July 29, 2019 • 41 mins
Part two of this year's Unearthed! in July features some longtime listener favorites like edibles, potables and of course shipwrecks.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly
Frying and it's time for Unearthed and July Part two.
(00:21):
We got a lot of the favorite things in this edition,
including the edibles and potables, and the shipwrecks and just
some weird stuff. Is all grouped together because it was
all kind of odd, uh, and some other assorted findings.
I think weird stuff is a great category, but we
are going to start with edibles and potables. A team
(00:42):
in Manti in Sri Lanka believes that they have found
the world's oldest clove, estimated to be one thousand years old.
There have been other clove discoveries that were older than that,
but at this point they're believed to be misidentifications. Clothes
are not native to Sri Lanka, though they grow in
the Maluku Islands, which are about four thousand miles away.
(01:02):
So this is not just the oldest clove, but it's
also evidence of a wide ranging trade in spices that
dates back at least one thousand years, and this is
supported by peppercorns of about the same age found at
the same site, which probably came from the Indian subcontinent.
Archaeologists in China's Jangsu Province found a jar full of
eggs in a year old tomb, and that led newspapers
(01:26):
around the world to make a lot of jokes about
thousand year eggs, also known as century eggs. These were
just eggs. They were in very good condition considering their age.
Only one of them was obviously broken, although the team
did report that the material inside the eggs would have
been largely decomposed by now. They planned to conduct some
(01:46):
X ray studies to determine exactly how many eggs were
in this jar, because they were way too delicate to
handle without the risk of damaging them. They are not
certain why the eggs were placed in the tomb, whether
this was an offering or if it was more of
a symbol of reverse or whether the deceased just really
liked eggs and wanted to make sure that they had
some eggs in the afterlife. I want eggs in the afterlife.
(02:11):
Researchers in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands now
believe that the presence of very small snail and clam
shells and archaeological sites there are evidence of children helping
their parents gather food through foraging. Previously, the conclusion had
been that these types of shells were evidence of people
who were really close to starvation and we're just eating
(02:32):
whatever they could find. But this team looked at shell
midden's dating back to about sixteen hundred years ago and
concluded that the adult foragers were focusing on large shellfish
that were really worth their time and effort to crack into,
while the children were picking up whatever they found that
was small enough for them to handle easily. This is
(02:52):
all sort of speculative, but it's also similar to research
taking place with current populations of islands in the Pacific,
where four patterns have been the same for generations and
where children routinely gather with their parents moving on to
some other food stuffs. A team excavating a construction site
in Ontario, Canada found some charred keenewa seeds from a
(03:14):
species of the plant that was native to eastern North
America but is extinct today. These seeds date back to
around nine hundred b C, which isn't the oldest keenewa
seed ever, but it is the farthest north that they
have been found that far back in history by a lot.
The previous northernmost example of this kina was from Kentucky,
(03:35):
and then the next oldest crop found in this part
of Ontario is corn that dated back to five d
b C, so four hundred years younger. This is technically
find The seeds themselves were unearthed in but the excavation
they were part of had collected one hundred forty thousand
of them and most of them were charred, so it
(03:55):
took years to go through all of them to find
out what was what, So it was late when the
findings on this were published. Today people think of keenoas
coming from South America, and it does, but this is
a species of food crop that was living at the
time in what's now Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas. In similar news,
a team of researchers from universities and institutions in the US,
(04:17):
the UK, China, and Lithuania has cross referenced the findings
of hundreds of studies of charred food crops like rice, millet, wheat,
and barley to create a massive map of how these
foods moved around the prehistoric world and what they found
was that these staple foods moved a very long way
between eight thousand and fifteen hundred BC, so I wouldn't
(04:40):
necessarily put all of that into the prehistoric bucket. Wheat
and barley were carried from southwest Asia into Europe, China,
and the Indian subcontinent. Rice spread across much of Asia.
Millet and sorgham originated in western Africa but moved to
the eastern and sub Saharan part of the continent, as
well as across the Indian Ocean, and then different types
(05:01):
of millets started out in Eastern Asia and moved west
all the way to Europe. Basically, although people might imagine
that food became more globalized after Europeans started traveling to
North America, that whole thing really started much much earlier,
with ordinary farmers trying new crops and strategies just to
get enough food. Now we have several things about beer.
(05:21):
Researchers in Peru are crediting a beer like beverage called
Chicha with keeping the Warri civilization stable in that part
of the continent from about six hundred to eleven CE.
This team has done research into pottery and the residues
within the pottery vessels and suggests that these pots in
the ticha that was being made, they're all being made locally,
(05:44):
with people traveling to what was essentially a tap room
for festivals and for more casual gatherings. The beverage was
also made with drought resistant pepper berries, which would have
helped ensure a steady supply of beer even when other
ingredients are much harder to grow. A lot of headlines
about this was like the secret to a long lived
society is plenty of beer. In other beer news, in
(06:07):
six the s s Oregon sank off Long Island. There
were no fatalities, but sadly a load of beer went
down with the ship. And this year a diver brought
three bottles back up from the bottom and gave one
of those bottles to serious brewing company who planned to
see if they could extract living yeast from it, and
the diver was one of the brewery's regular customers. Staff
at the brewery also tasted this beer, just a few
(06:30):
drops of it. According to the breweries owner of Bill Felter, quote,
it was nasty. I mean, I feel like we could
have said that without tasting it, but that's just probably um.
A few days after the story broke about Sirius Brewing's
plan to brew shipwreck beer, another story made their rounds
that St. James Brewery and whole Brook, Long Island had
(06:51):
already been making beer with yeast extracted from a bottle
from that same wreck for at least a year. That
beer uses both the shipwreck yeast and the modern string
sane An owner brewer Jamie Adams, was at the time
planning a beer with only yeast from the wreck to
debut at the New York State Brewers Fest. So after
getting this news that another brewery had already been doing
(07:11):
the thing he planned to do, Felter shelved his plans
to make a similar beer, not of respect for Adams
having done it already. Basically, the two New York brewers
were trying not to horn in on each other's beers.
This seems like a pretty amicable resolution, especially since at
first Adams thought about filing a season desist over it.
So hooray for brewers being cool. Yeah, it's a whole
(07:32):
saga about this shipwreck beer. Uh. And in one last
piece of beer news, scientists in Israel have extracted yeast
from a pottery that was up to five thousand years old,
and they've used that to brew beer. We got a
note about this one from listener Shatta, who mentioned that
the yeast had come from an archaeological fine we had
talked about an unearthed in I think that's actually a
(07:56):
much older find. The pottery that we talked about in
that particular thing was much older. But it's totally possible
that we did talk about the same find at somewhere
in a previous unearthed, because when I looked at I
was just keyword searching the past scripts for the word beer.
We've talked about beer, and almost all of them I'm
(08:16):
I'm waiting for the giant vodka discovery. So since I'm
not really a beer drinker. Um, okay, so this next
one is not exactly about food, but bear with us.
There is a lot of variety and human speech, but
a prevailing theory has been that most speech sounds have
existed for most of human history, not really changing all
that much. So even though some sounds like m are
(08:39):
common in much of the world, while others like the
clicking sounds in some African languages are more localized, that
all of these specific sounds have actually stayed pretty much
the same over time, But there's some new research from
the University of Zurich and two Max Planck Institutes that suggests,
maybe not hypothesizing, that some sounds like and are relatively
(09:01):
new and they only came about as the shape of
our human palet changed, with the changes of the palette
coming along with changes to what we eat. So basically,
early humans had a diet that was full of tough
foods that were difficult to chew, so by the time
people reached adulthood, their upper and lower teeth meant edge
to edge. But over time people started eating softer foods,
(09:23):
shifting their palette so that they had a slight overbite
with their upper front teeth slightly in front of the
lower ones most of the time, and that may have
made it possible for languages to start including sounds known
as labya dentals, in which your lower lip touches your
upper teeth. These sounds exist in about half of languages worldwide,
and they're especially prevalent in European languages, apparently rising with
(09:46):
advances in milling and other technologies that helped people produce
softer foods. These aren't the first researchers to suggest this connection,
but earlier linguists have been a lot more cautious that
this could just be a correlation rather in a causation.
