October 18, 2023 • 37 mins
Part two of our autumn 2023 edition of Unearthed! includes potpourri, repatriations, shipwrecks, art, and a few perfect October entries.
Research:
- “Early humans deliberately made mysterious stone 'spheroids'.” PhysOrg. 9/10/2023. https://phys.org/news/2023-09-early-humans-deliberately-mysterious-stone.html
- Alutiiq Museum. “Archaeologists Recover 3,000-year-old Weavings from Ancestral Alutiiq Settlement.” Alaska Native News. 8/26/2023. https://alaska-native-news.com/archaeologists-recover-3000-year-old-weavings-from-ancestral-alutiiq-settlement/69558/
- Australian National Maritime Museum. “Exploring South Australia's oldest shipwreck.” Phys.org. 8/15/2023. https://phys.org/news/2023-08-exploring-south-australia-oldest-shipwreck.html
- Barker, Christopher. “Stolen van Gogh Painting Worth Millions Returned in an Ikea Bag.” Smithsonian. 9/14/2023. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dutch-art-detective-recovers-a-van-gogh-stolen-in-2020-180982896/
- BBC News. “Man finds 8,000-year-old dolphin bones in back garden.” 7/31/2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-66361506
- BBC News. “Tiny Roman dog remains found during Oxford archaeological dig.” 7/25/2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-66294261
- Beazley, Jordan. “ANU museum to hand back stolen 2,500-year-old vase to Italy.” The Guardian. 9/13/2023. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/sep/14/anu-to-return-2500-year-old-vase-to-italy-after-link-to-art-trade-exposed
- Bebber, Michelle R. et al. “Atlatl use equalizes female and male projectile weapon velocity.” Scientific Reports. 8/16/2023. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-40451-8
- Beimfohr, Chelsea. “109-year-old survivor of Tulsa Race Massacre pens new book, speaks at King Center.” Atlanta News First. 9/26/2023. https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/09/27/109-year-old-survivor-tulsa-race-massacre-pens-new-book-speaks-king-center/
- Ben Crump. “Ben Crump and Family of Henrietta Lacks Announce Settlement.” https://bencrump.com/press/family-of-henrietta-lacks-announce-settlement/
- Binswanger, Julia. “Forgotten Winnie-the-Pooh Sketch Found Wrapped in an Old Tea Towel.” Smithsonian. 8/28/2023. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/winnie-the-pooh-sketch-wrapped-tea-towel-180982800/
- Briseida MEMA. “Archaeologists uncover Europe's oldest stilt village.” Phys.org. 8/11/2023. https://phys.org/news/2023-08-archaeologists-uncover-europe-oldest-stilt.html
- British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog. “Showing Elizabeth I in a new light.” 7/15/2023. https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2023/07/showing-elizabeth-i-in-a-new-light.html
- British Library Press Office. “British Library researcher throws new light on Elizabeth I.” July 2023. https://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2023/july/British-Library-researcher-throws-new-light-on-Elizabeth-I?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=press&utm_content=camdens_annals#:~:text=Helena%20Rutkowska%2C%20DPhil%20student%20at,to%20explore%20hundreds%20of%20previously
- Cell Press. “Ancient metal cauldrons give us clues about what people ate in the Bronze Age.” 8/18/2023. https://phys.org/news/2023-08-ancient-metal-cauldrons-clues-people.html
- Chappell, Bill. “Iconic female artist's lost painting is found, hundreds of years after it was created.” NPR. 9/25/2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/25/1201501653/artemisia-gentileschi-susanna-and-the-elders
- Cin, Muharrem. “Makeup materials from Roman era unearthed in ancient city of Aizanoi in Türkiye.” Andalou Agency. 9/24/2023. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/makeup-materials-from-roman-era-unearthed-in-ancient-city-of-aizanoi-in-turkiye/2999909
- Delgado, Maria Jesus. “Oldest hunter-gatherer basketry in southern Europe, 9,500 years old, discovered in Cueva de los Murciélagos, Albuñol (Granada, Spain).” EurekAler
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fry.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
It is time for Part two of this latest installment
of Unearthed. We talked about a lot of stuff with
animals and updates and other stuff in part one. Part two,
we've got some repatriations, just a whole bunch.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Of shipwrecks, a lot of shipwrecks. There's art.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
We're going to end with some things that seemed particularly
appropriate since it is October and Halloween season. As always,
we are starting off this second part of Unearthed with
the stuff that didn't categorize very well, but all seems
cool and interesting to me, and I always call that
the potpourri. An arrowhead dating back to between nine hundred
(00:59):
and eight hundred BCE, which has been in the collection
of Burn History Museum, was made of iron that came
from a meteorite. Although there are examples of people using
the metals from meteorites to make things in other parts
of the world, there have not been as many examples
from Central or Western Europe during this period. At least
there aren't that many yet. It is possible that other
(01:23):
examples have been overlooked, and this one was found as
teams intentionally tested objects from the collections of museums around Switzerland.
