five's counter sabotage unit, found
a number of drawings he commissioned from artist Lawrence Fish
depicting German booby trap bombs from World War Two. Rothschild's
idea was to basically put together a manual for people
needing to diffuse a number of innocuous looking items that
could really contain explosives. There are twenty five different drawings
(07:36):
documenting everything from an exploding chocolate bar which was purportedly
part of a plot to kill Winston Churchill, and an
exploding motor oil can. And the family was hoping that
a museum or an archive would take these drawings because
they're an interesting part of spy history, but we don't
have any word yet on whether anyone has taken them
up on this offer, and it has come to fruition
(07:58):
that they've become part of a museum collection. Next, we
have the fine that was the most exciting to me
of all fines this entire year. It is a missing
and newly found piece of the epic of Gilgamesh. Written
in these notes in all capital letters. That's how excited
I am Tracy has some Gilgamesh excitement. Basically, a museum
(08:21):
in Iraq bought a collection of clay tablets from a
smuggler inn. And this may seem shady, but it is
actually a tactic that museums in the region have been
using to try to reclaim artifacts that have previously been looted.
Farouk al Rawie and Andrew George at the University of
London works together to translate the text on this one
(08:41):
cuneiform tablet that was found in the batch, and it
contains twenty previously unknown lines of the epic of Gilgamesh,
in which Gilgamesh and Inky do you go to the
Cedar forest to fight an ogre? Tracy is so excited
over this one, which is grand. A paper outlining these
fine things was published in teen but it did not
(09:02):
actually make headlines until this year. It was kind of
the quiet discovery of last year. Yeah, this is the
only one that is a thing that like, we should
have heard about last year, but we didn't until suddenly
this year people were doing news reports on it. Uh
much more recently than very recently. This year, the contents
(09:23):
of a trunk full of never delivered correspondence were unearthed
in the Netherlands, and all of this correspondence dates back
to between sixteen eighty and seventeen oh six. The trunk
itself is leather and lined in Linen, and it was
given to a museum in the Hague in nine But
these letters were never opened and they're only just now
(09:44):
being analyzed by an international team of experts and academics.
And one of the things that they're doing that I
thought was really cool is to use non invasive imaging
to look inside uh the sealed envelopes without damaging them,
and then also to look inside the letters where the
paper of the letter themselves has been folded in an
intricate way to make the envelope and the letters themselves
(10:07):
are an assortment of things that just never made it
to their recipients because those people moved, or they refused
to accept them, or they refused to pay because at
the time the recipient was the one who paid for postage.
One theory is that the couple who collected them all
did so in the hope of turning a profit once
these pieces of correspondents were claimed and paid for. In February,
(10:30):
the University of Cambridge and the Fifth Willion Museum announced
that they had found compelling evidence that two bronze statues
were the work of Michelangelo. Now lots and lots and
lots of Michelangelo's work survives to this day, but until
this particular discovery, the art world thought that all of
his bronze work had been lost. And it's a pair
(10:50):
of statues. It's two naked men riding panthers, and they
were first attributed to Michelangelo in the nineteenth century. However,
because there was no clear evidence linking them to michel Angelo,
and because the statues themselves aren't signed in any way,
a lot of academics dismissed that association. And now there
is actually a link. One of his students had copied
(11:13):
many of Michelangelo's sketches, and one of those is very
similar to these two bronze statues. The idea here is
that Michelangelo actually sketched his idea out before making the statue,
and that his student copied that sketch. The last of
our our Letters, books and art category photographer Louis Vain
(11:35):
photographed Beirut, Lebanon and the Roman ruins of Palmyra, Syria
in eighteen sixty four. So the photographs themselves are exceptionally
well preserved, and in October this year, the Getty Research
Institute announced that they had acquired them. What's really notable
about them, besides the fact that they are very old
photographs that are preserved extremely well, is that a lot
(11:56):
of the locations that are in the photographs have since
that time been damaged or destroyed through wars and other conflicts.
This includes temples and Palmyra that were destroyed by Isis
earlier this year. So these particular photographs, in addition to
the very existence that they're old photographs that have been
preserved well, are also documenting uh sites of national heritage
(12:19):
that have since been lost. We're going to get to
the fascinating but a little bit grim topic of mass
graves in the moment, but first we are gonna pause
for a word from a sponsor. So on to some
mass graves. A crew working on a supermarket renovation in
Paris found hundreds of bodies in what appeared to me
(12:40):
a mass grave. The spot where the supermarket SIT's used
to be Trinity Hospital, which was founded in twelve or two,
and it opened a cemetery there about a hundred and
fifty years later during the Black Death. Archaeologists working at
the site have found eight different burial pits, very methodically
buried in rows. They're both male and female bodies covering
(13:00):
a wide range of ages without any clear indications of
injuries or diseases, leading the team to suspect that there
was some kind of epidemic. Although the most logical assumption
might be that the bodies were from the Black Death,
isotopic testing has not yet been done to determine their ages.
Another thousand bodies were found buried under what's now old
(13:22):
Divinity School at St. John's College. Although the site was
really discovered three years ago, the findings were only announced
this year. About four hundred of these skeletons were complete
and perfectly preserved, with the rest of the remains more fragmented,
like individual bones, disarticulated skeletons, Things like that the burials
(13:43):
from the thirteenth to the fifteen centuries belonged to the
hospital of St. John the Evangelist who which was for
the care of quote poor scholars and other wretched persons.
That was a description I did not have the heart
to leave out that the scholars were poor and that
there were other wretched persons as well. So in what
(14:07):
feels a little bit like our rerun from last year,
in which we talked about a whole lot of things
that were unearthed thanks to Crossrail. A mass grave was
found in central London during an excavation work at a
crossrail station. This grave contains thirty suspected victims of the
Great Plague, and the area being excavated was already known
to be a burial site from the bed Lumb burial ground. However,
(14:29):
most of what had been excavated at this site before
this point uh These were individual burial sites from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not a mass burial with all
of the bodies in one pit. In September, archaeologists confirmed
that the burials in two mass graves at Durham University
in northeast England are Scottish prisoners who died in sixteen
(14:52):
fifty after Oliver Cromwell won the Battle of Dunbar. The
ones whose sex could be determined were all male, and
none seemed to have died from battle wounds. They all
seemed to have died instead as a consequence of disease
and being held in poor conditions after the battle had concluded.