And now we're going to take a quick break so
Tracy and I can make lots of weird noises with
our mouths and figure out what we're doing and if
(10:07):
that is Palette related through history, we'll be back at
just a moment. Okay, we have a couple or three
discoveries coming up that basically confirm existing oral histories. First up,
(10:29):
archaeologists in Nova Scotia have been using ground penetrating radar
to try to confirm whether Fort Ann is the site
of an Acadian burial ground. There's a known British cemetery
at that site, but it's also believed that there are
at least two thousand Acadian people buried there as well,
without any sort of marker remaining for them. Preliminary evidence
(10:51):
suggests that this is the case. This radar study found
very regularly spaced disturbances that were arranged in lines at
the same depth every time, So if this is accurate,
it would confirm the Acadian belief that they have ancestors
buried at Fort Anne. This ground penetrating radar work really
happened at the end of December, but it was just
(11:11):
making news at the start of this year. And I'll
also note that we do have the Acadian expulsion on
the idealist for a future episode. Don't know when it
will happen. Archaeologists have confirmed the oral histories of the
Lake Bebean First Nation in northern British Columbia, Canada, something
the nation had asked to have done. According to the
nation's oral history, there were fishing villages along the shores
(11:33):
of Lake Bebing before the arrival of European colonists in
the area. The team found evidence of these villages, one
of them quite large, along with wooden fishing weirs which
would have been used to catch sakey salmon. And in
our last confirmation, researchers have also discovered that First Nations
people in the northwestern coast of North America were farming
(11:53):
clams for about three thousand years, longer than previously thought,
and that study had focused on claim and beds that
had been recorded in native oral histories. We are now
moving on to one of my favorite things art, in
this case cave art and rock art Uh there's a
massive collection of witch marks in a limestone gorge called
(12:13):
Creswell Craigs in East Midlands. In the UK, staff knew
there were some kind of markings down there, but they
didn't really know much about them, and they described them
to visitors as Victorian graffiti. But a couple of cavers
remarked on them last year, leading experts to take a
closer look. What they found was not the two or
three markings that they were kind of expecting. There were
(12:36):
as many as a thousand marks. These were meant as
wards against evil. They included marks that looked like a
V to stand for the Virgin Mary, and shapes that
look like crosses, and the letters PM, which stands for
pot Maria. These types of marks were common in the
area from the sixteenth through the nineteen centuries, although it's
(12:56):
not completely clear exactly when these particular marks were made
or exactly what people were hoping to keep out or
for that matter, in by making these marks. Yeah, these
are these are the sorts of marks that you were
really see in a lot of places, like not just
in the UK, if you go to um Old like
colonial era homes in North America, A lot of times
(13:19):
there are vs and crosses and things in places that
were meant a word evil away. This is just an
astoundingly large collection of them. Uh, And I am really
curious of Like, did you think there was a hell
mouth down there? What was happening? Researchers have also recorded
and interpreted a set of Cherokee inscriptions in Manitou Cave
in Alabama. The first of these inscriptions dates back to
(13:42):
April of eighteen twenty eight, so that was just a
few years before the Cherokee and other native people's were
removed from the area under the Indian Removal activate teen thirty,
and also just three years after the Cherokee adopted the
Cherokee syllabary as a system of writing for the Cherokee language.
The inscriptions in the cave document things like a stickball
(14:03):
game and the religious ceremony surrounding it. Stickball is not
a simple sport, it has important ritual significance within Cherokee
culture and religion, and there are also inscriptions on the
ceiling of the cave written backwards as if the reader
is somewhere within the rock. So this research team included
European Americans as well as members of the Eastern Band
of Cherokee Indians, the United Katua Band of Cherokees, and
(14:26):
the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and they all work together
to determine both how to interpret what the inscriptions mean
and to decide what should and shouldn't be published in
academic works, and some of these inscriptions were just not
meant to be read beyond the Cherokee. This work was
also important because there's not a lot of archaeological evidence
of a Cherokee presence in the area. The cave became
(14:49):
a tourist attraction in and other physical connections to the
Cherokee were removed or destroyed at that time. Moving on,
archaeologists studying indigenous petroglyphs in Australia have discovered the crews
of nineteenth century whaling ships added their own carvings to
the same area as well, sometimes right on top of
(15:11):
the existing indigenous art. Some of the carvings in the
Damp Year Archipelago are up to fifty thousand years old,
and the whalers additions are from eighteen forty one and
eighteen forty nine. The team found carvings from crew members
of the Connecticut and the Delta, both of which were
whalers that hailed from the United States. It's not clear
(15:32):
whether the whaling crews interacted with the local population at all,
or what their motivations were for choosing these particular carving sites.
It could have been an intentional signal of disrespect, or
they could have just thought they were adding graffiti to
a place that already had a lot of graffiti on it.
This particular study also noted that the interactions between these
(15:53):
whaling crews and the indigenous people of Australia is something
that warrants for their study because in a lot of
places it's not clear whether anybody came ashore, whether they
had any contact with anyone. But it's also clear that
the native people knew that there were quailers off the
coast of Australia up so there's lots of room for
more work to be done. Moving on. A team has
(16:14):
determined that cave art found in the Balkan Peninsula in
is the peninsula's oldest known figurative cave art, so that
oldest known designation is what happened this year. The paintings
date back about thirty four thousand years and they include
a bison and ibis and what maybe human figures. Researchers
at the University of Barcelona have also found a piece
(16:37):
of Paleolithic art carved into limestone that they're describing as
a very early example of narrative art. The pieces about
twelve thousand, five hundred years old and appears to depict
two people chasing two birds, which appear to be an
adult and a young crane. There are only three scenes
found in Paleolithic art so far that depict humans alongside birds.
(17:00):
So next up we have a whole collection of findings
that in some way are connected to like a technological acronym,
so it's things like DNA and CT scans and lighter
stuff like that. First up, researchers used DNA analysis to
study some chewed up pieces of pitch that were unearthed
in western Sweden back in the nineteen eighties. These were
(17:23):
about eight thousand years old and at the time they
were being used to make weapons, so people would heat
up this pitch and then chew on it to make
it really soft and sticky, and then use little bits
of it to do things like attached points to weapon shafts.
The DNA analysis suggested that three different people had chewed
on this pitch, two female and one male, and they
(17:44):
may have been quite young, based on the size of
the tooth impressions, as young as five years old. But
they did not find any weapons that were made with
this particular pitch, so it's possible that they were just
kids chewing on the same stuff used to make weapons,
and we're not weapon makers. Them Elves and another discovery.
In previous installments of Unearthed, we have talked about vikings
(18:06):
a lot, and we have also talked about horse burials
a lot, and now we have both at the same time.
We knew that Viking warriors were often buried with their horses,
and now, thanks to DNA evidence, we know that most
of the Viking warriors were mail and so were the
horses that were buried with them. Of the nineteen horses
that were studied in this particular project, eighteen of them
(18:27):
were male. All of them appeared to be healthy and
well cared for before being killed, apparently for the purpose
of the burial. In researchers performed CT scans on a
group of mummies at a hospital in Madrid. This year,
They announced their findings that one of them was a
priest named Nespamdo who was paraoh Ptolemy the seconds eye Doctor,
(18:48):
possibly also Ptolemy the Third's eye doctor, although that is
a matter of dispute uh and they made this conclusion
based on a collection of plaques from within the bandages,
one of which was thought God of eye doctors. He
has a designation because of a story within the mythology
of replacing somebody's eye after it was not God, I
think in battle. In previous installments of Unearthed, we have
(19:11):
talked about the use of ground penetrating radar and other
non invasive technologies which has led to the discovery of
massive cities and buried structures in South America and in Europe.
Similar discoveries have also been happening in Africa, where light
our scans in a South African nature preserve have pinpointed
the location of the city of Quinning, which thrived from
(19:33):
the fourteen hundreds until the late nineteenth century. It's basic
location was already known, but this pinpointed it more specifically,
and this new study also suggests that it had about
three times as many buildings as previously thought. It's likely
that the city was composed of between eight hundred and
nine hundred walled compounds housing as many as ten thousand people.
(19:55):
A team from the University of Cincinnati have discovered evidence
that suggests that the Maya did more than a subsistence
level of farming, growing a surplus of things like cotton
to trade all around the Yucatan Peninsula. This research has
involved satellite imaging and light our studies that have revealed
drainage and irrigation systems along with Rhodes. In the words
(20:16):
of Nicholas Dunning, a professor of geography who was part
of this research team, quote, it was a much more
complex market economy than the Maya are often given credit for.
