Speaker 1: Hello, this is let's talk about myths, baby, and I
Speaker 1: am your myth obsessed nerd host who is sort of
Speaker 1: out of place right now in this distinctly historic series
Speaker 1: of episodes, and of course I've managed to make it
Speaker 1: as mythological as possible all the same.
Speaker 2: But as we get further and further into this collapse
Speaker 2: of the Bronze Age and all of its many causes,
Speaker 2: all the little things that went into this collapse of
Speaker 2: the elite power structures, oh it's utterly fascinating. Oh my god.
Speaker 2: So today's episode is with another returning guest, doctor Flint Dibble,
Speaker 2: who talked to me about Atlantis last year the year
Speaker 2: before What is time and Flint came back to talk
Speaker 2: about this Bronze Age collapse and how it relates to
Speaker 2: what he studies, which is like animal bones and like
Speaker 2: eating via. Like it's fascinating, fascinating stuff s type of
Speaker 2: archaeology that I just didn't even think about until I learned, Like,
Speaker 2: of course it's a thing, and we can learn so
Speaker 2: much from animal bones in terms of like how they
Speaker 2: sacrifice the animals, how they ate them, what they prioritize,
Speaker 2: like all of these different things, and also the climate
Speaker 2: as it aligns with food completely fascinating. We have such
Speaker 2: a great conversation coming, and I just have to say,
Speaker 2: the biggest joy that has come out of this Bronze
Speaker 2: Age collapse episodes like the whole series is my realization
Speaker 2: that I knew about the collapse for sure, I did
Speaker 2: not know how much climate change came into play with it,
Speaker 2: and how much these experts on this stuff are just
Speaker 2: so so aware of the modern ramifications like I just yet,
Speaker 2: I didn't expect it to be like a very very
Speaker 2: forceful wake up call in terms of climate change. So
Speaker 2: stay tuned for that. And without any further ado from me,
Speaker 2: let's listen to how food can tell us so much
Speaker 2: about the collapse of the Bronze Age conversations. The evidence
Speaker 2: is in the thigh bone climate and collapse in the
Speaker 2: Bronze Age with doctor Flint Dibble. So, I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: very excited for this. Climate change is like my obsession
Speaker 2: in the modern world. So I like to hear about
Speaker 2: like you know, I mean, I know it's obviously a
Speaker 2: very different climate change, but the Bronze Age and the
Speaker 2: food ways and all of the different things that that
Speaker 2: you know, affected that whole time. Period is utterly fascinating.
Speaker 2: So do you want to just give me like a
Speaker 2: kind of overview of what what that means, like you
Speaker 2: just food wats broadly or what you know, what you
Speaker 2: study regarding this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I specifically study ancient animal remains. So I
Speaker 3: look at sort of the bones and the teeth from
Speaker 3: sheep and goats mostly, but also some cattle, pigs, dogs,
Speaker 3: you know, all range horses, donkeys.
Speaker 2: That's kind of wild to me.
Speaker 3: Specific I don't actually study too many why out animals
Speaker 3: a few, but I focus on larger mammals, and then
Speaker 3: I work with people that focus on fish and birds
Speaker 3: and really tiny mammals. Though I will study deer and hair.
Speaker 3: I'm really interested in hair, but that doesn't have anything
Speaker 3: to do with the Bronze age. But so I study
Speaker 3: ancient animals and what that lets you put together, and
Speaker 3: in particular, since I look at mostly domesticated animals is
Speaker 3: kind of the agricultural economy, right, that's the kind of
Speaker 3: evidence that we get out of this food waves in
Speaker 3: a sense, how do people produce these animals in terms
Speaker 3: of manage them? Did they move them around the landscape,
Speaker 3: what were the animals eating? How large were the herds
Speaker 3: even and so that's the underpinning, of course of economies
Speaker 3: in the Bronze Age and the Iron Ages, agriculture and
Speaker 3: animal husbandry. We all think about monuments and architecture and
Speaker 3: gold masks and stuff like that, but that's just sort
Speaker 3: of luxury stuff that's on the side. The reason the
Speaker 3: elites are wealthy is because they own so much land, right,
Speaker 3: and so this is what underpins the entire sort of
Speaker 3: palace economy in the Bronze Age. It's what underpins the
Speaker 3: economy and the Iron Age, I mean into down through
Speaker 3: the Roman period, the Medieval period until really the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 3: That's the underpinning of all human wealth and power and
Speaker 3: structure around which societies manage themselves. So yeah, so that's
Speaker 3: that what by studying animals and food that gives you
Speaker 3: an inn, let's say, to tackle a lot of different questions,
Speaker 3: so from economy but also sort of ritual So the
Speaker 3: ritual feasting you could think of this is how elites
Speaker 3: bring people together is to eat, right. I mean, I
Speaker 3: don't know if anyone listening to their students, but you
Speaker 3: know how you get food at a party or drinks.
Speaker 3: That's one of the huge draws. Even after a lecture,
Speaker 3: if it's a good lecture series, you'll have some little
Speaker 3: like wine and cheese or something like that. And so
Speaker 3: food is what brings people together, whether it's a holiday
Speaker 3: or whether it's just a family meal or whatnot. And
Speaker 3: so therefore food lets you look at things like religion
Speaker 3: or everyday life at home, but also not just the
Speaker 3: production of food. You can think about the distribution of food.
Speaker 3: These animals go to butchers who then butcher it up,
Speaker 3: which then either gets sold or given away at a
Speaker 3: festival or something like that, and then it's cooked in
Speaker 3: different ways until it ends up on somebody's plate who
Speaker 3: eats it, and then the bone gets tossed in the midden.
Speaker 3: And then I look at those bones and try to
Speaker 3: work the way back to what they can say along
Speaker 3: each of those steps along the way. And it's the
Speaker 3: combo of those steps that makes it food ways. So
Speaker 3: food waves is the study of the interaction of those
Speaker 3: different steps, from the production of food through to the
Speaker 3: consumption of food and disposal of trash.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just I love that. I mean to's the idea
Speaker 2: of It's like, ultimately you're just digging through garbage and
Speaker 2: finding this kind of done. Like I mean we were
Speaker 2: talking about this before, you know, like it'll be off
Speaker 2: off the microphone. But so just for the listeners generally,
Speaker 2: But what is really like so interesting is the reality
Speaker 2: of archaeology and like the really nerdy, weird stuff that
Speaker 2: you can learn from just like everyday life garbage. And
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, it's you know, this this series less
Speaker 2: so than Atlantis, but it is still about you know,
Speaker 2: kind of debunking some of the myths about the Bronze
Speaker 2: Age and it's collapse and so you know, it's it's
Speaker 2: obviously less, but I still I'll remember forever. This time.
Speaker 2: I was just like on Instagram and this real popped
Speaker 2: up of this.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: He's like one of those influencer history bros who gives
Speaker 2: you like a minute worth of history and says it's
Speaker 2: all true and real absolutely, and then you know, proceeds
Speaker 2: just about utter nonsense. And this guy, this guy is
Speaker 2: talking about the Mycenians and he's like introducing this whole thing,
Speaker 2: and he's got some accurate stuff about the Mysonians and
Speaker 2: then he's like and then one day they just disappeared
Speaker 2: completely and Greece descended into a Dark Age. And they
Speaker 2: he said that they lost the ability to read and write.
Speaker 2: And then from that dark age of no words Outsprung Homer,
Speaker 2: a man who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey and
Speaker 2: and so like, I think about that in relation to
Speaker 2: this series because it is so about, you know, the
Speaker 2: end of the Bronze Age. And you've already said Iron Age,
Speaker 2: so you've already you know, introduced the idea that there
Speaker 2: was no Dark Age, there was an Iron Age. But
Speaker 2: I think about that kind of thing like this. You know,
Speaker 2: they they disappeared out of nowhere, and it's like, well, no,
Speaker 2: and you know, we can look at their trash to
Speaker 2: find out that, no, they didn't just disappear out of nowhere.
Speaker 2: Like all these different things are going on, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's early days in my recording of this series, but
Speaker 2: still it's I just I love this idea you can
Speaker 2: dig into some trash and find the truth of things.
Speaker 2: So like, what what do we know about, you know,
Speaker 2: how this relates to the Bronze Age, What it says
Speaker 2: about you know, what they were doing and getting towards
Speaker 2: you know, the end of it, Like I want to
Speaker 2: hear with the Bronze Age itself, but also the kind
Speaker 2: of transition you know that they went through, because it
Speaker 2: was a transition, not a you know, loss of society entirely.
Speaker 3: Yes, I agree, so a few things. One I'm agnostic
Speaker 3: on the term dark Age. Actually, okay, I I think
Speaker 3: that well. First of all, yeah, it's not just some
Speaker 3: sort of collapse where everybody disappears. That's the ludicrous. I
Speaker 3: agree with the points that, like, you know, Aoni's Conos
Speaker 3: has a paper on the terminology the Dark Age and
Speaker 3: what that means and the problems with it, and he
Speaker 3: was on my PhD committee, so I mean I mostly
Speaker 3: agree with him. He did sign my PhD after all.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, you know, to a certain degree,
Speaker 3: life does get worse, and we can talk about what
Speaker 3: the Bronze Age was like, but one way you can
Speaker 3: track that is through people's diets and through malnourishment that
Speaker 3: you can see in people's teeth. And so this is
Speaker 3: not my own studies. It to other people that that
Speaker 3: study human remains. But uh Filu and others have published
Speaker 3: on sort of what you get in teeth is if
Speaker 3: while your teeth are growing, so you know, when you're
Speaker 3: a child, if you have a period of severe malnourishment,
Speaker 3: your teeth will sort of stop growing, they'll interrupt their
Speaker 3: growth for a period of time, and it develops this
Speaker 3: kind of line that you can see on it. It's
Speaker 3: called enamel hypoplasia. And so that line is an indication
Speaker 3: of people that are you know, they don't get enough food,
Speaker 3: and that specific pathological marker, that marker of this malnourishment.
Speaker 3: It shows up more frequently proportionally in many Iron Age
Speaker 3: populations than Bronze Age. So they are eating, they're more
Speaker 3: malnourished from the graves that have been excavated and studied
Speaker 3: more methodically and scientifically. And at the same time, you
Speaker 3: can see this in isotopic signatures of people. So for example,
Speaker 3: you know, certainly I have nothing wrong with people that
Speaker 3: are vegetarians or vegans, and in this case, I guess
Speaker 3: it's more vegans because what you can measure is you
Speaker 3: can measure animal protein consumption and that shows up in
Speaker 3: the isotopes in your teeth. Again, it's laid down while
Speaker 3: you're growing, or in your bones that's closer to the
Speaker 3: time of your death because your bones keep remodeling during
Speaker 3: your life. And again, people in the Iron Age, they're
Speaker 3: eating less animal protein on average than people in the
Speaker 3: Bronze Age, though in the Bronze Age it's very stratified.
Speaker 3: It's mostly the wealthy men that get a lot of
Speaker 3: animal protein. In the Iron Age it's much more even.
Speaker 3: It looks like everybody eats less, and so there's definitely
Speaker 3: the less wealth at least just existing, one would think,
Speaker 3: at least in terms of animal wealth at that time.
Speaker 3: So this is why I'm kind of a little agnostic
Speaker 3: about Dark Age. I think there's there is. Certainly writing
Speaker 3: does disappear, for example, linear b the tablets used in that.
Speaker 3: We find in Bronze Age what we call palaces, though
Speaker 3: it's a really stupid name.
Speaker 2: But I want to explain what that means to people,
Speaker 2: Like they're not I mean, we call them palaces. It's
Speaker 2: very palatial, but like also you need to understand what
Speaker 2: that means, and it's just kind of the word.
Speaker 3: Yeah, basically at this point, I think it's mostly means
Speaker 3: a large monumental complex that includes a large courtyard, sometimes
Speaker 3: adjacent to it, sometimes within it contained, and so they
Speaker 3: they're often some people want to recall them like courtyard
Speaker 3: complexes or things related to that, because clearly there are
Speaker 3: these large complexes, which means lots of rooms, different activities
Speaker 3: going on. Some have throne rooms, some don't, but you
Speaker 3: know that doesn't matter. But then the courtyard means that
Speaker 3: you can gather a whole lot of people together, right,
Speaker 3: And so it's these two combos of this evidence for
Speaker 3: hierarchy and the evidence and the ability to host large
Speaker 3: groups that sort of makes a palace, if you will.
Speaker 3: And it's an Oh, I think I'm not sure about this.
Speaker 3: Don't quote me on it, but uh, I guess you're
Speaker 3: gonna quote me on a podcast.