This particular one included aluminum twenty six isotopes that does
not occur naturally on Earth, but does exist in meteorites. Next,
archaeologists in Meredith, Spain, have unearthed an intricate for mosaic
(01:48):
featuring a depiction of Medusa's head, along with geometric patterns
and animal motifs all around the frame. The animals include
four peacocks, one for each season, and the depiction of
Medusa is believed to have been included as a protection
symbol for the household. Archaeologists in Peru have found what
(02:11):
they believed to be an open air dance floor that
could make a sound like thunder when it was danced on,
basically amplifying the sounds the dancers made as they moved
around that dance floor. It was built by layering clay
and guano, which left gaps that would reverberate when struck,
like by a dancer's foot. This platform was built sometime
(02:32):
between one thousand and fourteen hundred, not far from a
temple that may have been dedicated to a lightning deity.
So this is an interpretation of how this site may
have been used, but there's lots of existing evidence for
ritual dancing and belief in lightning and thunder deities in
the area next. Roughly one point four million years ago,
(02:55):
early human ancestors were making these limestone spears about the
size of a tennis ball, and there's been debate about
these things, like were our ancestors deliberately trying to shape
the limestone into spheres or was this the byproduct of
using stones as tools for pounding or grinding, sort of
(03:17):
like gradually forming them into spheres over time just by
using them for that purpose. New research at Hebrew University
of Jerusalems suggests that this was likely a deliberate effort
at sphere making. They came to this conclusion after using
three D analysis to reconstruct the geometry of one hundred
(03:37):
and fifty of these limestone spheroids. Over time, these pieces
of limestone became more and more spherical, but not smoother
like riverstones do, as they're shaped by sediment and running water.
It's still not known why these were made, though, like
they don't appear to have been an accidental byproduct of
(03:58):
tool making, but they could have been intended for use
as tools, or maybe they were projectiles, or maybe our
ancestors just thought they were neat like that. That's always
an option proto croquet. We have talked about archaeological sites
found ahead of the construction of stores and roads and railroads,
(04:20):
but now we have one discovered at the future site
of a rocket launch pad. This is on the island
of Unst Shetland in the UK and based on the
presence of burned bones, pits and arrangements of boulders, it
was likely a cremation cemetery. This is the first time
a cremation cemetery has been excavated in the Shetland Islands.
(04:43):
And in our last little bit of randomness, we have
this addition's installment of things discovered by children at school.
An eight year old in Bremen, Germany found an eighteen
hundred year old silver denarius while digging in the school sandbox.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
At least all the English.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Language reporting of this says it was in the school sandbox,
but there's also a video interview with him which is
in German, where he is digging as he sort of
shows the interview where what he was doing it doesn't
look like the kind of structured sandbox that you might
see it a playground, but just like in the dirt,
(05:22):
the boy whose name is Bjarn took the coin home,
but eventually he and his family contacted an archaeologist. Eventually
that coin was identified as from the reign of Emperor
Marcus Aurelius and it is one of only three such
coins to be found in Bremen. Next, we have some returns, repatriations,
(05:42):
and repatriations.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
It seems like.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
There have gradually been more of these as a trend
from one installment of on Earth to the next. Looking
back at some prior years of these episodes, sometimes there
were not any repatriations mentioned at all. Some of this
increase has come from criminal investigations to people who amassed
(06:06):
or sold large collections of illegally acquired objects. I think
there's been more effort into like pursuing criminal activity of
things that were more recently looted in recent years. Some
of this is also connected to institutions reevaluating their own
collections and how they acquired the objects in those collections.