And last we have a little lengthier fine. DNA testing
has been conducted on the remains of Casimir Pulaski. Pulaski
was an immigrant from Poland to North America. He became
(20:36):
a general in George Washington's Continental Army. He's considered now
to be a war hero in both Poland and in
the United States. Scientists who examined his skeleton a couple
of decades ago found that his pelvis looked more like
what they would expect on a female skeleton. They were
surprised enough by the pelvis's appearance that they wondered whether
(20:58):
his bones had been replaced with someone else's. At the time,
they planned to compare DNA from the remains to Pulaski's
living grand niece, but the technology in n was not
yet advanced enough to give a truly conclusive answer. That
is not the case today, and this year researchers concluded
that yes, the bones really are Pulaski's. So this evidence
(21:19):
also suggests that Pulaski may have been intersex or had
physical traits that don't clearly fit into a binary of
male and female. So in Pulaski's case, this includes that
his bone structure appeared more female, while he also had
male pattern baldness and facial hair. Facial hair is not
an exclusively male trait, but his pattern of facial hair
(21:40):
was definitely more masculine. This news led to a number
of articles suggesting that Pulaski might have been female, or
that we might need to refer to him with she
her pronouns instead of male pronouns, but that also doesn't
really match up what we know of Pulaski's life. He
was recorded as a boy when he was baptized, and
he really doesn't seemed to have gone outside the gender
(22:01):
norms for men during his life. If he or his
family thought anything was unusual about his body, that is
not recorded anywhere. So taking all of our cues from
Pulaski himself, he remains the right pronoun. Yeah. We we
should not reassign people's pronouns based on DNA evidence contrary
to how they actually lived. Uh. This was also part
(22:25):
of a Smithsonian Channel documentary, which, to be clear, I
have not watched. I don't know what all it says
in there. It's called America's Hidden Stories. The general was
female question mark and maybe we will have an episode
about Pulaski at some point in the future. Yeah, he
seems really interesting. Um. This research is also really interesting,
and it's also always interesting to have another potentially intersex
(22:48):
person um in our library of episodes. And the last
bit before we take a break isn't directly related to
Casimir Pulaski, but it does follow on with this practice
of trying to figure out sex and gender based on
a person's remains, and the idea of researchers figuring out
a person's sex based on their skeletal remains. It's come
(23:09):
up pretty frequently on our Unearthed episodes and in other
episodes of the show, but this is a really difficult
task in cultures that practice cremation. In a paper published
in January, Claudio Cavazouti of Durham University discusses analyzing the
cremated remains of a hundred and twenty four people which
were buried along with gendered grave goods, as in, a
(23:30):
grave containing weapons probably belonged to a man, and a
grave containing a yarn spindle was probably a woman's. They
cross referenced twenty four different skeletal traits with the goods
those remains were buried with to see if they could
find anything that seemed to predict gender. Out of these
twenty four traits, eight of them predicted the grave goods
gender with an accuracy rate of about eighty percent or better,
(23:54):
which is comparable with the methods that are used to
evaluate uncremated remains. So measurement of specific parts of the
bones like the thigh, the upper arm, the jaw, and
the big toe, among others, seemed to correlate with the
grave goods. Even after the body had been cremated, there
is still a lot of room for uncertainty in this though.
(24:14):
It all rests on the assumption that a society had
very clear gender roles in which people did not really
deviate from those roles, and that people's grave goods were
closely connected to their gender. It also assumes that there's
a close correlation between gender and sex, and in the
words of a press release on this discovery, quote anatomical
(24:35):
sex determination is possible in cremated remains, though they caution
that the measurements identified in this study differ from those
used to sex modern cremated remains, indicating that sexually diagnostic
traits differ between populations across time and space, but it
is still an interesting potential new source of data. Now
we're gonna take a quick sponsor break before getting into
(24:58):
some other things. Next up, we have a whole collection
of things that were repatriated or returned to where they
came from. First up, art Detective Arthur Brand returned to
Spanish reliefs that were at least a thousand years old,
(25:21):
handing them over to two officers and two museum curators
at the Spanish Embassy in London. These reliefs had been
stolen from the Santa Maria de Lara church in northern
Spain in two thousand four, and then a British couple
bought them, having no idea what they are or that
they had been stolen. The British Library returned three historic
documents that had been removed from a Greek monastery in
(25:43):
nineteen nine. Authorities in Greece had traced the illegally traffic
documents to the British Library, which immediately returned the documents
through the Greek embassy in London. And another similar story,
a Bible that was stolen out of the Carnegie Library
of Pittsburgh and then nineties was found in a museum
in the Netherlands and returned. The Bible was four hundred
(26:05):
four years old and it's theft had gone unnoticed for
several years until auditors surveyed the rare Books room where
it was housed. There were three hundred fourteen books missing
from this room, allegedly thanks to library archivist Gregory Prior
and Caliban bookshop owner John Schulman, who were in on
the job together. It appears that the criminal case so
(26:28):
the two of them, is ongoing. Yeah, as as I
was looking at this, there was there were a lot
of indictments and hearings and things like that, and it
doesn't appear that there have been convictions or acquittals yet
unless I missed something. This is not the only huge
document or book theft that we have to talk about,
because in similar news, in the nineteen forties, Harold E. Perry,
(26:51):
who was a clerk in the Massachusetts State Archives, meticulously
stole an extensive collection of historical documents and then covered
his acts by destroying the records of those documents in
the archive catalog. This is just evil archivists day. A
lot of these letters were kept in a bound book,
and he also clipped out the index page of the
(27:12):
book that listed the documents. His crime came to light,
and he was arrested in nineteen fifty and he received
a suspended sentence in exchange for helping track down the
material that he had stolen and then sold. Last year,
authorities tracked down one of the documents, a letter from
Alexander Hamilton's to the Marquis de Lafayette written in seventeen
(27:33):
eighty during the Revolutionary War. The FBI ultimately seized the
letter from an auction house in late and in May
of this year, the U s Attorney filed a forfeiture
complaint in Federal court to try to get the letter
back into the Commonwealth archive. That process seems to still
be ongoing. A relief found in Australia's Macquarie Museum has
(27:55):
been repatriated to Egypt after it was discovered that the
piece had been sled out of Egypt in the nineteen nineties.
The fragment was initially unearthed in the nineteen seventies or eighties,
but then officials at the storehouse where it was being
kept discovered that it was missing. In Now we're shifting
gears to talk about the remains of people, and in April,
(28:16):
Germany began the process of returning the remains of Aboriginal
people to Australia. These remains had been removed from Australia
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The April
ceremony was the first of several, described by Australia's Minister
for Communications as quote the largest number of ancestors returned
from Germany to date in Australia. Attempts will be made
(28:37):
to confirm the identity of each so they can be
returned to the appropriate people, and for one last gear
shift in this section. In opposite news to all of that,
and April, Greek President pro Copus Pavlopolis called for the
British Museum to return a collection of two thousand, five
hundred year old sculptures known as the Parthenon Marbles, which
(28:58):
were removed from Greece by Lord elgin In and are
now in the collection of the British Museum. So Greece
has been requesting for these marbles to be returned since
it became independent in eighteen thirty two, and this is
also a developing story, with protests taking place over it
at the British Museum in June. The museum has maintained
that these were acquired through a legal agreement with the
(29:21):
Ottoman Empire, which ruled Greece at the time, and has
so far returned refused to return the marbles. Now we're
doing a bigger gear shift to kind of nuttier topics. Yeah,
this was just the stuff that was just weird. It
goes together because it's weird. The Calby potato chip factory.
So there's your clue. We're really shifting gears at this point.
In Hong Kong has been using French potatoes to make
(29:43):
its chips, and one of its shipments earlier this year
contained not a potato but an unexploded World War One
hand grenade. It's a fine how do you do? Uh?
The grenade had been discharged, but it had not been detonated,
and then it probably just lay in a field until
it was accidentally dug up along with potatoes. A bomb
(30:03):
squad detonated it on site. No one was injured, and
then the news reports called it a bomb to tear,
which is great. Yes, if you do not speak French,
a pum to tear is what you call a potato.
It means apple of the earth, yep. But this is
a bomb to tear. I'm not usually really into the puns,
(30:25):
but the fact that this one combined the French that
delighted me. A plumber and machine operator in Aubourg, Denmark
pulled a medieval sword out of the ground in February,
having just found it on the job. The Historical Museum
of Northern Jutland was called in and identified the sword
as probably dating back to the fourteenth century. They noted
that it was very well made and was the type
(30:46):
of item that normally would have been buried with the
person who owned it, so they speculated that it may
have been lost during a battle and then it just
stayed where it fell for the centuries that followed. This
is not the first just discovered sword that we've talked about,
but it's been a while since we had one that
wasn't in a lake. A team at the University of
York has unearthed an account of a nun faking her
(31:08):
death to escape the convents. The register that contained this
account was in the archive the whole time, so the
book itself was not lost, but this was part of
a marginal note in one of them, so somebody had
to actually read all the scribbling to get to it.
