Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It is time for Unearthed,
Speaker 1: this time for the episode that's just going to close
Speaker 1: out the last three months of twenty twenty three, even
Speaker 1: though it is now twenty twenty four. If you're new
Speaker 1: to the show, this is when a few times a
Speaker 1: year we take a look at things that have been
Speaker 1: literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So
Speaker 1: this is October, November, and December of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: We will be kicking.
Speaker 1: Off with a whole whole lot of updates to prior
Speaker 1: episodes of the show, including some updates on things that
Speaker 1: have come up.
Speaker 2: On Unearthed before.
Speaker 1: We also in today's episode have some things that were
Speaker 1: dug up in the garden, and some edibles and potables
Speaker 1: which are not the garden, and some books and letters.
Speaker 1: And then on Wednesday we'll have some other perennial favorites
Speaker 1: like shipwrecks and artwork.
Speaker 2: Those will all be next time.
Speaker 1: So back in twenty fourteen, we did a full episode
Speaker 1: on Stone Hinge after non invasive imaging revealed a lot
Speaker 1: of previously unknown monuments and other structures under the surface there.
Speaker 1: Of course, there has been other research at the site
Speaker 1: since then, some of which we have covered on subsequent
Speaker 1: installments of Onearthed. This year, one team is focused on
Speaker 1: Stone eighty, which is known as the Altarstone, leading to
Speaker 1: a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science titled
Speaker 1: the Stonehenge Alterstone was probably not sourced from the old
Speaker 1: red sandstone of the Anglo Welsh basin time to broaden
Speaker 1: our geographic and stratigraphic horizons. That whole thing is the
Speaker 1: paper's title.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: It amuses me as a title because it is just
Speaker 1: structurally dissimilar from a lot of paper titles. You don't
Speaker 1: usually have a complete sentence followed by a complete sentence
Speaker 1: question as the title of the paper. They're borrowing from
Speaker 1: old school title style.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of.
Speaker 1: So in this paper, researchers used several methods to analyze
Speaker 1: the altstone, and this included optical petrography, X ray fluorescence
Speaker 1: and scanning, electron microscope and energy dispersive X ray spectography,
Speaker 1: and they found that this stone has a higher barium
Speaker 1: content than most of the other stones at the site,
Speaker 1: and then, as that paper title suggests, the stone was
Speaker 1: believed to have originated from the Anglo Welsh Basin. There
Speaker 1: are some stones from that basin that have a similar
Speaker 1: barium content to the ultrastone, but those do not have
Speaker 1: the same mineral content as the altarstone, so they're kind
Speaker 1: of not an exact match. This suggests that this stone
Speaker 1: may have come from somewhere else, possibly farther north in Britain,
Speaker 1: and possibly from sandstone deposits that are younger than this
Speaker 1: roughly four hundred million year old Old Red Sandstone formation
Speaker 1: of West Wales. I did not realize how challenging Old
Speaker 1: Red Sandstone was going to be to say, to shift
Speaker 1: gears and expand on, something we briefly mentioned in our
Speaker 1: recent two parter on indigenous writer Mourning Dove. Research into
Speaker 1: fossilized footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico
Speaker 1: has been ongoing over the last couple of years. In
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, a paper titled evidence of humans in
Speaker 1: North America during the Last Glacial Maximum was published in
Speaker 1: the journal Science, and it described these footprints as having
Speaker 1: been made between twenty one thousand and twenty three thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, So this twenty twenty one research was controversy
Speaker 1: for a few reasons. Within the field of archaeology, one
Speaker 1: of the prevailing hypotheses about the arrival of humans in
Speaker 1: the Americas is known as Clovis First, and that's basically
Speaker 1: that the culture known as the Clovis people was the
Speaker 1: first to inhabit North America and that started roughly thirteen
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. So there was already archaeological research suggesting
Speaker 1: that humans were in the Americas before that point, but
Speaker 1: this ten thousand year difference between thirteen thousand years and
Speaker 1: twenty three thousand years from this paper that seemed really dramatic.
Speaker 1: There were also archaeologists who expressed some skepticism about the
Speaker 1: conclusions because this research was based on radiocarbon dating of
Speaker 1: aquatic plant seeds in what is now rock but had
Speaker 1: been a lake bed, So if the seeds had absorbed
Speaker 1: carbon from the water, that could have thrown off the
Speaker 1: app accuracy of this carbon dating. In addition to that,
Speaker 1: indigenous scholars and critics pointed out that this research and
Speaker 1: the reporting around it didn't really acknowledge any connection between
Speaker 1: these footprints and the indigenous peoples of North America. Although
Speaker 1: the National Park Service's news release described the research as
Speaker 1: done quote in connection with the Park's Native American partners,
Speaker 1: this wasn't reflected in the text of the paper or
Speaker 1: in reporting from major news outlets like The New York Times.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a suggestion that these footprints were made by
Speaker 1: the ancestors of Indigenous people living today, or that the
Speaker 1: results affirmed indigenous nations own histories about how long they've
Speaker 1: been on the continents. The Pony Tribe member Nick Martin,
Speaker 1: writing for High Country News, described it this way, quote
Speaker 1: anyone who read only mainstream coverage would walk away without
Speaker 1: a clue that this is actually an indigenous story, not
Speaker 1: merely a triumphant discovery of capital science. Not a single
Speaker 1: Indigenous citizen, historian, elder, storyholder, biologist, geneticist, or archaeologist was
Speaker 1: quoted in the piece, nor did the word indigenous or
Speaker 1: native appear once. Martin also cited cremate archaeologist Paulette Stevens,
Speaker 1: whose book The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere details
Speaker 1: archaeological sites that date back farther than twenty three thousand years,
Speaker 1: sometimes much farther. But a lot of this news reporting
Speaker 1: really made the newly published papers conclusions sounds almost unprecedented.
