Unearthed! in July 2022, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is
part two of our regularly scheduled episode of Unearthed. To

(00:21):
this swin covering Things that feed has things that were covered,
things that were literally or figuratively uncovered in April, May
and juneo and so in this episode we have some
animal stuff and some arts stuff. A lot of times
on and Earth we talked about exhumations didn't really have

(00:45):
as much on the exclamation front. There were a couple
of things that came up where I was like, this
feels ghoulish to discuss. I think this needs to like
stay where it is as always, though, we will start
with some potpourri, which is just the stuff I had
a hard time categorizing, right, and we're starting with a
little bit of an accidental exhibition, so will kind of

(01:06):
scratch that it for people that love exhumations. Teams working
to rebuild the spire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris
found a well preserved sarcophagus, which was removed from the
cathedral in mid April. Although it was found among brick
pipes that were part of a nineteenth century heating system.
Researchers believed it dated back as far as the fourteenth century.

(01:29):
It has already been confirmed that it contains at least
part of a person's skeleton. That was confirmed using an
endoscopic camera. There was also some plant matter suggesting that
the sarcophagus may have been lined with boxwood, something that
was done to try to preserve the bodies of wealthier
and more powerful people. There were a lot of headlines
in mid April saying that this was going to be

(01:52):
open soon. But if it has been opened since then,
I was not able to find anything about it. That's
the good thing about soon. It does not have a
finite amount attached to it, so you could just say it.
We have talked at various points about residues inside ceramic
vessels and what those residues have suggested about what those

(02:15):
vessels contained. Usually this has been something like barley or makeup,
or animal fat, or occasionally even parasite eggs. But in
the case of some vessels found in Jerusalem which date
back to the Crusades, they contained explosive materials, so they
may have been hand grenades. This probably wasn't black powder

(02:35):
that was introduced to the area from Asia by about
the thirteenth century, but instead it was something flammable that
was locally made. So to be super clear here, the
idea that there were things that were basically hand grenades
during the Crusades, that's not a new idea. These are
not the first vessels ever to be found that were

(02:56):
likely to have been used as hand grenades. But I
didn't get really excited when the residues inside the containers
were not cooking residues, which has been the case so
many times, but instead explosion residues. Up next. Back in
ten Laura Young, proprietor at Temple of Vintage, was that
a goodwill in Austin, Texas and saw a marble bust

(03:18):
under a table. She bought that marble bust for about
thirty five dollars. It was clearly old and it weighed
about fifty pounds, and in May it was announced that
it was a two thousand year old sculpture that had
originally been housed at the Pompeianum, which was a replica
Roman villa commissioned by King Ludwig the First of Bavaria.
But the Pompeianum was badly damaged during World War Two

(03:40):
and much of its contents were looted by Nazis. It
is a total mystery how this thing came to be
at a good will in Austin, and there's also a
lot of debate about exactly who it's meant to depict.
But at the moment it is on loan to the
San Antonio Museum of Art. It's not the first time
there's been like a random thrift store or goodwill sale

(04:03):
that has made news, but this one's backstory to me
was like what a ride King Olympigs involved. It's just
layer upon layer upon layer of nuttiness. Lastly, for our
bit of potpoury, research from the University of Georgia Laboratory
of Archaeology and its partners at the Muskogee Nation was

(04:24):
published in the journal American Antiquity in May. This research
involved the study of a site and what's now Cold Springs,
Georgia that suggests the presence of a council house dating
back at least fifteen hundred years there. To quote from
the paper, we argue that council houses were the early
manifestations of a form of collective governance that can be

(04:47):
confidently documented in one form or another over the last
fifteen hundred years among ancestral Muscogeean societies. Sources indicate that
council houses were the hub of political life within communities
and often across regions. And although council houses were in
part a bridge to ceremonial worlds, they were key forums

(05:07):
in which to discuss and debate the collective good and governance.
So this is a shift away from an idea that's
been a part of archaeological interpretations of these sites in
North America for a long time. That idea is that
until about the year one thousand, these communities were largely egalitarian,

(05:28):
but then after the year one thousand they quickly transitioned
into societies that had a hierarchy and ruling elite, in
particular a chief. So this paper instead offers the interpretation
that democratic institutions in North America instead date back to
people like the ancestral Muskogean communities, and that then those
institutions continued all through the development of the Muscogee Nation.