It dates back to thirteen eighteen. Archbishop William Melton wrote
(31:29):
the nun Joan of Leeds was after quote the way
of carnal lust, but really that may have just meant
that she wanted to leave the religious life behind and
get married. He wrote that she quote out of a
malicious mind, simulating a bodily illness. She pretended to be dead,
not dreading for the health of her soul, and with
the help of numerous of her accomplices evildoers with malice
(31:51):
aforethought crafted a dummy in the likeness of her body
in order to mislead the devoted faithful, and she had
no shame in procuring its burial the sacred space amongst
the religious of that place. He later described it as
a scandal of all of her order. So in the
reporting about this, Professor Sarah Rees Jones described this as
(32:12):
being like a Monty Python sketch. And so far no
one has found an update about the resolution to all
of this. We don't know what happened with jan of
Leeds or what happened with the rest of her orders. Mystery.
I hope she had a very fun life. According to
a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, iron
(32:32):
age celts in southern France may have tried to embalm
decapitated heads. They came to this conclusion while studying skull
fragments that dated back to the third century b C.
With the fragments likely coming from people who were decapitated
after having been killed in battle. They found traces of
resin that are not present in animal skulls from the area,
(32:53):
suggesting that the resident was applied intentionally, probably to try
to slow down the decay process. These skull fragments were
also found within the walls of a compound, so they
suspect that this was done for the fort's own warriors
as a mark of respect, maybe to display them, not
to preserve the skulls for display outside as a warning
(33:15):
to their enemies. I guess maybe if you were really
into it, you might preserve your enemies skulls and hang
them inside to look upon them in victory things. Just
a little. Let's preserve this head and keep it indoors
all I can think of his future AMAS Head museum. Yeah,
where they just keep heads alive so that you could
talk to former presidents. Uh. We are once again moving
(33:39):
into a new area of discussion. Now we are to
a fan favorite, which is shipwrecks. Yep, who doesn't love
a shipwreck story? Uh? An anchor off the coast of Cornwall,
maybe from the Merchant Royal, which was a ship that
wrecked in the seventeenth century and is described as the
most valuable shipwreck of all time. A fishing vessel called
the Spirit and Lady caught the anchor while trawling separately,
(34:03):
Alexandria University's Archaeological Mission found several submerged anchors off the
coast of Egypt, as well a shipwreck found off the
Mediterranean coast of Egypt in what was the sunken port
city of what I think is pronounced Sonus Heracleon, that
is a guess, has confirmed herodotus description of a type
of boat known as a barrass. These ships were used
(34:26):
to sail along the Nile, and Herodotus wrote a lengthy
description of them and their construction in his history. He
said that they were using planks arranged like bricks and
connected with tenens, with beams stretched over the planks, with
a rudder and keel, and the whole thing made waterproof
with papyrus. So he wrote this description about twenty five
hundred years ago, But this is the first time anybody
(34:49):
has found the exact type of vessel that he was
talking about. I don't know if anybody is super doubted
whether he was being truthful in this account of boats.
There are plenty of questions and Herodotus history, but it
was nice to have it validated. In other news, and
astrolabe was pulled up for the wreck of the Esmerelda,
one of Vasco da Gama ships. In this year. It
(35:12):
was confirmed to be the oldest astrolabe ever found. Da
Gama had left the Esmerelda off the coast of Portugal
in fifteen o three, and the ship later sank in
a storm. This astrolabe was so warned by the time
it was discovered that it's markings were no longer visible
to the naked eye. It just looks like kind of
a corroded disc, so it took laser scanning and the
(35:33):
construction of a three D model to actually confirm what
it was. A whole bunch of shipping containers fell off
a ship in the North Sea at the beginning of
this year. Some of those contained hazardous materials and the
area is ecologically delicate, so salvage crews got to work
trying to track them all down, and they wound up
finding a shipwreck that dates back to fifteen forty and
(35:54):
is described as Dutch maritime histories missing link because it
represents a bridge between medieval maritime technology and the Dutch
Golden Age. This is at least fifty years older than
the previous oldest Dutch ship, and researchers are hoping to
use it to learn more about how Dutch maritime technology evolved.
An ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece has been
(36:15):
opened up as a public underwater museum. And it's not
all that uncommon for shipwrecks to become dive sites. I mean,
we talked about beer brought up from a shipwreck earlier
in the show, but this is the first ancient shipwreck
in Greece to be open to the public. It's a
ship that went down in the late fifth century BC,
so it's very old. It was carrying a huge load
(36:38):
of m for a filled with wine. So divers can
see the remains of the ship and these jars that
are all over the sea floor, plus of course the
sea life that makes its home there now and then
our last thing is just a cool thing that Tracy
found and I love it. I thought you might. Archaeologists
from Washington State University have found what they believe is
(36:59):
North of America's oldest tattoo tool. It dates back about
two thousand years to the ancestral Puebloans in what is
now you Tom and it is made of a suma candle,
yucca leaves and cactus spines, and those cactus spines are
stained black at the tips. Yeah, I wonder what that
tattoo was. It's a good question, um, and that has
(37:22):
been unearthed for July. We'll have some more unearthed in
the fall. See how it goes in terms of having
them more than twice a year. Yeah, and in the
meantime while we ponder what that could be like. Uh,
do you have listener mail for us? I do. It
is another listener mail about Tiffany stained Glass. And so
(37:46):
this is from Nathaniel, who says, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
I'm a longtime listener, first time writer. I just listened
to your recent podcast on hap shuts It. I was
aware of her existence, but not much more than that,
and I'm amazed at how much more there is to
know about her and the mystery of poot. Thank you.
The reason I'm writing, though, is the letter you read
at the end of that episode from a listener and
(38:07):
stained glass artisan, Christopher. I loved hearing what Christopher wrote,
and I wanted to add more information in that vein.
I'm also a great fan of Tiffany stained Glass put
me down as another plus one request for an episode
on that or an adjacent topic, and wanted to let
you know about an even bigger Tiffany Treasure Trove close by.
I'd like to thank Christopher for having so many teas
(38:30):
in that sentence. The Church of the Covenant, at the
corner of Berkeley and Newberry Streets, just one block away
from the Arlington Street church in Boston, which Christopher named
in his letter, has not only an enormous intact collection
of Tiffany stained glass, the church sanctuaries whole interior design
was entirely done by Tiffany to coordinate with the windows,
(38:52):
and includes an enormous Tiffany chandelier that was displayed at
the Chicago World's Fair. It's the largest surviving church that
Tiffany ever did unchanged since completion apart from maintenance, and
is now a National Historic Landmark Tracy. Since you're a
fellow Boston area local, you might want to know there
are open tours of Sanctuary offered in season most days.
(39:15):
If you want to do you an episode on Tiffany
or stained Glass, I'm happy to put you in touch
with someone at the Church of the Covenant if you'd like.
Although not a frequent churchgoer, I grew up attending Covenant
and married there a few years ago, and I'm still
a member. I would be thrilled to be helpful to you.
Then Nathaniel passes on uh topic suggestion about the invention
(39:36):
and history of pipe organs, which is also really fascinating,
and then concludes, I love the podcast and love history.
Thank you for helping me discover fascinating kidds knowledge about
the world. You make me a better and more nuanced person.
Warm regards, Nathaniel, Thank you so much, Nathaniel. Um, Yeah,
there is a surprising amount of Tiffany Glass and Tiffany
designed stuff in Boston and I'm sure in a lot
(39:59):
of other cities too. Uh. The way back when we
first talked about Tiffany Stained Glass on the show, one
of the things that I had stumbled across in very
short succession was that a whole building that was originally designed,
the interior design was all done by Tiffany, and there's
this huge restoration project going on because it's a building
(40:19):
that changed hands a lot of times, so unlike this church. Uh,
like a bunch of stuff is covered over and moved around,
and they've been trying to put it back to what
it used to look like. So there's just there's so much.
So thank you Nathaniel for that note and to everybody
who has sent us lots of email lately if you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast. Where a history podcast at how stuff Works
(40:41):
dot com, and then we're all over social media at
miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
and Instagram. You can also come to our website missed
in History dot com and find show notes for all
the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on together.
This one includes the links to the original stories for
all of these things that were unearthed. You can also
find a searchable five it every episode ever and then
(41:01):
up at the top of the page where it says
live shows, you can see information about our upcoming live
shows and tour, and you can subscribe to our show
in Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever
else you get more podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
(41:21):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly
Frying and it's time for Unearthed and July Part two.