Speaker 2: But you've already preis you're a preface, you're a guy.
Speaker 3: But but I think almost all, if not all, of
Speaker 3: the linear be tablets, So the actual writings we have
Speaker 3: come from what we would label as a palace, right,
Speaker 3: certainly most of them do. So yeah, so so yeah,
Speaker 3: that's that's something my take on it. So all right, food, Well,
Speaker 3: we can say a lot so these and a lot
Speaker 3: of it comes from writing as well, and how it
Speaker 3: relates to the archaeological evidence can be interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can ask you know, I know you study
Speaker 2: the bones, but like I'm so, I'm interested in how
Speaker 2: the linear be tablets that we have, like correspond to
Speaker 2: the food because obviously, I mean what I know of
Speaker 2: linear Be is that you know, primarily the records that
Speaker 2: we have, our palatial records are you know, trades and
Speaker 2: like food stores and all of these different things that
Speaker 2: they're just kind of recording, you know, for their own
Speaker 2: just sort of administrative purposes, which is why linar B
Speaker 2: is very cool but also frustrating because they didn't write
Speaker 2: down stories, which is just too bad. But like, I
Speaker 2: want to know how those things kind of relate, Like,
Speaker 2: you know, do you look at how the bone evidence
Speaker 2: of food like relates to those you know, the registers
Speaker 2: kind of that we have in linear Bee.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. So thankfully linear Be is well studied
Speaker 3: and a lot of it's been published, and there's actually
Speaker 3: been a lot of studies more probably on food stuffs
Speaker 3: in linear b than of the animal bones themselves. So
Speaker 3: it's something that you can go to and read and
Speaker 3: site and see how it fits together. And the picture
Speaker 3: you get from these linear Bee tablets is this it
Speaker 3: gives a very misleading picture of society. Certain aspects are accurate,
Speaker 3: but it's misleading in the sense that it's so palatial focused,
Speaker 3: and so it's really like you said, their accounts, and
Speaker 3: so it's goods in and out, and it's sort of
Speaker 3: it shows how they control also the larger agricultural economy,
Speaker 3: but it's only what they're focused on. So the big
Speaker 3: thing that you can tell when you compare the archaeological
Speaker 3: record to the written record is there's so much missing
Speaker 3: in the written record, right, there's a focus on only
Speaker 3: a few food stuffs, and so sheep are one of
Speaker 3: the really big ones, and then wheat is another really
Speaker 3: really big one, and olive oil and wine are also
Speaker 3: reasonably prominent in there. But it ignores everything else, which
Speaker 3: is oh oh. In the animals. They also have some
Speaker 3: mentions of palatial oxen tines for pulling plowsh okay, So
Speaker 3: those are what most of the food stuffs. And the
Speaker 3: linear bee tablets, sorry, the linear be tablets mostly talk
Speaker 3: about those food stuffs and not all the others. They
Speaker 3: don't talk about, you know, barley, for example, nearly as
Speaker 3: much or lesser quality wheats hold wheats we call them
Speaker 3: emmer einecorn, which we're around. They don't talk about all
Speaker 3: the different diversity of beans, which are really really important.
Speaker 3: I know it sounds silly.
Speaker 2: I love that diversity of beans.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's all these legumes, beans and peas, and you know,
Speaker 3: they're really important to sort of agriculture because they absorb
Speaker 3: nitrogen from the air and then fix it in the soil.
Speaker 3: So wheat depletes grains in general, they deplete all the
Speaker 3: nitrogen from the soil, while beans bring it back. So
Speaker 3: beans are extremely important because they regenerate the soil's nitrogen
Speaker 3: and at the same time they're they're very healthy. They
Speaker 3: provide a lot of calories, they're easy to grow and
Speaker 3: to eat and prepare and things like that. So we
Speaker 3: know from our archaeobotanical samples that have been published that
Speaker 3: beans and peas are eaten all the times, and barley
Speaker 3: is far more common than wheat in the archaeobotanical record.
Speaker 3: It grows better in Greek landscape because it's so dry there,
Speaker 3: which is a key point that we'll get to. And
Speaker 3: so yeah, so there's so much missing and same thing,
Speaker 3: pigs and goats don't come up very often, and it's
Speaker 3: just and even of the sheep. So there's tens of
Speaker 3: thousands of sheep in the linear BT's from Kenosos in particular,
Speaker 3: because there was a huge interest not in the sheet
Speaker 3: for food, but for wool, and so they were making textiles.
Speaker 3: A lot of tablets focus on the textile economy, including
Speaker 3: weavers and different people working with textiles and uh and
Speaker 3: and we believe it was a major export from like
Speaker 3: from Manoan crete and then later on from the Mycenean world.
Speaker 3: I think you'd have to ask Eric, but I think
Speaker 3: there's this fresco in Egypt where there's he's published on
Speaker 3: it where they're showing he identifies the people carrying textiles
Speaker 3: is as I think Monoan's and so it's been a
Speaker 3: while since ever that paper. So so yeah, so, so
Speaker 3: the textiles are big, big business and that's what they're
Speaker 3: interested in. And so what that means is so you know,
Speaker 3: as a zoe archaeologist, sorry, there's some kind of fun
Speaker 3: the tangents. As a zo archaeologist, one of the big
Speaker 3: questions we ask of our animal teeth and bones is
Speaker 3: what are the ages of slaughter of animals? And this
Speaker 3: makes sense in a second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I.
Speaker 3: Promise, I promise, And this is an exercise I do
Speaker 3: with my students all the time where I say, all right,
Speaker 3: so why the heck does this matter? Right? Yeah, So
Speaker 3: let's play a game here with You are a goat
Speaker 3: herder on the island decrete, and all you care about
Speaker 3: is milk. You don't care about meats, you don't care
Speaker 3: about the skins. All you want to maximize is milk production.
Speaker 3: So what kind of goats do you want? In terms
Speaker 3: of age and sex?
Speaker 2: I mean, as a very knowledgeable person on goats, I'm
Speaker 2: assuming the older and female.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you want a lot of female because they give birth,
Speaker 3: which the leads me to them, which leads to them
Speaker 3: producing milk. But they give birth fifty to fifty male female.
Speaker 3: And you know, do you keep a couple lucky guys
Speaker 3: alive breeding purposes? But they give birth fifty to fifty
Speaker 3: male female. What do you do with the young males?
Speaker 2: Do they just eat them when they're very young?
Speaker 3: Yeah, because they're drinking them milk, right, and you want
Speaker 3: to get as much of that as possible, So you know,
Speaker 3: you look at anthropologically ethnographically, this is what people raising
Speaker 3: goats or cattle or sheep if they really want to
Speaker 3: maximize milk. That's the age and sex profile you'd have
Speaker 3: for a herd, right, older females, infant males bean slaughter.
Speaker 3: Now let's shift that up to wool. So now you
Speaker 3: want to have your wooly sheep on crete. You want
Speaker 3: them to maximize their wool production. What do you want?
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm assuming that all sheep grow wool, and
Speaker 2: it's not a gendered or thing, but so you just
Speaker 2: want them all and then you just want them to
Speaker 2: live as long as possible. I have no idea.
Speaker 3: Nobody can see me except for you. I'm giving you
Speaker 3: a clue. Oh well, I mean I'm stroking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, describe what you're doing. I mean, I don't like,
Speaker 2: I don't know that. I don't have any idea how
Speaker 2: sheep grow woll. Well, so just like they do it, just.
Speaker 3: Like I produce more wool. Yeah, Male sheep on average,
Speaker 3: male sheep on average produce more wool. Okay, So have
Speaker 3: you ever been to the beach?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: Okay, So when you scope out the beach, you know,
Speaker 3: looking for potential hookups or whatever it is we all do,
Speaker 3: and you think about it in terms of wool on backs,
Speaker 3: who has the most wool on their backs?
Speaker 2: Older men?
Speaker 3: Okay, the same is true for sheep. The exact same
Speaker 3: thing is true for sheep. Older male sheep have woolier
Speaker 3: backs on average, and if you castrate them, they're even woolier.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that works with humans. I had
Speaker 3: no idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it is true for sheep.
Speaker 3: And so we call, you know, agriculturally, if you're a sheepherder,
Speaker 3: a shepherd, and you have a you're maximizing wool. You
Speaker 3: want older male castrated sheep and older male castrated sheep
Speaker 3: in English are called weathers w E T H E R,
Speaker 3: and they're really common throughout traditional agricultural economies if you're
Speaker 3: looking at wool production, and so that's what you'd be
Speaker 3: looking for, and that's what the linear B tablets focus on.
Speaker 3: They only talk about tens of thousands of weathers male
Speaker 3: castrated sheep, and they don't talk about the rest of
Speaker 3: the herd. And so it's up to us to try
Speaker 3: to put that back into place. And it seems like
Speaker 3: according to Paul Halstead, who studied both these tablets, and
Speaker 3: he's like the the I don't know, he's just retired recently,
Speaker 3: but he was like the guy who's published the most
Speaker 3: on sort of Bronze Age Greek zoo archaeology animal. He
Speaker 3: was also the person who trained me, and so he's
Speaker 3: pointed out that the way these tablets seem to be
Speaker 3: working is they're describing tens of thousands of weathers, but
Speaker 3: they're not all within a herd. In fact, they're controlled
Speaker 3: by private individuals, and so they're controlling the heard, which
Speaker 3: includes a few palatial weathers or a certain number of them.
Speaker 3: And so you can start putting together the larger sheepherd
Speaker 3: economy by looking at the animal remains, if you see
Speaker 3: what I mean. Yeah, And so the palatial stuff misses
Speaker 3: out on a lot, right, It's missing the larger picture
Speaker 3: of what's going on. Even if we can understand that
Speaker 3: the palace at Kenosos controls you know, castrated male sheep
Speaker 3: throughout the island, and the at Pilos, we have these
Speaker 3: records showing the control of plow oxen and they move
Speaker 3: them around to different places that need plowing, and so
Speaker 3: there's a lot of administration that goes on to kind
Speaker 3: of plan out where they are and who they get
Speaker 3: lent to, I guess perhaps, And so that's the sort
Speaker 3: of way that the palace controls agricultural production by controlling
Speaker 3: these plow oxen teams, and same thing with the weathers,
Speaker 3: and so they focus on these specific goods, and that's
Speaker 3: what they're sort of focused on, and the archaeological evidence
Speaker 3: gives us the larger picture, obviously more diversity, but also
Speaker 3: the relationship is interesting though, because sheep are the most
Speaker 3: common animal in the archaeological record. For example, wheat is
Speaker 3: not in the archaeobotanical it's par but sheep certainly are.
Speaker 3: And in my study, I study the site in southwest
Speaker 3: Greece near Pilos, near the Palace Semester at Pilos, it's
Speaker 3: called nick Korea. And we can talk about this one
Speaker 3: a bunch because it really matters for this transition historiographically.
Speaker 3: It's been at the center of how scholars have interpreted
Speaker 3: the change between Bronze Age and Iron Enge. They're all wrong,
Speaker 3: I'm right, I mean to a certain degree most people.
Speaker 3: Most people realized they were all wrong already by the
Speaker 3: time I published my article. But you know, it's so
Speaker 3: so at Nick Korea, though, when it starts off in
Speaker 3: the Middle Bronze Age and in the very beginning of
Speaker 3: the Late Bronze Age, is an independent community, and then
Speaker 3: by what's called the late Haladic three periods around sixteen
Speaker 3: fifty DC year or so, it becomes dominated by the
Speaker 3: Palace of Nester. And it's at that time that we
Speaker 3: see this shift from pigs being the most common animal
Speaker 3: to sheep. And what's really cool is the age of slaughter.
Speaker 3: The sheep gets older and there's more male so it
Speaker 3: looks like they are focused they're starting to focus more
Speaker 3: on wool production. It isn't like they're only focused on
Speaker 3: wool production, though, is those tablets that seem to show
Speaker 3: it's part of a more diverse economy. But this change
Speaker 3: in control has had an impact on the Korea.
Speaker 2: Interesting. Okay, quick nerdy question. We call it the Palace
Speaker 2: of Nestor. Is that only tied to Homeric tradition or
Speaker 2: is there any kind of like name in linear B No, No.
Speaker 3: No, it's it's just we you know, Carl Blake, and
Speaker 3: it's pretty cool. He found it like on like the
Speaker 3: first day, and but then World War two broke out
Speaker 3: and yeah, and he went back and activated it. But no,
Speaker 3: it's just because they're you know, ninety nine point nine
Speaker 3: percent sure. It actually is the of Bronze age pilos,
Speaker 3: and therefore the palace would be Nestor's palace because that's
Speaker 3: who homer put as the king of Pilos.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I just was like,
Speaker 2: do we have slightly is there anything? But yeah, I know,
Speaker 2: I mean everything I do love.