(06:29):
So what we are about to talk about is not
every single return that was mentioned over the course of
the last three months, but more of like a selection
of them. First, at the end of June, the Chrysler
Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia returned a monolith to Nigeria.
But what made headlines at the start of July was
(06:50):
what the museum received in return, which was a resin
facsimile from a not for profit organization called Factum Foundation
for Digital Technology and Preservation. As its name suggests, Factum
Foundation is devoted to digitally recording and preserving the world's
cultural heritage, including creating facsimiles of recorded objects that are
(07:13):
visually indistinguishable from the original. This monolith is a Bocor monolith,
and these are stone sculptures representing ancestors that were carved
between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. A lot of these
monoliths have been stolen from Nigeria and then placed in
museums in other countries, and this is the first one
(07:35):
to have been repatriated. The Chrysler Museum returned it after
finding photographic evidence that it had still been in Nigeria
in nineteen sixty one, meaning that its removal from the
country was illegal under Nigerian law. The Factum Foundation has
been recording and making facsimiles of these monoliths since twenty sixteen,
(07:56):
working very closely with Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments.
The Netherlands has repatriated more than four hundred and seventy
five objects to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, including the first
ever repatriations from the Reis Museum, where six of the
objects were being held. Many of these items were taken
(08:16):
to the Netherlands while these regions were under Dutch colonial authority.
This is part of an ongoing effort to return objects
that were taken from former colonies when they were under
Dutch control. In March, a woman in England sold the
contents of her garden shed to a salvage company, and
among the items in the shed were two stone statues.
(08:40):
The salvage company decided to research those statues before selling them,
and they turned out to be two tenth century stone
idols of female deities that had been stolen from a
temple in India. That theft happened sometimes between nineteen seventy
nine and nineteen eighty two. Both of these stats have
(09:00):
now been returned to India. They will likely be placed
in the National Museum in New Delhi, where two other
statues from the same temple currently are as. I understand
it like all of the statues from this temple were
stolen and it's not realistic to try to like return
them to that original site, so they're going to the museum.
(09:20):
The University of Manchester is returning one hundred and seventy
four items to the Aboriginal and Indiyaqua community of Groot Island,
off the northern coast of Australia. This follows years of
discussions with the Anandiyaqua Land Council and the Australian Institute
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. These items were
(09:40):
acquired in the nineteen fifties by Peter Worsley, who at
the time was a PhD student in anthropology. He bought
or traded for these items while building relationships with the
local people and andi Yaqua representatives have said people may
not have understood that from Worsley's point of view, he
was a quiet baring them permanently. This return took place
(10:03):
at Manchester Museum, but it followed a three year process
in which representatives from the museum had traveled to Groot
Island to speak with the Anendoyaqua people there. Australian National
University is repatriating an amphora to Italy, one depicting Heracles
an a lion that's been a key part of the
(10:24):
university's collection. The university bought this amphora in nineteen eighty
four in what's been described as a good faith purchase
from Sothebys, but eventually Italian authorities notified the university that
the amphora was connected to an art dealer who had
been selling illegally acquired art. An investigation into the rest
(10:45):
of the collection found other pieces that had also been
illegally removed from Italy, so plans are being made to
return those as well. While the university and the Italian
government are expected to finalize an agreement for the return
of this amphora by the end of year, the plan
is for it to remain at Australian National University for
(11:05):
four years for research and teaching purposes before it actually
goes back. And lastly, the National Museum of Scotland has
returned a totem pole that was stolen from the Nizga
First Nation in the nineteenth century. An anthropologist and museum
curator named Marius Barbo had been taking pictures of culturally
and historically interesting objects around Canada and sending those pictures
(11:28):
to museums around the world. The National Museum of Scotland,
then known as the Royal Scottish Museum, offered to pay
Barbou for the pole, and while most of the local
people were away hunting or fishing, he cut it down
and removed it from the area by raft. These totem
poles are regarded as living beings, so this was particularly egregious.
(11:51):
Last August, a delegation traveled to Scotland to ask for
the poll's return, and plans were underway to return it
by desc of twenty twenty two. About four hundred people
attended a welcoming ceremony at the end of September of
this year. This totem pole is now in the Niskan
Nation at the Niskan Museum, and its former space in
(12:14):
the National Museum of Scotland is going to remain empty,
sort of as a starting point for conversations about how
this totem pole was stolen and why it was returned.