(00:21):
We got a lot of the favorite things in this edition,
including the edibles and potables, and the shipwrecks and just
some weird stuff. Is all grouped together because it was
all kind of odd, uh, and some other assorted findings.
I think weird stuff is a great category, but we
are going to start with edibles and potables. A team
(00:42):
in Manti in Sri Lanka believes that they have found
the world's oldest clove, estimated to be one thousand years old.
There have been other clove discoveries that were older than that,
but at this point they're believed to be misidentifications. Clothes
are not native to Sri Lanka, though they grow in
the Maluku Islands, which are about four thousand miles away.
(01:02):
So this is not just the oldest clove, but it's
also evidence of a wide ranging trade in spices that
dates back at least one thousand years, and this is
supported by peppercorns of about the same age found at
the same site, which probably came from the Indian subcontinent.
Archaeologists in China's Jangsu Province found a jar full of
eggs in a year old tomb, and that led newspapers
(01:26):
around the world to make a lot of jokes about
thousand year eggs, also known as century eggs. These were
just eggs. They were in very good condition considering their age.
Only one of them was obviously broken, although the team
did report that the material inside the eggs would have
been largely decomposed by now. They planned to conduct some
(01:46):
X ray studies to determine exactly how many eggs were
in this jar, because they were way too delicate to
handle without the risk of damaging them. They are not
certain why the eggs were placed in the tomb, whether
this was an offering or if it was more of
a symbol of reverse or whether the deceased just really
liked eggs and wanted to make sure that they had
some eggs in the afterlife. I want eggs in the afterlife.
(02:11):
Researchers in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands now
believe that the presence of very small snail and clam
shells and archaeological sites there are evidence of children helping
their parents gather food through foraging. Previously, the conclusion had
been that these types of shells were evidence of people
who were really close to starvation and we're just eating
(02:32):
whatever they could find. But this team looked at shell
midden's dating back to about sixteen hundred years ago and
concluded that the adult foragers were focusing on large shellfish
that were really worth their time and effort to crack into,
while the children were picking up whatever they found that
was small enough for them to handle easily. This is
(02:52):
all sort of speculative, but it's also similar to research
taking place with current populations of islands in the Pacific,
where four patterns have been the same for generations and
where children routinely gather with their parents moving on to
some other food stuffs. A team excavating a construction site
in Ontario, Canada found some charred keenewa seeds from a
(03:14):
species of the plant that was native to eastern North
America but is extinct today. These seeds date back to
around nine hundred b C, which isn't the oldest keenewa
seed ever, but it is the farthest north that they
have been found that far back in history by a lot.
The previous northernmost example of this kina was from Kentucky,
(03:35):
and then the next oldest crop found in this part
of Ontario is corn that dated back to five d
b C, so four hundred years younger. This is technically
find The seeds themselves were unearthed in but the excavation
they were part of had collected one hundred forty thousand
of them and most of them were charred, so it
(03:55):
took years to go through all of them to find
out what was what, So it was late when the
findings on this were published. Today people think of keenoas
coming from South America, and it does, but this is
a species of food crop that was living at the
time in what's now Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas. In similar news,
a team of researchers from universities and institutions in the US,
(04:17):
the UK, China, and Lithuania has cross referenced the findings
of hundreds of studies of charred food crops like rice, millet, wheat,
and barley to create a massive map of how these
foods moved around the prehistoric world and what they found
was that these staple foods moved a very long way
between eight thousand and fifteen hundred BC, so I wouldn't
(04:40):
necessarily put all of that into the prehistoric bucket. Wheat
and barley were carried from southwest Asia into Europe, China,
and the Indian subcontinent. Rice spread across much of Asia.
Millet and sorgham originated in western Africa but moved to
the eastern and sub Saharan part of the continent, as
well as across the Indian Ocean, and then different types
(05:01):
of millets started out in Eastern Asia and moved west
all the way to Europe. Basically, although people might imagine
that food became more globalized after Europeans started traveling to
North America, that whole thing really started much much earlier,
with ordinary farmers trying new crops and strategies just to
get enough food. Now we have several things about beer.
(05:21):
Researchers in Peru are crediting a beer like beverage called
Chicha with keeping the Warri civilization stable in that part
of the continent from about six hundred to eleven CE.
This team has done research into pottery and the residues
within the pottery vessels and suggests that these pots in
the ticha that was being made, they're all being made locally,
(05:44):
with people traveling to what was essentially a tap room
for festivals and for more casual gatherings. The beverage was
also made with drought resistant pepper berries, which would have
helped ensure a steady supply of beer even when other
ingredients are much harder to grow. A lot of headlines
about this was like the secret to a long lived
society is plenty of beer. In other beer news, in
(06:07):
six the s s Oregon sank off Long Island. There
were no fatalities, but sadly a load of beer went
down with the ship. And this year a diver brought
three bottles back up from the bottom and gave one
of those bottles to serious brewing company who planned to
see if they could extract living yeast from it, and
the diver was one of the brewery's regular customers. Staff
at the brewery also tasted this beer, just a few
(06:30):
drops of it. According to the breweries owner of Bill Felter, quote,
it was nasty. I mean, I feel like we could
have said that without tasting it, but that's just probably um.
A few days after the story broke about Sirius Brewing's
plan to brew shipwreck beer, another story made their rounds
that St. James Brewery and whole Brook, Long Island had
(06:51):
already been making beer with yeast extracted from a bottle
from that same wreck for at least a year. That
beer uses both the shipwreck yeast and the modern string
sane An owner brewer Jamie Adams, was at the time
planning a beer with only yeast from the wreck to
debut at the New York State Brewers Fest. So after
getting this news that another brewery had already been doing
(07:11):
the thing he planned to do, Felter shelved his plans
to make a similar beer, not of respect for Adams
having done it already. Basically, the two New York brewers
were trying not to horn in on each other's beers.
This seems like a pretty amicable resolution, especially since at
first Adams thought about filing a season desist over it.
So hooray for brewers being cool. Yeah, it's a whole
(07:32):
saga about this shipwreck beer. Uh. And in one last
piece of beer news, scientists in Israel have extracted yeast
from a pottery that was up to five thousand years old,
and they've used that to brew beer. We got a
note about this one from listener Shatta, who mentioned that
the yeast had come from an archaeological fine we had
talked about an unearthed in I think that's actually a
(07:56):
much older find. The pottery that we talked about in
that particular thing was much older. But it's totally possible
that we did talk about the same find at somewhere
in a previous unearthed, because when I looked at I
was just keyword searching the past scripts for the word beer.
We've talked about beer, and almost all of them I'm
(08:16):
I'm waiting for the giant vodka discovery. So since I'm
not really a beer drinker. Um, okay, so this next
one is not exactly about food, but bear with us.
There is a lot of variety and human speech, but
a prevailing theory has been that most speech sounds have
existed for most of human history, not really changing all
that much. So even though some sounds like m are
(08:39):
common in much of the world, while others like the
clicking sounds in some African languages are more localized, that
all of these specific sounds have actually stayed pretty much
the same over time, But there's some new research from
the University of Zurich and two Max Planck Institutes that suggests,
maybe not hypothesizing, that some sounds like and are relatively
(09:01):
new and they only came about as the shape of
our human palet changed, with the changes of the palette
coming along with changes to what we eat. So basically,
early humans had a diet that was full of tough
foods that were difficult to chew, so by the time
people reached adulthood, their upper and lower teeth meant edge
to edge. But over time people started eating softer foods,
(09:23):
shifting their palette so that they had a slight overbite
with their upper front teeth slightly in front of the
lower ones most of the time, and that may have
made it possible for languages to start including sounds known
as labya dentals, in which your lower lip touches your
upper teeth. These sounds exist in about half of languages worldwide,
and they're especially prevalent in European languages, apparently rising with
(09:46):
advances in milling and other technologies that helped people produce
softer foods. These aren't the first researchers to suggest this connection,
but earlier linguists have been a lot more cautious that
this could just be a correlation rather in a causation.