They also did some really extensive study on the skeletons themselves,
(15:12):
including isotopic studies that were used to determine where they
were from Scotland. These are the studies where they look
at the isotopes that are in your body as indicative
of what kind of food you ate and where you like,
what your environment was like. They basically figured out that
all of these bodies had been recruited from a very
wide area of Scotland, which supports what was already previously suspected,
(15:36):
and glean from written records about how officers and the
men that they commanded were recruited from all over. And
next we move on to the surprising fines category. So
we will start in the Netherlands where at d Rents Museum,
researchers ran a CT scan on a statue of a
Buddha and inside that statue they found the one thousand
(16:00):
a year old mummy of a monk sitting in lotus position.
Based on characters on the roll of cloth in which
the mummy is sitting, researchers believe it to be Li Kwon,
a member of the Chinese Meditation school and the Double
Take Department. Archaeologists in Gloucestershire found a Roman headstone belonging
to a twenty seven year old woman named Boudica or Bodica,
(16:24):
which led to a whole lot of no not that
Boudica on our Facebook page. What caught the team's eye
was not the name's similarity to the infamous warrior woman Boudica,
but the fact that this stone was an excellent condition
and also appears to have actually belonged to the skeleton
that was found under it, which is just extremely rare
(16:47):
and finds from that long ago, Like they find some
stones and they find some bodies, but they don't often
find that from that long ago, a stone and a
body that actually go together. Moving on to Ireland, a
large beech tree blew over there uh and in its
roots system was entangled a medieval skeleton, So the skeleton's
(17:09):
lower leg bones stayed in the ground. The force of
the tree falling over effectively ripped this skeleton in half.
Radio Carbon dating and other analysis suggests that this is
a late teens early twenties male who was actually stabbed
to death. Everything else about it's unclear. We we know
that there was a church and a graveyard that were nearby,
(17:31):
but it's not clear whether this person was buried in
that church's graveyard or whether it was separate. We also
don't know if these stab wounds were from a fight,
or from a battle, or some other interesting third option.
Not a lot known about this skeleton unearthed by a
falling tree. Uh. And now we are shifting gears to
the food and drink department of unearthed, which always sounds interesting,
(17:53):
but sometimes it's a little um, a little tummy churning. However,
h an excave aation at a building site in Tel
Aviv this year uncovered pottery used to make beer in
Egypt approximately five thousand years ago. So this beer would
have been barley in water that had been left to
ferment in the sun, with fruit concentrates added. A hundred
(18:16):
and sixty eight intact bottles of champagne were found in
a shipwreck off the coast of Finland. And but this
year UH is the year that researchers actually published their
findings on this wreck in the proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. And also someone chose too on purpose
drink some of it. It was described as being extremely sweet,
(18:39):
with notes of smoke, leather, and tobacco. Apparently, the very
cold temperatures of the sea, plus the fact that there
was water on both sides of the cork kept it
off from the grading two too badly, although it was
not really effervescent anymore. And we have two stories about
evidence of ancient people butchering some very very large animals
(19:01):
for uses food. The first is that an excavator and
a team of University of Michigan paleontologists joined forces to
examine a mammoth unearthed in a field southwest of an Arbor, Michigan.
So mammoth finds are reasonably common, although it's a lot
more common to find mathodons in that part of the world.
This one, in particular, though, shows clear evidence of humans
(19:23):
having butchered the mammoth for its meat. The mammoth itself
lived roughly eleven thousand, seven hundred to fifteen thousand years ago,
although conclusive dating has not been done as of when
this finding was written up, and the team believed that
humans places placed the mammoth's carcass in a pond and
(19:44):
weighed it down with boulders as a way to preserve it.
To confirm this, researchers will further examine the mammoth. They're
going to investigate its bones to see if they have
evidence of the cuts that would have come along with butchering.
And a somewhat similar but much older five and stone tools,
and the remains of a straight test elephant, all of
(20:04):
them dating back between three hundred thousand and six hundred
thousand years were unearthed at a site in Greece. The
evidence suggests that this was a butchering site for elephants,
and that's based on the remains of the elephants and
the tools, as well as the types of cut marks
on the bones that the mammoth researchers are going to
be looking for themselves. That does not sound yummy to
(20:25):
me me either, but you never know. None of the
food sound yummy to me. This year. It seems like
we've had some unearthing where that said, Oh, that seems
like it could be interesting. No, this ancient extremely sweet, smoky,
leathery champagne and uh, butchered elephant does not sound particularly
delicious to me. Sounds interesting to me, sweet smoky champagne
(20:51):
sounds fascinating to me. Actually. Well, And there was a
um a researcher who did not elect to drink any
of it, but he did get some of it squirted
into the palm of his hand from a little pipe
it and he said the smell of it stuck with
him for hours, which I couldn't tell whether he was
okay with that or not. Uh, but we're gonna take
(21:13):
a brief break and then we were going to get
back to the world of unearthing with some really old things,
oldest known things that were unearthed this year. Now back
to our story, so uh, jumping in to a little
bit of ancient astronomy. The oldest known recording of a
solar eclipse was discovered in Ireland. A carving on a
(21:36):
rock cairn outside of Kills is reported to depict an
eclipse that took place on November b c E. This
recording is on three stones, depicting what the eclipse looked
like from that location in a much grizzlier note. The
oldest documented decapitation in the America's was discovered in Brazil
(21:56):
this year. An international team working in east central Zil
found a nine thousand year old set of remains that
included a skull, six neck, vertebrae, and hands, and the
skull that the head had been removed like the head
and upber neck really had been removed from the rest
of the body by pulling and rotating the very careful
(22:17):
arrangement of the head and hands, combined with mass spectroscopy
analysis of the bones themselves, led the team to conclude
that this was a ritual enacted on a member of
the community, not a punishment on an outsider, and this
is about six thousand years before the previously known oldest decapitation.
(22:37):
An ancient shard of pottery was discovered to contain the
oldest known alphabet premier this year, so the pottery itself
dates all the way back to the fifteenth century v C.