Speaker 3: It's not even on the home. It's not even on
Speaker 3: the beach, you know, in in in the in the Odyssey,
Speaker 3: when Telemachus goes there, they sacrifice cattle on the beach.
Speaker 3: Everything's along the beach and everything. They call it sandy Pilos.
Speaker 3: That's the epithet. There's no sand there. I've dug there.
Speaker 3: I've spent like seven as many seasons, I don't know,
Speaker 3: four or five seasons digging there. I helped find the
Speaker 3: tomb of the Griffin Warrior. I was field director then,
Speaker 3: and uh, there's no sand in sight. It's all very
Speaker 3: clay soil that's really hard to dig through. And I
Speaker 3: don't know why Homer calls it sandy Pilos, and it
Speaker 3: really annoys me. I wish it was sandier. It would
Speaker 3: have been easier to dig.
Speaker 2: Well, the Odyssey is a little tricky in terms of
Speaker 2: tracking wear or anything is and what it actually looked
Speaker 2: like in reality. So that makes some sense, you know,
Speaker 2: the of it all slash every other stop. Autotysseus's journey. No,
Speaker 2: that's really interesting. So okay, I want to I mean,
Speaker 2: I wanted to hear kind of anything about you know,
Speaker 2: how we know about this, the food and everything, especially
Speaker 2: in this palace. But I one thing I just can't
Speaker 2: resist talking about, and I'm so curious about it because
Speaker 2: I don't I don't know at all how or if
Speaker 2: it you know, we we have evidence of it, how
Speaker 2: it affected things. But I am obsessed with the volcanic eruption,
Speaker 2: and I would imagine that that shows up in bones,
Speaker 2: like do we have record of like what kind of
Speaker 2: was affected? Because to me, it feels like a volcanic
Speaker 2: eruption of that size would affect agriculture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so but in certain areas, so probably on crete
Speaker 3: only only. Yeah. So it was obviously a massive eruption
Speaker 3: destroying Santorini. And then there's a part of the signature
Speaker 3: on crete. Most of what it does actually is so
Speaker 3: what comes to is tephra, right, and so there are
Speaker 3: tephra layers that have been excavated, like in eastern crete
Speaker 3: at Polycastro, I believe, and elsewhere, and so, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't seem to have gone say so Santorini's not too
Speaker 3: far from crete even and so it's not like we
Speaker 3: have any tephra layers on the mainland, and even these
Speaker 3: tephra layers on crete are you know, there are very
Speaker 3: ephemeral layers, and so we do scholars do think when
Speaker 3: you model it in a sense, having observed more modern
Speaker 3: volcanic eruptions and historical descriptions of it, it certainly the
Speaker 3: would have impacted the crops around Crete and around some
Speaker 3: other Edgean islands and the cyclides and stuff. With taffyra
Speaker 3: coming down, maybe having the sky darker, the sulfur could
Speaker 3: potentially have cooled the temperature a little bit, But it
Speaker 3: wasn't some major impact that you can see in people's
Speaker 3: or animals bones or as far as I know from
Speaker 3: any seeds that have been published. Not to say it
Speaker 3: would not have had a big impact, but it would
Speaker 3: have been fairly temporary and less unless, of course you
Speaker 3: lived right there and you died in it and stuff
Speaker 3: like that. That's of course.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there was probably like a refuge or
Speaker 2: I remember whenever I learned about this last which was
Speaker 2: probably in school, like refugee crisis kind of thing happened.
Speaker 3: Perhaps, yeah, people.
Speaker 2: Got out or a lot of them.
Speaker 3: I mean, who knows. It's tough to tell, and because
Speaker 3: we just don't have so it's mostly so it doesn't
Speaker 3: really have to do at the end of the Bronze
Speaker 3: Age either. It's a lot earlier, right, Yeah, several hundred
Speaker 3: years earlier, and it certainly would have impacted sort of
Speaker 3: circulation networks in the sicklidies, because Santorini was a really
Speaker 3: important acriteria. I mean, it was a very important settlement,
Speaker 3: and it had important interactions with both the Monons and
Speaker 3: the Mycenians and in the middle of the Asia Minor
Speaker 3: and stuff like that, and so yeah, it would have
Speaker 3: been it would have been really devastating economically, one would imagine,
Speaker 3: But yeah, there isn't. It's one of those things that
Speaker 3: scholars argue about NonStop, is what kind of impact that
Speaker 3: really had, And mostly it's tough to detect that archaeologically,
Speaker 3: just like Pompei erupting, that should have had a huge
Speaker 3: enormous impact on the Bay of Naples region, right, and
Speaker 3: the Bay of Naples region was sort of the hotspot
Speaker 3: for the Roman elite. And so yet it's almost like
Speaker 3: a side mentioned in history, you know, in the histories
Speaker 3: that we get it's an important archaeological find and all
Speaker 3: this kind of stuff, but it certainly was not something
Speaker 3: that and we would imagine refugees and stuff like that
Speaker 3: from as well, and no descriptions of that made history
Speaker 3: or anything. Again, no real clear archaeological evidence. And don't
Speaker 3: believe the recent headlines that they found plenty of the
Speaker 3: elders Villa or something like that. That's total crap.
Speaker 2: No, I it's interesting. I definitely was under the impression
Speaker 2: that the that the eruption of Thera was like considerably
Speaker 2: bigger than POMPEII, I guess. And I just think of
Speaker 2: like the historic eruptions of you know, the whatever the
Speaker 2: one was, where like basically they got a year of
Speaker 2: darkness like all the way up in the UK, and
Speaker 2: I think it was a volcano in Indonesia or something.
Speaker 2: So I just imagine of like just the the kind
Speaker 2: of because to me, like, I mean, Sanderini's far from
Speaker 2: the mainland, but it's not that far, you know. So
Speaker 2: I'm just interested to hear that that it didn't necessarily
Speaker 2: at least.
Speaker 3: Not in any detectable way. I don't think I've ever
Speaker 3: seen anybody published tefra from Santerini outside of crete or
Speaker 3: ice course or or closer a field like in thessivilities.
Speaker 3: I don't think I've ever I've never excavated any layers
Speaker 3: of pilos or my senior where I've excavated or elsewhere,
Speaker 3: and I've never as far as I know, I could
Speaker 3: be wrong, but I don't think there's anything like that
Speaker 3: on the mainland. It doesn't mean that there's no impacts,
Speaker 3: but it's just we don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah, I just I would have
Speaker 2: assumed it affected like crop growth in some kind of way,
Speaker 2: but maybe in sort of if it did, it was
Speaker 2: just undetectable or something. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I'm just and if enough for a falling on creeps
Speaker 3: that you're getting a clear layer of it, that could
Speaker 3: kill a lot of crops, but it would only be
Speaker 3: for a season. So as long as you have some
Speaker 3: stuff stored, you recover the next season, you get trade
Speaker 3: and other things, and probably some people die, of course,
Speaker 3: you know, because that's what happens. Unfortunately, that's what archaeologies
Speaker 3: how we find stuff. But yeah, yeah, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: No, interesting, okay, yeah, yeah, so what like what do
Speaker 2: we you you mentioned, you know, when we get into
Speaker 2: the getting into the Bronze or to the Iron Age,
Speaker 2: that there's a lot more of like this malnutrition and stuff.
Speaker 2: So do we know do we know of like what
Speaker 2: kind of I mean, I guess would be hard to
Speaker 2: tell what kind of caused that, But like other than
Speaker 2: just that, there's obviously different food happening and things. But
Speaker 2: I just love to hear about what we know about
Speaker 2: that transition of like what changes that we know kind
Speaker 2: of we're happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's start with the traditional picture or what
Speaker 3: was the picture from the eighties until about I don't know,
Speaker 3: ten years ago ish, because that's what people still come across,
Speaker 3: mostly in most of the literature, especially if it's not
Speaker 3: like you're not up to date. So basically it's pretty
Speaker 3: clear that something happens. Palaces disappear, monumental structures, art trade
Speaker 3: still seems going strong. If you read Sarah Murray's book
Speaker 3: on trade between the Bronze and the Iron Age, there's
Speaker 3: still a lot of trade going on, and she's her
Speaker 3: surveys in Eastern Attica are showing that as well. But
Speaker 3: what you do see is this total shifting towards more
Speaker 3: of a regional economy and there is this evidence of
Speaker 3: somewhat the people are living in a different kind of lifestyle.
Speaker 3: There's not the same kind of hierarchy. Whether that's good
Speaker 3: or bad is a different question. Like I said, in
Speaker 3: the Bronze Age, the elites were the ones benefiting from
Speaker 3: that hierarchy, right, and they were the ones eating well
Speaker 3: while nobody else was, including their wives and their children.
Speaker 3: And so you know, we can tell this from from
Speaker 3: isotope tests of people from these from Tholos tombs around
Speaker 3: Pilos and so so. Yeah, so in the Iron Age,
Speaker 3: for a long time people because of Nikoia, the site
Speaker 3: that I mentioned, I restudied these bones. This is one
Speaker 3: of the first sites where animal bones were ever studied
Speaker 3: in the Greek world, and it was one of the
Speaker 3: first scientific expedition excavations out at the University of Minnesota
Speaker 3: where they had collaborated with Carl Blagen excavating Pilos. And
Speaker 3: at Pilos, by the way, some of the animal remains
Speaker 3: have been published by Ballacy Ezekido and Paul Hall said.
Speaker 3: They show large scale feasting an animal sacrifice even then, right,
Speaker 3: and in the linear the archive room is actually where
Speaker 3: the big assemblage of sacrificial stuff is just weird little
Speaker 3: point of bones and texts together, you know. And so
Speaker 3: it seems like it was a record of the sacrifice
Speaker 3: because they deposited these jawbones and leg bones from cattle
Speaker 3: and red deer there like it's a record of the sacrifice. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so the bones as a record. And so this project
Speaker 3: in ne Korea happens in the seventies. It's the first
Speaker 3: time people are studying seeds and animal remains and doing
Speaker 3: soil studies and this kind of stuff, and it's really cool.
Speaker 3: And they got this paleontologist to study dinosaurs to go
Speaker 3: study these bones because he worked at Minnesota. And he
Speaker 3: notices that there's a lot more cattle in the Iron
Speaker 3: Age than in the Bronze Age, and the Bronze Age
Speaker 3: is sheep. Well, it's pick and sheep depends, like I said.
Speaker 3: And he says, they all became cowboys. They became so
Speaker 3: they went No, seriously, it is autobiography, he says this,
Speaker 3: and so and and and this is what started this
Speaker 3: idea that the change from the Palatial Period to the
Speaker 3: Dark Age is this shift from civilized agriculture to sort
Speaker 3: of less civilized pastoralism. Okay, right, and so I don't
Speaker 3: mean I shouldn't make it sound so pejortive because a
Speaker 3: lot of smart people worked on this, but uh but
Speaker 3: I think they're wrong.
Speaker 2: And it's just still like it's it's time, you know.
Speaker 2: It's just things change over time, and the way we
Speaker 2: structure these things and understand anything changes, So it makes
Speaker 2: sense it doesn't, yeah, less than the original findings.
Speaker 3: And so uh so Anthony Snagrast sort of looked around.
Speaker 3: He was the guy who really started earlier in age
Speaker 3: studies and in Greece. He like coined a lot of
Speaker 3: the terminology and periods and how to think about them,
Speaker 3: and so he put together what he calls the pastoral hypothesis.
Speaker 3: In a sense, people start living in more ephemeral structures.
Speaker 3: We see this shift from wheel may pottery to handmade potter.
Speaker 3: We see this shift from sort of agriculture to cattle.
Speaker 3: And the reason behind all this stuff is because they've
Speaker 3: shifted towards pastoralism. And this is what dominated, like I said,
Speaker 3: for a few decades the thinking on this, and it
Speaker 3: only was about ten years ago when the first book
Speaker 3: on archaeodiet and isotopic studies. It shows that actually people
Speaker 3: are even less animal protein at that time. And so
Speaker 3: my restudy of these bones at Nekorea, they basically showed
Speaker 3: that the reason why there's more cattle has nothing to
Speaker 3: do with humans. It has to do with the fact
Speaker 3: that the soil is more acidic in the higher levels
Speaker 3: of the site, and so smaller animals their bones didn't
Speaker 3: survive as well, while cattle survived. And I've mapped this
Speaker 3: all out spatially, like you have some areas where there's
Speaker 3: no Early Iron Age occupation, so it's just late Bronze
Speaker 3: Age at the top and those little areas, cattle are
Speaker 3: still the more dominant animal even in the late Bronze
Speaker 3: Age because they're worse preserved those bones, and so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: so that's it. That's what my article that Dan Filou
Speaker 3: is about is sort of the myth of this beef ranching.