And now we're going to take a quick break so
Tracy and I can make lots of weird noises with
our mouths and figure out what we're doing and if
(10:07):
that is Palette related through history, we'll be back at
just a moment. Okay, we have a couple or three
discoveries coming up that basically confirm existing oral histories. First up,
(10:29):
archaeologists in Nova Scotia have been using ground penetrating radar
to try to confirm whether Fort Ann is the site
of an Acadian burial ground. There's a known British cemetery
at that site, but it's also believed that there are
at least two thousand Acadian people buried there as well,
without any sort of marker remaining for them. Preliminary evidence
(10:51):
suggests that this is the case. This radar study found
very regularly spaced disturbances that were arranged in lines at
the same depth every time, So if this is accurate,
it would confirm the Acadian belief that they have ancestors
buried at Fort Anne. This ground penetrating radar work really
happened at the end of December, but it was just
(11:11):
making news at the start of this year. And I'll
also note that we do have the Acadian expulsion on
the idealist for a future episode. Don't know when it
will happen. Archaeologists have confirmed the oral histories of the
Lake Bebean First Nation in northern British Columbia, Canada, something
the nation had asked to have done. According to the
nation's oral history, there were fishing villages along the shores
(11:33):
of Lake Bebing before the arrival of European colonists in
the area. The team found evidence of these villages, one
of them quite large, along with wooden fishing weirs which
would have been used to catch sakey salmon. And in
our last confirmation, researchers have also discovered that First Nations
people in the northwestern coast of North America were farming
(11:53):
clams for about three thousand years, longer than previously thought,
and that study had focused on claim and beds that
had been recorded in native oral histories. We are now
moving on to one of my favorite things art, in
this case cave art and rock art Uh there's a
massive collection of witch marks in a limestone gorge called
(12:13):
Creswell Craigs in East Midlands. In the UK, staff knew
there were some kind of markings down there, but they
didn't really know much about them, and they described them
to visitors as Victorian graffiti. But a couple of cavers
remarked on them last year, leading experts to take a
closer look. What they found was not the two or
three markings that they were kind of expecting. There were
(12:36):
as many as a thousand marks. These were meant as
wards against evil. They included marks that looked like a
V to stand for the Virgin Mary, and shapes that
look like crosses, and the letters PM, which stands for
pot Maria. These types of marks were common in the
area from the sixteenth through the nineteen centuries, although it's
(12:56):
not completely clear exactly when these particular marks were made
or exactly what people were hoping to keep out or
for that matter, in by making these marks. Yeah, these
are these are the sorts of marks that you were
really see in a lot of places, like not just
in the UK, if you go to um Old like
colonial era homes in North America, A lot of times
(13:19):
there are vs and crosses and things in places that
were meant a word evil away. This is just an
astoundingly large collection of them. Uh, And I am really
curious of Like, did you think there was a hell
mouth down there? What was happening? Researchers have also recorded
and interpreted a set of Cherokee inscriptions in Manitou Cave
in Alabama. The first of these inscriptions dates back to
(13:42):
April of eighteen twenty eight, so that was just a
few years before the Cherokee and other native people's were
removed from the area under the Indian Removal activate teen thirty,
and also just three years after the Cherokee adopted the
Cherokee syllabary as a system of writing for the Cherokee language.
The inscriptions in the cave document things like a stickball
(14:03):
game and the religious ceremony surrounding it. Stickball is not
a simple sport, it has important ritual significance within Cherokee
culture and religion, and there are also inscriptions on the
ceiling of the cave written backwards as if the reader
is somewhere within the rock. So this research team included
European Americans as well as members of the Eastern Band
of Cherokee Indians, the United Katua Band of Cherokees, and
(14:26):
the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and they all work together
to determine both how to interpret what the inscriptions mean
and to decide what should and shouldn't be published in
academic works, and some of these inscriptions were just not
meant to be read beyond the Cherokee. This work was
also important because there's not a lot of archaeological evidence
of a Cherokee presence in the area. The cave became
(14:49):
a tourist attraction in and other physical connections to the
Cherokee were removed or destroyed at that time. Moving on,
archaeologists studying indigenous petroglyphs in Australia have discovered the crews
of nineteenth century whaling ships added their own carvings to
the same area as well, sometimes right on top of
(15:11):
the existing indigenous art. Some of the carvings in the
Damp Year Archipelago are up to fifty thousand years old,
and the whalers additions are from eighteen forty one and
eighteen forty nine. The team found carvings from crew members
of the Connecticut and the Delta, both of which were
whalers that hailed from the United States. It's not clear
(15:32):
whether the whaling crews interacted with the local population at all,
or what their motivations were for choosing these particular carving sites.
It could have been an intentional signal of disrespect, or
they could have just thought they were adding graffiti to
a place that already had a lot of graffiti on it.
This particular study also noted that the interactions between these
(15:53):
whaling crews and the indigenous people of Australia is something
that warrants for their study because in a lot of
places it's not clear whether anybody came ashore, whether they
had any contact with anyone. But it's also clear that
the native people knew that there were quailers off the
coast of Australia up so there's lots of room for
more work to be done. Moving on. A team has
(16:14):
determined that cave art found in the Balkan Peninsula in
is the peninsula's oldest known figurative cave art, so that
oldest known designation is what happened this year. The paintings
date back about thirty four thousand years and they include
a bison and ibis and what maybe human figures. Researchers
at the University of Barcelona have also found a piece
(16:37):
of Paleolithic art carved into limestone that they're describing as
a very early example of narrative art. The pieces about
twelve thousand, five hundred years old and appears to depict
two people chasing two birds, which appear to be an
adult and a young crane. There are only three scenes
found in Paleolithic art so far that depict humans alongside birds.
(17:00):
So next up we have a whole collection of findings
that in some way are connected to like a technological acronym,
so it's things like DNA and CT scans and lighter
stuff like that. First up, researchers used DNA analysis to
study some chewed up pieces of pitch that were unearthed
in western Sweden back in the nineteen eighties. These were
(17:23):
about eight thousand years old and at the time they
were being used to make weapons, so people would heat
up this pitch and then chew on it to make
it really soft and sticky, and then use little bits
of it to do things like attached points to weapon shafts.
The DNA analysis suggested that three different people had chewed
on this pitch, two female and one male, and they
(17:44):
may have been quite young, based on the size of
the tooth impressions, as young as five years old. But
they did not find any weapons that were made with
this particular pitch, so it's possible that they were just
kids chewing on the same stuff used to make weapons,
and we're not weapon makers. Them Elves and another discovery.
In previous installments of Unearthed, we have talked about vikings
(18:06):
a lot, and we have also talked about horse burials
a lot, and now we have both at the same time.
We knew that Viking warriors were often buried with their horses,
and now, thanks to DNA evidence, we know that most
of the Viking warriors were mail and so were the
horses that were buried with them. Of the nineteen horses
that were studied in this particular project, eighteen of them
(18:27):
were male. All of them appeared to be healthy and
well cared for before being killed, apparently for the purpose
of the burial. In researchers performed CT scans on a
group of mummies at a hospital in Madrid. This year,
They announced their findings that one of them was a
priest named Nespamdo who was paraoh Ptolemy the seconds eye Doctor,
(18:48):
possibly also Ptolemy the Third's eye doctor, although that is
a matter of dispute uh and they made this conclusion
based on a collection of plaques from within the bandages,
one of which was thought God of eye doctors. He
has a designation because of a story within the mythology
of replacing somebody's eye after it was not God, I
think in battle. In previous installments of Unearthed, we have
(19:11):
talked about the use of ground penetrating radar and other
non invasive technologies which has led to the discovery of
massive cities and buried structures in South America and in Europe.
Similar discoveries have also been happening in Africa, where light
our scans in a South African nature preserve have pinpointed
the location of the city of Quinning, which thrived from
(19:33):
the fourteen hundreds until the late nineteenth century. It's basic
location was already known, but this pinpointed it more specifically,
and this new study also suggests that it had about
three times as many buildings as previously thought. It's likely
that the city was composed of between eight hundred and
nine hundred walled compounds housing as many as ten thousand people.
(19:55):
A team from the University of Cincinnati have discovered evidence
that suggests that the Maya did more than a subsistence
level of farming, growing a surplus of things like cotton
to trade all around the Yucatan Peninsula. This research has
involved satellite imaging and light our studies that have revealed
drainage and irrigation systems along with Rhodes. In the words
(20:16):
of Nicholas Dunning, a professor of geography who was part
of this research team, quote, it was a much more
complex market economy than the Maya are often given credit for.