(05:52):
This paper is titled the Early Materialization of Democratic institutions
among the Ancestral Muscogeon of the America in Southeast and
it is an open access paper, so you can read
the whole thing if you wish. Yeah, we're gonna move
on to edibles and potables now. Researchers from the University
of Cambridge have conducted isotopic analysis of two thousand sets

(06:15):
of skeletal remains dating back to the early medieval period,
and their findings suggest that people in medieval Britain really
weren't eating very much meat, and that included the skeletal
remains of people who were probably nobles and royals who
are imagined as having eaten a whole bunch of like
turkey legs all the time. At the same time, though,

(06:38):
we have food lists from royal feasts dating back to
the same period, and those lists show lots of meat
being served. So the basic conclusion here, kind of unsurprisingly
is that those lists are for feasts that were really
special occasions and not just regular occurrences. Key to this
research was a food list for a banquet during the

(06:58):
reign of King Aina of Wessex. When the team tallied
up everything on that list, they found that meat accounted
for more than half of the total number of calories served.
They tried to estimate what one person's meal looked like
based on the idea that each guest got one of
the three hundred bread rolls shown on the list. Based
on that calculation, each guest would have gotten five hundred

(07:20):
grams each of mutton and beef, plus a total of
five hundred grams of salmon, eel, and poultry, along with cheese, honey,
and ale. Other lists used for other meals in other
parts of what's now southern England also showed that same
basic pattern. None of them mentioned any vegetables. Yeah, a

(07:41):
lot of articles that I read about this were like,
vegetables might have been served, they're just not on the list.
It's okay, sure. So there's, aside from that, a fair
amount of conjecture here, including the way that it rests
on the idea that every person got one bread roll.
Even if that's not quite right there, this does seem
like the amount of food that was listed on all

(08:03):
of these food lists that would have been meant for
hundreds of people, not for just like the monarchs and
their immediate court. I'm still tickled at the idea that
there could have been secret Broccolini. Various reporting on this
has compared it to a great, big barbecue hosted by
the peasants for the royalty, probably with leftovers that were

(08:23):
picked over and later turned into things like hardy stews.
Next up, according to research from Tel Aviv University and
the Hebrew University, olive trees were first domesticated about seven
thousand years ago. They came to this conclusion by analyzing
charcoal remains from an archaeological site and determining that the

(08:43):
wood that had been burned at that site was from
olive trees. This is in an area where olive trees
don't grow naturally, and there was more olive wood among
the charcoal than could logically be explained by somebody having
just like brought some wood from somewhere else. They also
found evidence of lots of small fig branches, which may

(09:04):
have been evidence that people were cultivating fig trees there,
since they resembled branches that would have been pruned off
during the process of cultivation. Before we get into our
next subject, which is animals, let's take a quick sponsor break.

(09:28):
So next up we have some stuff about animals, and
first we will talk about chickens today, domestic chickens or
Gallus domesticus are found really all over a lot of
the world, but it hasn't been totally clear where or
when these birds were first domesticated. Researchers have suggested various

(09:49):
parts of Asia as the likely starting point. To be clear,
Asia is enormous, so that's not narrowing it down all
that much. Uh. The time line has been similarly vague,
with suggestions stretching all the way from more than ten
thousand years ago to as recently as four thousand years ago.