Speaker 3: And no other site in the Iron Age that's been
Speaker 3: published since then by me or others shows cattle as
Speaker 3: the dominant animal. There's no real evidence for a pastoral economy.
Speaker 3: It looks like an agricultural economy continues. It's just more impoverished.
Speaker 3: We don't see this sort of upcycling of stuff and
Speaker 3: h yeah, so that's that's sort of what happens. And
Speaker 3: if you think about Homeric Epic, now, so how does
Speaker 3: how does this picture of the early Iron Age animal
Speaker 3: and animal husbandry and food stuffs and food ways, how
Speaker 3: does it relate to what we see in homer And
Speaker 3: it's I call it food porn food pornography.
Speaker 2: I remember you mentioned that when we when we talked
Speaker 2: about Atlantis. And it's funny because you're you're saying this
Speaker 2: in my head originally, like when you're before you said that,
Speaker 2: actually it's the cattle because they bone survived. But I'm thinking, well,
Speaker 2: you know, Homeric epic.
Speaker 3: Is all I should have mentioned that that was a
Speaker 3: part of his thing too. He's like, you know, and
Speaker 3: Anthony Snydgrass and others like we read about it. This
Speaker 3: is what they're doing. They're stealing cattle, their cattle rustling
Speaker 3: and their cowboys.
Speaker 2: Everything they sacrifice is cattle. And because I was already
Speaker 2: thinking when you're talking earlier about how many sheep there were,
Speaker 2: I was like, well, there's like no sheep in epic,
Speaker 2: which is just interesting. So yeah, that's that's really interesting
Speaker 2: because it does seem like a very cattle heavy people
Speaker 2: of course, you know, in terms of where where we're
Speaker 2: really interacting with that stuff, it's over and you know,
Speaker 2: quote unquote Troy. But like, yeah, that's that's really interesting
Speaker 2: because it does feel like that would fit, but then
Speaker 2: it sounds like it doesn't. You know, they did have.
Speaker 3: Not at all, and it's not only in Troy. At
Speaker 3: Pilos's under cattle and then they have that. That's the
Speaker 3: long scene, always cattle, and that's where they describe in
Speaker 3: detail and book three the sacrifice of the cow. They
Speaker 3: gild the horns, all the all the women chant as
Speaker 3: they bring the axe down, and like you know, all
Speaker 3: this kind of stuff, and so that's like the big
Speaker 3: sacrificial scene actually mostly comes from the Odyssees, and a
Speaker 3: lot of feasting does as well on Ehaica and elsewhere,
Speaker 3: and so yeah, but they're always eating cattle and it's
Speaker 3: and they're eating a lot of meat. It's like just
Speaker 3: like meat on meat on meat, which I love and
Speaker 3: I study, but it's not what you see. And I
Speaker 3: think that this is what I call I got to
Speaker 3: finish this article one day on this archaeology of epic
Speaker 3: poetry where I think for the for if we consider
Speaker 3: Homer a real person. Or let's just say when the
Speaker 3: story was heard by people in the early Iron Age,
Speaker 3: they were probably salivating. This is like descriptions of amazing
Speaker 3: food that they don't have access to. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: when this story is told in classical Athens and they're
Speaker 3: having huge sacrifices, they're saying, we're arranging our sacrifices to
Speaker 3: honor how Homer said that our ancestors made sacrifices. So
Speaker 3: it informs how they do things later on. And so
Speaker 3: you can think about how Homeric poetry is, the reception
Speaker 3: of it by ancient people, and especially because so much
Speaker 3: of it is food, how their diet is going to
Speaker 3: impact how they're going to sort of hear and understand
Speaker 3: and interpret the poem and these stories. Right. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: so that's one way that it relates is the cattle.
Speaker 3: You can also look at how sacrificial rituals arrange themselves,
Speaker 3: where in a sense, if you I have mentioned it
Speaker 3: at the Palace of Nester, it's sort of this jawbone
Speaker 3: and then the femur and the humorous so the upper
Speaker 3: fore limb and hind limb, front leg and back leg
Speaker 3: of the animal, and over time it becomes much more
Speaker 3: orthodox in what you burn for the gods. So you've
Speaker 3: read some Homer, what body part do you burn for
Speaker 3: the gods?
Speaker 2: Well, I know it's always you know the well, I
Speaker 2: guess Homer. I'll have trouble defining what's in Homer versus
Speaker 2: what's just sort of the doesn't matter those but yeah,
Speaker 2: it's the idea that, like, you know, because of Prometheus,
Speaker 2: you burn like the fatty stuff for the gods, basically
Speaker 2: the stuff you don't want to eat and then then
Speaker 2: you eat.
Speaker 3: So he see it, describes it as he see it,
Speaker 3: describes it as the it's a trick. So it's a
Speaker 3: big trick where you know, they kill the cow and
Speaker 3: then they make two portions, the meat wrapped in the
Speaker 3: hides and then the bones wrapped in the fat. And
Speaker 3: then Zeus comes down and he's like, I want that one,
Speaker 3: even though he knows it's a lie. And so that's
Speaker 3: why we he see it the way it ends it
Speaker 3: is like that's why we burn fat wrapped bones on
Speaker 3: the altars of the gods. Okay, but Homer's more specific,
Speaker 3: and the in the Odyssey dozens of times think about it.
Speaker 3: There's a specific bone that he burns. Oh, very specific,
Speaker 3: and don't worry, it's accurately translated almost all the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I would never, I've not.
Speaker 3: Next time, next time you read some home or pay
Speaker 3: attention to the thigh bones. It's always the thigh bone
Speaker 3: that's burned the myria in ancient Greek, and that's the
Speaker 3: port and it's always fat wraps, so that connects to
Speaker 3: he see it. And then but what we have archaeologically,
Speaker 3: I said, in the Bronze Age is more complicated. We
Speaker 3: have burning of bones. In fact, at this at the
Speaker 3: Mount Lecheon, the ash altar there in the Bronze Age layers,
Speaker 3: and all the way down it's burnt thigh bones, mostly
Speaker 3: a sheep. At Hallasmenos on Crete where I published it
Speaker 3: in the late Monoan period, it's the lower legs and
Speaker 3: heads of sheep and cattle, and the same at iron
Speaker 3: Age and Ecorea, and then at Pilos, like I mentioned,
Speaker 3: it's the jawbone, the forelimb, and the and the thigh bone.
Speaker 3: And then I do need to remember the name of
Speaker 3: that site. And iOS Constantinos on Mathena on the peninsula Mathana,
Speaker 3: and at these Bronze Age layers, at a Leucis, it's
Speaker 3: the also the feet and the heads, but of pigs,
Speaker 3: and so we have all this diversity of bones being burned,
Speaker 3: and slowly over time, it takes not a millennium, but
Speaker 3: by about five hundred BC or so, it's pretty much
Speaker 3: only the thigh bones that are burned. And so that
Speaker 3: goes back to again, I think it has to do
Speaker 3: with the reception of Homer as Homer. Yeah, as Homer
Speaker 3: it becomes more popular, the people see that as the
Speaker 3: orthodox of how we do our religious rituals and refer
Speaker 3: to it. They become more orthodox in what they burn
Speaker 3: on their alters, and it's just thigh bones eventually. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and so yeah.
Speaker 2: It's so interesting. I mean, see, this is why I'm
Speaker 2: thrilled to have, you know, have Joel come on to
Speaker 2: talk about the Homeric interactions, because like I mean, it's
Speaker 2: really it's really fascinating the way that they would mirror
Speaker 2: so many things off of Homer with the understanding that
Speaker 2: like it was you know, the Bronze age kind of thing,
Speaker 2: like what we now think of as a Bronze Age,
Speaker 2: Like yeah, oh, it's just faating.
Speaker 3: And that's why it's silly to think of homer as
Speaker 3: describing the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. It's a
Speaker 3: weirdnish mash of both. And you know, people like Susan
Speaker 3: Sharritts who share I forget, she's Ameritis, not a Sheffield.
Speaker 3: She's published on this, the direct relationship between archaeology and
Speaker 3: Homeric epic and how do you can find chronological markers
Speaker 3: in there? And so you know, so what they have
Speaker 3: is like the type of spear that they use or
Speaker 3: the type of shield they use. We can compare that
Speaker 3: to spears and shields that we have for iconography and
Speaker 3: in graves and stuff like that. And so homer uses
Speaker 3: both the shields and the spears from both the Bronze
Speaker 3: Age and the Iron Age. And there's one scene that
Speaker 3: she describes I forget where where a hero grabs it
Speaker 3: first the Bronze Age style sphere, and then the very
Speaker 3: next line is it's an Iron Age style sphere. And
Speaker 3: so just from the description of the spear, it's not
Speaker 3: like there's a different word, it's the way the spear
Speaker 3: is being used and described matches one or the other,
Speaker 3: like the physical nature of it and so so yeah,
Speaker 3: so Homeric epic poetry does not pay very clear attention.
Speaker 3: It just takes a bit from both if you see it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well yeah, because I mean because the thing
Speaker 2: about it, you know, and Joel was on my show
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago to talk about this, but
Speaker 2: you know, the whole I mean, obviously there's so much
Speaker 2: complexity to oral storytelling. But like, ultimately, what we have
Speaker 2: that survives was just written down at some point and
Speaker 2: that's the version that we have, but there would have
Speaker 2: been so many other versions, and you know, it was
Speaker 2: probably written down in the archaic period in Athens, and
Speaker 2: so it's so completely like tied to that time period
Speaker 2: in addition to everything else, because you're dealing with like
Speaker 2: five or six hundred years of storytelling then being written
Speaker 2: down into the only thing that we have, like exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so interesting to look at it all that way.
Speaker 2: And I mean I love the idea of just how
Speaker 2: many other versions could have existed or like, you know,
Speaker 2: what how different they were when they were actually being
Speaker 2: you know, sung to people five hundred years earlier. Things
Speaker 2: will never know. I want a time machine.
Speaker 3: Okay. So what we have left to do though, is
Speaker 3: we I've explained the older hypothesis this kind of yeah, pastoralism.
Speaker 3: There's like a whole new thing that I've been putting
Speaker 3: forth and other people have been putting forth, which is
Speaker 3: that a lot of it has to do with climate change.
Speaker 3: So this is not me being woke.
Speaker 2: Or something like that, right, show it's fine. We do
Speaker 2: not deny even a single thing about climate change on
Speaker 2: this show.
Speaker 3: No, no, I know, but I mean, but I guess
Speaker 3: the point is a lot of this just has to
Speaker 3: do with the fact that there's more evidence out there
Speaker 3: for things climate change. So with the fact that climate
Speaker 3: is changing today due to human causes, there's been a
Speaker 3: lot more research funds that have going gone towards understanding
Speaker 3: past climate change. And so you know that we've reached
Speaker 3: a critical mass in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Aegean
Speaker 3: and the Greek world specifically, that we now understand that
Speaker 3: the climate does get drier between the Bronze Age and
Speaker 3: the Iron Age. This drying of the climate starts not
Speaker 3: right at the collapse point though, so it's not some
Speaker 3: sort of inflection all this sudden. There's a megage route
Speaker 3: some some scholars have called it that because originally it
Speaker 3: was identified as the three point two Ka event. So
Speaker 3: from thirty two hundred years ago or twelve hundred, right,
Speaker 3: and so, uh and it's still called that.
Speaker 2: And there is it does worthy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it makes sense though, because you have to
Speaker 3: date everything with from before present if you're doing scientific dating.
Speaker 3: And the other reason for it is because there's also
Speaker 3: a fourteen point or four point two K event and
Speaker 3: an eight point two K event for some reason, there's
Speaker 3: a lot of periods of sharp climate change at the
Speaker 3: point two periods years ago. It's really weird. It's the
Speaker 3: type of thing I'm surprised conspiracy theorists have not jumped
Speaker 3: on because it's like a totally weird not.
Speaker 2: That it's not as exciting they needed to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, they've got climate change everything.
Speaker 2: What you're saying is that at the point two years
Speaker 2: the aliens have come down and they you know, made
Speaker 2: these major changes to Earth's climate.
