Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
Speaker 1: and I'm Holly Fry. Uh. And this week we had
Speaker 1: our year in Unearthed. In coming out the second week
Speaker 1: of so much stuff, so much stuff, we we needed
Speaker 1: a little break, so we took a little break. Um.
Speaker 1: And It's not totally uncommon for me to like start
Speaker 1: work on an episode and then say, take a vacation
Speaker 1: or have a couple of days out or whatever, and
Speaker 1: come back to it later on. But this was I
Speaker 1: think the lengthy ist break of such such circumstances that
Speaker 1: I have had, and it made it kind of weird
Speaker 1: because when I actually got back to my desk and
Speaker 1: started going back through stuff, I was like, I don't
Speaker 1: remember so much of this at all. Not what I expected.
Speaker 1: Plus us uh, then having three weeks of news to
Speaker 1: go through to see if anything else happened, which there
Speaker 1: were definitely interesting things that happened. Yes, that whole Pompeiian thing,
Speaker 1: the Pompeii thing. People were like tweeting at us about. Listen,
Speaker 1: I'm excited about a food stall for sure. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: It kind of it made me miss various travels where
Speaker 1: I have you know, gone to food drucks or cookie
Speaker 1: restaurants or anything like that. Yeah, I am. I am
Speaker 1: definitely missing travels, which I know is like the most
Speaker 1: privileged place to sit to be like, oh I wish
Speaker 1: I could travel again. There are bigger issues that people
Speaker 1: are grappling with. I know, um, but I really do
Speaker 1: love the idea, my my whole thing. We're still it's
Speaker 1: been postponed a couple of times. We'll see when it happens,
Speaker 1: but we are still planning to do a history stuff
Speaker 1: you missed an history class trip to Italy when the
Speaker 1: pandemic is over and it's safe. And I keep being like,
Speaker 1: I gotta make a side trip to Pompeii. I wanted
Speaker 1: to do it already, but now I'm like, I gotta
Speaker 1: see this food stand if I can. Yeah, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure. I mean this this all folds into the
Speaker 1: question of, um, when that trip might ever happen. Uh.
Speaker 1: I feel like when I was looking at stuff, like
Speaker 1: a lot of that stuff is currently closed because of
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Um. It continues to be interesting to me
Speaker 1: which things, uh stay stay closed in which things are open,
Speaker 1: and how places are trying to mitigate risk. Um. The
Speaker 1: next thing that we are going to record in this
Speaker 1: recording session involves a park, and when I was just
Speaker 1: looking at a map of it, um, I was also
Speaker 1: seeing the information about which parts of the park are closed, which, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the whole thing. I've been spending a lot of
Speaker 1: my time um in very expansive parks uh that are
Speaker 1: still open to the public because being outdoors is generally
Speaker 1: a little less risky. Um. But the Massachusetts I can't
Speaker 1: remember which department it is that's in charge of all
Speaker 1: of that tweets out like the parking lot at this
Speaker 1: place is closed for the next three hours because the
Speaker 1: park is at its like maximum safe capacity. It's just
Speaker 1: just the whole thing. None of that's related to Unearthed there,
Speaker 1: just related to Our're still having a pandemic, right, We're
Speaker 1: still trying to figure out when we can do history
Speaker 1: things and visit places that come up unearthed. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: many of them, like you said, are closed, So it's
Speaker 1: related ish Yeah. Plus a tiny sneak peak of something
Speaker 1: that's coming next week on the show. Yeah, I really
Speaker 1: really loved the section that you include. Did hear about
Speaker 1: bias and assumption? When analyzing bodies, I should say, because
Speaker 1: it is one of those things that people UH often
Speaker 1: think about certain things that have been related as fact
Speaker 1: as settled history. But we can't always do that because
Speaker 1: you have to remember that specific lenses were being applied,
Speaker 1: and we have to you know, kind of backwards engineer,
Speaker 1: like did that lens end up possibly misidentifying something? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: and we also we have UM cultures from more recent
Speaker 1: history than that section was about that do generally roughly speaking,
Speaker 1: have like a gender dichotomy. Where As a general rule,
Speaker 1: it is more of the men men's responsibility to hunt
Speaker 1: and more the women's responsibility to gather. But when you
Speaker 1: go farther and farther back in in prehistory and like
Speaker 1: there's no there's not a living culture to talk to
Speaker 1: people about. We don't really have any kind of written
Speaker 1: records UM, there becomes a point where it's like we're
Speaker 1: just sort of assuming that the way it works now
Speaker 1: is also the way that it worked then, which is
Speaker 1: not necessarily true. And it is one of the really
Speaker 1: interesting things that they talked about on the podcast that
Speaker 1: I mentioned in that, which is the Men series from
Speaker 1: the podcast Scene on Radio UM. Because they talked to