(10:10):
Even pinpointing the domesticated chickens likely wild ancestor has been
pretty recent, with research suggesting that it is one species
of Southeast Asian jungle foul published just two years ago.
Two new studies may have brought this into more focus.
The first was published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. Researchers studied domestic chicken remains across more

(10:35):
than six hundred archaeological sites in eighty nine countries. Together,
this suggested that chickens were first domesticated in central Thailand
sometime between sixteen fifty and twelve fifty BC. This was
at about the same time that people were first cultivating
greens like rice and millet, including cultivating a rice by

(10:55):
scattering seed onto saturated soil rather than planting it in
a totally submerged patty field. So wild birds may have
been attracted to these fields or to grain storage areas
is an easy food source, thus kickstarting the process of domestication.
Another unanswered question has been how and when domestic chickens

(11:17):
moved from where they were first domesticated to other parts
of the world, and that's where the other paper comes in.
It was published in the journal Antiquity, and this research
used radio carbon dating to try to pinpoint when domesticated
chickens first arrived in Europe and Northwest Africa. Based on
this dating, domesticated chickens first arrived in Mediterranean Europe about

(11:42):
hundred years ago and then in northern Africa between one
thousand and eight hundred years ago. Our next animal find
is frogs, specifically more than eight thousand frog and toad
bones representing about three hundred fifty total animals, that were
found in a ditch north of Cambridge, England. This ditch

(12:02):
is adjacent to an iron age roundhouse and most of
the bones are from common species of frogs, but it's
unclear why there are so many of them in this
particular location. The BBC described experts as baffled. There's been
so much speculation about these frogs, like did they hold
some kind of special symbolism for the Iron age population

(12:26):
of this area that has been true of other civilizations
and other parts of the world during the same overall
time period. Or maybe we're people eating the frogs. The
bones don't show the kinds of charring or cut marks
that would suggest that they had been a food source,
but if people had prepared them by boiling, those wouldn't
necessarily be there. Or this wasn't that far from an

(12:50):
area that people were processing grain, So did the grain
attract lots of insects and then the insects attracted lots
of frogs If this was just a popular, you know,
hangout place for frogs. That still doesn't explain why there
were so many bones in one place. Some of the
ideas there are that they got into the ditch and
they couldn't get out again, or that having so many

(13:12):
frogs together in a small space had led to the
spread of a disease. Uh. It kind of cracks me
up that there was a lot of coverage of these
frogs and it all sort of landed on. There are
a lot of frogs by this iron a rage roundhouse.
Not totally sure why frog mysteries. Our last bit of

(13:32):
animal research is circling back to domestication again. It is
about domesticated dogs. We know that dogs were domesticated from wolves,
but similarly to that whole thing with the chickens, there's
been a lot of ongoing research into exactly when and
where this first happened. This includes the possibility that dogs

(13:52):
were domesticated in multiple places around the world, independently of
each other. I feel like we've had various dog domestication
things that have come up on on Earth before that
suggests sometimes wildly different things. I'm telling you this is
why I have not done a dog episode like I
did when we talked about the domestication of the cap

(14:14):
because there's so much conflicting stuff and just continually changing.
A genomic history of gray wolves published in the journal
Nature suggests that today's dogs are descended from two different
wolf populations. This research involved analyzing seventy two ancient wolf
genomes from Europe, Siberia, and North America, as well as

(14:36):
the genomes of sixty eight modern wolves, one sixty nine
modern dogs, and thirty three ancient dogs. All together, this
represents animals that lived over the last one hundred thousand years.
This research doesn't conclusively settle the question of when and
where dogs were first domesticated. None of the wolf genomes

(14:58):
that were part of the research per I'd like the
exact match with today's modern dogs that would do that,
But it does appear that in general today's dogs are
more closely related to wolves from eastern Eurasia than to
wolves from other parts of the world, So that suggests
that dogs may have first been domesticated in Eastern Eurasia.