Speaker 1: New research published in October supports the conclusions from the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one paper, this time using carbon dating of
Speaker 1: ancient pollen greens, as well as a technique called optically
Speaker 1: stimulated luminescence which estimates the age of the courts in
Speaker 1: the sediment layers. This research was again published in the
Speaker 1: journal Science under the title Independent age Estimates Resolve the
Speaker 1: controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands. There have
Speaker 1: been archaeologists who have pointed out that seeds, pollen, and
Speaker 1: quartz luminescence all have downsides for use in dating. But
Speaker 1: now there are three different sources of data, all pointing
Speaker 1: to the same basic time period. So this paper's acknowledgments
Speaker 1: begin quote. Science is a way of knowing, and we
Speaker 1: acknowledge that there are many ways of knowing. Therefore, we
Speaker 1: deeply appreciate the perspectives, cultural practices, and oral histories of
Speaker 1: the tribes and pueblos whose homeland is in southern New Mexico.
Speaker 1: This time around, The New York Times quoted Edward Jolie,
Speaker 1: who is an enrolled citizen of the Muskogee Creek Nation
Speaker 1: of Oklahoma and also has Oglala Lakota ancestry. Jolly said,
Speaker 1: in part quote, it's another one of those we told
Speaker 1: you so. A lot of Natives have said, We've always
Speaker 1: been here. NPR also quoted Julie as saying, quote, given
Speaker 1: that the vast majority of archaeology in the Americas is
Speaker 1: the archaeology of Native Americans, it's particularly significant that Native voices,
Speaker 1: Indigenous voices have become more prominent and more accepted. So
Speaker 1: I feel like this is a step forward from the
Speaker 1: first paper and how it is reported on, but I
Speaker 1: still would not call this like a collaborative or indigenous
Speaker 1: led project. Right moving on, we did an episode on
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic in twenty fourteen, and then
Speaker 1: again a year into the COVID nineteen pandemic. We revisited
Speaker 1: that topic through the lens of what we had all
Speaker 1: been living through. One of the things we mentioned in
Speaker 1: both of those episodes was that the nineteen eighteen flu
Speaker 1: pandemic disproportionately killed young, otherwise healthy people, unlike many infectious
Speaker 1: diseases that are more likely to be fatal to the
Speaker 1: very old, the very young, and people who have illnesses
Speaker 1: or certain disabilities. That's been a widely repeated description of
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighteen pandemic, but research published in the Proceedings
Speaker 1: of the National Academy of Sciences in October calls that
Speaker 1: into question. So this research was based on analysis of
Speaker 1: the skeletons of three hundred and sixty nine people from
Speaker 1: the Hammontode Documented Osteological Collection in Cleveland, Ohio. The researchers
Speaker 1: divided the bones that they were examining into a control
Speaker 1: group people who had died before the pandemic, and then
Speaker 1: the group that died during the pandemic. The skeleton's shin
Speaker 1: bones were examined for lesions that would indicate some kind
Speaker 1: of environmental, social, or nutritional stress. The researchers concluded that
Speaker 1: the people who had active lesions were to use their
Speaker 1: terminology frail, and that they were more likely to die
Speaker 1: during the pandemic. They concluded that there wasn't clear evidence
Speaker 1: that the nineteen eighteen flu disproportionately killed young, healthy people.
Speaker 1: It was true that the people who cared for patients
Speaker 1: during the flu and reported their deaths saw lot more
Speaker 1: young adults dying than during other disease outbreaks, but according
Speaker 1: to this research, pre existing medical conditions and socioeconomic factors
Speaker 1: played a role in their deaths. In other words, they
Speaker 1: may have been young, but they were not necessarily healthy.
Speaker 1: There are some limits to this research though. The skeletons
Speaker 1: in the Hammontide collection are all from people who died
Speaker 1: in Cleveland. Most of them died in places like prisons,
Speaker 1: charity hospitals, poorhouses, and tuberculosis clinics, and then their bodies
Speaker 1: were unclaimed, So that's a very specific population of people.
Speaker 1: It is not really clear whether these results would apply
Speaker 1: to the population more broadly. And this also doesn't really
Speaker 1: explain why the nineteen eighteen flu was disproportionately more lethal
Speaker 1: among young adults compared to other epidemics, because people do
Speaker 1: tend to develop more conditions that can place more stress
Speaker 1: on their bodies as they get older. A side note,
Speaker 1: this collection has come up on the show before it
Speaker 1: was developed by carl A.
Speaker 2: Hammon and Thomas W. Todd.
Speaker 1: Past podcast subject W. Montague Cobb studied under Todd at
Speaker 1: Western Reserve University and worked with this collection. We will
Speaker 1: take a quick sponsor break and then we will come
Speaker 1: back for a few more updates. In twenty eleven, prior
Speaker 1: hosts of the show did an episode on the nineteen
Speaker 1: eleven Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, which killed almost one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty workers, most of them young women in New
Speaker 1: York City. There was not much to commemorate this fire
Speaker 1: until October of last.
Speaker 2: Year, when a new memorial.
Speaker 1: Was dedicated at the site where the fire took place.