We're going to get to shipwrecks next, Tracy, we are
We're going to take a quick break first though. Okay,
(12:39):
we've got a bunch of shipwrecks this time around.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
First.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
The latest dives at the Antikytheris shipwreck took place between
May nineteenth and June eighteenth of this year, with findings
being reported starting in July. A lot of this work
has been focused on surveying and mapping the wreck itself,
including areas that have not been explored before. Divers visited
(13:04):
the site and also used remote controlled drones to gather data.
The team has also continued to unearth things like statues, glassware,
and pottery from the reck site. One piece of marble
that they found might be the beard that goes to
the head of a Heracles statue that was discovered at
the site last year. Some newly discovered ceramic fragments also
(13:28):
suggest that there might be another wreck of an older,
smaller ship in this same area. This is part of
a five year study of the site, and all the
data being gathered now is being compiled with data from
earlier work at the wreck. The goal is to create
a comprehensive three D model of the site. Next, a
(13:49):
couple of Roman shipwrecks made the news this time around
One dates to the first or second century BCE and
was found off the port of Chivitevekya. It is one
of many ships that have been found full of hundreds
of mfoa. Most of thoseore intact. We don't yet know
(14:10):
what these particular ones are holding, but it's a type
of jar that was usually used for things.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Like wine or oil.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
The other is known as the Kappa Corso TiO and
it sank between Italy and France, also roughly two thousand
years ago. This wreck was discovered a little more than
a decade ago and has been explored since then. So
this work focused on documenting changes to the wreck over
time and removing some of its contents for analysis. There
(14:38):
were mphoa on this ship as well, along with a
lot of glass tableware like bowls and bottles. Researchers have
been studying the oldest known European shipwreck in South Australia.
That ship is called the South Australian. It is an
English bark that sank in eighteen thirty seven. The wreck
was found in twenty eighteen, but then the COVID nineteen
(15:01):
pandemic delayed plans to send people to study it. Although
this ship was originally a packet ship and it carried
about eighty people to the Australian colony, it mostly worked
as part of the whaling industry. It basically functioned as
a platform for removing the blubber from harpooned whales. Work
(15:22):
at this wreck is ongoing and it's historically and archaeologically
important in several ways, including the vessels overall age, the
fact that it was one of the earlier ships to
bring colonists to Australia, and its function as part of
the shore based whaling industry. It's also one of only
two English packet ships to go through this kind of
archaeological study. Next, divers in the Saint Lawrence River spotted
(15:46):
what turned out to be the compass platform from the
deck of the Empress of Ireland. That is a wreck
we have gotten requests to cover on the show. We
have not yet done an episode on that, so maybe
this discovery will bump that up the list. The sinking
of the Empress of Ireland has been described as the
(16:07):
worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
More than a.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Thousand people died after the Empress of Ireland collided with
another ship in May of nineteen fourteen. The compass platform
had been removed from the wreck in the nineteen nineties
and then dropped back into the water while it was
being brought back to shore. Efforts to find it at
the time were unsuccessful. If you're like, didn't they look
(16:33):
very hard? The river right there is really wide. It
was a month's amount of.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
River bottom to try to search.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
The divers who spotted this thought that it might be
just an upside down table, and photos made their way
to maritime historian David Sampierre, who had been studying the
Empress of Ireland for thirty years and immediately realized what
it was. After a two year search, maritime historians have
found the largely intact wreck of the Trinidad, which sank
(17:06):
about ten miles away from Algoma, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan.
The Trinidad was used to carry coal, iron, and grain
across the lake, although apparently its owners did not keep
up with its maintenance and repairs very well. It had
been leaky for years when it started seriously taking on
water in May of eighteen eighty one. Its crew decided
(17:27):
to abandon ship and escaped In a small boat, although
a dog who was on board sadly did not survive.