(15:20):
At the same time, though, dogs in Western Asia and
Northern Africa seem to have lots of connection to wolves
from Southwest Eurasia, as much as half of their ancestry
comes from the Southwest Eurasian population, so that is the
basis for the idea that dogs came from two populations
of wolves. Yeah, something that's come up on previous Unearthed

(15:43):
has been about how dogs that were brought to North
America from Europe during colonization like overtook dogs that had
already been domesticated here. And I am not sure how
this research incorporated that idea. UH tried to figure it
out and could not. But anyway, we are going to

(16:04):
move on now to some art finds. Workers replacing gas
pipes outside of Verona, Italy have found a floor mosaic
believed to have been part of a villa owned by Theodoric,
king of the Ostrogoths, also known as Theodoric the Great.
This idea seems to connect mostly to how large and

(16:25):
ornate the mosaic is, but in the words of Vincenzo Tone,
Cultural Heritage Superintendent of Verona, quote, bits of mosaic, thermal
facilities and residential complexes have been emerging in a scattered
way at Montorio over the past decades, and it is
now time to systematize them. Our next art find was

(16:45):
also found under something. These are polychrome paintings that were
found under the plaster at the Royal Salt Works Castle
in Balitka, Poland during restoration work. The oldest of these
newly discovered paintings date back to the seventeenth century, and
they've been covered over with successive layers of plaster in

(17:06):
the centuries since then. These paintings are spread across five
rooms in the castle, and they show floral motifs, coats
of arms, and Arabesque decorations, as well as some representational paintings.
Some of them are realistic paintings of architectural or decorative features.
So rather than having a carved column or a draped
fabric to decorate the wall of a room, instead having

(17:28):
a painting of the column or fabric to create the
illusion of their being there. Some of these, just from
my looking at them on a computer screen on a website,
are really convincing. Like if I walked into a room
with the whole thing exposed, I might have been like,
what a great column over there. It's not a column,

(17:49):
it's a painting. Next, researchers from the Universities of York
and Durham have been studying engraved stones from the collections
of the British Museum and have come to the conclusion
that prehistoric people's carved these stones by firelight. These stones
are known as plaquettes. They were made between twenty three

(18:10):
thousand and fourteen thousand years ago, and there's heat damage
on some of the stones that suggests that they were
held close to a fire. Okay, you may be asking,
couldn't people have just started with a rock that had
already been near a fire, or left the rock near
the fire when they weren't actively working on it, and
that's the previous assumption of where the pinkish heat damage

(18:32):
on these stones came from. But after coming to this conclusion,
researchers tried to confirm it using three D models and
virtual reality software, and the results supported the idea that
the pattern of the heat damage suggested that the stones
had been held near the fire intentionally. We've talked about
some other research recently that suggests that prehistoric people's created

(18:55):
art by firelight. In the case of that other research,
we were talking about cave art and the likelihood that
the fumes and the lack of oxygen from the smoke
might have created another psychological dimension to the creation process
for this artwork, and that is the case here too.
Dr Andy Needham was quoted as saying, quote, creating art

(19:16):
by the firelight would have been a very visceral experience,
activating different parts of the human brain. We know that
flickering shadows and light enhance our evolutionary capacity to see
forms and faces in inanimate objects, and this might help
explain why it's common to see plaquette designs that have
been used or integrated natural features in the rock to

(19:40):
draw animals or artistic forms. Moving on. A team off
the coast of southern France is trying to preserve and
document a cave system full of prehistoric art before it
is lost to plastic pollution and climate change. The coscy
cavern system is reachable only through a treacherous dive into
a ca burned that is increasingly submerged. This site is

(20:03):
the only known location of cave art of prehistoric marine animals. Yeah,
and we say it's treacherous, like there have been people
who have drowned trying to get to the site to
pinpoint where it was to explore it. The artwork in
this cave date dates back about thirty thousand years, and
efforts to document it have really been escalating since a

