Unearthed! in July 2022, Part 1

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Is once
again time for Unearthed. Since we started doing these quarterly,

(00:21):
it kind of feels like it feels like it's always time.
It does. When you had mentioned you were working on
this one, I was like, no, yeah, it's time. It
is time. Uh. If you are brand new to the show.
Unearthed is when we take a look at what has
been literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months.

(00:42):
So this installment of Unearthed is about things that were
unearthed in April, May and June. This installment part one,
we have updates and some jewelry and some auctions and
some books and letters and some shipwrecks. And then in
part two of this Unearthed on Wednesday, will have the

(01:03):
edibles and potables and some art and some animals other
stuff too. Once again, we had two episodes worth of stuff.
Looked a little doubtful for a while there, but so
the Black Death made a bunch of headlines in June
after it was reported that researchers had conclusively determined the

(01:24):
starting point of the second plague pandemic, that's the centuries
long pandemic that the Black Death was part of. This
research was probably the biggest headline maker of all of
the headlines in this particular installment of unearthed. As described
in research that was published in the journal Nature, the
team studied DNA and a burial site in modern Kurdistan.

(01:47):
That burial site has graves in it that date back
to the year thirteen thirty eight. Archaeologists have actually known
about this burial site and the years engraved on the
markers for more than a century. What was not known
was whether the people buried they're actually died of plague.
There's a word on these grave markers that has been
translated as pest or as pestilence, and people do use

(02:11):
that to mean plague a whole lot, but it could
also mean any number of other diseases and conditions. So,
based on the time period and the way people talked
and wrote about the plague, that seems like a pretty
logical conclusion, So it makes sense that researchers were focused
on this site. This research did indeed confirm that the
people buried at these grave sites died of plague. That

(02:33):
plus the years marked on the tombstones, means we know
for sure that there were people who died of plague
in eight and we're buried at this location in modern Kyrgyzstan.
But the paper and the reporting around it made it
sound like a much broader discovery, with headlines like origins
of the Black Death identified. That's actually the headline on

(02:54):
a release from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
which was part of this work, But it was also
all over mainstream news reporting with headlines like we finally
know where the Black Death started. This is definitely a
case where I saw those headlines and I was like,
did we though? Are you shore sure about that? I
was not the only person with questions. People with far

(03:17):
more qualifications to study that than me had questions. Also,
not everybody was sold on that conclusion. So, for example,
Dr Monica Green has written extensively on the Black Death
and the Second Plague pandemic, and on June twenty two
she put out a thread on Twitter about this paper.
She noted which parts of it confirmed to what was
already known, like the existence of this burial site and

(03:39):
the tombstones in it, as well as what in this
research builds onto that existing knowledge, like confirming that the
pestilence that's referenced on those tombstones really was the plague
and not something else. She also looks at the DNA
research that was done in the study in detail in
a way that isn't really easy for us to capture
his lay people doing an audio podcast. Uh, it's about

(04:02):
single nucleotide polymorphisms or s nps pronounced snips. Those are
basically genetic variations or mutations. Three of them are a
key part in the evolutionary history of your Cinea pestis,
and according to Green, the analysis in the paper only
has really good coverage of one of them, while also

(04:23):
showing a fourth snip that seems to be new. This
actually led us some back and forth on Twitter about
whether that fourth snip is really a false positive or not.
Beyond that, though, Green also notes that a lot of
the more recent historical research into the plague and the
Black Death and all of that has suggested that the

(04:44):
origins are in the thirteenth century, not the fourteenth century
where this research was focused. So in addition to these
questions about the details of the DNA study, there's a
whole century of history that's being omitted here. So, in
other words, the idea that this could inclusively pinpoints the
starting point for the Black Death that seems like a

(05:05):
much bigger claim than can really be supported by the
details in this paper. The Black Death has come up
a lot on the show. There's a short episode on
it from previous hosts back in two thousand nine, but
more recently, it was a big part of our episode
on What Tyler in the Uprising of One that came
out on June tenth. Moving on, a team looking for

(05:28):
evidence regarding the murder of Emmett Till found a warrant
for the arrest of Caroline Bryant Donham, named in the
warrant as Mrs roy Bryant. That warrant dated back to August.
We talked about the lynching of Emmett Till in our
episode The Motherhood of Mamie Till Mobile which came out August.