And last we have a little lengthier fine. DNA testing
has been conducted on the remains of Casimir Pulaski. Pulaski
was an immigrant from Poland to North America. He became
(20:36):
a general in George Washington's Continental Army. He's considered now
to be a war hero in both Poland and in
the United States. Scientists who examined his skeleton a couple
of decades ago found that his pelvis looked more like
what they would expect on a female skeleton. They were
surprised enough by the pelvis's appearance that they wondered whether
(20:58):
his bones had been replaced with someone else's. At the time,
they planned to compare DNA from the remains to Pulaski's
living grand niece, but the technology in n was not
yet advanced enough to give a truly conclusive answer. That
is not the case today, and this year researchers concluded
that yes, the bones really are Pulaski's. So this evidence
(21:19):
also suggests that Pulaski may have been intersex or had
physical traits that don't clearly fit into a binary of
male and female. So in Pulaski's case, this includes that
his bone structure appeared more female, while he also had
male pattern baldness and facial hair. Facial hair is not
an exclusively male trait, but his pattern of facial hair
(21:40):
was definitely more masculine. This news led to a number
of articles suggesting that Pulaski might have been female, or
that we might need to refer to him with she
her pronouns instead of male pronouns, but that also doesn't
really match up what we know of Pulaski's life. He
was recorded as a boy when he was baptized, and
he really doesn't seemed to have gone outside the gender
(22:01):
norms for men during his life. If he or his
family thought anything was unusual about his body, that is
not recorded anywhere. So taking all of our cues from
Pulaski himself, he remains the right pronoun. Yeah. We we
should not reassign people's pronouns based on DNA evidence contrary
to how they actually lived. Uh. This was also part
(22:25):
of a Smithsonian Channel documentary, which, to be clear, I
have not watched. I don't know what all it says
in there. It's called America's Hidden Stories. The general was
female question mark and maybe we will have an episode
about Pulaski at some point in the future. Yeah, he
seems really interesting. Um. This research is also really interesting,
and it's also always interesting to have another potentially intersex
(22:48):
person um in our library of episodes. And the last
bit before we take a break isn't directly related to
Casimir Pulaski, but it does follow on with this practice
of trying to figure out sex and gender based on
a person's remains, and the idea of researchers figuring out
a person's sex based on their skeletal remains. It's come
(23:09):
up pretty frequently on our Unearthed episodes and in other
episodes of the show, but this is a really difficult
task in cultures that practice cremation. In a paper published
in January, Claudio Cavazouti of Durham University discusses analyzing the
cremated remains of a hundred and twenty four people which
were buried along with gendered grave goods, as in, a
(23:30):
grave containing weapons probably belonged to a man, and a
grave containing a yarn spindle was probably a woman's. They
cross referenced twenty four different skeletal traits with the goods
those remains were buried with to see if they could
find anything that seemed to predict gender. Out of these
twenty four traits, eight of them predicted the grave goods
gender with an accuracy rate of about eighty percent or better,
(23:54):
which is comparable with the methods that are used to
evaluate uncremated remains. So measurement of specific parts of the
bones like the thigh, the upper arm, the jaw, and
the big toe, among others, seemed to correlate with the
grave goods. Even after the body had been cremated, there
is still a lot of room for uncertainty in this though.
(24:14):
It all rests on the assumption that a society had
very clear gender roles in which people did not really
deviate from those roles, and that people's grave goods were
closely connected to their gender. It also assumes that there's
a close correlation between gender and sex, and in the
words of a press release on this discovery, quote anatomical
(24:35):
sex determination is possible in cremated remains, though they caution
that the measurements identified in this study differ from those
used to sex modern cremated remains, indicating that sexually diagnostic
traits differ between populations across time and space, but it
is still an interesting potential new source of data. Now
we're gonna take a quick sponsor break before getting into
(24:58):
some other things. Next up, we have a whole collection
of things that were repatriated or returned to where they
came from. First up, art Detective Arthur Brand returned to
Spanish reliefs that were at least a thousand years old,
(25:21):
handing them over to two officers and two museum curators
at the Spanish Embassy in London. These reliefs had been
stolen from the Santa Maria de Lara church in northern
Spain in two thousand four, and then a British couple
bought them, having no idea what they are or that
they had been stolen. The British Library returned three historic
documents that had been removed from a Greek monastery in
(25:43):
nineteen nine. Authorities in Greece had traced the illegally traffic
documents to the British Library, which immediately returned the documents
through the Greek embassy in London. And another similar story,
a Bible that was stolen out of the Carnegie Library
of Pittsburgh and then nineties was found in a museum
in the Netherlands and returned. The Bible was four hundred
(26:05):
four years old and it's theft had gone unnoticed for
several years until auditors surveyed the rare Books room where
it was housed. There were three hundred fourteen books missing
from this room, allegedly thanks to library archivist Gregory Prior
and Caliban bookshop owner John Schulman, who were in on
the job together. It appears that the criminal case so
(26:28):
the two of them, is ongoing. Yeah, as as I
was looking at this, there was there were a lot
of indictments and hearings and things like that, and it
doesn't appear that there have been convictions or acquittals yet
unless I missed something. This is not the only huge
document or book theft that we have to talk about,
because in similar news, in the nineteen forties, Harold E. Perry,
(26:51):
who was a clerk in the Massachusetts State Archives, meticulously
stole an extensive collection of historical documents and then covered
his acts by destroying the records of those documents in
the archive catalog. This is just evil archivists day. A
lot of these letters were kept in a bound book,
and he also clipped out the index page of the
(27:12):
book that listed the documents. His crime came to light,
and he was arrested in nineteen fifty and he received
a suspended sentence in exchange for helping track down the
material that he had stolen and then sold. Last year,
authorities tracked down one of the documents, a letter from
Alexander Hamilton's to the Marquis de Lafayette written in seventeen
(27:33):
eighty during the Revolutionary War. The FBI ultimately seized the
letter from an auction house in late and in May
of this year, the U s Attorney filed a forfeiture
complaint in Federal court to try to get the letter
back into the Commonwealth archive. That process seems to still
be ongoing. A relief found in Australia's Macquarie Museum has
(27:55):
been repatriated to Egypt after it was discovered that the
piece had been sled out of Egypt in the nineteen nineties.
The fragment was initially unearthed in the nineteen seventies or eighties,
but then officials at the storehouse where it was being
kept discovered that it was missing. In Now we're shifting
gears to talk about the remains of people, and in April,
(28:16):
Germany began the process of returning the remains of Aboriginal
people to Australia. These remains had been removed from Australia
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The April
ceremony was the first of several, described by Australia's Minister
for Communications as quote the largest number of ancestors returned
from Germany to date in Australia. Attempts will be made
(28:37):
to confirm the identity of each so they can be
returned to the appropriate people, and for one last gear
shift in this section. In opposite news to all of that,
and April, Greek President pro Copus Pavlopolis called for the
British Museum to return a collection of two thousand, five
hundred year old sculptures known as the Parthenon Marbles, which
(28:58):
were removed from Greece by Lord elgin In and are
now in the collection of the British Museum. So Greece
has been requesting for these marbles to be returned since
it became independent in eighteen thirty two, and this is
also a developing story, with protests taking place over it
at the British Museum in June. The museum has maintained
that these were acquired through a legal agreement with the
(29:21):
Ottoman Empire, which ruled Greece at the time, and has
so far returned refused to return the marbles. Now we're
doing a bigger gear shift to kind of nuttier topics. Yeah,
this was just the stuff that was just weird. It
goes together because it's weird. The Calby potato chip factory.
So there's your clue. We're really shifting gears at this point.
In Hong Kong has been using French potatoes to make
(29:43):
its chips, and one of its shipments earlier this year
contained not a potato but an unexploded World War One
hand grenade. It's a fine how do you do? Uh?
The grenade had been discharged, but it had not been detonated,
and then it probably just lay in a field until
it was accidentally dug up along with potatoes. A bomb
(30:03):
squad detonated it on site. No one was injured, and
then the news reports called it a bomb to tear,
which is great. Yes, if you do not speak French,
a pum to tear is what you call a potato.
It means apple of the earth, yep. But this is
a bomb to tear. I'm not usually really into the puns,
(30:25):
but the fact that this one combined the French that
delighted me. A plumber and machine operator in Aubourg, Denmark
pulled a medieval sword out of the ground in February,
having just found it on the job. The Historical Museum
of Northern Jutland was called in and identified the sword
as probably dating back to the fourteenth century. They noted
that it was very well made and was the type
(30:46):
of item that normally would have been buried with the
person who owned it, so they speculated that it may
have been lost during a battle and then it just
stayed where it fell for the centuries that followed. This
is not the first just discovered sword that we've talked about,
but it's been a while since we had one that
wasn't in a lake. A team at the University of
York has unearthed an account of a nun faking her
(31:08):
death to escape the convents. The register that contained this
account was in the archive the whole time, so the
book itself was not lost, but this was part of
a marginal note in one of them, so somebody had
to actually read all the scribbling to get to it.