(20:24):
rise in sea levels started threatening the site in twleven.
This was likely home to more than five hundred works
of art originally, but as more of the cave has
become submerged and damaged, only about a hundred and fifty
of those images remain. Only about twenty of the cave
system is still dry today. The work to document this

(20:47):
cave has included extensive three D mapping, and a replica
of the cave opened as a museum in Marseille in June.
Our last art find is also about rock art. Griffith
University Center for Social and Cultural Research has been working
with the traditional elders of Katakut National Park in Australia

(21:07):
to train a machine learning model to detect rock art
that a human might miss. This might help researchers find
and identify rock art in places that are treacherous or
difficult to reach, so they could work from photos and
then decide whether they need to go in for further exploration.
At this point, the machine learning model is correctly detecting

(21:27):
the presence of rock art about eight nine percent of
the time, so again, the idea here is that once
the model picks up the presence of rock art from
a photo, researchers can then visit that area in person
to study the artwork more closely. We've got more on
Earth coming up, but first we are going to pause
for a little sponsor break. The last few things we're

(21:56):
going to talk about aren't exactly discoveries. There are reports
that have been released over the last few months, So
first Harvard University has released a report detailing the school's
historical involvement in slavery and the slave trade. Mr report
also details the university's involvement in race science and the

(22:17):
eugenics movement in the decades after slavery. Harvard is not
unique at all in its connections to slavery, nor is
it the first university in the US do this kind
of work. It's been going on at some of the
nation's oldest and most prestigious universities for more than a decade.
The committee that produced this report also made a series

(22:38):
of recommendations for reparations. The recommendations include things like steps
to engage and support descendant communities, honor enslaved people whose
lives and labor were connected to Harvard, connect with historically
black colleges and universities, and implement steps to hold the
university accountable. The university has committed one hundred million dollars

(22:59):
to carry out those recommendations, and the full paper, recommendations,
and other materials are available at Legacy of Slavery dot
Harvard dot DU. Another report from Harvard was not released voluntarily,
an unfinalized draft report on human Remains in Harvard's collections

(23:20):
was leaked to the Harvard Crimson Student newspaper, which reported
on it in June. According to this draft report, the
remains of at least nineteen people who may have been enslaved,
and the remains of almost seven thousand Indigenous people are
still in Harvard's collections as of when we are recording this.
The committee has not yet released its finished work on this,

(23:44):
and committee members expressed frustration and disappointment with the leak
of the draft version, saying that that version did not
reflect week's worth of ongoing work into this. In May,
the U s Department of the Interior released the first
volume of an investigative report from the Federal Indian Boarding
School Initiative, detailing the system of boarding schools that operated

(24:07):
in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These schools,
as we have discussed on the show before, intentionally separated
Indigenous children from their families and communities as an act
of cultural genocide. This investigation documented four hundred eight schools,
as well as marked or unmarked burial sites at fifty

(24:29):
three of the schools in the system. And this report
is really just a first step documenting where the schools
were and what the conditions were like there. One point
that has made in the report is to quote from
the Department of the Interiors released about it quote despite
assertions to the contrary, The investigation found that the school

(24:49):
system largely focused on manual labor and vocational skills that
left American, Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian graduates with
employment options often irrelevant to the industrial US economy, further
disrupting tribal economies. If you listen to the earlier episodes
where we've talked about this, like part of the whole

(25:11):
set up of these was supposedly like giving people skills
for their future employment, and that is confirmed in this
not what was happening at all. Following the report, Secretary
of the Interior deb Holland announced what she described as
a year long essential listening tour called the Road to Healing.
This will involve visiting indigenous communities across the country, including Alaska,

(25:33):
Native and Hawaiian communities, to both connect communities, to support
and to create a permanent collection of oral histories. There
are also steps in place for a second volume of
the report, and lastly, not exactly a report, but in
a similar Vein to all of this, the Smithsonian has
adopted a new policy on ethical collecting, which went into

(25:55):
effect in April. This is connected to the Smithsonian's announced
of returning items from its collection known as Benin Bronzes,
which we've talked about on the show previously. This policy
covers all of the museums that are part of the Smithsonian,
but since those museums are pretty broad in terms of
the time period and types of objects, they include the

(26:17):
details of how it will be put into place will
vary from one museum to another, like the standards for
the National Air and Space Museum and the standards for
the National Museum of Natural History. They would have some
places where they would logically overlap, but also some places
where they would need to address like very different ideas.