(05:50):
The team doing this research included members of the Emmett
Till Legacy Foundation and Deborah Watts, who is one of
Till's cousins, is the head of the foundation, and she
and her daughter Terry were among the group of people
who was searching for some kind of evidence here. In
addition to the earlier episode on Mamie Till Mobley, we
have also talked about this case on previous installments of Unearthed,

(06:13):
after the U. S. Department of Justice reopened the case
in and then closed it again in one saying that
no new evidence had been discovered that could lead to
an arrest of a living person. Caroline Bryant Dunham is
still living and people involved with this case have expressed
their hope that this old warrant could still be served.

(06:34):
People knew about this warrant back in ninety five, but
the Lafleur County sheriff at the time told reporters that
they didn't want to bother her. Her then husband, Roy Bryant,
and another man named JW. Milam were tried for this
crime and acquitted, but they confessed to the crime in
an interview that they later sold to a reporter for

(06:55):
four thousand dollars. So there's been some discussion of whether
this war it could be the thing that allows there
to be some more progress on the case. This next
thing is not exactly an update, but it is related
to an earlier episode topic. A statue of dancer Marjorie
tall Chief was stolen from the Vintage Garden at the
Tulsa Historical Society and Museum at the end of April.

(07:19):
Marjorie was the sister of pass podcast subject Maria tal Chief,
who is another of the indigenous ballerinas honored with a
statue at the garden. We covered Maria tal Chief on
the show on November. A few days after this theft
was discovered, the Historical Society got a call from CMC Recycling,
which buys scrap metal, and the recycling center was reporting

(07:42):
that it had pieces of this statue. Somebody had cut
it up into parts and then had sold the pieces
to them as scrap. The statues of Marjorie and Maria
tal Chief are part of a work called Five Moons.
This was the work of artists Monty England and Gary Henson.
It honors five indigenous ballerinas from what's now Oklahoma. England

(08:04):
died in two thousand five and the original mold for
the statue of Marjorie tall Chief was destroyed in a
foundry fire. So while a fundraiser to replace the statue
met its goal right away, it initially seemed like it
would kind of be a challenge to actually make a replacement.
A bit later in May, though, additional pieces of the
statue were recovered at another recycling center, including the head

(08:28):
of the statue, and although there's some pieces that are
still missing. Henson, who's a member of the Shawnee tribe,
was quoted as saying, with the amount of the statue
that's been recovered so far, he's confident that he's was
going to be able to restore it. Previous host of
the show talked about the mary Rose in their episode
five Shipwreck Stories in The mary Rose sank in five

(08:50):
and is now in the Mary Rose Museum. At the
end of one, we talked about conservation efforts involving the
mary Rose, which involved pinpointing exactly where bacteria are living
within the preserved wreckage because secretions from those bacteria could
become acidic when exposed to air, and that could cause
the wreckage to deteriorate. The hull of the ship itself

(09:13):
is not the only part of this wreck that has
been brought to the museum or is now facing some
challenges with preservation. The mary Rose had two brick ovens,
and bricks from those events are also at the museum,
and they're also being affected by acids. When the bricks
were recovered from the wreck site, they were washed and
dried to remove the salt water that they had been

(09:36):
soaking in for centuries. Conservators thought that the bricks were
stable at that point, but more recently, salt crystals have
started forming on them, suggesting that there is still something
going on inside them that could be causing damage. The
researchers have been using a bunch of different imaging and
analysis techniques to try to get a sense of both

(09:56):
the physical and the chemical processes that might be work here.
This is involved examining the bricks themselves and the crystals
that have been growing on them, and much like the
way those bacterial secretions could become acidic when they're exposed
to air, these salts seem to have created an acidic
environment inside the bricks as they've dissolved. One interesting part

(10:19):
of all this is that the team didn't find evidence
of sodium or chlorine, which are the key components of
sea salt. That suggests that the original washing treatments on
the bricks did remove sea salt as intended, but that
these other salts were left behind. Like the work that
we previously discussed around the Merry Rose. This is a
work in progress with the team trying to find ways