The text on it is about thirty years old. Although
this pottery shard itself has been known for a while,
the script on it was only deciphered this year thanks
(22:58):
to Dutch egypt College Ben Herring, who figured out that
this was the alphabet and words and not someone's grocery
list or something. The oldest named smoking pipe was found
in Jamestown in September. Named smoking pipes were a thing
during the colonization of Jamestown, and the pipes themselves are
(23:19):
the oldest known examples of print in the North American colonies.
Most of the names are those of important English figures,
including Sir Walter Raleigh and prominent Jamestown colonists. This newly
discovered oldest pipe carries the name William Faldo, who was
a Swiss inventor in the Virginia Company. Has been a
lot of time down a rabbit hole of trying to
(23:40):
figure out why people were into having these pipes with
names on, Like, was it sort of like the equivalent
of wearing your football jersey or having a pint glass
that had your favorite brewery on them. I don't know.
It just seems to be a thing that the colonists like.
We are going to move on to category the last
category for our unearth this year, and it is another
(24:05):
listener favorite, exhumations. So Chilean poet Pablo Naruta was exhumed
in to try to determine if he had been poisoned.
We're talking about it today because in May of this year,
Chile's Naruta Foundation issued a demand that it be reburied
immediately because it had not been. I had real trouble
(24:27):
pinning down whether he has in fact been reinterred since
this demand was issued. I could not find the answer.
But in November, so just last month, according to the
Associated Press, the Chilean government conceded that in spite of
the fact that previous testing found no evidence of poison,
he may actually have been murdered. So the judge presiding
(24:48):
over the case has asked for another round of tests
to look for substances that were not included in the
prior round, suggesting that maybe he still has not been reinterred.
In all this time, authorities pushed for an exhumation of
a famous Australian cold case and an episode request we
often get known as the Summerton Man. This year, his
body was found in and he was determined to have
(25:11):
died of poisoning, but he was never identified. And adding
to this mystery was the fact that a piece of paper,
apparently in code, was found in his pocket. A lot
of people wonder if this was some sort of spy
assassination based on that combination of unknown identity and weird
scrap of code in his pocket. I think he talked
about researching that one time. Am I am I making
(25:33):
that up? You are not making that up? Did you
find it? It was a nebulous well of not a
lot of information. Uh No, I don't think I got
that far. I think I've some other shiny object popped
into my field of vision and I followed another path.
So in the list for sure. Maybe in the future
we'll talk about him. Maybe in the future we will
(25:53):
have more episode or more information if they do in
fact exhume him. Officials exhuming the body of serial killer
John Wayne Gacy's victims wound up getting a break in
a completely unrelated case during this process. This whole exhumation
effort was started by County Sheriff Tom Dart to try
to match unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy with DNA
(26:18):
evidence provided by family members who were looking for their
missing loved ones. So the DNA being matched came from
relatives of young men who had vanished in the nineteen seventies.
Dr Willow Wertheimer was one of the people who had
a missing male loved one she was looking for. She
submitted her DNA. It was uh not found to be
(26:40):
related to the body of a John Wayne Gacy victim
who had been unidentified, but to the body of a
man who had been shot to death in San Francisco
thirty six years ago. And this whole project, though we
should note, did identify one of Gaycey's victims within weeks,
as well as identifying other unidentified remains as well. Also
(27:01):
in the realm of exhumations, people are asking for that uh,
to my knowledge, have not happened yet. There's Little Nellie
who is known as the patron Saint of Cork sometimes
the unofficial patron Saint of Cork. She died of probably tuberculosis,
in and she was exhumed at that point a year
(27:21):
after she died so that her body could be moved
to convent grounds. When she was exhumed, her body was
found to be basically intact. So this fact, plus the
fact that she had been described as just extremely devout
and holy during her very brief life, led to her
developing a posthumous following. People started making pilgrimages to her
(27:43):
grave site. However, the convent where she had been buried
was destroyed by a fire in two thousand and three,
and now a bank owns that property and has been
understandably reluctant to just allow people to come to her
grave site and pray for security reasons. The bish up
of Court and Ross has moved for her to be
exhumed so that she can be reburied yet again in
(28:06):
a place where people could visit her and pray to her.
That request was from back in August, and I have
no word yet about whether that exhumation would actually happen,
but I was very fascinated by the story of Little
Nellie and how she became this sort of unofficial patron
saint based on her brief and apparently very devout life
(28:28):
and in this year's biggest exhamation news and also to
close things off, another past podcast is definitely that of
the family of Czar Nicholas the Second. At this point,
historians overwhelmingly believed that Zar Nicholas, his wife, and all
of their children were all killed by a Bolshevik firing squad. However,
Russia has been trying to determine conclusively that all the
(28:51):
remains are genuine so that they can be interred together
in St. Petersburg. There has been extensive testing on these
remains believed to be the roman Offs as well already,
but this time they sort of increased the pattern. They
also exhumed Alexander the Third, who was Nicholas the Second father,
to compare his DNA to the ported the purported remains
(29:13):
of the roman Off children Alexei and Maria. The reason
there were doubts about whether these two bodies in particular
were genuine is because their remains were found separately from
the rest of the family. And also the reason there's
been some doubt about the identity of the bodies of
the rest of the family is that they also were
not excavated for years after they were originally found. Russia
(29:34):
announced in November the DNA tests have confirmed that the
remains are genuine. I think that might be the one
conclusive answer of all the questions that were being raised
in this year's Unearthed episodes. That's a lot of stuff
that we on Earth. I'm sure there are things that
people were hoping we would talk about that we have
not talked about. They may be things that are on
(29:55):
our pinboard of all of our unearthed and stuff. In
January we will start another pen board for Unearthed and TwixT.
It literally starts the minute a new year rolls around.
I feel like this was a really busy year. Yeah.
I do not recall having nearly this many findings that
(30:16):
were related to past stuff in the archive before, and
I don't know how much of that is because now
that you and I have worked on the podcast for
a few years, were a lot more familiar with all
of the things that past hosts have worked on. Although
I still perpetually stumble across stuff I had no idea
was in there um or or if it really isn't.
(30:36):
This year just saw a lot of discoveries that were
coincidentally related to stuff we've talked about on the show.
In any case, do you want to wrap up with
a little bit of mail from one of our great listeners.