It dates back to thirteen eighteen. Archbishop William Melton wrote
(31:29):
the nun Joan of Leeds was after quote the way
of carnal lust, but really that may have just meant
that she wanted to leave the religious life behind and
get married. He wrote that she quote out of a
malicious mind, simulating a bodily illness. She pretended to be dead,
not dreading for the health of her soul, and with
the help of numerous of her accomplices evildoers with malice
(31:51):
aforethought crafted a dummy in the likeness of her body
in order to mislead the devoted faithful, and she had
no shame in procuring its burial the sacred space amongst
the religious of that place. He later described it as
a scandal of all of her order. So in the
reporting about this, Professor Sarah Rees Jones described this as
(32:12):
being like a Monty Python sketch. And so far no
one has found an update about the resolution to all
of this. We don't know what happened with jan of
Leeds or what happened with the rest of her orders. Mystery.
I hope she had a very fun life. According to
a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, iron
(32:32):
age celts in southern France may have tried to embalm
decapitated heads. They came to this conclusion while studying skull
fragments that dated back to the third century b C.
With the fragments likely coming from people who were decapitated
after having been killed in battle. They found traces of
resin that are not present in animal skulls from the area,
(32:53):
suggesting that the resident was applied intentionally, probably to try
to slow down the decay process. These skull fragments were
also found within the walls of a compound, so they
suspect that this was done for the fort's own warriors
as a mark of respect, maybe to display them, not
to preserve the skulls for display outside as a warning
(33:15):
to their enemies. I guess maybe if you were really
into it, you might preserve your enemies skulls and hang
them inside to look upon them in victory things. Just
a little. Let's preserve this head and keep it indoors
all I can think of his future AMAS Head museum. Yeah,
where they just keep heads alive so that you could
talk to former presidents. Uh. We are once again moving
(33:39):
into a new area of discussion. Now we are to
a fan favorite, which is shipwrecks. Yep, who doesn't love
a shipwreck story? Uh? An anchor off the coast of Cornwall,
maybe from the Merchant Royal, which was a ship that
wrecked in the seventeenth century and is described as the
most valuable shipwreck of all time. A fishing vessel called
the Spirit and Lady caught the anchor while trawling separately,
(34:03):
Alexandria University's Archaeological Mission found several submerged anchors off the
coast of Egypt, as well a shipwreck found off the
Mediterranean coast of Egypt in what was the sunken port
city of what I think is pronounced Sonus Heracleon, that
is a guess, has confirmed herodotus description of a type
of boat known as a barrass. These ships were used
(34:26):
to sail along the Nile, and Herodotus wrote a lengthy
description of them and their construction in his history. He
said that they were using planks arranged like bricks and
connected with tenens, with beams stretched over the planks, with
a rudder and keel, and the whole thing made waterproof
with papyrus. So he wrote this description about twenty five
hundred years ago, But this is the first time anybody
(34:49):
has found the exact type of vessel that he was
talking about. I don't know if anybody is super doubted
whether he was being truthful in this account of boats.
There are plenty of questions and Herodotus history, but it
was nice to have it validated. In other news, and
astrolabe was pulled up for the wreck of the Esmerelda,
one of Vasco da Gama ships. In this year. It
(35:12):
was confirmed to be the oldest astrolabe ever found. Da
Gama had left the Esmerelda off the coast of Portugal
in fifteen o three, and the ship later sank in
a storm. This astrolabe was so warned by the time
it was discovered that it's markings were no longer visible
to the naked eye. It just looks like kind of
a corroded disc, so it took laser scanning and the
(35:33):
construction of a three D model to actually confirm what
it was. A whole bunch of shipping containers fell off
a ship in the North Sea at the beginning of
this year. Some of those contained hazardous materials and the
area is ecologically delicate, so salvage crews got to work
trying to track them all down, and they wound up
finding a shipwreck that dates back to fifteen forty and
(35:54):
is described as Dutch maritime histories missing link because it
represents a bridge between medieval maritime technology and the Dutch
Golden Age. This is at least fifty years older than
the previous oldest Dutch ship, and researchers are hoping to
use it to learn more about how Dutch maritime technology evolved.
An ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece has been
(36:15):
opened up as a public underwater museum. And it's not
all that uncommon for shipwrecks to become dive sites. I mean,
we talked about beer brought up from a shipwreck earlier
in the show, but this is the first ancient shipwreck
in Greece to be open to the public. It's a
ship that went down in the late fifth century BC,
so it's very old. It was carrying a huge load
(36:38):
of m for a filled with wine. So divers can
see the remains of the ship and these jars that
are all over the sea floor, plus of course the
sea life that makes its home there now and then
our last thing is just a cool thing that Tracy
found and I love it. I thought you might. Archaeologists
from Washington State University have found what they believe is
(36:59):
North of America's oldest tattoo tool. It dates back about
two thousand years to the ancestral Puebloans in what is
now you Tom and it is made of a suma candle,
yucca leaves and cactus spines, and those cactus spines are
stained black at the tips. Yeah, I wonder what that
tattoo was. It's a good question, um, and that has
(37:22):
been unearthed for July. We'll have some more unearthed in
the fall. See how it goes in terms of having
them more than twice a year. Yeah, and in the
meantime while we ponder what that could be like. Uh,
do you have listener mail for us? I do. It
is another listener mail about Tiffany stained Glass. And so
(37:46):
this is from Nathaniel, who says, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
I'm a longtime listener, first time writer. I just listened
to your recent podcast on hap shuts It. I was
aware of her existence, but not much more than that,
and I'm amazed at how much more there is to
know about her and the mystery of poot. Thank you.
The reason I'm writing, though, is the letter you read
at the end of that episode from a listener and
(38:07):
stained glass artisan, Christopher. I loved hearing what Christopher wrote,
and I wanted to add more information in that vein.
I'm also a great fan of Tiffany stained Glass put
me down as another plus one request for an episode
on that or an adjacent topic, and wanted to let
you know about an even bigger Tiffany Treasure Trove close by.
I'd like to thank Christopher for having so many teas
(38:30):
in that sentence. The Church of the Covenant, at the
corner of Berkeley and Newberry Streets, just one block away
from the Arlington Street church in Boston, which Christopher named
in his letter, has not only an enormous intact collection
of Tiffany stained glass, the church sanctuaries whole interior design
was entirely done by Tiffany to coordinate with the windows,
(38:52):
and includes an enormous Tiffany chandelier that was displayed at
the Chicago World's Fair. It's the largest surviving church that
Tiffany ever did unchanged since completion apart from maintenance, and
is now a National Historic Landmark Tracy. Since you're a
fellow Boston area local, you might want to know there
are open tours of Sanctuary offered in season most days.
(39:15):
If you want to do you an episode on Tiffany
or stained Glass, I'm happy to put you in touch
with someone at the Church of the Covenant if you'd like.
Although not a frequent churchgoer, I grew up attending Covenant
and married there a few years ago, and I'm still
a member. I would be thrilled to be helpful to you.
Then Nathaniel passes on uh topic suggestion about the invention
(39:36):
and history of pipe organs, which is also really fascinating,
and then concludes, I love the podcast and love history.
Thank you for helping me discover fascinating kidds knowledge about
the world. You make me a better and more nuanced person.
Warm regards, Nathaniel, Thank you so much, Nathaniel. Um, Yeah,
there is a surprising amount of Tiffany Glass and Tiffany
designed stuff in Boston and I'm sure in a lot
(39:59):
of other cities too. Uh. The way back when we
first talked about Tiffany Stained Glass on the show, one
of the things that I had stumbled across in very
short succession was that a whole building that was originally designed,
the interior design was all done by Tiffany, and there's
this huge restoration project going on because it's a building
(40:19):
that changed hands a lot of times, so unlike this church. Uh,
like a bunch of stuff is covered over and moved around,
and they've been trying to put it back to what
it used to look like. So there's just there's so much.
So thank you Nathaniel for that note and to everybody
who has sent us lots of email lately if you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast. Where a history podcast at how stuff Works
(40:41):
dot com, and then we're all over social media at
miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
and Instagram. You can also come to our website missed
in History dot com and find show notes for all
the episodes Holly and I have ever worked on together.
This one includes the links to the original stories for
all of these things that were unearthed. You can also
find a searchable five it every episode ever and then
(41:01):
up at the top of the page where it says
live shows, you can see information about our upcoming live
shows and tour, and you can subscribe to our show
in Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever
else you get more podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
(41:21):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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