(10:42):
to figure out what they should do next. Let's take
a quick sponsor break before we get back to another
update of another shipwreck. The Clotilda has made a few
appearances on Unearthed. This was the last vessel known to

(11:05):
bring enslaved people into the United States, and then after
that happened, it's captain intentionally burned and sank it in
the Mobile River in Alabama. This was an eighteen sixty
and that was almost fifty years after Congress passed the
Act prohibiting the importation of slaves, so that was illegal,
but people were still doing it anyway. In previous episodes,

(11:29):
we have talked about the discoveries of other wrecks that
were believed to be the Clotilda. We also have talked
about this one, which was confirmed to be the correct
ship in twenty nine. Team researchers started making their first
research dives to the wreck in May of this year.
They've been studying and scanning the wreck itself and evaluating
its integrity, as well as organisms living in the wreck

(11:52):
which play a part in its overall integrity. They have
also been looking for and retrieving disarticulated pieces of the wreck.
Before setting fire to the Clotilda, the slave traffickers who
were using it transferred everyone aboard onto a river boat,
so there should not have been any people on board
when it's sank. But the team is also looking for

(12:14):
DNA evidence from the ship. They're doing that by collecting
small core samples from the ship, and the hope is
that they'll be able to connect people who were trafficked
aboard this ship to their living descendants today. And speaking
of DNA, for the first time, scientists have sequenced the
genome of someone who died at Pompeii after the eruption

(12:35):
of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine. Researchers extracted
DNA from two sets of remains that were found close
to each other at a building called the House of
the Craftsman. One appeared to be from a man between
the ages of thirty five and forty, and the other
from a woman estimated to be about fifty, but there
were gaps in the woman's DNA sequence, so only the

(12:57):
man's was used for this genome sequencing. After comparing this
DNA to that of more than a thousand other ancient
people and that of four seventy one people from Western
Europe today. They found out this person had DNA similar
to people living in Italy during the Roman Era and
to people who are living in modern Italy. That lines

(13:19):
up with what you would expect based on this person
being at Pompey when it was destroyed. Then by examining
his mitochondrial DNA, researchers also determined that he had some
genes in common with people from Sardinia which aren't also
shared with people from other parts of Italy, so it
seems like he had some ancestry there as well, and

(13:39):
this gives us a glimpse into the possible diversity and
mobility of people who were living in this part of
the world almost two thousand years ago. The people who
died at Pompeii were covered in ash and that protected
their DNA from some of the factors that would normally
cause it to degrade over thousands of years. But even so,
getting enough intact DNA to sequence a whole genome has

(14:01):
been a very lengthy process. Yeah, they've had lots of
other attempts that have not worked out, and other Pompeii News.
One of the latest finds there is a tortoise, either
a wild tortoise from somewhere near the city or somebody's pet.
This tortoise seems to have burrowed under some debris to
lay her eggs. The tortoise was removed in stages and

(14:23):
an egg was found still inside her body. So this
tortoise was found under the remains of a building that
had already been destroyed in the earthquake that happened shortly
before uh everything else was destroyed in the volcanic eruption.
Sometimes when you see things that people like, ah, that's
that's the remains of whatever animal, and you're like, is
it really though this? You look at the pictures and

(14:44):
you're like, that is that's a tortoise right there. There
are still fines coming up from the Anti Kids Are
a shipwreck as part of the return to Anti Kids
Are a project including the head of a statue of Hercules.
It's possible that this two thousand year old head is
the one that goes on the body of a statue

(15:04):
that sponge divers found in nineteen hundred and which is
now in the Athens National Archaeological Museum. Other finds from
this latest set of dives include some of the ship's equipment,
including parts of the anchor, parts of a marble statue base,
and some human teeth. Maybe the bell witch put them there.