I do. It's from Jessica, and Jessica says, Dear Tracy
and Holly, thank you for doing this stuff you missed
in history class podcast. I discovered it about a year
ago while living in Oxford, and it has made walking
(30:58):
around much more interesting. While a graduate student in archaeology,
I focused primarily on the Bronze Age in the Near
East hints, I always enjoyed learning about things more recent
and in other regions. I've been looking for a good
reason to write you, and it finally came. My current
university had a graduate student symposium a few weeks ago,
and one of the art history presentations made me think
of your podcast on redlining. While the presentation was more
(31:22):
generally about photography and associated racial stereotypes of pre nineteen
o six earthquake San Francisco Chinatown. It included a fascinating
map of Chinatown before the earthquake, which she attached. The
map demonstrated some of the same qualities as redlining and
was used to try to convince the city council not
to rebuild Chinatown after the earthquake. The map shows old
(31:45):
Chinatown to essentially be a den of iniquity. The pink, yellow, green,
and blue squares represent buildings containing Chinese gambling houses, opium dens,
Chinese prostitution, and white prostitution, respectively. I found it interesting
that Chinese and white prostitution were listed separate, Lee, indicating
that those are perceived differently. I hope you also find
this interesting. I'm sure as common as I'm sure it's common.
(32:08):
I will now suggest a topic for the podcast, and
she suggests this history of archaeology or history of museums,
both of which sound very large, especially when visiting museums.
I find myself conflicted. I enjoy what was collected by
old European antiquarians, but I don't like the fact that
they essentially spole material cultural history. I hope you both
have good holidays. Sincerely, Jessica, thank you, so much, Jessica.
(32:31):
I wanted to read this for two reasons. One as
I am definitely interested anytime somebody sends me a new
example we had not previously seen about the types of
of efforts that we talked about in our Redlining podcasts.
The other is that we have um. One of the
one of the other pin boards that I have that
(32:52):
I used to try to corral things has to do
with repatriations, which is when um one nation and who
has been having holding something in a museum or another
collection repatriates it back to its country of origin. I
didn't have as many of these that I found this
year that we're interested to talk about, so we didn't
have a section on that in today's podcast. But I
(33:13):
definitely understand that conflict. Uh We earlier this year had
an interview with folks from the Pbody Museum at Harvard
talking about the search for the Harvard Indian School. I
got to go to the Pbody Museum earlier this year,
and at several points in the museum there are signs
(33:34):
explaining how the museum has been working to try to
contact the especially indigenous cultures that some of the artifacts
came from, and returning those cultures returning those artifacts to
their home cultures where it's appropriate and desired. Um. So
there are several places within the museum that you see
these little signs that say, this artifact that previously was
(33:55):
on display here has been returned to these people for
from this place, based on this which I wound up
sort of going on a treasure hunt through the museum
and reading all of these signs as part of what
I was looking at. So thank you so much Jessica
for writing to us. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, were history
(34:16):
podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're also on
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the Hisstory dot tumbler dot com and are also on
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you would like to learn more about what we have
talked about today, you can come to our parent company website,
which is how stuff Works dot com and put the
word serial killers in the search bar. You will find
(34:37):
an article about how serial killers work. We only talked
about one of those and on Earth Things that that
is a pretty old favorite of people's morbid curiosity. I
think you can also come to our website, which is
miss in history dot com and find show notes for
all the episodes. Holly and I have worked on an
archive of every episode ever, so you can do all
(34:58):
these wonderful things and a whole lot more. How stuff
works dot com or missing history dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics, because it how
stuff works dot com. Mmmmmm
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Oh, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson. Today. It is Part two of Unearthed,
and it is our annual roundup of stuff that literally
(00:21):
and figuratively got unearthed this year. Part one of our
annual roundup included three big subjects and they were Egypt,
past podcast updates, and shipwrecks. And so today is a
lot more of a hodgepodge. One note that I would
like to give before we started, I originally had multiple
(00:41):
stories in here that we're about people armed with metal
detectors who found whole hordes of Viking coins. This happened
on both sides of the North Sea. It happened a
bunch of different times. I realized that they all sounded
exactly the same, and this podcast episode was becoming very long.
So what I basically want to do is just shout
(01:02):
out to all the amateur archaeologists because the same theme
came up again and again that they all called in
the pros the minute they realized that they had something significant,
which is awesome. Uh. It means that there are now
a lot of uh really old coins that are in
museums now for everybody to be able to learn from
and be educated on. This was also true of the
(01:23):
folks who found a couple of Bronze age axes using
a metal detector. They contacted the authorities, and the find
ultimately wound up doubling the number of discovered axes from
that particular time period to a total of ten. So
big applause, Yeah, big applies to the folks who go, hey,
(01:45):
this coin looks valuable. Maybe I should contact someone who
can do this a little more thoroughly than I can
with my limited experience and knowledge. Indiana jets to be
proud those things belong to museums. Uh oh, we're going
to start out with this one. As you know, Tracy,
when she puts these together, she groups them into similar
(02:06):
like groupings as much as possible. And this one is
going to start with things that are not remotely safe
to leave lying around. So in January, news broke that
National Park Service employees had found a Winchester Model eighteen
seventy three repeating rifle leaning up against the juniper tree.
The rifle was manufactured and shipped in eighteen eighty two,
(02:28):
but otherwise we don't know who bought it when it
was left by the tree, or why. At the time
it was made, though it was a very popular firearm
and was nicknamed the Gun that Won the West. It
does appear that it was there against the tree for
quite some time because the wooden stock had cracked due
to exposure to the elements, the barrel itself had gotten rusted.
(02:49):
The whole thing had kind of faded and weathered enough
that it's kind of surprising that anyone thought against the tree.
A couple of the pictures like, you gotta know it's
there to reel eyes. There is a gun against the tree,
and the National Park Service staff passed that find along
to conservators. Also in the realm of things that you
(03:11):
just should not leave lying out, archaeologists have been bringing
a lot of stuff up from the wreckage of Blackbeards
ship the Queen Ann's Revenge. A lot of them are
medical implements. A lot of the medical implements look extremely scary.
One of these is a urethral syringe, and this was
used to inject mercury into the urethra the whole at
(03:33):
the end of the penis probably as a treatment treatment
for syphilis, and it looks as terrifying, as you might
imagine based on the words that just came out of
my mouth. That will make you tense up, whether you
have a penis or not. That is attention making terror uh.