Speaker 1: This memorial has text in English, Yiddish, and Italian, which
Speaker 1: are the languages that were spoken by the workers who
Speaker 1: died there. And then there's also a stainless steel ribbon
Speaker 1: mounted about twelve feet above the sidewalk on two sides
Speaker 1: of the building. Those ribbons list the names of one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty six victims of the fire, and the
Speaker 1: names are cut through the steel, so they reflect on
Speaker 1: this dark panel that's below that. As I understand it,
Speaker 1: I think there's a second part of this memorial that
Speaker 1: is still in the works.
Speaker 2: Moving on.
Speaker 1: In autumn of twenty twenty two, we talked about the
Speaker 1: discovery of an iron folding chair that was found in
Speaker 1: a burial site. This chair dates back to the sixth century,
Speaker 1: and at the time it was removed from the site
Speaker 1: as part of a whole block of soil. It has
Speaker 1: now been fully excavated from that block. The Bavarian State
Speaker 1: Office for Monument Preservation conducted the excavation as well as
Speaker 1: an analysis of the chair, which found that it had
Speaker 1: previously undetected brass inlays as decoration. When we first talked
Speaker 1: about this chair, it was believed to have been buried
Speaker 1: as a mark of status for the person it was
Speaker 1: buried with, or maybe a mark of political office. That
Speaker 1: continues to be true. This is a woman's burial site
Speaker 1: and we don't really know much about her, but she
Speaker 1: seems to have been very high status. Also, this chair,
Speaker 1: it just looks like an iron frame if you look
Speaker 1: at pictures of it, kind of an X shaped iron frame.
Speaker 1: The seat has not survived until today, but there are
Speaker 1: traces left on the iron that suggest it was made
Speaker 1: from animal fur. In April of twenty sixteen, we did
Speaker 1: an episode on Denmark's early history and the Yellingstones. These
Speaker 1: runestones were part of research that was published in the
Speaker 1: journal Antiquity this past fall. This research used three D
Speaker 1: scanning to study the inscriptions on the Yelling Stone and
Speaker 1: another set of runestones called the rov Noon two Stones.
Speaker 1: Both sets of runestones mention a woman called Thyral. The
Speaker 1: Yellingstones were raised by King Harold Bluetooth to commemorate his parents,
Speaker 1: Gorm and Thyrus, so we know who that Thira is,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't clear whether the Thiram mentioned and the
Speaker 1: rabnuns two stones was the same person. The team's analysis
Speaker 1: of the stones, shapes and carving techniques suggest that the
Speaker 1: same person carved at least one each of the Yelling
Speaker 1: Stones and the rabnunj two stones, so they concluded that
Speaker 1: the thire mentioned and the two different stones were probably
Speaker 1: the same person. If that is the case, then she
Speaker 1: was mentioned more than any other person in runestones from
Speaker 1: Viking Age Denmark, meaning that she was probably very powerful
Speaker 1: and important. So last time we did an earst, we
Speaker 1: talked about the discovery that more than one thousand items
Speaker 1: were missing from the collection of the British Museum. As
Speaker 1: of reporting in mid December, only about three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty of them had been recovered. Nearly all of the
Speaker 1: recovered items came from the antiquities dealer who first warned
Speaker 1: the museum that items were being stolen back in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one. There were also an the other three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty items in the museum's collection that were discovered
Speaker 1: to be missing gold mounts or gemstones. It's likely that
Speaker 1: most of those will not be recovered because they were sold.
Speaker 1: In case of the gold mounts were just melted down
Speaker 1: and sold as scrap. Next, the Cern Giant made an
Speaker 1: appearance on Unearthed in July of twenty twenty one. That is,
Speaker 1: the enormous chalk figure of a naked man carrying a
Speaker 1: knotted club on a hillside in Dorset, England. At the time,
Speaker 1: researchers were trying to figure out how old it was,
Speaker 1: and that research wound up involving microscopic snails. These researchers
Speaker 1: estimated that the oldest chalk layers dated to between the
Speaker 1: years seven hundred and eleven hundred. They did not find
Speaker 1: evidence to suggest who made the figure, why, or what
Speaker 1: it is meant to represent. New research published last year
Speaker 1: builds on that earlier study and suggests some answers to
Speaker 1: those questions. The team included that the giant marked a
Speaker 1: muster site for the armies of King Alfred and was
Speaker 1: originally meant to represent the mythical figure of Hercules, and
Speaker 1: then later on monkst that Cern Abbess reinterpreted it as
Speaker 1: a representation of Saint Edwold Alfred lived in the ninth century,
Speaker 1: which aligns with that earlier research on the age of
Speaker 1: the chalklayers and researchers pointed out several similarities between classical
Speaker 1: depictions of Hercules and the Cern giant, including the knotted club,
Speaker 1: his nakedness, and the fact that Hercules was often depicted
Speaker 1: in motion and that chalk figure looks like he's walking.
Speaker 1: They described various written references to Hercules in the early
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, and they pointed out how CERN's location, proximity
Speaker 1: to water and shelter, and proximity to known Viking rating
Speaker 1: sites made it an ideal muster point for an army,
Speaker 1: as is the case a lot of the time. A
Speaker 1: lot of the reports on this research made it so
Speaker 1: like this is the conclusive solving of a mystery. This
Speaker 1: is really, as the paper itself makes clear, a possible
Speaker 1: explanation based on available evidence and the words of Thomas Morcombe,
Speaker 1: a researcher at the University of Oslo, in one of
Speaker 1: the paper's articles, quote, I think we found a compelling
Speaker 1: narrative that fits the giant into the local landscape and
Speaker 1: history better than ever before, changing him from an isolated
Speaker 1: mystery to an active participant in the local community and culture. Also,
Speaker 1: I realized after I wrote this entire piece that it's
Speaker 1: technically something I should have saved for the first Unearthed
Speaker 1: installment of twenty twenty four. But oh well, no one
Speaker 1: really cares. You're going to unearthed jail, which I have
Speaker 1: to now build. Thanks a lot, Tracy. In November, the
Speaker 1: US MEANT unveiled a new quarter featuring past podcast subject
Speaker 1: Maria tallchief that was part of the American Women Quarters program.