(15:26):
Thinking about that, every time we talk about teeth, I
think I've heard um. And in our last update for now,
Vinda Luanda has made several appearances on previous episodes of Unearthed.
That's the Roman fort and settlement in Northumberland that's home
to all kinds of ongoing archaeological work. And in May

(15:47):
the team at Vindolanda announced a new finding dating back
to the third century, a large piece of stone carved
with a fallus and engraved with the words second Dennis Kakore,
which we will translate approximately to second Dennis the pooper. Yeah.
Most articles about this translate with the word that's a
little more stronger than pooper. Uh Phallust's were often used

(16:14):
as a symbol of good luck at this place in time.
There are lots of fallus engravings around this one, though
seems more clearly meant as an insult. Somebody did not
like that guy. I like that. We found um essentially
like very intensely created insult graffiti. Yeah, that's basically what

(16:36):
that is. Moving on, we have a few pieces of
jewelry and clothing and similar items. You know those best
friend necklaces that are made to resemble a broken heart
where one friend wears half and the other friend wears
the other. Tracy might have thought these didn't still exist.
They do. I assure you. You can even get Star
Wars ones. Yeah, I just associate them with being thirteen

(16:59):
in early uh like decades ago, so that's just the
last time you encounter them, perhaps, but they are still
out there doing the rounds uh well. Postdoctoral researcher Maria
Ajala from the University of Helsinki has been examining slate
ring ornaments that may have been put to similar use

(17:21):
about six thousand years ago. So there are a lot
of these rings in the archaeological record, but for the
most part they have not been found intact, and that
is not really surprising. A lot of stuff in the
archaeological record is broken, and these are small slate rings
that are thousands of years old, so would not necessarily

(17:43):
expect a lot of them to be whole at this point.
But Ahala's research suggests that these did not just break
through where or handling or everything associated with the passage
of all that time. That instead, at least some of
them were broken intentionally and then possibly used to maintain
or signify relationships in the community, so one person gets

(18:03):
one piece and one person gets the other piece. This
research involved a whole group from the University of Helsinki
and the University of Turku, and they matched up the
pieces of these rings and analyzed their geochemical composition, and
they found that in some cases different parts of the
same ring had been found in two different locations. Some

(18:24):
of the rings were also found hundreds of kilometers from
where they were made, again suggesting that they were playing
some role within a large, interconnected community network. Moving on,
what maybe the oldest prayer beads so far found in
Britain have been unearthed on the island of Lindisfarne. These
were found near the neck of some skeletal remains that

(18:46):
may have belonged to a monk, and it's likely that
they were strung together and worn, although if that's the case,
the string itself is no longer there, which again it's
not very surprising. They're made from salmon vertebrae and the
whole through the vertebrae, which are naturally occurring as part
of their anatomy. Those holes have been enlarged, either intentionally

(19:07):
or as a side effect of their having been worn
on a string. You date back to the eighth or
ninth century, and I just think the idea of having
your prayer beads made out of fish Ford ray like,
that's cool. Well, it it makes me envision a future
craft project, is what it makes me. I'm like, how, well,
what do you have to do to sterilize those guys?

(19:28):
What do you Let's uh, let's talk about this next up.
A hiker in Norway spotted a sandal sticking out of
melting ice in The hiker got in touch with a
glacial archaeology program called Secrets of the Ice, and a
team went to investigate. They got to the site in
time to excavate the sandal and several other items before

(19:49):
a snowstorm covered it all back up. Since that time,
the team from Secrets of the Ice has made a
replica of the sandal, which resembles a Roman laceup sandal
called a carbontina. Then raised some questions about that seems
like not very adequate footwear for a frozen snowy place.
Uh there was a suggestion that maybe they were worn

(20:11):
with socks. They've also done some radio carbon dating and
confirmed that the sandal dates back to the fourth century,
meaning that the mountain pass where this was found was
already in use by that point. Most recently, the sandal
has been part of a report from the Norwegian University
of Science and Technology about discoveries like this one which

(20:32):
are revealed as glaciers melt, and how a lack of
funding and monitoring is preventing researchers from being able to
find and retrieve many of these kinds of objects before
they saw out and are destroyed. And in our last
jewelry find, a man plowing a field in Turkeya also
known as Turkey plowed up at thirty three year old bracelets.