But then moving on to the category of books, letters,
(03:55):
and art. Uh. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town's herculaneum
and Pompeii were buried. All of the graffiti, the bodies
and artifacts that were there were preserved by the volcanic ash,
and that is common knowledge at this point. But another
thing preserved and left largely untouched until now was the library.
Herculaneums library, buried in the year seventy nine, was unearthed
(04:18):
by archaeologists in seventeen fifty two. So the trouble was
that until very recently it was basically impossible to try
to read any of the scrolls that were buried along
with the rest of the town's was so impossible that
in the eighties researchers decided to stop trying and leave
it for future generations because basically all of the efforts
(04:40):
that they had made up until that point destroyed the
scrolls without actually being able to read anything on them. However,
it is later now and the future generation is officially
this one, and the method that's used is called X
ray phase contrast tomography. It's also a brief it it
as XPCT, and basically, this technique looks at the tiny,
(05:04):
tiny difference between the thickness of plain papyrus in the
thickness of papyrus with ink on top of it, and
using this, researchers were able to piece together writing from
an unrolled fragment and hope that the same methods will
be able to have a look at the entire library.
They published their initial findings in the journal Nature Communications,
(05:25):
the much much easier to read category. Crews are placing
blackboards at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City found an
entire other set of blackboards, still with writing and lessons
on them under the ones they were taking down. These
old chalkboards have been covered over with new ones, but
not erased beforehand in nineteen seventeen. They include drawings and
(05:47):
multiplication wheel, musical notes, and writing. It seems like maybe
they might have been covered up around Thanksgiving time, because
all of the lessons include stuff about Thanksgiving, and that
particular story actually made the rounds twice this year, once
when the Washington Post picked up the story from local
news and again when another website we will not name
(06:08):
republished them all again uncredited and so they were brand new.
Do not do that. It is plagiarism. So uh. In
a sadder note that people have asked us to talk
about on the show as a whole episode, and I
have not really figured out how we might handle that.
Bank employees stumbled across a note and other papers from
(06:30):
Baroness Mary bet Sarah, who died along with Crown Prince
Rudolph of Austria in January eight nine. At the time
of their deaths, she was seventeen and he was thirty,
And although their deaths have always been described as a
murder suicide, her notes, which had been deposited in the
bank in n and we're previously believed to have been destroyed,
(06:52):
are essentially suicide notes. So any non clarity about whether
she was a willing participant in this whole death basically
obliterated with these notes. So moving on to our next discovery.
While cleaning out their house, the family members of Victor Rothschild,
(07:13):
who worked with m I five's counter sabotage unit, found
a number of drawings he commissioned from artist Lawrence Fish
depicting German booby trap bombs from World War Two. Rothschild's
idea was to basically put together a manual for people
needing to diffuse a number of innocuous looking items that
could really contain explosives. There are twenty five different drawings
(07:36):
documenting everything from an exploding chocolate bar which was purportedly
part of a plot to kill Winston Churchill, and an
exploding motor oil can. And the family was hoping that
a museum or an archive would take these drawings because
they're an interesting part of spy history, but we don't
have any word yet on whether anyone has taken them
up on this offer, and it has come to fruition
(07:58):
that they've become part of a museum collection. Next, we
have the fine that was the most exciting to me
of all fines this entire year. It is a missing
and newly found piece of the epic of Gilgamesh. Written
in these notes in all capital letters. That's how excited
I am Tracy has some Gilgamesh excitement. Basically, a museum
(08:21):
in Iraq bought a collection of clay tablets from a
smuggler inn. And this may seem shady, but it is
actually a tactic that museums in the region have been
using to try to reclaim artifacts that have previously been looted.
Farouk al Rawie and Andrew George at the University of
London works together to translate the text on this one
(08:41):
cuneiform tablet that was found in the batch, and it
contains twenty previously unknown lines of the epic of Gilgamesh,
in which Gilgamesh and Inky do you go to the
Cedar forest to fight an ogre? Tracy is so excited
over this one, which is grand. A paper outlining these
fine things was published in teen but it did not
(09:02):
actually make headlines until this year. It was kind of
the quiet discovery of last year. Yeah, this is the
only one that is a thing that like, we should
have heard about last year, but we didn't until suddenly
this year people were doing news reports on it. Uh
much more recently than very recently. This year, the contents
(09:23):
of a trunk full of never delivered correspondence were unearthed
in the Netherlands, and all of this correspondence dates back
to between sixteen eighty and seventeen oh six. The trunk
itself is leather and lined in Linen, and it was
given to a museum in the Hague in nine But
these letters were never opened and they're only just now
(09:44):
being analyzed by an international team of experts and academics.
And one of the things that they're doing that I
thought was really cool is to use non invasive imaging
to look inside uh the sealed envelopes without damaging them,
and then also to look inside the letters where the
paper of the letter themselves has been folded in an
intricate way to make the envelope and the letters themselves
(10:07):
are an assortment of things that just never made it
to their recipients because those people moved, or they refused
to accept them, or they refused to pay because at
the time the recipient was the one who paid for postage.
One theory is that the couple who collected them all
did so in the hope of turning a profit once
these pieces of correspondents were claimed and paid for. In February,
(10:30):
the University of Cambridge and the Fifth Willion Museum announced
that they had found compelling evidence that two bronze statues
were the work of Michelangelo. Now lots and lots and
lots of Michelangelo's work survives to this day, but until
this particular discovery, the art world thought that all of
his bronze work had been lost. And it's a pair
(10:50):
of statues. It's two naked men riding panthers, and they
were first attributed to Michelangelo in the nineteenth century. However,
because there was no clear evidence linking them to michel Angelo,
and because the statues themselves aren't signed in any way,
a lot of academics dismissed that association. And now there
is actually a link. One of his students had copied
(11:13):
many of Michelangelo's sketches, and one of those is very
similar to these two bronze statues. The idea here is
that Michelangelo actually sketched his idea out before making the statue,
and that his student copied that sketch. The last of
our our Letters, books and art category photographer Louis Vain
(11:35):
photographed Beirut, Lebanon and the Roman ruins of Palmyra, Syria
in eighteen sixty four. So the photographs themselves are exceptionally
well preserved, and in October this year, the Getty Research
Institute announced that they had acquired them. What's really notable
about them, besides the fact that they are very old
photographs that are preserved extremely well, is that a lot
(11:56):
of the locations that are in the photographs have since
that time been damaged or destroyed through wars and other conflicts.