Speaker 1: These quarters all feature the head of George Washington shown
Speaker 1: in profile on the obverse, with the women on the reverse.
Speaker 1: Tall Chiefs coin shows her in a balletic leap with
Speaker 1: both her English and Osage names, with her O Sage
Speaker 1: name written in Osage orthography. Past podcast subject Nina Otero
Speaker 1: Warren was also featured on one of these quarters back
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty two, which I did not know about
Speaker 1: until just now. Forthcoming quarters that are planned through twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five include past subjects Mary Edwards Walker, I To
Speaker 1: b Wells, and Juliette Gordon Lowe, and in our last update,
Speaker 1: the n C Wyeth illustration that somebody bought for four
Speaker 1: dollars at a Savers in New Hampshire, which we talked
Speaker 1: about in our previous installment of Unearthed, continued to make
Speaker 1: news in Q four. It sold at auction for one
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety one thousand dollars in September, but the
Speaker 1: buyer never paid the auction house and the seller had
Speaker 1: to reclaim it. But in December the illustration was scx
Speaker 1: specfully sold to a private buyer for more than one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars. Moving on, we have three fines that
Speaker 1: were found out in the garden. First, a metal detectorist
Speaker 1: found some bronze discs in a newly harvested carrot field
Speaker 1: in northeastern Switzerland over the summer and notified archaeologists about them.
Speaker 1: They then worked with the landowner to get permission to
Speaker 1: cut a block of soil out of this carrot field
Speaker 1: and take it to the lab, where they wound up
Speaker 1: finding more of these discs, along with two spiral finger
Speaker 1: rings and more than one hundred amber beads that were
Speaker 1: so tiny they had to be picked out of the
Speaker 1: soil with sweezers. The discs were probably part of a
Speaker 1: necklace and the team also found some gold spirals separate
Speaker 1: from those finger rings that might have been spacers in
Speaker 1: between the discs when it was worn as a necklace.
Speaker 1: All this dates back to about fifteen hundred BCE. They
Speaker 1: also found some things that were jewelry, including a beaver tooth,
Speaker 1: a bear tooth, and a shark tooth, as well as
Speaker 1: bits of ore in crystal, an arrowhead, and an ammonite fossil.
Speaker 1: It's possible that they and the necklace were all intentionally buried.
Speaker 1: An article in Smithsonian Magazine describes them as possibly someone's
Speaker 1: collection of curiosities or things that were worn together as
Speaker 1: a protective amulet. Next, a family on the island of
Speaker 1: Yomferland in southern Norway was using a metal detector to
Speaker 1: try to find a lost ear ring in their garden
Speaker 1: when they instead found two ninth century broaches under a tree.
Speaker 2: One was oval.
Speaker 1: Shaped and was a style that was often worn as
Speaker 1: part of a pair, but the other one is not
Speaker 1: the match to that one. It is circular and matches
Speaker 1: a style that was known to have been used in
Speaker 1: Denmark sometime around seven eighty to eight fifty CE. It
Speaker 1: is possible that these items came from a burial site,
Speaker 1: and that the map to the oval pen, along with
Speaker 1: other grave goods or possibly remains, they might be found
Speaker 1: with some further excavation. According to an article in artnet News,
Speaker 1: this is the earliest conclusive evidence that Jomfrelun was actually
Speaker 1: settled in the ninth century. This last one, before we
Speaker 1: take a break, starts out in a garden, but then
Speaker 1: moves beyond it. The National Museums of Scotland published work
Speaker 1: in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
Speaker 1: in November detailing discoveries that were made back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties and sixties. The first was in nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: when a schoolboy in Fife was assigned to dig potatoes
Speaker 1: in the school garden as a punishment. In addition to
Speaker 1: the potatoes, he found a four thousand year old Egyptian
Speaker 1: statue head made from sandstone. The statue head was sent
Speaker 1: to the Royal Scottish Museum, which is now the National
Speaker 1: Museums of Scotland, and at the time people thought this
Speaker 1: was a really unexpected but isolated find. They seemed to
Speaker 1: have kind of gone, wow, that's weird, and then moved on.
Speaker 1: This school was located at a historic building called Melville House,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen sixty six another student there was vaulting
Speaker 1: during pe class and landed on part of a bronze
Speaker 1: votive statue of an APIs bowl that was sticking out
Speaker 1: of the ground. And what was really just a wild coincidence,
Speaker 1: the teacher who was supervising this pe class was the
Speaker 1: boy that had dug up the sandstone head out of
Speaker 1: the ground in nineteen fifty two. He apparently left the
Speaker 1: school with this statuette, which was never recovered. The school
Speaker 1: eventually closed and the Fife Regional Council purchased Melville House
Speaker 1: to use as a residential school for children with behavioral
Speaker 1: issues who had been convicted of a crime. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, a group of teens took yet another find
Speaker 1: to the National Museum of Scotland, this time an ancient
Speaker 1: Egyptian figurine of a man made from bronze. It was
Speaker 1: at this point where people were like, Okay, something's going
Speaker 1: on here, what's under the Melville School.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: After finally getting some more specific information about exactly where
Speaker 1: this statue had been found, the museum did a more
Speaker 1: thorough investigation and they found a number of other Egyptian
Speaker 1: objects buried there. The Crown claimed the figurine and other
Speaker 1: finds from the former school site as a treasure trove.