(20:54):
He took this bracelet to the Chora Museum, which restored
it and confirms that it came from the hits civilization.
Although this region was home to the capital of the
Hittite civilization, there haven't been many pieces of Hittite jewelry found,
so this discovery is helping researchers get more of a
sense of its jewelry styles. And jewelry making techniques. This

(21:15):
one is kind of like a large bangle made of bronze,
silver and gold, and it's decorated with Hittite symbols and figures.
We're gonna take a quick sponsor break and then talk
about some things that showed up at auction. Next up,

(21:38):
we have a few notable items that have gone up
for auction over the last few months. First, a violin
made by Antonio Stratabari in seventeen fourteen called the Da
Vinci X Sidell Violin, sold at auction in June for
fifteen point nine million dollars. I don't know why all

(22:00):
the need to say it that dramatically. It's it's it's
a lot of money. That's a lot of money, but
also um in line with the amount of money that
a person would expect to see for a strata various violin.
This instrument was given the Da Vinci nickname in the
nineteen twenties, and the ex sidel denotes that it previously

(22:23):
belonged to Totia side L. Tosia side L was a
virtuoso violinist who played this instrument in orchestral performances and
on film scores. It may have been included in the
score to The Wizard of Oz. That's sort of like
a there's some conjecture involved there, because he definitely recorded

(22:44):
violin music for a number of film scores and was
working for MGM around the time that that score was recorded,
but his involvement is not specifically noted anywhere um it
as though included in a lot of other four film
scores from around that time. In our next auction, a

(23:05):
medal commemorating General Daniel Morgan and his victory at the
Battle of Cowpens during the American Revolution has been sold
at auction for almost a million dollars. Apart from the
record setting price tag. Before the medal appeared at auction,
it was believed to be lost. Yeah. This medal was
originally part of a series of a hundred and thirty

(23:26):
three medals called the Comita Americana. The United States commissioned
French artists to create these medals between seventeen seventy six
and the early nineteenth century. They all commemorate notable people
and events from the Revolutionary War. The Morgan medal was
designed by Augustine Duprey and it was struck in Paris,

(23:47):
in seventeen eighty nine. When General Morgan died in eighteen
o two, his grandson Morgan Lafayette Neville inherited this medal,
but then it was stolen from the bank where he
worked the cashier in eighteen eighteen. In addition to the medal,
the thieves stole more than a hundred thousand dollars and

(24:07):
some gold and silver and other medals from the bank faults.
This is part of a big bank heist. Although these
thieves were apprehended and one of them helped authorities recover
most of the stolen goods, the original Morgan metal was
among the items that were never found. One of the
thieves claimed that it had been in a bag that
was dropped into the Ohio River. So Congress approved a

(24:29):
replacement medal to be made at the Philadelphia Mint and
that was given to General Morgan's great grandson in eighteen
forty one. That's not the end of this saga, though,
JP Morgan bought the medal in the eighteen eighties, which
for some reason, when I got to that part in
the story, I went, ah man out loud, like I don't.

(24:51):
JP Morgan bought other stuff that did not then get
the destroyed somehow, but Morgan believed incorrectly that he was
related to General Daniel Morgan, and at some point after
he bought the medal, it disappeared. It was believed to
have been lost or melted down until an anonymous person
consigned it to auction house Stacks Bowers, just seemingly out

(25:15):
of nowhere. The buyer who spent nine hundred sixty dollars
on it that's a bid of eight hundred thousand dollars
plus a buyer's premium, is also anonymous, but an executive
from the auction house has publicly maintained that it has
quote gone to a good home. I don't know what
that is meant to mean. I'm gonna make sure it

(25:37):
gets proper nutrition and the bus reading it like it was,
they sent the middle the medal to live on a
farm up state uh anyway. Next, a tiny book of
poems by Charlotte Bronte was sold at auction in April.
This tiny book had last been sold at auction in

(25:59):
nine sixteen, and after that point it seemed to disappear
until somebody found it in an envelope that was tucked
inside a nineteenth century book. This was the last of
her known tiny books to be in private hands. We've
talked about these tiny Charlotte Bronte books and the other
Brontes tiny books at various points in the show before. Yeah,