This includes temples and Palmyra that were destroyed by Isis
earlier this year. So these particular photographs, in addition to
the very existence that they're old photographs that have been
preserved well, are also documenting uh sites of national heritage
(12:19):
that have since been lost. We're going to get to
the fascinating but a little bit grim topic of mass
graves in the moment, but first we are gonna pause
for a word from a sponsor. So on to some
mass graves. A crew working on a supermarket renovation in
Paris found hundreds of bodies in what appeared to me
(12:40):
a mass grave. The spot where the supermarket SIT's used
to be Trinity Hospital, which was founded in twelve or two,
and it opened a cemetery there about a hundred and
fifty years later during the Black Death. Archaeologists working at
the site have found eight different burial pits, very methodically
buried in rows. They're both male and female bodies covering
(13:00):
a wide range of ages without any clear indications of
injuries or diseases, leading the team to suspect that there
was some kind of epidemic. Although the most logical assumption
might be that the bodies were from the Black Death,
isotopic testing has not yet been done to determine their ages.
Another thousand bodies were found buried under what's now old
(13:22):
Divinity School at St. John's College. Although the site was
really discovered three years ago, the findings were only announced
this year. About four hundred of these skeletons were complete
and perfectly preserved, with the rest of the remains more fragmented,
like individual bones, disarticulated skeletons, Things like that the burials
(13:43):
from the thirteenth to the fifteen centuries belonged to the
hospital of St. John the Evangelist who which was for
the care of quote poor scholars and other wretched persons.
That was a description I did not have the heart
to leave out that the scholars were poor and that
there were other wretched persons as well. So in what
(14:07):
feels a little bit like our rerun from last year,
in which we talked about a whole lot of things
that were unearthed thanks to Crossrail. A mass grave was
found in central London during an excavation work at a
crossrail station. This grave contains thirty suspected victims of the
Great Plague, and the area being excavated was already known
to be a burial site from the bed Lumb burial ground. However,
(14:29):
most of what had been excavated at this site before
this point uh These were individual burial sites from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not a mass burial with all
of the bodies in one pit. In September, archaeologists confirmed
that the burials in two mass graves at Durham University
in northeast England are Scottish prisoners who died in sixteen
(14:52):
fifty after Oliver Cromwell won the Battle of Dunbar. The
ones whose sex could be determined were all male, and
none seemed to have died from battle wounds. They all
seemed to have died instead as a consequence of disease
and being held in poor conditions after the battle had concluded.
They also did some really extensive study on the skeletons themselves,
(15:12):
including isotopic studies that were used to determine where they
were from Scotland. These are the studies where they look
at the isotopes that are in your body as indicative
of what kind of food you ate and where you like,
what your environment was like. They basically figured out that
all of these bodies had been recruited from a very
wide area of Scotland, which supports what was already previously suspected,
(15:36):
and glean from written records about how officers and the
men that they commanded were recruited from all over. And
next we move on to the surprising fines category. So
we will start in the Netherlands where at d Rents Museum,
researchers ran a CT scan on a statue of a
Buddha and inside that statue they found the one thousand
(16:00):
a year old mummy of a monk sitting in lotus position.
Based on characters on the roll of cloth in which
the mummy is sitting, researchers believe it to be Li Kwon,
a member of the Chinese Meditation school and the Double
Take Department. Archaeologists in Gloucestershire found a Roman headstone belonging
to a twenty seven year old woman named Boudica or Bodica,
(16:24):
which led to a whole lot of no not that
Boudica on our Facebook page. What caught the team's eye
was not the name's similarity to the infamous warrior woman Boudica,
but the fact that this stone was an excellent condition
and also appears to have actually belonged to the skeleton
that was found under it, which is just extremely rare
(16:47):
and finds from that long ago, Like they find some
stones and they find some bodies, but they don't often
find that from that long ago, a stone and a
body that actually go together. Moving on to Ireland, a
large beech tree blew over there uh and in its
roots system was entangled a medieval skeleton, So the skeleton's
(17:09):
lower leg bones stayed in the ground. The force of
the tree falling over effectively ripped this skeleton in half.
Radio Carbon dating and other analysis suggests that this is
a late teens early twenties male who was actually stabbed
to death. Everything else about it's unclear. We we know
that there was a church and a graveyard that were nearby,
(17:31):
but it's not clear whether this person was buried in
that church's graveyard or whether it was separate. We also
don't know if these stab wounds were from a fight,
or from a battle, or some other interesting third option.
Not a lot known about this skeleton unearthed by a
falling tree. Uh. And now we are shifting gears to
the food and drink department of unearthed, which always sounds interesting,
(17:53):
but sometimes it's a little um, a little tummy churning. However,
h an excave aation at a building site in Tel
Aviv this year uncovered pottery used to make beer in
Egypt approximately five thousand years ago. So this beer would
have been barley in water that had been left to
ferment in the sun, with fruit concentrates added. A hundred
(18:16):
and sixty eight intact bottles of champagne were found in
a shipwreck off the coast of Finland. And but this
year UH is the year that researchers actually published their
findings on this wreck in the proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. And also someone chose too on purpose
drink some of it. It was described as being extremely sweet,
(18:39):
with notes of smoke, leather, and tobacco. Apparently, the very
cold temperatures of the sea, plus the fact that there
was water on both sides of the cork kept it
off from the grading two too badly, although it was
not really effervescent anymore. And we have two stories about
evidence of ancient people butchering some very very large animals
(19:01):
for uses food. The first is that an excavator and
a team of University of Michigan paleontologists joined forces to
examine a mammoth unearthed in a field southwest of an Arbor, Michigan.
So mammoth finds are reasonably common, although it's a lot
more common to find mathodons in that part of the world.