Speaker 1: They are now in the museum's collections, and this seems
Speaker 1: to be the only collection of Egyptian objects to be
Speaker 1: declared a treasure trove in Scotland. It's not entirely clear
Speaker 1: where these objects came from or why they were buried
Speaker 1: at Melville House, but one possibility is at Alexander Lord Balgoni,
Speaker 1: who had inherited the property, acquired them during a visit
Speaker 1: to Egypt in eighteen fifty six. He took that trip
Speaker 1: to try to improve his health, but he died of
Speaker 1: tuberculosis in eighteen fifty seven. It's possible that his relatives
Speaker 1: buried these things because the memories of him they invoked
Speaker 1: were painful, or because they thought they were cursed, which
Speaker 1: was a commonly held superstition in Britain in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: Now that superstition was not held only in Britain, obviously,
Speaker 1: but that was sort of a thing that a lot
Speaker 1: of non Egyptian people thought about things that had been
Speaker 1: brought out of Egyptian teams will take a quick sponsor
Speaker 1: break before we talk about edibles and potables. Next, we
Speaker 1: have some edibles and potables. First, research using dental calculus
Speaker 1: or tartar suggests that people in a lot of western
Speaker 1: Europe regularly used seaweed as a food source for thousands
Speaker 1: of years. Researchers evaluated samples from the tea the seventy
Speaker 1: four People taken from twenty eight archaeological sites. Those sites
Speaker 1: stretched from southern Spain to northern Scotland, and they found
Speaker 1: evidence that people made seaweed, pond weed, and other similar
Speaker 1: aquatic plants a regular part of their diets from roughly
Speaker 1: sixty four hundred BCEE to the twelfth century SAE. This
Speaker 1: is interesting because while seaweed is part of the cuisine
Speaker 1: in other parts of the world, especially parts of Asia,
Speaker 1: it has not been as associated with food from Europe
Speaker 1: in the modern era, at least until very recently. Instead,
Speaker 1: most archaeological evidence suggested that Europeans were using seaweed and
Speaker 1: similar plants to make things like fertilizer and fuel. It
Speaker 1: seems that by the eighteenth century, most people in Europe
Speaker 1: saw seaweed as something to be eaten only in times
Speaker 1: of famine, not as an everyday staple. Yeah, unless I
Speaker 1: missed it, I don't think this paper speculated on why
Speaker 1: seaweed fell out of favor as a food source. I
Speaker 1: found that interesting, especially since now you can go buy
Speaker 1: some real expensive seaweed chips or whatever in that truthday
Speaker 1: agriculture would be my guess. But uh, this is what
Speaker 1: that makes this next one kind of like tangentially related
Speaker 1: because next, according to research published in the Proceedings of
Speaker 1: the National Academy of Sciences, early farmers who settled on
Speaker 1: the Baltic coast about six thousand years ago may have
Speaker 1: included fish in their diets. This research involved studying the
Speaker 1: fat residues and pottery fragments, and about half of the
Speaker 1: fragments belonging to early farmers contained residues from fish. This
Speaker 1: probably doesn't sound all that surprising, since fish would have
Speaker 1: been an available food source, but previous research examining prehistoric
Speaker 1: cooking pots has suggested that people in Britain, Spain, France,
Speaker 1: and Portugal stopped fishing once they started farming, and this
Speaker 1: included people living in coastal areas. But this research suggested
Speaker 1: that farmers who arrived on the coast stretching from what's
Speaker 1: now western Denmark to southern Finland, instead learned fishing techniques
Speaker 1: from hunter gatherers who were already living there. In the
Speaker 1: words of Professor Oliver Craig, director of the bio Arc
Speaker 1: Lab at the University of York, quote, while this might
Speaker 1: seem like an obvious and logical strategy, it is insignificant
Speaker 1: contrast to virtually all other early Neolithic sites that are
Speaker 1: located in coastal areas where we see no evidence that
Speaker 1: they made use of marine resources. Craig also noted that
Speaker 1: there did not seem to be a lot of intermarriage
Speaker 1: between the two groups between like the newcomer farmers and
Speaker 1: the existing hunter gatherers, and that might have provided some
Speaker 1: kind of explanation for why this community kind of adopted
Speaker 1: fishing when other coastal farming communities did not. Another surprising
Speaker 1: find they thought was that about five percent of the
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer community's pots contained dairy residues, suggesting they had
Speaker 1: some kind of access to dairy prior to transitioning to
Speaker 1: farming and presumably keeping domesticated animals that produce milk. Moving on,
Speaker 1: researchers in Puerto Rico have used plant DNA extracted from
Speaker 1: copper LTEs to study the diets of two pre Columbian
Speaker 1: Caribbean communities, the Hikoid culture and the Saladoid culture. The copproltes,
Speaker 1: which are basically mummified poop, suggest that both communities ate
Speaker 1: a diverse variety of foods, including sweet potatoes both wild
Speaker 1: and domesticated, peanuts, peppers, papaya, and maize. There was also
Speaker 1: evidence of the consumption of edible fungus, including Judla cooce,
Speaker 1: which grows on corn. The team also found residues from
Speaker 1: two plants that might not be thought of as food.