(26:22):
Bronte wrote the poems when she was about thirteen, and
she made them into a book by hand, sewing it
together with a needle and thread. The book is fifteen
pages long and it contains ten poems, and it is
titled A Book of Rhymes by Charlotte Bronte, sold by
nobody and printed by herself. The word rhymes is misspelled,

(26:42):
with the H and the Y transposed. As far as
we know, these are the only previously unpublished poems by
Charlotte Bronte. I find that that flip of the H
and the y really charming. Um. When the sale of
this tiny book was originally publicized, the I or was anonymous,
so there was was of course some level of upset

(27:04):
by people who felt like that this should be in
a museum. A few days later, though, it was announced
that the purchaser was the Friends of the National Libraries,
who bought it for one point to five million dollars
and is donating it to the Bronte Parsonage Museum. I
have thoughts about giant auctions and anonymity that we will
talk about on Friday, Okay maybe. And lastly, Saw the

(27:31):
Bees will be auctioning off a three hundred nine year
old copy of Shakespeare's First Folio on July seven. That's
after we record this, but it is before the episode
will come out. Two d thirty five of the seven
hundred fifty copies that were originally made of the First
Folio are still known to exist today, but fewer than
twenty are in private collections, so one showing up at

(27:53):
auction really doesn't happen very often. Yeah, we may have
another update on this later on in a few your
installment of Unearthed. Those last couple of auctions could also
have been filed under books and letters, and that's what
we're turning to next. According to research published in Advances
in Space Research, researchers have found the oldest known written

(28:15):
record of an aurora. This was in a Chinese text
called the Bamboo Annals, which date back to about the
tenth century BC. This describes a multicolored light in the
sky during the reign of King Zhao, who was the
fourth king of the Jou dynasty. This paper is about
more than just the existence of the document and a

(28:37):
possible description of an aurora. In it, it tries to
calculate exactly where this observation happened, and more precisely when
concluding that the phenomenon was observed near the ancient settlement
of how Jing sometime in nine seventy seven or nine
fifty seven BC plus or minus a year. Reporting about
this makes it sound way more conclusive than the paper

(28:59):
itself seems to, so the headline say things like earliest
description of aurora found, while the paper describes this more
as a candidate for the earliest description of an aurora.
The paper also notes that earlier interpretations of exactly what
was observed and where that observation was made have been
kind of controversial. I love how we have so many

(29:20):
stories that are like well the headline. The headline says this,
with the that's not what the actual contents reveal. Moving on.
On March nine, an anonymous person returned to missing notebooks
belonging to Charles Darwin to the Cambridge University Library, along
with a note that read librarian, Happy Easter X. But

(29:44):
we would have needed a time machine to have talked
about this on our previous installment of Unearthed, because it
wasn't announced until April, which was after the Spring Unearthed
episodes were written and recorded. The Cambridge University Library had
put out a public appeal for the return of the
notebooks in November after realizing that these books they were

(30:04):
not just misplaced, they were actually missing from the library.
They had been removed from the shelf where they normally
lived in two thousands so they could be photographed, and
then in early two thousand one somebody discovered that the
notebooks had not been put back where they were supposed
to go. At first, the staff just thought they had
been misplaced somewhere, like they had been put on the

(30:26):
wrong shelf for something. That's kind of a running theme
on Unearthed. There have been various points, so we've talked
about people finding things in their own collection because it
had just been put in the wrong spot. When the
library realized that the notebooks were really gone, they were
not in the library anymore, they reported it to the police.
That police report was made in October. Of these notebooks

(30:47):
are from after Darwin returned from his voyage aboard the Beagle,
and one of them includes the famous Tree of Life
sketch that illustrates his thought processes. He was working through
the idea that would later become part of his land
mark work on the Origin of species. According to news reporting,
when this was announced, a police investigation was still ongoing.