This one, in particular, though, shows clear evidence of humans
(19:23):
having butchered the mammoth for its meat. The mammoth itself
lived roughly eleven thousand, seven hundred to fifteen thousand years ago,
although conclusive dating has not been done as of when
this finding was written up, and the team believed that
humans places placed the mammoth's carcass in a pond and
(19:44):
weighed it down with boulders as a way to preserve it.
To confirm this, researchers will further examine the mammoth. They're
going to investigate its bones to see if they have
evidence of the cuts that would have come along with butchering.
And a somewhat similar but much older five and stone tools,
and the remains of a straight test elephant, all of
(20:04):
them dating back between three hundred thousand and six hundred
thousand years were unearthed at a site in Greece. The
evidence suggests that this was a butchering site for elephants,
and that's based on the remains of the elephants and
the tools, as well as the types of cut marks
on the bones that the mammoth researchers are going to
be looking for themselves. That does not sound yummy to
(20:25):
me me either, but you never know. None of the
food sound yummy to me. This year. It seems like
we've had some unearthing where that said, Oh, that seems
like it could be interesting. No, this ancient extremely sweet, smoky,
leathery champagne and uh, butchered elephant does not sound particularly
delicious to me. Sounds interesting to me, sweet smoky champagne
(20:51):
sounds fascinating to me. Actually. Well, And there was a
um a researcher who did not elect to drink any
of it, but he did get some of it squirted
into the palm of his hand from a little pipe
it and he said the smell of it stuck with
him for hours, which I couldn't tell whether he was
okay with that or not. Uh, but we're gonna take
(21:13):
a brief break and then we were going to get
back to the world of unearthing with some really old things,
oldest known things that were unearthed this year. Now back
to our story, so uh, jumping in to a little
bit of ancient astronomy. The oldest known recording of a
solar eclipse was discovered in Ireland. A carving on a
(21:36):
rock cairn outside of Kills is reported to depict an
eclipse that took place on November b c E. This
recording is on three stones, depicting what the eclipse looked
like from that location in a much grizzlier note. The
oldest documented decapitation in the America's was discovered in Brazil
(21:56):
this year. An international team working in east central Zil
found a nine thousand year old set of remains that
included a skull, six neck, vertebrae, and hands, and the
skull that the head had been removed like the head
and upber neck really had been removed from the rest
of the body by pulling and rotating the very careful
(22:17):
arrangement of the head and hands, combined with mass spectroscopy
analysis of the bones themselves, led the team to conclude
that this was a ritual enacted on a member of
the community, not a punishment on an outsider, and this
is about six thousand years before the previously known oldest decapitation.
(22:37):
An ancient shard of pottery was discovered to contain the
oldest known alphabet premier this year, so the pottery itself
dates all the way back to the fifteenth century v C.
The text on it is about thirty years old. Although
this pottery shard itself has been known for a while,
the script on it was only deciphered this year thanks
(22:58):
to Dutch egypt College Ben Herring, who figured out that
this was the alphabet and words and not someone's grocery
list or something. The oldest named smoking pipe was found
in Jamestown in September. Named smoking pipes were a thing
during the colonization of Jamestown, and the pipes themselves are
(23:19):
the oldest known examples of print in the North American colonies.
Most of the names are those of important English figures,
including Sir Walter Raleigh and prominent Jamestown colonists. This newly
discovered oldest pipe carries the name William Faldo, who was
a Swiss inventor in the Virginia Company. Has been a
lot of time down a rabbit hole of trying to
(23:40):
figure out why people were into having these pipes with
names on, Like, was it sort of like the equivalent
of wearing your football jersey or having a pint glass
that had your favorite brewery on them. I don't know.
It just seems to be a thing that the colonists like.
We are going to move on to category the last
category for our unearth this year, and it is another
(24:05):
listener favorite, exhumations. So Chilean poet Pablo Naruta was exhumed
in to try to determine if he had been poisoned.
We're talking about it today because in May of this year,
Chile's Naruta Foundation issued a demand that it be reburied
immediately because it had not been. I had real trouble
(24:27):
pinning down whether he has in fact been reinterred since
this demand was issued. I could not find the answer.
But in November, so just last month, according to the
Associated Press, the Chilean government conceded that in spite of
the fact that previous testing found no evidence of poison,
he may actually have been murdered. So the judge presiding
(24:48):
over the case has asked for another round of tests
to look for substances that were not included in the
prior round, suggesting that maybe he still has not been reinterred.
In all this time, authorities pushed for an exhumation of
a famous Australian cold case and an episode request we
often get known as the Summerton Man. This year, his
body was found in and he was determined to have
(25:11):
died of poisoning, but he was never identified. And adding
to this mystery was the fact that a piece of paper,
apparently in code, was found in his pocket. A lot
of people wonder if this was some sort of spy
assassination based on that combination of unknown identity and weird
scrap of code in his pocket. I think he talked
about researching that one time. Am I am I making
(25:33):
that up? You are not making that up? Did you
find it? It was a nebulous well of not a
lot of information. Uh No, I don't think I got
that far. I think I've some other shiny object popped
into my field of vision and I followed another path.
So in the list for sure. Maybe in the future
we'll talk about him. Maybe in the future we will
(25:53):
have more episode or more information if they do in
fact exhume him. Officials exhuming the body of serial killer
John Wayne Gacy's victims wound up getting a break in
a completely unrelated case during this process. This whole exhumation
effort was started by County Sheriff Tom Dart to try
to match unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy with DNA
(26:18):
evidence provided by family members who were looking for their
missing loved ones. So the DNA being matched came from
relatives of young men who had vanished in the nineteen seventies.
Dr Willow Wertheimer was one of the people who had
a missing male loved one she was looking for. She
submitted her DNA. It was uh not found to be
(26:40):
related to the body of a John Wayne Gacy victim
who had been unidentified, but to the body of a
man who had been shot to death in San Francisco
thirty six years ago. And this whole project, though we
should note, did identify one of Gaycey's victims within weeks,
as well as identifying other unidentified remains as well. Also
(27:01):
in the realm of exhumations, people are asking for that uh,
to my knowledge, have not happened yet. There's Little Nellie
who is known as the patron Saint of Cork sometimes
the unofficial patron Saint of Cork. She died of probably tuberculosis,
in and she was exhumed at that point a year
(27:21):
after she died so that her body could be moved
to convent grounds. When she was exhumed, her body was
found to be basically intact. So this fact, plus the
fact that she had been described as just extremely devout
and holy during her very brief life, led to her
developing a posthumous following. People started making pilgrimages to her
(27:43):
grave site. However, the convent where she had been buried
was destroyed by a fire in two thousand and three,
and now a bank owns that property and has been
understandably reluctant to just allow people to come to her
grave site and pray for security reasons. The bish up
of Court and Ross has moved for her to be
exhumed so that she can be reburied yet again in
(28:06):
a place where people could visit her and pray to her.