Speaker 3: No, I'm not saying that at all, but no, and
Speaker 3: it's not every point too either, it's just now. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so about twelve hundred years ago it gets more rapid
Speaker 3: the driver. But this drying transition years ago started yeah,
Speaker 3: thirty two hundred years ago, sorry, started actually before that,
Speaker 3: so somewhere around fifteen hundred BC, I think. So there's
Speaker 3: a team out of Uppsala University, Erica Wiberg and Martin
Speaker 3: Fine and Antonine Bonier who have been working on this
Speaker 3: in the Peloponnese and detail and I published a few
Speaker 3: things with them, and they've been putting together all these
Speaker 3: climate records and then comparing them to regional surveys and stuff,
Speaker 3: and so what they seem to show is that when
Speaker 3: the climate first starts getting dryer about fifteen hundred BC,
Speaker 3: the first response that humans make is to So there's
Speaker 3: different ways you can adapt to climate change if you
Speaker 3: think about it like agriculturally speaking, and one of it
Speaker 3: is to intensify, so start growing more in more areas.
Speaker 3: So this is where you start seeing from regional surveys
Speaker 3: more dots on the map and in more marginal landscapes.
Speaker 3: So they're trying to intensify their production even areas that
Speaker 3: we don't farm today, you know, sort of on steeper slopes.
Speaker 3: They've measured this in terms of slope steepness and so yeah,
Speaker 3: so that's the first attempt. And we see this as
Speaker 3: a period though of cultural flourishing. You know, this is
Speaker 3: the waxing of the falacial Bronze Age. Sorry I never
Speaker 3: talked like this, but this is what you think of,
Speaker 3: is like the Bronze Age with with palaces and when
Speaker 3: your bat This is a period where it's starting to
Speaker 3: get dryer though, and so they're they're trying to adapt
Speaker 3: by intensifying. And then it's really tough to tell what
Speaker 3: kind of impact this climate change has had on sort
Speaker 3: of the palace structure itself. It clearly would not have been,
Speaker 3: you know, a direct impact that would have impacted food,
Speaker 3: which then would have impacted economic stuff, which then would
Speaker 3: have had other impacts on society. And eventually we see
Speaker 3: this you know, inflection point around what Eric Client would say,
Speaker 3: eleven seventy a BC. Right, obviously that's way too precisely dated,
Speaker 3: but whatever, it's eleven seventy seven, what am I saying?
Speaker 3: And so uh yeah, so so you know, but around
Speaker 3: the twelfth century BC we start seeing more of these
Speaker 3: palaces burning. However they do stay, those sites stay in
Speaker 3: occupation a little longer. More recent excavations at Pilo's, Massini,
Speaker 3: Tians and elsewhere. Kenosos of course never has an abandonment,
Speaker 3: and so clearly people are not just disappearing, and it's
Speaker 3: a slower transition into what you'd think of as an
Speaker 3: early Iron Age economy and what we're seeing. So Martin Fine,
Speaker 3: he's a paleoclimatologist at Upsala, and he does sort of
Speaker 3: so you you piece together the climate through looking at pollen.
Speaker 3: You can drill cores into lake beds where pollen survives.
Speaker 2: The scientific I love it those.
Speaker 3: Sediments, you know, they they accumulate in layers, and each
Speaker 3: of those layers is essentially a year or something like that.
Speaker 3: And all these cores down you look at the landscape
Speaker 3: from the pollen that's in there, and so you can
Speaker 3: see changes in sort of dryness or humidity or temperature
Speaker 3: based on which types of natural you know, wild plants
Speaker 3: show up in there. But Martin he studies speliothems, which
Speaker 3: are stalactites or stalagmites in caves, and so you cut
Speaker 3: a cross section of them. Their form from dripping of water,
Speaker 3: so you know, the water dissolves the calcium in the
Speaker 3: bedrock and then as it drips it sort of accumulates
Speaker 3: and solidifies, and since it's formed in these kind of
Speaker 3: layers again through the dripping, and that's why you have
Speaker 3: that sort of conical shape to these stalactites and stalagmites.
Speaker 3: You can sort of take a cross section of them,
Speaker 3: and then you can test them with oxygen isotopes and
Speaker 3: other isotopes that will tell you that tell you about precipitation.
Speaker 3: And so that's actually a more direct understanding of what's
Speaker 3: going on with precipitation specifically. And while of course pollen
Speaker 3: looks at the wild plants, which gives you a sense
Speaker 3: of how plants are, and so it's tough to understand though,
Speaker 3: if what the change in precipitation is right, you know,
Speaker 3: is this like five millimeters of rainfall, in which case
Speaker 3: maybe humans can shrug it off, or is it twenty
Speaker 3: And how is that different in different regions and things
Speaker 3: like that, right, And so that's where what I wanted
Speaker 3: to do is I wanted to see if humans adapted
Speaker 3: to this climate change and can we find any evidence
Speaker 3: that the people living there they wanted to adapt their
Speaker 3: sort of animal economy to it. And so what I
Speaker 3: found is, yes, very clearly they do. There's this shift
Speaker 3: from sheep to ghats, but only in eastern areas of
Speaker 3: the mainland and crete. And the reason for that is
Speaker 3: because if you look at a topographic map of Greece,
Speaker 3: there's a mountain range that runs right down the middle
Speaker 3: and the western half of Greece, and crete gets twice
Speaker 3: as much rainfall as the eastern half. So in the
Speaker 3: areas where they were more at risk from a drier climate,
Speaker 3: the eastern half, that's when they had to adapt by
Speaker 3: shifting from sheep to ghosts. And so I published that
Speaker 3: with about fifteen sites, or well fifteen sites in each period.
Speaker 3: And now I've just zoomed in on create my big
Speaker 3: research projective project is called Zoa Crete, and that picked out,
Speaker 3: like I don't know, forty five different sites in crete,
Speaker 3: and you can see this shift over time, and it's
Speaker 3: really clearly eastern versus western, and it's very very clearly
Speaker 3: therefore correlated with rainfall. And so that tells me that
Speaker 3: and I hope others that this climate change was not
Speaker 3: just something that's showing up in a really you know
Speaker 3: I am I trying to say, in a really sensitive
Speaker 3: scientific study, this would have been enough that people felt
Speaker 3: the need to adapt to it, and so it was
Speaker 3: very much impacting their their their what what what kind
Speaker 3: of what their crop outputs and animal outputs were not
Speaker 3: enough archaeobotanical studies have been done from the Iron Age
Speaker 3: and Bronze Age to really put together a global picture,
Speaker 3: like the global a complete picture of these periods and
Speaker 3: contrast them. Only a few Iron Age sites have been studied.
Speaker 3: More on that, I hope eventually from colleagues. But so, yeah,
Speaker 3: but what's happening also is it's a very slow change,
Speaker 3: so it doesn't happen immediately almost anywhere. It takes several
Speaker 3: hundred years for people to adapt, and so that also
Speaker 3: suggests they struggled with it. So like at Nikorea, they
Speaker 3: never really do it goes you know, like if you
Speaker 3: ignore that shift cattle, they're still very sheep heavy. They
Speaker 3: are also in the west, so you know that that
Speaker 3: might be part of it. So they're getting it there,
Speaker 3: maybe not as impacted, but yeah, most areas, it seems
Speaker 3: like it takes several centuries for this shift towards goats.
Speaker 3: And one of the things that I'm trying to think
Speaker 3: about is how that impacts then developments to the next period,
Speaker 3: because the next period, of course is archaic crease, and
Speaker 3: you think about it. I described this as it's adaptive,
Speaker 3: but it's also shows that every area is responding differently
Speaker 3: in a unique sort of heterogeneous way, and that sort
Speaker 3: of mimics this next period of established from the city
Speaker 3: states right where it's a very heterogeneous, regional sort of
Speaker 3: cultural and economic way of people managing themselves. But they're
Speaker 3: all in these Greek city states. And so I'm wondering
Speaker 3: if this kind of regionality that we see in ceramics
Speaker 3: it also has to do with agriculture and food production,
Speaker 3: and if it's this shift in economic production that helps
Speaker 3: lead to these cultural changes that we call, you know,
Speaker 3: the developed in a city state and things like that
Speaker 3: in these different political economies. So that's what I would
Speaker 3: say is sort of happening now or what we think,
Speaker 3: what a lot of us think is happening now.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. I it's so funny.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm I just associate Greace with goats so
Speaker 2: much that I'm interested in hearing that transition exactly. Like
Speaker 2: I mean, I've been to Samothrak and I've been to Crete,
Speaker 2: and it's like those are my two those are my
Speaker 2: goat islands in my head. Like I mean, I've definitely
Speaker 2: seen them, you know, on another a lot of other
Speaker 2: like cyclic cycladic islands. But I just in my head,
Speaker 2: it's just like they're so tied together, like goats. Goats
Speaker 2: are just so Greek to me. But I love hearing
Speaker 2: about the rainfall. It's so this is like very niche connection.
Speaker 2: But like so I live on the west coast of Canada.
Speaker 2: I live in the Pacific Northwest. I live in this
Speaker 2: general realm where everyone assumes that the whole thing we
Speaker 2: have all the time, all day, every day is rain, right,
Speaker 2: like Seattle and Vancouver, that rainiest places imaginable, and they
Speaker 2: like like our sort of sort of surround where I live, Victoria,
Speaker 2: the Island, Vancouver Island, But Vancouver Island has this big
Speaker 2: mountain called the Malahat, and everything south of the Malahat,
Speaker 2: which is like only a short ways up our very
Speaker 2: very large island, everything south of the Malahat gets about
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know the scientific number, but like
Speaker 2: just anecdotally having lived in Vancouver and Victoria, like Victoria
Speaker 2: and the South Island gets probably sixty to seventy percent
Speaker 2: less rain than Vancouver and Seattle and even north of
Speaker 2: that mountain because we like we call it our rain shadow.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's like a thing broadly, but
Speaker 2: like we live in this little rain shadow where like
Speaker 2: everyone assumes it's raining all the time, but really, especially
Speaker 2: as climate change progresses, like Victoria gets very little rain
Speaker 2: compared to the other places, and we just live in
Speaker 2: this nice little bubble. So I'm like, oh, I like
Speaker 2: I have this kind of like I know how that
Speaker 2: can happen and how it like affects the difference, and
Speaker 2: like it can really just be like such a just
Speaker 2: that little shift of there's a mountain there and the
Speaker 2: amount of like rainfall is so affected. And I'm deeply unscientific,
Speaker 2: so but I love the idea that I could just
Speaker 2: like connect that. I'm like, oh, yeah, I know that
Speaker 2: just from living here.
Speaker 3: That's really important because I mean, you know, when you
Speaker 3: you've been to Greece, right, and it's such a heterogeneous landscape.
Speaker 3: You have some mountains, upland plateaus and coastal plains, you
Speaker 3: have you know, a whole set of kind of different
Speaker 3: biomes and so you know, yeah, we need to understand
Speaker 3: this on a very precise regional and microregional scale, right.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it's it's so diverse there, Like I just
Speaker 2: have to say, like one of the things that stood
Speaker 2: out to me most like I've been I've been to
Speaker 2: a lot of great islands now and not as much
Speaker 2: on the mainland, but like I went to Samothraki a
Speaker 2: couple of years ago, and that island to me is
Speaker 2: like from my experience, it is the most diverse. Like
Speaker 2: have you been there at all?
Speaker 3: No, I've never been to. No, I wish.
Speaker 2: I mean it's wild. Wild is the only word to
Speaker 2: use to describe it. I mean the goats alone. But
Speaker 2: like there most of the island is like very typical Greek,
Speaker 2: you know, it's it's very dry and arid, and there's
Speaker 2: this big mountain like the island like is Mount Pangari.
Speaker 2: And and then but there's this one little spot of
Speaker 2: this very small island where just one face of the
Speaker 2: mountain is like a rainforest and there's like you know,
Speaker 2: waterfalls and rivers and the plants that you go Like
Speaker 2: there's this town called Therma, and then the river is
Speaker 2: Fonias and you can go to this like gorge area
Speaker 2: and it's like a different world. It's like the trees
Speaker 2: are completely different. Everything is so green and wet and luscious.
Speaker 2: And then you leave this like tiny little square of
Speaker 2: the island, and you were on typical Greek where everything
Speaker 2: is so dry and mountainous and and it's like brown,
Speaker 2: and there's just goats everywhere. And it's fascinating to me
Speaker 2: because Samotharky's one of the smallest islands, like and it
Speaker 2: just like this, this complete difference, just on this one place.
Speaker 2: So I can only imagine, you know, what exists in
Speaker 2: the wider Greek world that I haven't seen yet. But
Speaker 2: I'm also just obsessed with sam with Reki, so I
Speaker 2: can talk about but.
Speaker 3: I want to pop your bubble, or pop your myth
Speaker 3: bubble for a second about these goats. So this is
Speaker 3: a myth. This is like cattle's in Homer.