(31:08):
The notebooks were left in a pink gift bag and
they were wrapped up in plastic wrap, and they were
in a part of the library that isn't covered by
security cameras. Now that these have been found, the library
was planning to put them on display in an exhibit
called Darwin in Conversation that scheduled to open on July nine. Again,
that is after this episode is being recorded, but before

(31:31):
it will actually come out. Speaking of returned books, an
original manuscript by Nostradama's disappeared from the Barnabid Center for
Historical Studies in Rome sometime around two thousand seven and
was presumably stolen. It resurfaced last year when an art
dealer tried to auction it off. Apparently it had moved

(31:51):
through a series of flea markets before showing up on
the German auction house website, and that is when authorities
spotted it. Both manuscript just about five hundred pages long,
and one of those pages is marked with a stamp
from nineteen one, which is what allowed investigators to conclusively
trace it back to the library and than thinking maybe

(32:12):
it was a different copy of the same book. It
was returned to the library in May, and for our
last thing under Books and Letters. During COVID lockdowns, the
Leads Central Library surveyed its rare books and special collections.
During this process, they found about three thousand items that,
for one reason or another, had not been cataloged. One

(32:34):
was a tiny, tiny Bible containing the Old and New Testaments.
This is a teeny teeny version of the Great Bible
of fifteen thirty nine, which was nicknamed the Chained Bible
because there was supposed to be one in each church
where it would be chained to the pulpit to keep
people from walking away with it. Was supposed to make

(32:54):
the Bible more accessible to people, but not so accessible
that you can take it out of the church. The
Chained Bible was pretty big. This is the opposite. It's
type is so small that it has to be read
with a magnifying glass. The library is actually not sure
where it came from or how it came to be
in their collections theories already. We can talk about that

(33:15):
on Friday teeth. I'm making a note so I don't forget.
It's time for shipwrecks, everybody's favorite. Hooray. Construction workers in
tell in Estonia have found the wreck of a cog
believed to have belonged to the Henseatic League. It was
found under a street under about five ft of earth

(33:37):
in an area that used to be covered in water.
This cog is about eighty feet long and made of oak,
with the spaces in between the planks sealed with tar
and animal hair. It's been dated to the end of
the thirteenth century, and things like shoes, packing material and
tools have also been found nearby. As of April, there

(33:58):
wasn't a clear plan for the because of its size.
If it's going to be moved, it has to be
moved in pieces. But it was found during construction of
a new office building, and that construction has been delayed
by a couple of months because of this shipwreck. Fined next,
the government of Colombia has released photos of the wreck
of the San Jose, which sank off of Cartagena in

(34:20):
seventeen o eight. This ship was part of a convoy
of merchant vessels and was carrying goods that are estimated
to be worth billions of dollars today. These photos were
taken over a series of studies of the wreck using
remotely operated vehicles, and they show that the ship is
still full of things like pottery, glassware, and gold. It's

(34:42):
believed to contain at least two tons of precious metals
and gemstones. Two other wrecks were discovered as part of
this work, described as a colonial era galleon and a
schooner from the post colonial period. There is ongoing debate
about who can claim the wreck of the San Jose.
It was a Spanish ship, so Spain says that's ours,

(35:06):
but it was found off the coast of Columbia. Columbia
is like that gives us DIBs on it. A lot
of the precious metals aboard, though, were mined by the
Cohara Cohara people, whose homeland isn't what's now Bolivia. Lots
of people with claims on it. Back in two thousand seven,
divers and international waters off the coast of Great Yarmouth,

(35:27):
Norfolk found a cannon from a shipwreck that they believed
to be the HMS Gloucester. The ship's identity was confirmed
when its bell was brought up to the surface in
t but the discovery of the ship itself wasn't announced
until June of this year for security reasons. Because it
was in international waters, authorities needed time to secure the site.