That request was from back in August, and I have
no word yet about whether that exhumation would actually happen,
but I was very fascinated by the story of Little
Nellie and how she became this sort of unofficial patron
saint based on her brief and apparently very devout life
(28:28):
and in this year's biggest exhamation news and also to
close things off, another past podcast is definitely that of
the family of Czar Nicholas the Second. At this point,
historians overwhelmingly believed that Zar Nicholas, his wife, and all
of their children were all killed by a Bolshevik firing squad. However,
Russia has been trying to determine conclusively that all the
(28:51):
remains are genuine so that they can be interred together
in St. Petersburg. There has been extensive testing on these
remains believed to be the roman Offs as well already,
but this time they sort of increased the pattern. They
also exhumed Alexander the Third, who was Nicholas the Second father,
to compare his DNA to the ported the purported remains
(29:13):
of the roman Off children Alexei and Maria. The reason
there were doubts about whether these two bodies in particular
were genuine is because their remains were found separately from
the rest of the family. And also the reason there's
been some doubt about the identity of the bodies of
the rest of the family is that they also were
not excavated for years after they were originally found. Russia
(29:34):
announced in November the DNA tests have confirmed that the
remains are genuine. I think that might be the one
conclusive answer of all the questions that were being raised
in this year's Unearthed episodes. That's a lot of stuff
that we on Earth. I'm sure there are things that
people were hoping we would talk about that we have
not talked about. They may be things that are on
(29:55):
our pinboard of all of our unearthed and stuff. In
January we will start another pen board for Unearthed and TwixT.
It literally starts the minute a new year rolls around.
I feel like this was a really busy year. Yeah.
I do not recall having nearly this many findings that
(30:16):
were related to past stuff in the archive before, and
I don't know how much of that is because now
that you and I have worked on the podcast for
a few years, were a lot more familiar with all
of the things that past hosts have worked on. Although
I still perpetually stumble across stuff I had no idea
was in there um or or if it really isn't.
(30:36):
This year just saw a lot of discoveries that were
coincidentally related to stuff we've talked about on the show.
In any case, do you want to wrap up with
a little bit of mail from one of our great listeners.
I do. It's from Jessica, and Jessica says, Dear Tracy
and Holly, thank you for doing this stuff you missed
in history class podcast. I discovered it about a year
ago while living in Oxford, and it has made walking
(30:58):
around much more interesting. While a graduate student in archaeology,
I focused primarily on the Bronze Age in the Near
East hints, I always enjoyed learning about things more recent
and in other regions. I've been looking for a good
reason to write you, and it finally came. My current
university had a graduate student symposium a few weeks ago,
and one of the art history presentations made me think
of your podcast on redlining. While the presentation was more
(31:22):
generally about photography and associated racial stereotypes of pre nineteen
o six earthquake San Francisco Chinatown. It included a fascinating
map of Chinatown before the earthquake, which she attached. The
map demonstrated some of the same qualities as redlining and
was used to try to convince the city council not
to rebuild Chinatown after the earthquake. The map shows old
(31:45):
Chinatown to essentially be a den of iniquity. The pink, yellow, green,
and blue squares represent buildings containing Chinese gambling houses, opium dens,
Chinese prostitution, and white prostitution, respectively. I found it interesting
that Chinese and white prostitution were listed separate, Lee, indicating
that those are perceived differently. I hope you also find
this interesting. I'm sure as common as I'm sure it's common.
(32:08):
I will now suggest a topic for the podcast, and
she suggests this history of archaeology or history of museums,
both of which sound very large, especially when visiting museums.
I find myself conflicted. I enjoy what was collected by
old European antiquarians, but I don't like the fact that
they essentially spole material cultural history. I hope you both
have good holidays. Sincerely, Jessica, thank you, so much, Jessica.
(32:31):
I wanted to read this for two reasons. One as
I am definitely interested anytime somebody sends me a new
example we had not previously seen about the types of
of efforts that we talked about in our Redlining podcasts.
The other is that we have um. One of the
one of the other pin boards that I have that
(32:52):
I used to try to corral things has to do
with repatriations, which is when um one nation and who
has been having holding something in a museum or another
collection repatriates it back to its country of origin. I
didn't have as many of these that I found this
year that we're interested to talk about, so we didn't
have a section on that in today's podcast. But I
(33:13):
definitely understand that conflict. Uh We earlier this year had
an interview with folks from the Pbody Museum at Harvard
talking about the search for the Harvard Indian School. I
got to go to the Pbody Museum earlier this year,
and at several points in the museum there are signs
(33:34):
explaining how the museum has been working to try to
contact the especially indigenous cultures that some of the artifacts
came from, and returning those cultures returning those artifacts to
their home cultures where it's appropriate and desired. Um. So
there are several places within the museum that you see
these little signs that say, this artifact that previously was
(33:55):
on display here has been returned to these people for
from this place, based on this which I wound up
sort of going on a treasure hunt through the museum
and reading all of these signs as part of what
I was looking at. So thank you so much Jessica
for writing to us. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, were history
(34:16):
podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're also on
Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is miss
the Hisstory dot tumbler dot com and are also on
Pinterest at Pentriess dot com slash miss in history. If
you would like to learn more about what we have
talked about today, you can come to our parent company website,
which is how stuff Works dot com and put the
word serial killers in the search bar. You will find
(34:37):
an article about how serial killers work. We only talked
about one of those and on Earth Things that that
is a pretty old favorite of people's morbid curiosity. I
think you can also come to our website, which is
miss in history dot com and find show notes for
all the episodes. Holly and I have worked on an
archive of every episode ever, so you can do all
(34:58):
these wonderful things and a whole lot more. How stuff
works dot com or missing history dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics, because it how
stuff works dot com. Mmmmmm
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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