Speaker 1: Those were tobacco and cotton. The team proposed several possible
Speaker 1: explanations for why these people would have had tobacco and
Speaker 1: cotton and their feces like they may have chewed tobacco
Speaker 1: or added it to food for medicinal or victual reasons,
Speaker 1: or the residues may be a side effect of crushing
Speaker 1: and inhaling tobacco. The cotton may have come from grinding
Speaker 1: cotton seeds for oil, or from wetting strands of cotton
Speaker 1: in the mouth while using the cotton for weaving or
Speaker 1: other crafts. Although a number of chronicles have described people
Speaker 1: in the Caribbean using cassava as a staple food. There
Speaker 1: wasn't evidence of that in these samples. It's possible that
Speaker 1: the steps needed to process cassava root into an edible
Speaker 1: food degraded its DNA to the point that it could
Speaker 1: no longer be detected in these copper lights, or it
Speaker 1: may have been eaten more seasonally, and these samples were
Speaker 1: produced at the wrong time of year. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of pounding and grinding and drying involved in that process,
Speaker 1: and so the idea was maybe there just wasn't a
Speaker 1: lot of DNA left, especially after all these centuries have passed.
Speaker 1: So aside from the fact that copper lights can only
Speaker 1: show what a person was eating during one relatively small
Speaker 1: window of time, this research also involved comparing the DNA
Speaker 1: from the copper lights to contemporary plant DNA, so it's
Speaker 1: possible that there was also DNA from other plants that
Speaker 1: just isn't in this modern database. The team also compared
Speaker 1: the copper lights to feces from modern people living in Mexico, Peru,
Speaker 1: and the United States, which suggested that present day hunter
Speaker 1: gatherers had a similar diet to those living in pre
Speaker 1: Columbian Puerto Rico. And to close off the edible and potables,
Speaker 1: we have two finds that are related to wine. The
Speaker 1: first is five thousand year old wine discovered at the
Speaker 1: tomb of merit Neath and Abidas, Egypt. Archaeologists found hundreds
Speaker 1: of wine jars, many of them still intact and some
Speaker 1: of them still sealed. Some of the vessels also contained
Speaker 1: well preserved grape seeds. Queen Merrit Knith lived during Egypt's
Speaker 1: first dynasty, and according to recas searchers, the wine and
Speaker 1: other grave goods found in this tomb suggests that she
Speaker 1: may have been Egypt's first pharaoh. She was definitely a
Speaker 1: powerful woman. Abidas was Egypt's first royal cemetery, and Meret
Speaker 1: Neith is the only woman known to have her own
Speaker 1: monumental tomb there. This tomb is part of a complex
Speaker 1: that also includes the tombs of forty one of the
Speaker 1: queen's servants and courtiers, and inscriptions in the tomb complex
Speaker 1: state that merret Neath was responsible for central government offices,
Speaker 1: including the treasury. Beyond that, though we currently know very
Speaker 1: little about her or her life. Yeah, there's I would
Speaker 1: say it's not conclusively agreed that she could have been
Speaker 1: Egypt's first pharaoh. There some that are like, well, clearly
Speaker 1: she was very powerful, but like not to the point
Speaker 1: of being a pharaoh.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: This tomb has also raised some questions around the idea
Speaker 1: of human sacrifice and the burials of Egyptian royals during
Speaker 1: the First Dynasty. So in a lot of tombs that
Speaker 1: we know about, it appears that the rule retainers were
Speaker 1: killed and buried along with them to serve them in
Speaker 1: the afterlife. But in this tomb, the tombs of the
Speaker 1: servants and the courtiers seem to have been built at
Speaker 1: different times over a longer period, so not all.
Speaker 2: At once when she was in tombs.
Speaker 1: So it suggests more that, you know, perhaps people died
Speaker 1: of other causes and then were entombed, or something else
Speaker 1: was going on. Our other wine discovery is a Roman
Speaker 1: era winery found along a river in southern France that
Speaker 1: happened during excavations for a parking lot at a factory.
Speaker 1: This winery is nearly two thousand years old, with a
Speaker 1: raised platform for pressing grapes flanked by basins to collect
Speaker 1: the juice. There's also a three room building that was
Speaker 1: probably used for fermentation and storage. The floors still have
Speaker 1: impressions from the large vessels that would have been used
Speaker 1: to store the wine.
Speaker 2: And now we.
Speaker 1: Will close out today's episode with books and letters. First,
Speaker 1: a box of undelivered letters from the Seven Years War
Speaker 1: has been in the UK's National Archives and they were
Speaker 1: opened and read for the first time in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: This was three stacks of letters, tied and ribbon, most
Speaker 1: of them sealed with wax, and they were addressed to
Speaker 1: men serving aboard the French warship Galatee. The ship was
Speaker 1: captured by the British in seventeen fifty eight and the
Speaker 1: French postal administration tried to direct these letters to various ports,
Speaker 1: sort of hoping to catch up with the ship before
Speaker 1: learning of the ship's capture. The letters were ultimately intercepted
Speaker 1: and confiscated. This work was spearheaded by Renault Moriau, who
Speaker 1: was working on a book and got permission to open
Speaker 1: the letters. About a quarter of the men stationed aboard
Speaker 1: the Galatei had a letter in this collection, and more
Speaker 1: than half of the letters were signed by women. Some
Speaker 1: letters were written by the women themselves and others were
Speaker 1: written by scribes. Many turned out to mostly be love
Speaker 1: letters written by the men's wives or fiancees or companions.
Speaker 1: Others were from parents or siblings. Some of them sort
Speaker 1: of chronicle some drama over several letters sent by different people.