Speaker 2: What do you mean a myth?
Speaker 3: What I mean that this is a myth? Your association
Speaker 3: of Greece with goats. So let me tell you a story.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I okay, I mean how many I've
Speaker 2: seen that?
Speaker 3: I know, I know, I know, but I'm going to
Speaker 3: prove it to you. I'm going to prove it to you. Wait,
Speaker 3: do you do you eat meat? I forget? Yeah? Yeah, okay, good,
Speaker 3: that that's important. So all right, I gave a lecture.
Speaker 3: I studied all these goats from Azori on Cretan. I
Speaker 3: was called goats and other animals in there, and I
Speaker 3: went to the Internet and I asked for pictures of
Speaker 3: goats to illustrate my point, and I got so many
Speaker 3: amazing goat pictures, mostly from Greek archaeologists, but really people
Speaker 3: all over the world, because goats are so photogenic.
Speaker 2: It's why I sort of got I have from Samothraki
Speaker 2: in correct, the horns on some of them, because they're
Speaker 2: all wild and they're like, yeah.
Speaker 3: Far they're they're they were domesticated and they went feral.
Speaker 3: Yeah so uh but yes, and you need to send
Speaker 3: me some of those so I can integrate them into
Speaker 3: my lectures. But it was only after I did this
Speaker 3: and asked for sheep and cattle for my Twitter followers
Speaker 3: and nobody could send me any good photos that I
Speaker 3: realized that these goats and from all over the world.
Speaker 3: They're highly visible because people let them roam right, so
Speaker 3: they're very visible, and people like them, so they notice
Speaker 3: them and see them and photograph them. They end up
Speaker 3: going viral online and that's why you see all these
Speaker 3: articles every year, like the Year of the Goat. Everybody's
Speaker 3: going crazy about baby goats. Online, you know, and whatnot.
Speaker 3: They are, but they don't represent the actual animal economy
Speaker 3: in modern Greece. It's still mostly sheep. So if you
Speaker 3: go into a taverna, what do you order? You order
Speaker 3: lamb or do you order goat? And so you m yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: And so this is just what you're seeing because the
Speaker 3: sheep are being raised in a more sort of constricted way.
Speaker 3: They are what's you know, on agricultural fields that you
Speaker 3: don't go and visit. You know, you're not going to
Speaker 3: the farms of Greece where most of those sheep are. Instead,
Speaker 3: you're up at the archaeological sites and in the forest
Speaker 3: or at the beach where goats might sometimes roam by
Speaker 3: because they just sort of roam around.
Speaker 2: Now I have to tell you a bit more about
Speaker 2: the Samothration that's a.
Speaker 3: Different story because of the're feral goats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well exactly, and Sanmo Three's feral goats, Like I
Speaker 2: think I read this number somewhere once, but they outnumber
Speaker 2: people tend to one on Samothraci, like the goats are
Speaker 2: while you literally cannot exist in the outdoors on Samothraki
Speaker 2: unless you're in like the town without hearing goats everywhere
Speaker 2: around you all the time. It's incredible. But Samothraki is
Speaker 2: also the only place I've ever seen sheep, and so,
Speaker 2: like I was staying in this hotel.
Speaker 3: Except for a butcher shop.
Speaker 2: Well yes, exactly, live no, I was staying in this
Speaker 2: hotel and like all of Samothraki, like there's just a
Speaker 2: road all the way around the island because it's a
Speaker 2: mountain in the middle, and so everything is basically on
Speaker 2: the coast, and so from my hotel, I can see
Speaker 2: the coast and you can like I walked this long
Speaker 2: street that goes around the island to like get to
Speaker 2: the closest restaurant. So I like walked this strip along
Speaker 2: the water like so many times. And one time I
Speaker 2: was coming back to my hotel and I'm walking along
Speaker 2: and there is just an entire like herd of sheep
Speaker 2: and this shepherd guy who's there with a truck and
Speaker 2: his shepherd crook, and I was like, this is the
Speaker 2: most iconic thing I've ever seen, Like so and but
Speaker 2: he'd brought his herd of sheep to the beach and
Speaker 2: they were like just grazing somewhere, and I was really
Speaker 2: obsessed with like okay, but he had his so many
Speaker 2: of them, like how does he get them back? And
Speaker 2: I was like so interested in this farmer and his
Speaker 2: sheep and they're on the beach and it's so cool.
Speaker 2: And then so I like go back to my hotel
Speaker 2: room to decide. I'm like, I'm gonna watch. I want
Speaker 2: to see like what this guy does. But I get
Speaker 2: distracted because the sheep are on this beach and then
Speaker 2: directly behind the sheep dolphins, huh start cool breaching like
Speaker 2: literally probably ten to twenty feet off the coast, directly
Speaker 2: behind this herd of sheep, and I'm just staring at
Speaker 2: this thing, like what am I even watching right now?
Speaker 2: I've got dolphins behind a herd of sheep in front
Speaker 2: of me, and I got so distracted by the dolphins
Speaker 2: I didn't catch how the guy heard it all his
Speaker 2: sheep at wherever the heck he was, because I had
Speaker 2: been like there for a week and never seen a
Speaker 2: single sheep because of the goats, except when he brought
Speaker 2: them in. So it definitely proves your point. But also
Speaker 2: it's just one of my favorite eends from Semukreki. It's
Speaker 2: the craziest island, Like it's another world entirely. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I did see domesticated sheep and a lot of feral goats.
Speaker 3: Far goats are on and it's yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 3: but even the even the ones that are domesticated are problems.
Speaker 3: Like we had a lot of problems with them climbing
Speaker 3: our fences and getting onto the site. So that are
Speaker 3: those the students excavating. They'd enter the trench every morning
Speaker 3: to go turts, and so you know, it creates problems
Speaker 3: with scientific sampling. It creates all kinds of issues. But
Speaker 3: you can't really control goats because they're able to climb
Speaker 3: pretty much anything, and so.
Speaker 2: You know why they work so well, yeah, mountainous grease.
Speaker 3: But yeah, and it also means when you start hitting
Speaker 3: a recession and stop doing as much investment into agricultural
Speaker 3: wild spaces, goats can just take over, like on samitharchy,
Speaker 3: and it's a real problem there. Yeah, yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 3: they are a myth in that sense. They mostly raise
Speaker 3: them for feta. So most of the feta you eat
Speaker 3: his goats cheese. And then most of the animal that
Speaker 3: you eat is often lamb, unless it's adult, in which
Speaker 3: case some butchers or restaurants that might occasionally give you
Speaker 3: goat when they say it's cheap, that can happen to Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've definitely seeing goat on the menu. I have chosen
Speaker 2: to eat it, but I mean I'm not like a
Speaker 2: big adventurous meat person. I'll admit though in grease i
Speaker 2: am more so, so I probably should, but no, it's
Speaker 2: I mean, it's interesting because, yeah, I associate when it
Speaker 2: comes to at least grease and Greek food, I associate
Speaker 2: goat with the milk, with feta and cheese. Broadly, it's
Speaker 2: a lot of a lot of goat cheese over there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but you should if you're ever in Greece
Speaker 3: for something like smoky Tuesdays, Seek No Pempty or Easter
Speaker 3: or something like that. I mean, it's just lamb everywhere,
Speaker 3: all over, and so I mean, you know, they really
Speaker 3: are a lamb eating culture rather than a goat eating culture. Definitely.
Speaker 2: The only place I've really seen goat on the menu
Speaker 2: is like in crete, which I know, yeah, it's.
Speaker 3: All over, it's all over, but it's it's it's good.
Speaker 3: It's a goat is great. They sometimes do it with
Speaker 3: old goat, but you can also get young goat, and
Speaker 3: I've never had bad goat. It's it's good, and it's
Speaker 3: it's you have to it's a little game here, but
Speaker 3: it's it's when they when they know if you if
Speaker 3: they know how to cook it, they'll make it really delicious.
Speaker 2: I mean Greek food. They know how to cook it.
Speaker 3: But maybe you don't want to go out and cook
Speaker 3: a goat.
Speaker 2: No, No, they're going to do it for me. I
Speaker 2: don't cook a lot of animal mad I just get
Speaker 2: people to do it for you. It's just I mean,
Speaker 2: this is so fascinating because I just never think about
Speaker 2: this side of it, the interactions with animals, let alone
Speaker 2: the study of bones to figure out this kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Is there is there more? I mean, obviously there's so
Speaker 2: much more, but like, is there more particularly that you
Speaker 2: want to share when it comes to this, like the
Speaker 2: Bronze Age associations and you know that transition or really
Speaker 2: anything fond about how about bronz Age and food?
Speaker 3: This ain't Bronze Age per se. It's more like what
Speaker 3: we can think about coming next. So in a sense
Speaker 3: I've mentioned at a few points things like isotopes studies, right,
Speaker 3: So you can take isotopes from people's teeth and bones,
Speaker 3: and it tells you about diet and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: So you can look at how much animal consumption or
Speaker 3: different kinds of plants people are eating, stuff like that.
Speaker 3: But you can also do that with animals. And so
Speaker 3: this is what I'm doing right now, is you can
Speaker 3: actually take samples from the teeth of the bones of
Speaker 3: animals and you can see understand their diet and even
Speaker 3: better if you if anyone was paying a lot of attention,
Speaker 3: I mentioned that at some point those those spieliothems, those
Speaker 3: stalactites and stalagmites, uh, they use sometimes oxygen isotope can
Speaker 3: tell you about seasonal or precipitation, or weather patterns, climate pans.
Speaker 3: So you can do this on the tooth of a
Speaker 3: sheeper goat. Unlike most human teeth, sheep and goat teeth
Speaker 3: or cattle teeth, they grow up and the way they
Speaker 3: I'm making signs with you too with my hand. Nobody
Speaker 3: can see them, but.
Speaker 2: They normally I remember, but now I'm like, does the shape.
Speaker 3: So the way that these teeth grow is it's it's
Speaker 3: one layer of enamel at a time, right, And so
Speaker 3: if we sample a tooth horizontally, and we take several
Speaker 3: samples up a tooth. What we end up with is
Speaker 3: a signature of what this animal is eating during different
Speaker 3: seasons of the year. Yeah, right, And so we can
Speaker 3: correlate that using oxygen, and then the carbon signature, which
Speaker 3: we get at the same time from the mass spectrometer
Speaker 3: from the same sample, tells us about the type of
Speaker 3: plants that the animal is eating. And so what that
Speaker 3: tells us is how these animals are managed seasonally. So
Speaker 3: when you think about modern day agriculture, you see all
Speaker 3: these goats, do you have a sense of how they're
Speaker 3: herded between uplands and lowland seasonally?
Speaker 2: I only associate it with samilthraki, where they're just fucking everywhere.
Speaker 2: They're doing their own things. They don't give a shit.
Speaker 3: Fucking feral goats everywhere everywhere. Okay, So traditionally these sheep
Speaker 3: and goat and other animals there are oftentimes, so if
Speaker 3: you think about it, they're in the uplands in the
Speaker 3: summer when it's cooler and the uplands are more lush,
Speaker 3: and they're in the lowlands in the winter. That's sort
Speaker 3: of modern animal husbandry. And there's been this debate that's
Speaker 3: been raging between ancient historians and archaeologists for about one
Speaker 3: hundred y and it's called the agro pastoral debate, and
Speaker 3: it's about a big chunk of it is about whether
Speaker 3: they move their animals up and down seasonally. And so
Speaker 3: now we can start to answer this kind of question
Speaker 3: by doing this isotope study up a tooth to see
Speaker 3: what they're eating and where they're going from the geological
Speaker 3: signature seasonally, and so that's going to be able to
Speaker 3: tell us a lot more. I've started getting results from Zorea,
Speaker 3: so that's iron Age and archaic, but there's no Bronze
Speaker 3: Age animals there. And then collaborator of my Ballacia Izikivu,
Speaker 3: has published some from Bronze Age Kumosos, and I am
Speaker 3: going to Greece next week. I'm working with her and
Speaker 3: I'm grabbing material with a permit from the Ministry of
Speaker 3: Culture and everything like that. I'm not just taking it
Speaker 3: with me.
Speaker 2: I appreciate it, and I you.