(35:48):
Gloucester ran aground in six eighty two with the Duke
of York on board, and that Duke of York later
became James the second and seventh and the words of
Professor Larage how at the University of East Anglia quote
because of the circumstances of its sinking, this can be
claimed as the single most significant historic maritime discovery since

(36:11):
the raising of the Merry Rose in Although the Duke
and more than three hundred people aboard survived this wreck,
hundreds of other passengers and crew did not. At this point,
researchers haven't found any human remains at the wreck site,
but they have found things like clothing, equipment, and wine bottles.
An exhibition is planned for some of the items that

(36:33):
have been recovered that is set to start in the
spring of next Archaeologists have found at hundred year old
shipwreck in a stream outside of Bordeaux France. There seems
to have been a cargo ship that was capable of
navigating both rivers and coastal waters. This wreck is being

(36:53):
removed for further study. There aren't a lot of records
about exactly how ships were built in this for picular
time and place, so this find is an important source
of information on that, and its removal is a feat
It's about twelve meters long, and it has to be
cleared of sediment and mapped and documented, and then every
piece of wood is being individually numbered and moved the

(37:15):
whole process. And our last shipwreck of this installment of Unearthed,
a shipwreck in the Philippines has been identified as the
destroyer USS Samuel B. Roberts, which sank in battle in
n It was found at a depth of six thousand,
nine eight five ms that's twenty two nine hundred sixteen

(37:36):
feet and that is more than four miles, making it
the deepest shipwreck ever discovered. According to a statement by
retired admiral and naval historian Samuel J. Cox, the site
is a hallowed war grave. Eighty nine of its crew
of two hundred twenty four were killed when the ship
went down, so that's it. For part one of this

(37:56):
installment of Unearthed, and we'll be back on Wednesday with
some more fines. You got a little listener mail I do.
I have listener mail from Michelle Youse. Title for the
email was West Wing not compulsory, but perhaps Terry Pratchett
is uh, and Michelle wrote, high amazing women. I've been

(38:18):
listening since Christmas twenty twenty, starting at the beginning, and
earned the stuff you miss in history class PhD sometime
last year. It's been great listening to all the podcasts
when I'm mowing the lawn, walking crocheng or running when
it's not too hot. I live in Darwin in the
Northern Territory, Australia Tropics. As soon as I saw the
title of the last episode, mar Cater, I immediately thought

(38:40):
of the West Wing episode clip and the characters trying
to turn their heads upside down to understand the map
when it was reversed. I was wondering if you had
mentioned the episode. I didn't think you would since in
other episodes I've thought this is referenced on the West Wing,
but you haven't mentioned it. And given that I'm the
same ages Tracy and loved Terry Pratchett. I wonder if
this mystery would ever be solved, and today it was

(39:03):
Tracy hasn't watched The West Wing. What an obvious answer.
And don't worry. I'm not telling you to watch the show.
I am saying your photos on the I Heart Radio
episode are fantastic and I love the photo of you
both and dress up on the Facebook page. My friends
and I call that open mouth type of photo a
muppet photo. My wedding photos look like that. Thanks for

(39:24):
your fine work. Michelle goes on to suggest some episode
topics related to First Nation's history from Australia, and then
has some animal pictures, which the first is a frilled
neck lizard from around where Michelle lives. And this particular

(39:45):
picture when I saw, for some reason, my brain was like,
that looks like a lizard. But the head of this
lizard does not make any sense to me, I think
because like I had not really thought through the like
the thrilled neck aspect of it. And then we have
lots of adorable dog pictures, So thank you so much

(40:09):
for these pictures. As for topic suggestions, one piece of
complexity involving First Nation's history related to Australia is that
some of the cultures involved have cultural taboos regarding death
and uh using the names of people who have died,
and that sort of adds a piece of complexity and

(40:31):
like how we would approach and talk about those episodes
and what we would need to do regarding that. So
thank you for these suggestions. That is an aspect of
thinking through how we might would incorporate them. So thank
you again for this um, this story and these uh
these animal pictures. I sure do love Terry Pratchett, and

(40:52):
I'm glad to have solved the mystery that I have
not watched any episode of The West Wing all the
way through. I I've only seen I don't even know.
I think it's just like I think something about the
Mercatur projection floated that clip up to the top of
my my YouTube feed somehow, like that is where I

(41:14):
thought it was on YouTube, So that's what it's wi.
I've never mentioned the West Wing. If you would like
to send us a note about this or anither podcast
or history podcast at I heeart radio dot com. We're
also all over social media at Missing History That's Sorrow
fund our Facebook, Twitter, at Pinterest, and Instagram, and you
can subscribe to our show on the iHeart Radio app,

(41:37):
or wherever you like being your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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