Speaker 1: This next one came to us from listener Megan, who
Speaker 1: sent us a link about the discovery of a three
Speaker 1: hundred and eighteen year old Scottish Bible in Iowa. Kathy Magruder,
Speaker 1: who runs a bookstore in Indianola, was going through the
Speaker 1: library and a retirement home in Des Moines when she
Speaker 1: found this bible. The retirement home had realized that there
Speaker 1: were a lot of books in their library that were
Speaker 1: never being checked out, and they had given Magruder the
Speaker 1: opportunity to just go through them and make an offer
Speaker 1: on any of them that she might want. The title
Speaker 1: page of this bible said that it had been printed
Speaker 1: in sixteen oh five, which Magruder quickly realized could not
Speaker 1: be true since it was a King James Bible and
Speaker 1: that edition of the Bible was first printed in sixteen eleven.
Speaker 1: After further research and consulting with a rare books expert,
Speaker 1: she learned that the title page had a known misprint
Speaker 1: and that it was from seventeen oh five, not sixteen
Speaker 1: oh five. According to news reports, the Bible was also
Speaker 1: printed without oversight from the church. That would have been illegal.
Speaker 1: It's really not clear at this point how the Bible
Speaker 1: wound up in the library at the retirement home. None
Speaker 1: of the Holmes residents have shared the names of the
Speaker 1: people that are mentioned in a family history that was
Speaker 1: included among the pages of the Bible. Magruder ultimately sold
Speaker 1: this Bible to another Indianola resident. Our last letter find
Speaker 1: is a bit of a journey. In twenty thirteen, archaeological
Speaker 1: curator Sarah Rivers Coofield found a silk bustle dress at
Speaker 1: an antique mall in Maine. After buying it and getting
Speaker 1: it home, she found a concealed pocket, one that seemed
Speaker 1: a lot harder to get at than typical pockets in
Speaker 1: Victorian era ad dresses. Once she got into that pocket,
Speaker 1: she found a couple of pieces of paper. The notes
Speaker 1: on the paper seemed to be written in some kind
Speaker 1: of code, saying things like spring wilderness, lining one reading novice.
Speaker 1: There were also lines in a different color that seemed
Speaker 1: like they were checking off each line of code, as
Speaker 1: well as some notes in the margin that looked like
Speaker 1: times of day, like ten PM. Obviously this was intriguing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she posted about this in her blog and she said
Speaker 1: it was quote in case there's some decoding prodigy out
Speaker 1: there looking for a project. People figured out pretty quickly
Speaker 1: that this seemed like it had to be some kind
Speaker 1: of telegraph code, and then eventually Wayne Chan, and analyst
Speaker 1: with the Center for Earth Observation Science at the University
Speaker 1: of Manitoba, made the connection that it was.
Speaker 2: A weather code.
Speaker 1: Eventually, a librarian at Noah's Central Library in Silver Spring, Maryland,
Speaker 1: sent Chan a pdf of a weather codebook published by
Speaker 1: the USDA Weather Bureau in eighteen ninety two. With that
Speaker 1: as a starting point, Chan finally figured out that this
Speaker 1: was a code that had been used by the Army
Speaker 1: Signal Service Corps, which eventually became the National Weather Service.
Speaker 1: We talked about the evolution of the Signal Service Corps
Speaker 1: in our twenty sixteen episode on the Schoolhouse Blizzard. The
Speaker 1: string of words were the station location, followed by code
Speaker 1: words for temperature and barometric pressure, dew point, precipitation and
Speaker 1: wind direction, cloud cover and wind velocity, and sunset observations.
Speaker 1: Chan's work on this was printed in the journal Cryptologia.
Speaker 1: There is still some mystery around these papers, though it
Speaker 1: seems like they were written by somebody working with the
Speaker 1: Signal Service Corps in eighteen eighty eight. The codes on
Speaker 1: those papers align with specific observations that are on record
Speaker 1: from May of that year, but there's also a label
Speaker 1: sewn into the dress that has the name Bennett. There
Speaker 1: were women on the clerical staff at the Service Corps
Speaker 1: DC office, but none of those women were named Bennett.
Speaker 1: There was a man named Maitland Bennett, and it's possible
Speaker 1: that his wife helped him in his work, but she
Speaker 1: would have been about eight months pregnant when these notations
Speaker 1: were made. It is not totally impossible that this dress
Speaker 1: could have been worn by somebody who was eight months pregnant,
Speaker 1: kind of depending on how she was carrying, and whether
Speaker 1: the dress had all of its boning in, and like
Speaker 1: what kind of maternity course that she might have had
Speaker 1: on at the same time. Though this is a really
Speaker 1: fitted garment, it doesn't seem necessarily likely that somebody eight
Speaker 1: months pregnant could have been wearing it. So there's just
Speaker 1: some question marks that I was sent the blog right
Speaker 1: up about the dress to Holly, and I was like, Holly,
Speaker 1: do you think somebody's eight months pregnant could have worn it?
Speaker 1: And I was like, yeah, yeah, it might not have
Speaker 1: been the most common, but yeah, but yeah, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: have certainly been comfortable looking at it through today's eyes,
Speaker 1: But we also have seen so many examples of evidence
Speaker 1: of women wearing very uncomfortable things to today's eyes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's there is material in the dress that could have
Speaker 1: been like let out to an extent. But like as
Speaker 1: it is sort of shown on the blog, it the
Speaker 1: shape does it looks like it would have been at
Speaker 1: best very uncomfortable for most people unless it were worn
Speaker 1: differently than in the photographs.