Speaker 3: Know, I have a conservator that's gonna inspect what I
Speaker 3: do and I'll be discussing how I sample it, and
Speaker 3: I have an official permit and everything, and I'll be
Speaker 3: taking material back here in Cardiff in order to do
Speaker 3: this analysis on material from Iron Age and then Classical
Speaker 3: period and Roman period sheep and goat from Kenosos. So
Speaker 3: we'll have a record from the Bronze Age to the
Speaker 3: Roman period soon at Kenosos that could maybe be talking
Speaker 3: about in more detail how this animal management adapts and
Speaker 3: responds and drives cultural changes and relates to climate change
Speaker 3: and things like that. And so we'll really have a
Speaker 3: clearer understanding of that between those periods at a few
Speaker 3: of these sites, and if I get more funding, I'll
Speaker 3: do it at more sites, places like Cathens and elsewhere,
Speaker 3: because I think it's important to reach this level of resolution.
Speaker 3: If you will, you know, if we want to really
Speaker 3: understand how humans adapt to sort of climate change, one
Speaker 3: thing I can say is they take way too long.
Speaker 3: That that clearly now, yeah, we can tell that right now.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is this is an article I want
Speaker 3: to write for some magazine. Is like, you know, when
Speaker 3: you look at these shifts in the Greek world, they
Speaker 3: tell us that people took too long. They clearly recognize
Speaker 3: that the climate was changing. And it's funny how we're
Speaker 3: mimicking this intensification. We're just growing our economy. But you know,
Speaker 3: at some point we're gonna have to start thinking about
Speaker 3: changing our diversity. So that's this guy Mac Marston who
Speaker 3: teaches it. Bu We wrote this article on different ways
Speaker 3: people can adapt to climate change, and one is intensification,
Speaker 3: the other one is diversity, biodiversity and diversify strategies. Even
Speaker 3: so you don't just do the same strategy. You do
Speaker 3: different kinds of strategies in different places. And so you know,
Speaker 3: we're gonna have to start thinking about that today and
Speaker 3: we need to act faster because you know, we look
Speaker 3: at the Iron Age of Greece and even though I
Speaker 3: agree calling it a dark age is silly, doesn't make sense.
Speaker 3: But at the same time people there were more people
Speaker 3: that were malnourished, there were people that were not eating
Speaker 3: as well, and there are no elites at all, you know,
Speaker 3: Like you get these stories of elites that want to
Speaker 3: build a bunker and survive, and then they ask what
Speaker 3: can I do when my guards have guns and I don't,
Speaker 3: And it's like, well, dude, if you want to look
Speaker 3: at some history so you can inform yourself when you
Speaker 3: look at collapse, collapse is a stupid term. Collapse literally
Speaker 3: just means the collapse of the elites. When we think
Speaker 3: of cultural collapses and civilizational collapses, it's the elites who
Speaker 3: get fucked yep, just as much as everyone else. And
Speaker 3: the elites disappear, right, they get they get eaten and become.
Speaker 2: The poor as well, and so you know, the angry left. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's fine.
Speaker 3: Like, if there's some billionaire listening who wants to build
Speaker 3: a bunker, screw that. Fuck that work to help society
Speaker 3: as a whole mitigate and adapt to climate change, because
Speaker 3: we're all going down together.
Speaker 2: And your billions aren't gonna matter then, so nothing, they
Speaker 2: don't matter now, So maybe just fucking use them correctly
Speaker 2: instead of Yeah, yeah, Zucker, and we're talking to you. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I just I mean, that's yeah, that's a pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: I'm glad we have that connection to modern climate change because,
Speaker 2: like I mean, if you think like they took too
Speaker 2: long back then and they did not have the human
Speaker 2: made impacts of climate change that we have now, and
Speaker 2: we are like the evidence is there, we're fucked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean like well, I mean, look, I refuse
Speaker 3: to be a dumer about it. I mean, the reality
Speaker 3: is people have adapted, and we can adapt if we
Speaker 3: can somehow get the will to do it.
Speaker 2: You know, Well, that's the thing. It's not about the people.
Speaker 2: It's about the elite wanting to do it right. And
Speaker 2: I mean I would love to, but I have no
Speaker 2: control over that.
Speaker 3: Some notes of optimism is that the lots of countries
Speaker 3: are decarbonizing at you know, not as fast as we need,
Speaker 3: but they it's moving along, and that's important to acknowledge
Speaker 3: because that builds up economies of scale, makes it cheaper
Speaker 3: to decarbonize for other people. And to be honest, if
Speaker 3: you think about it long term, it's a capitalists should
Speaker 3: want to decarbonize. It's a lot cheaper to use renewable
Speaker 3: energy sources than they have to mine into the ground
Speaker 3: and transport them all over the world, like that costs money.
Speaker 3: So you know, like I think we will decarbonize. And
Speaker 3: there's lots of efforts to adapt things like our some
Speaker 3: mostly in wealthier countries of course, agricultural systems and to
Speaker 3: build flood barriers and to adapt to rising sea levels.
Speaker 3: But I definitely think we need to think more about
Speaker 3: food as well, because, to be honest, we talk about
Speaker 3: like more intense storms and we talk about rising sea level,
Speaker 3: but what's really impacting people today from climate change that
Speaker 3: is already happening is food. That's why we see famines,
Speaker 3: That's why we see refugee crises, that's why we see
Speaker 3: there's people that have speculated with good evidence, not just
Speaker 3: crappy speculation that you know, the wars in Syria, for example,
Speaker 3: started with famines which were caused basically by climate change,
Speaker 3: or at least made a lot worse. And so you
Speaker 3: know already today, if we want to be thinking about
Speaker 3: what's really impacting most people, it's food. It's the price
Speaker 3: of food that it's the availability of food. It's our
Speaker 3: ability to grow and distribute food. That is what underpins
Speaker 3: our society and our ability to live. So we got
Speaker 3: to fix that up and make it work better. It
Speaker 3: also contributes to to to carbon as well. You know,
Speaker 3: all the fertilizers we use, the ways in which we
Speaker 3: produce animals, factory.
Speaker 2: Farming in North America specifically, yeah, yeah, yeah, And so
Speaker 2: we're talking to you a lot today between the oil
Speaker 2: and the factory farming province. It is reassuring, it is
Speaker 2: there's some positive I mean, hopefully, I have trouble with
Speaker 2: trusting any capitalist government, but I'd like to think that
Speaker 2: maybe things will change, yeah, you know for us today,
Speaker 2: but it's so interesting to look at these past examples
Speaker 2: of what was happening. Like I think we often don't
Speaker 2: don't think about that because because you know, human made
Speaker 2: climate change now is so much faster, and it like
Speaker 2: we are dealing with so much of that now that
Speaker 2: it's interesting to look back on the stuff that did
Speaker 2: happen naturally.
Speaker 3: And we have to, I mean, like it's silly not
Speaker 3: to look to the past to understand how we can respond.
Speaker 3: I mean, I know that some archaeology has some relevance
Speaker 3: with something called lithic mulching. So for a long time
Speaker 3: in Southwest America you see sort of Southwest indigenous farms archaeologically,
Speaker 3: I mean, and there's sort of terraces, and it's like,
Speaker 3: how are people growing in the middle of the desert, right,
Speaker 3: And what you see oftentimes is this scattering of stones
Speaker 3: in the soil. And we know they're growing there because
Speaker 3: we have pollen and archaeopotanical stuff. We have terraces and
Speaker 3: like you know, houses and other structures there. And the
Speaker 3: way they're able to do that is through something called
Speaker 3: lithic mulching, where when you put stones in the soil
Speaker 3: the stones help retain moisture. You can think about this
Speaker 3: if you go outside today and do after on a
Speaker 3: drier day, and you pick up a rock, the soil
Speaker 3: right under the rock is wetter than the soil that's
Speaker 3: right next to it, and so the and lithic multi
Speaker 3: The more archaeologists look at it, we find it in
Speaker 3: indigenous cultures all over the world, right and so so
Speaker 3: now people are starting to adapt that to modern farming
Speaker 3: in areas that are getting drier, and so we should
Speaker 3: definitely be looking to the past to start thinking about
Speaker 3: how to I mean, look, how often have humans had
Speaker 3: to deal with climate change? Obviously a lot over the
Speaker 3: span of thousands and thousands of years, but not that
Speaker 3: it's only this one event in our own lifetime. So
Speaker 3: you know, if we want to understand different ways that
Speaker 3: human societies have adapted, I mean, I think we have
Speaker 3: to look to the past. And it's so silly that
Speaker 3: we see things like all these cuts to things like
Speaker 3: archaeology and humanities and stuff like that, because how do
Speaker 3: we how do we contextualize major changes? There's no way
Speaker 3: to do that. We always economists look to the past
Speaker 3: with stock performance, people who comment on sports look to
Speaker 3: the past with statistics. You know what they're doing. We
Speaker 3: got to do the same thing with humans. You know,
Speaker 3: we look to the past to inform our own decisions,
Speaker 3: to provide context to why we make decisions. And so,
Speaker 3: you know, just because ours is anthropogenic climate change does
Speaker 3: not make it. You know, the end point could be
Speaker 3: drastically different as climate change goes faster and more severe
Speaker 3: than ever before. But obviously we want to work to
Speaker 3: mitigate that, you know, that's the goal is to decarbonize
Speaker 3: and mitigate that and so, but at the same time,
Speaker 3: there's some amount of climate change that's cooked in, let's say,
Speaker 3: and so we should be looking in the past or
Speaker 3: ways that we can mitigate that or adapt to it,
Speaker 3: is what I mean. Sorry, Yeah, and obviously things like
Speaker 3: elithic mulching, but also the evidence for biodiversity from past
Speaker 3: food production. If you go to POMPEII, for example, and
Speaker 3: you walk around, you might notice there's these weird concrete
Speaker 3: things that kind of look like a platform form with
Speaker 3: like spider legs underneath it. Oh.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I was just there, but now I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: what are this? Okay, sorry, keep going, It's okay.
Speaker 3: You can you see them in a more wide open
Speaker 3: spaces at Pompeii. What they are is so all right,
Speaker 3: so you probably saw the bodies when you went to Pompeii.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, not enough, I was. We spent too much
Speaker 2: time walking around, but I did I thought saw some.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So what happens with that is when the volcanic
Speaker 3: material rains down, organic life forms like people got trapped
Speaker 3: in this lapili is what they're called there, and eventually
Speaker 3: the bodies decayed away and left a void. And early
Speaker 3: excavators saw these voids. There were people, and they poured
Speaker 3: in plaster. And that's what those bodies are that you
Speaker 3: see on display, those spider leg things with a platform.
Speaker 3: That's actually the same thing but for a tree trunk
Speaker 3: and roots. Oh cool. Yeah, they're all over Pompeii. None
Speaker 3: of them have signs. You have to know what you're
Speaker 3: looking for or to see them. But they're all over
Speaker 3: right by the Amphitheater And like you know, well, I
Speaker 3: wish I talked to you two minutes ago.
Speaker 2: I was there for the first time in January.
Speaker 3: But what this lets us do at Pompeii, because especially
Speaker 3: these days, experts are really they're they're keen to identify
Speaker 3: this kind of stuff, and like Barbara Burrell's doing excavations
Speaker 3: at a villa nearby, I think is that a plontis
Speaker 3: I'm blanking on which villa it is, and different teams
Speaker 3: they're able to see these, and they're able to now
Speaker 3: pour in the plaster in about different kind of plaster,
Speaker 3: which gets you more specific root cast. It was wil
Speaker 3: Helmina Zruzhzemsky, by the way, she was the first one
Speaker 3: to develop this technique in the seventies. But now we're
Speaker 3: down to like this micro level of roots, which lets
Speaker 3: biologists then identify very closely to species and much smaller
Speaker 3: plants as well, which means we can say this tree
Speaker 3: was here, that tree was there, that's stake in the
Speaker 3: ground that had a vine on it was right there, right,
Speaker 3: And then from other types of things like archaeobotanical stuff
Speaker 3: and pollen samples, we can really put together a farmstead
Speaker 3: right in real place, what's growing where at the time
Speaker 3: of the eruption, And what we see is it looks
Speaker 3: nothing like our farms today, nothing at all. When you
Speaker 3: go to like the Midwest or in Midwest, it's corn
Speaker 3: as far as you can see. And I don't know
Speaker 3: In France it's corn or sunflowers as far as you
Speaker 3: can see. In Greece it's olive trees as far as
Speaker 3: you can see, you know, And so we have this monoculture.
Speaker 3: This is the epitome of polyculture. It's one row of
Speaker 3: olives next to another row of a different kind of
Speaker 3: fruit tree in between them as a row of vines.
Speaker 3: Right over there is a small little field for wheat
Speaker 3: and legumes. It's all in one farmstead and that is
Speaker 3: extremely productive, if you you know, the more different. There's
Speaker 3: a lot of studies done by Big Agriculture as well,
Speaker 3: even funded by the show that the more biodiversity there
Speaker 3: is a plot of land, the more you can produce.