Speaker 1: anthropologists and other experts about the evolution of that whole
Speaker 1: thing and how like how and when the idea evolved
Speaker 1: that there that these jobs were separated by gender. There
Speaker 1: was also one point, like we had a similar conversation
Speaker 1: on the show at one point that we got some
Speaker 1: you know, kind of frustrated emails from people about and
Speaker 1: then shortly thereafter there was an archaeologist who sort of
Speaker 1: tweeted out this series of like, these are the things
Speaker 1: we really have to think about when we're doing this
Speaker 1: kind of work. And I was like, well, I feel
Speaker 1: incredibly vendicated because these are the same points that I
Speaker 1: was trying to make. I am not an archaeologist, so
Speaker 1: I'm glad to like continue to hear people having these
Speaker 1: conversations and uh, you know, trying to make it clear
Speaker 1: that there's stuff that like your upbringing in your culture
Speaker 1: and your perspective affects all of these things, regardless of
Speaker 1: you know, how much you want to try to believe
Speaker 1: that there's an impartiality to it. Right. I Also my
Speaker 1: thing too is that and I tend to do it
Speaker 1: as well, right because we're trying to parse difficult subject
Speaker 1: matter just in terms of like understanding how other things worked,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the strokes get so broad that we forget
Speaker 1: that almost every I mean, I can't think of a
Speaker 1: single example of a society or a culture that we
Speaker 1: know of that doesn't have outliers, right right right, there's
Speaker 1: all as people. Even if you say, well, most women
Speaker 1: in this culture do this, there's always an exception. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and most men in this culture do this, but there's
Speaker 1: always some exception, and so noting as much as we
Speaker 1: study history that there seems to be an exception everywhere
Speaker 1: to something, Uh, I start to think about, like how
Speaker 1: much of this is exceptions and just like a more
Speaker 1: of a proportion analysis that we haven't really taken into
Speaker 1: account because we're oversimplifying when we are like, no men
Speaker 1: in this culture did it, well maybe maybe even sixty,
Speaker 1: but there could have been others. So yeah, well, and
Speaker 1: the Grave Goods conversation is so like if we just
Speaker 1: think about people living today, like as a totally made
Speaker 1: up example of a person might say like, I really
Speaker 1: want to be buried with my grandmother's ring because I
Speaker 1: loved my grandmother so much and it's gonna like it
Speaker 1: makes me feel comforted to think that I will have
Speaker 1: her with me when I go to my final rest. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then you know, three d years later, somebody digs
Speaker 1: up that grave and says, this ring must have been
Speaker 1: a high mark of status, was really valuable. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like there's there's a we were learning things all
Speaker 1: the time and and and reevaluating how we've drawn conclusions
Speaker 1: all the time, and that's like an important and necessary
Speaker 1: part of the study of history and archaeology and anthropology
Speaker 1: and everything everything all fields, all fields, evolving all the time.
Speaker 1: They don't just stop. I also had a funny random
Speaker 1: thought while we were recording that I didn't mention because
Speaker 1: it would have taken us woefully off track about the
Speaker 1: beads that were so fine that they had to be
Speaker 1: sifted with mosquito net. Yeah, and how they were found
Speaker 1: up near what would have been that that person's shoulder.
Speaker 1: And in my head, because I am a crafty person
Speaker 1: who has done a lot of beating in my time,
Speaker 1: I imagined this person that was working with taty tiny
Speaker 1: beads and like they dropped their thing and they were
Speaker 1: they just died of anger at the moment, like, oh
Speaker 1: Dan it beads everywhere we've opened beads all over. The
Speaker 1: beads all over seems like a good stopping point. Death
Speaker 1: by bead frustration. Yeah yeah, oh man, somehow it reminded
Speaker 1: me of I was making myself some hot cocoa while
Speaker 1: I was on a break, and it's like a particular
Speaker 1: hot coco that I really like. That it is is
Speaker 1: a mix um and I don't remember what I did,
Speaker 1: but I did something that just like flung a table
Speaker 1: spoon of the powder all over and the sound I
Speaker 1: made was so dismayed that from the other room I heard,
Speaker 1: are you all right anyway? Welcome to the new year
Speaker 1: of recording and year. I know this is now a
Speaker 1: couple of years or a couple of year, a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks into the new year as this episode comes out,
Speaker 1: but we're recording it literally right after. So I hope
Speaker 1: everyone who had has some kind of a break over
Speaker 1: the holiday time had as good of a break as possible.
Speaker 1: Uh Yeah, If you want to write to us, we're
Speaker 1: a history podcast that I heart radio dot com, and
Speaker 1: you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast and
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