(26:37):
Now we are moving on to repatriations, and we talked
about quite a few repatriations back in April, but things
have been a little quieter on that front this time around,
so we're gonna end on this. The Museum of Rescued
Art opened in Rome's Ancient Beths of Diocletian in June.
This is a museum where Italy is going to display
artwork that has been illegally looted or sold but then covered.

(27:01):
So the plan is for this museum's exhibits to change
every few months as the items are then sent back
to the regions that they were originally taken from. So
when Italian authorities recover something that's illegally made its way
into a museum collection somewhere else in the world or
to an auction house or a private collection, that object

(27:22):
may spend some time on public display in this museum
before then being returned to where it came from. A
lot of these objects came from illegal digs, which a
lot of the times to destroy important context to pinpoint
where something came from. So authorities can't actually tell specifically
where an object originated, they will return it to some

(27:43):
place in that general area. The museum's first exhibition includes
about one hundred of two hundred sixty objects that were
brought back to Italy from the United States last December.
This particular set of objects is thousands of years old,
predating the room An era. They're terra cotta heads, ceramic jars,

(28:04):
and atruscan funeral boxes in the current display. Yeah, I
am sure we will have some more repatriations to talk
about next installment of on Earth, because I know of
one that was announced just this morning. See your next quarter,
See your next quarter when we talk about things that
happened in July. UM, so yeah, that is what has

(28:27):
been unearthed this time or around. We will talk about
various behind the scenes details of this in our Friday episode,
but for now, I have some listener mail. Um. This
is from Lori, and Lori wrote, I love, love, love
your podcast. I have so many episodes left for my PhD,
but maybe I'm up to a bachelor's I love that idea. Anyway,

(28:50):
I loved hearing about the tour guide who pronounced chaos
as cows. I had a professor of Russian literature who
had the same alternate pronunciation, but I feel like it
took the class as a whole a bit longer to
decipher the intended word, mostly because of the piece of
literature being discussed didn't seem to have any relation to
either cows or chaos at the time the mid nineties,

(29:12):
so no Google in the classroom. I wrote the word
as a name and planned to look it up later.
The professor must have appreciated all the glazed looks on
our faces and wrote the word on the chalkboard to
a collective sigh of recognition. It was great. I love
this story, um. LORI also sent lots of animal pictures.

(29:36):
One of these pictures is of a dog named Stevie,
as in Stevie Nicks, who is hiding in the bathtub
because Stevie dislikes rain and loathe thunderstorms, and I really
wanted to hug Stevie. I know, I know some folks
who have a dog who was terrified of thunderstorms, um,

(29:59):
and one of their nicknames for their dog came from
the fact that one day there was a thunderstorm and
he was scared, so he pete in his bed, But
then he didn't want to be in a wet bed,
so he went over to his dry bed and then
pete and that one also, and it was like, oh, buddy,
I'm so sorry, so sorry for the thunderstorm fear. UM.

(30:21):
So we have also cat pictures as part of these.
Thank you so much Laurie for this story, UH and
for this uh collection of animal pictures. Most of them
are napping, which I really appreciated. Uh. I love to
look at a napping animal. UM. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast

(30:43):
or a history podcast that I heart radio dot com
and we're all over social media at ms in History
that story will find your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram,
and you can subscribe to our show on the I
heart radio app or wherever you like to get your podcasts.
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of

(31:05):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Unearthed! in July 2022, Part 2