Speaker 2: I think, does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Yes, I think it would have been worn differently than
Speaker 1: in the photographs. Yeah, because I think if she carried low,
Speaker 1: she absolutely could have been wearing it. Yeah, it just
Speaker 1: is a matter of where the waistline sat before her
Speaker 1: baby bump protruded. So it could have because we looked
Speaker 1: at some pictures of women who were wearing very similar
Speaker 1: garments when they were obviously pretty pregnant. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: like it's a complete crapshoot. You don't know, we don't
Speaker 1: know what she looked like when she was pregnant, so
Speaker 1: there's no additional info. Yeah, some of the some of
Speaker 1: the articles that I'd liked, she definitely couldn't have. And
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't think that's really how like
Speaker 1: Victorian our addresses worked like they there's a lot of
Speaker 1: material there to work with, sort of depending on somebody's body. Oh,
Speaker 1: they are like secret compartments in some of them that
Speaker 1: can move around and shift stuff out and expand and contract.
Speaker 1: We talk about that forever. But that is it for
Speaker 1: today on on Earth. And we'll have, of course more
Speaker 1: next time, as Tracy promised at the top, Yeah, do
Speaker 1: you have listener mail. In the meantime, I have two
Speaker 1: quick things today. They are both following our episode on
Speaker 1: the the Great English Sparrow War, and we talked about
Speaker 1: a commitment in North America to like rename all the
Speaker 1: common names of birds that are named after people or
Speaker 1: are otherwise exclusionary. And I said, I was not sure
Speaker 1: if there was a similar movie meant in the names
Speaker 1: of other animals. To be very clear, what I was
Speaker 1: trying to say was like another organization definitively saying we
Speaker 1: are renaming all the names. I definitely know that there are,
Speaker 1: like our various individual animals that have been renamed, and
Speaker 1: like other calls for renaming, but like, I don't know
Speaker 1: if like another organization that has said we are doing
Speaker 1: this in a broad way across all of the names.
Speaker 1: So we got a couple of emails. One is from
Speaker 1: Kiki who said Happy New Year. Was such a joy
Speaker 1: to return to work and have almost two whole weeks
Speaker 1: of backlog to listen to. I was enthralled with the
Speaker 1: English sparrow war and extremely excited when the Starlings were mentioned.
Speaker 1: There have been lots of other names updated names in
Speaker 1: the last decade, ish insects, implants, and places think military
Speaker 1: installations in Mountain Denali. There are two articles that talk
Speaker 1: about renaming for cultural reasons instead of just discovering species
Speaker 1: twice so. The first of these links is to a
Speaker 1: Smithsonian article about renaming what is now called the spongy moth.
Speaker 1: This article is actually from before that renaming. It is
Speaker 1: for a moth that was previously named a slur for
Speaker 1: the Romany people.
Speaker 2: The other is an article.
Speaker 1: From Scientific American that is about a call in New
Speaker 1: Zealand to make changes to animal names and then the
Speaker 1: email goes on to say, obviously it's an ongoing issue,
Speaker 1: but we are so much farther than we were. Please
Speaker 1: find attached a picture of my new coworker, obviously doing
Speaker 1: a great job at bookkeeping.
Speaker 2: Thanks Kiki.
Speaker 1: The new co worker is a very very cute puppy
Speaker 1: dog in a gray bed looks so exciting to be
Speaker 1: at work.
Speaker 2: And the way of lying down in.
Speaker 1: Just the laziest way possible, in the way that I
Speaker 1: always envy my cats when I am working and they
Speaker 1: are sleeping in the most comfortable looking positions. Oh, there's
Speaker 1: such jerks about it too. They're like, oh work really,
Speaker 1: look they are. Opel has started doing a thing where
Speaker 1: she yells at me and what she wants me to
Speaker 1: do is come back to bed, and I'm like, I'm working, ople,
Speaker 1: I cannot come back to bed. So the other email
Speaker 1: we got was from Rachel. Rachel said, Hi, Tracy and Holly.
Speaker 1: As usual, I'm a week behind with a podcast. However, today,
Speaker 1: when listening to the behind the scenes for the English
Speaker 1: Sparrow episode, Tracy mentioned that she knew there was a
Speaker 1: move to rename birds that were named after people. She
Speaker 1: also mentioned that she didn't know if it was happening
Speaker 1: to any other animals. Here's a link to a recent
Speaker 1: New York Times article the answer to that question. Hope
Speaker 1: you haven't received this numerous times already. Thanks for all
Speaker 1: you do. I learned so much for the shows over
Speaker 1: the many years I've been listening, Rachel. Thank you, Rachel.
Speaker 1: No one had sent this article to me, so this
Speaker 1: article is a little bit different. It is about a
Speaker 1: call to look at the scientific names. Like we had
Speaker 1: been talking mostly about common names, but these are like
Speaker 1: the scientific enus and species names named.
Speaker 2: After in this case Hitler.
Speaker 1: And there's actually been a whole big back and forth,
Speaker 1: some of it after that episode was recorded about the
Speaker 1: International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which oversees a lot of
Speaker 1: this internationally, basically saying it would be really disruptive if
Speaker 1: we just renamed all of this this stuff for cultural reasons,
Speaker 1: and then other people saying no, it really wouldn't be.
Speaker 1: So this is obviously still ongoing, So thank you very
Speaker 1: much Rachel and Kekey for these emails. If you would
Speaker 1: like to send us a note about this or any
Speaker 1: other podcast or history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and
Speaker 1: you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff
Speaker 1: you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.