Speaker 3: The amount that we think of of ancient people getting
Speaker 3: out of a plot of land has been kind of
Speaker 3: the scholars until recently have underestimated it. In fact, ancient agriculture,
Speaker 3: probably a lot of it produced more per unit of
Speaker 3: land than modern industry of agriculture because it was so biodiverse.
Speaker 3: We don't like it for our economy today because it
Speaker 3: takes a lot more work, right, so it's an efficiency
Speaker 3: of labor issue, But in terms of maximizing your production
Speaker 3: out of the landscape in the face of something like
Speaker 3: climate change. We need to be thinking about polyculture systems.
Speaker 3: And you know, that's what most indigenous agriculture around the
Speaker 3: world is, that's what most ancient Greek and Roman agriculture
Speaker 3: around the world is, so on and so forth. That's
Speaker 3: actually how to be more productive and efficient and stable
Speaker 3: and resilient, sustainable and resilient with your sort of food
Speaker 3: production systems. And so we should be looking to these
Speaker 3: food productions resistance in the past to get some ideas
Speaker 3: on how to rejigger our own in the face of this.
Speaker 3: One of my arguments, well.
Speaker 2: I imagine that looking back to what indigenous people did,
Speaker 2: you know in so many places, I think of North
Speaker 2: America so specifically, but you know, like they knew how
Speaker 2: to use the land without harming the land in a
Speaker 2: lot of ways. Like they really really had this like
Speaker 2: actual real connection with with the land and were able
Speaker 2: to do all of these things that we just you know,
Speaker 2: capitalism has just made it so that like it just
Speaker 2: doesn't occur in the same ways. And and it's all
Speaker 2: about you know, power and power structures versus you know,
Speaker 2: particularly those indigenous groups that were less concerned with that
Speaker 2: and more concerned with with just living happily on the
Speaker 2: land and honoring it and all of that. It's you know,
Speaker 2: it's a it's a really interesting thing. And I think
Speaker 2: particularly in North America, Like I know that you know,
Speaker 2: indigenous archaeology and stuff is studied, but obviously the you know,
Speaker 2: the the colonial impacts that are still so long lasting.
Speaker 2: I mean that they're not you know, we're not looking
Speaker 2: as much as I think that we should. But it
Speaker 2: is so interesting to look at, you know, the way
Speaker 2: that a lot of indigenous people really cared for their
Speaker 2: land in ways that is so different from us today.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, just a much more like holistic approach to that, and.
Speaker 3: It's much smarter. I mean, like think about it evolutionarily,
Speaker 3: like how long did people survive in the land doing
Speaker 3: these kind of traditional agricultural ways of life. They supported
Speaker 3: many many, many thousands of years, many thousands of years
Speaker 3: of generations of people. Industrialization, it looks like we're about
Speaker 3: to go out like a flash in a pan where
Speaker 3: you know, it's like if you think about it, like
Speaker 3: what we think of as smart, no, that way of
Speaker 3: life is the smart way that's evolutionarily beneficial, you know,
Speaker 3: is to actually honor the land around you, and too
Speaker 3: to understand how to live off of it in a
Speaker 3: sustainable way, not to just exploit it and accumulate wealth
Speaker 3: for no reason, you know, other than a pissing contest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, I I could go
Speaker 2: on forever, but yeah, I just I love that we were,
Speaker 2: that you made these connections because I think, yeah, the
Speaker 2: connection to modern the modern day is so important and
Speaker 2: just generally interesting to look at this comparison, because I
Speaker 2: think it is it's sometimes hard or easy to forget
Speaker 2: how many thousands of years ancient indigenous peoples lived on
Speaker 2: their lands without damaging a damn thing about it. And
Speaker 2: then yeah, in the last few hundred years, we've just
Speaker 2: come in and torn it all up, and we're about
Speaker 2: to just like leave this planet in the dust because
Speaker 2: we don't know how to to actually work with the
Speaker 2: land in the ways that you know, are sustainable and
Speaker 2: lasting and actually benefit both the earth and the people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and make it work together, you know. And
Speaker 3: it's amazing because we live in a period where we
Speaker 3: have all this knowledge and it's just like where we
Speaker 3: have the ability to like, like it's not like the
Speaker 3: people in the early Iron age had the ability to
Speaker 3: really track precipitation in the same way, and so they
Speaker 3: figured it out. Yeah, they figured it out. I mean
Speaker 3: it took a while, but we know how to figure
Speaker 3: it out right now. We have the understanding of why
Speaker 3: indigenous agriculture was ecological for example, and sustainable. We have
Speaker 3: the ability to understand that the climate is changing and
Speaker 3: that it's not about to stop, so we need to
Speaker 3: do something about it. And so it's just so silly
Speaker 3: to think about I don't know, like as if this
Speaker 3: should be some debate between science and and and and
Speaker 3: humanities or something like that, or scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge.
Speaker 3: Indigenous knowledge is scientific and scientific knowledge helps us understand
Speaker 3: how to tackle these problems, and so we should be
Speaker 3: taking that and using you know, figuring out how to
Speaker 3: survive and thrive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well yeah, I mean theeah, the big difference is
Speaker 2: we we know we need to do this, we know
Speaker 2: we need to adapt, whereas you know, certainly in their
Speaker 2: early Iron Age they're looking at it, they're like they're
Speaker 2: not certain yet, Like it probably took a while for
Speaker 2: them to realize they had to adapt because you don't,
Speaker 2: I mean, you don't notice things are changing until they've
Speaker 2: been changing for a while exactly because it feels like
Speaker 2: a blip until you're like, well, actually, I guess it's
Speaker 2: been ten years of this. Now we have to look
Speaker 2: at starting to adapt and then you have more of
Speaker 2: like that transition that figuring it out, and even.
Speaker 3: Then, what is this called the baseline effect? Yeah, the
Speaker 3: shifting baseline effect is another big thing which prevents us
Speaker 3: from realizing this where you know, you don't always realize
Speaker 3: that things have changed because your own ground zero is
Speaker 3: shifting alongside it, right, right, And so this is a
Speaker 3: well known human phenomenon. It's why it's really difficult to
Speaker 3: detect something like climate change, because it happened so gradually
Speaker 3: that even by the time it has changed to the
Speaker 3: point where things should be observable, your memory has sort
Speaker 3: of changed about what things were like. And you know,
Speaker 3: we're all and so clever unless we measure things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, that's really interesting. I'm utterly thrilled with the
Speaker 2: turn that this took to modern climate change. I mean,
Speaker 2: I suppose I saw it coming too, but I told
Speaker 2: you clim I mean yeah, and I even if you
Speaker 2: hadn't been going to talk about it in the modern world,
Speaker 2: I certainly would have brought it up. So yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I I this is absolutely fascinating. Good, yeah, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for doing this. Of course I
Speaker 2: kept you for a while, so it's fine. Yeah, yeah, great, perfected.
Speaker 2: This has been an incredible episode. Do you want to
Speaker 2: tell my listeners where they can read more from you,
Speaker 2: hear more from you, whatever you want to share.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So my name is Flint Devil and you can
Speaker 3: find me. Most of what I'm going to try to
Speaker 3: produce for the public will be on YouTube, but if
Speaker 3: I write or do other things, you can find me
Speaker 3: on other social media like x or blue Sky or
Speaker 3: threads or whatever. Masks done yeah under my name.
Speaker 2: That one still exists too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I mostly just go on there to post.
Speaker 3: But you know, I don't know it's it's I used
Speaker 3: to really like writing Twitter threads. I really like the
Speaker 3: medium let me express myself about archaeology in a nice way,
Speaker 3: and this takeover of it by Elon Musk is just
Speaker 3: really I don't know.
Speaker 2: I know it, Yeah, it changed it all. I really
Speaker 2: missed the old Twitter too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I'm debating just trying to ignore that
Speaker 3: and just try to recreate what I was doing, and
Speaker 3: it's it's sort of like the idea of going on
Speaker 3: Joe Rogan. You have to appeal to where people are
Speaker 3: and if we have as scholars, I think we have
Speaker 3: to stop just talking to ourselves but talk to you know,
Speaker 3: the public at large about what we know and why
Speaker 3: it matters. And yeah, it's not easy, but it's something
Speaker 3: like Twitter x of whatever the hell you want to
Speaker 3: call it. I still call it Twitter most of the time.
Speaker 3: And it's it's sort of like, you know, the look
Speaker 3: that's still a very effective platform for sharing this kind
Speaker 3: of stuff because it is. And so I don't like
Speaker 3: that he's taking it over, but what can I do.
Speaker 3: It's just I have to live my life. We all
Speaker 3: have to live our lives in this shitty situation where
Speaker 3: the oligarchs own everything and don't think about anything other
Speaker 3: than their own wealth and see, yeah, just sucks.
Speaker 2: Don't bring themselves down with us if they will.
Speaker 3: That's actually an article I really want to write. It's like,
Speaker 3: how like, you know, they need to recognize that there's
Speaker 3: no escaping this. If you look back to history, they're
Speaker 3: totally fucked, all of them. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, whatever
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter who they are. They're all fucked, just
Speaker 3: like we all are going to burn along Sideah, it's fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh jeez, and your your YouTube is it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? YouTube? It's archaeology with Flint Divil is what it's called.
Speaker 2: But yeah, wonderful.
Speaker 3: It's my name, and find me. I have some fun
Speaker 3: stuff coming out at a big video about Atlantis and
Speaker 3: another one called Disproving Lost Civilizations.
Speaker 2: Amazing. Yeah, well, I I will link to everything in
Speaker 2: that episode of description too so everyone can find it cool.
Speaker 2: But yeah, that sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much
Speaker 2: for doing this fun good uh nerds, thank you so
Speaker 2: much for listening. Oh my gosh, that was It was
Speaker 2: such a fun episode. And as you heard at the end,
Speaker 2: you can find more from Flint about all of this
Speaker 2: very real and fascinating archaeology on YouTube. I've linked to
Speaker 2: that in the episode's description as well. Since we recorded this,
Speaker 2: though I was told off Mike before we recorded, but
Speaker 2: since we recorded this, Flint has gone on a podcast.
Speaker 2: I think the intention is good. I'm having trouble saying
Speaker 2: it because it is the Joe Rogan podcast and I
Speaker 2: have thoughts and feelings, but it was to debate Graham Hancock,
Speaker 2: who talks a lot about pseudo archaeology and stu to
Speaker 2: history and things like that. And so if you enjoyed
Speaker 2: my Atlantis episodes, or you know the time I returned
Speaker 2: to this type of stuff when that quote unquote documentary
Speaker 2: Ancient Apocalypse came out. If you're interested in that, you
Speaker 2: might want to check out this episode of just look
Speaker 2: for Flint's name in your podcast app. I feel like
Speaker 2: that's better. And next week, on Tuesday, instead of a
Speaker 2: standard narrative episode, I will be bringing you the last
Speaker 2: episode of this Bronze Age series, another conversation and one
Speaker 2: with Well. I mean, I think he's probably considered to
Speaker 2: be the top name in the Bronze Age collapse. And
Speaker 2: if he's not the top one, then he's certainly among them.
Speaker 2: I'll be speaking with doctor Eric Klein, who's the author
Speaker 2: of eleven seventy seven BCE, The Year Civilization Collapsed, about
Speaker 2: well exactly that and so so much more. So stay tuned.
Speaker 2: That's coming on Tuesday. Thank you all so much for listening.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about it. Baby is written and produced by
Speaker 2: me Live Albert, but of course this series would not
Speaker 2: exist without the brain of MICHAELA. Smith the assistant producer,
Speaker 2: and of course Laura Smith is the audio engineer and
Speaker 2: a production assistant working on the audio of all of
Speaker 2: these conversations. The podcast is part of the iHeartMedia Network.
Speaker 2: Questioning Myself this thing I say all of the time.
Speaker 2: Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Help me continue bringing you the world of ancient Greece
Speaker 2: and the Mediterranean by subscribing to my Patreon, where you
Speaker 2: will get access to loads of past bonus episodes from
Speaker 2: these seven almost seven years that I've been doing this thing.
Speaker 2: Holy crap, it's been a while. Thank you all so
Speaker 2: much for listening these dives into history. I have such
Speaker 2: a love a love with like a little bit of
Speaker 2: hate relationship with them. They just require such different brain
Speaker 2: space for me, and I just, oh my gosh. But
Speaker 2: speaking to these experts that is the best part because
Speaker 2: I just get to sit back and like be in
Speaker 2: utter awe of some of the stuff, and it's just incredible.
Speaker 2: I hope you learned a lot. I sure did. I
Speaker 2: am live and I love this shit.