This wreck was spotted using sonar scans and then there
was a thorough survey. Apart from the masts and rigging
having fallen, this ship is largely intact, like when you
look at images of it, it just looks kind of
like a boat sitting there on the floor. This includes
(17:51):
the crew's personal effects, all still being in place, and
dishes are still stacked in the cabinets.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
No fish stole them.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Next, a piece of wood bought at a garage sale
has been identified as coming from the USS Main. It
had been donated to the Pascak Historical Society in New Jersey,
but there were no clear records about where it had
come from. Staff had doubts about whether it was authentic
or not. The word purported was even on the sign
identifying it in the museum's display. Retired history teacher Christopher
(18:24):
Kirsting decided to see if he could figure out the truth,
and his search wound up involving a curator at Arlington
National Cemetery, which is home to the USS Main Memorial,
and a retired Navy captain and USS Main expert named
Steve Whittaker. Whittaker examined the wood and the paint flex
and compared those to historical records, and then compared the
(18:46):
wood itself to photos of the main as it was
being salvaged. This piece of wood was a match for
a spar that had been cut from the mast during
salvage operations. The spar was returned to the Historical Societciety,
which then gave it to Arlington National Cemetery, seeing that
as a more.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Appropriate home for the artifact.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
In September, Ocean Exploration Trust's expedition vehicle Nautilus took an
expedition to Papahano Mokuakia Marine National Monument to study three
historically significant shipwrecks from the Battle of Midway. There was
the York Town, which was an American ship, and two
Japanese vessels, the Akagi and the Kaga. All three of
(19:28):
these were aircraft carriers. Remotely operated vehicles were used to
take high resolution photos and videos of all three of
the res This work was done in collaboration with the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the National Monument,
and was part of a greater effort to study the
area and guide decisions into how the monument should be
(19:49):
managed and conserved. The Akagi's location was determined during a
mapping survey in twenty nineteen, but this expedition was the
first time that anybody has actually wily seen it with
their eyes since it sank, and this was also the
first real time look at the Yorktown. There were more
than one hundred experts on hand watching the footage as
(20:12):
it was being recorded, to both offer interpretations of what
they were seeing and to guide where the vehicles and
the expedition should go from there. So this next discovery
isn't a shipwreck, but it came from one. Back in
two thousand and one, a recreational scuba diver off the
coast of Sweden found a metal object that turned out
(20:33):
to be a muzzle loading shipboard cannon. The wreck it
came from has not been found, but research published in
August suggests that this may be the oldest European cannon
ever found. This comes thanks to a piece of cloth
that was stuck in the powder chamber, probably left over
from the last charge loaded into it. That cloth dates
(20:54):
back to the fourteenth century, which makes this the oldest
shipboard cannon discovered to date. This research also looked at
the cannon itself, finding that it was made from a
copper alloy that really is not ideal for making cannons.
It probably would have cracked under intense use. In one
(21:14):
of my favorite quotes, I read this entire unearthed research
in the words of Steffen von Arben, maritime archaeologists at
the University of Guttenberg, quote, Clearly, the person who cast
the cannon did not have the necessary knowledge and understanding
of the properties of various copper alloys. And in one
(21:34):
last thing that also isn't a shipwreck, but is sort
of shipwreck adjacent divers have retrieved the engine from an
airplane from Lake Huron, one that was being flown by
Tuskegee airman Frank Moody when he was killed during a
training accident. One of the machine guns malfunctioned and damaged
the plane's propeller, and that is what caused the crash.
(21:56):
Although Moody's body washed ashore a few months after his
the wreckage of the plane was not found until twenty fourteen.
The retrieval of the engine is part of an ongoing
effort to bring all of the wreckage up from the
floor of the lake. And this has been a year's
long process, since pieces of this plane are scattered over about.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
A half a mile.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
The engine and the other parts of the plane will
eventually be on display at the Tuske Airman National Historical
Museum in Detroit. We have another quick break and then
talk about art. Now we have some art things. A
(22:45):
few years ago, a woman bought a painting at Savers,
which is a chain of secondhand stores. And I think
diehard Savers fans might be upset that I just called
it a chain of secondhand stores instead of the religious
experience that it can be right.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
She liked the frame, just thought it was frame. This
frame she liked.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
She put it in a closet, forgot about it until
doing some spring cleaning, and then, after finding it again,
posted a picture of it on a Facebook group, and
that wound up catching the eye of an art conservator
who realized this was a work by painter and illustrator N. C.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Wyeth.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
This was one of four possible cover designs for the
cover of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona. That novel came
out in eighteen eighty four, and that painting and that
frame were bought at Savers for four dollars, but the painting,
once it was recognized, sold at auction in September for
one hundred and ninety one thousand dollars. Next, excavations at
(23:46):
the ancient city of Maastris on the Black Sea have
found an almost complete life size statue of a water nymph,
assuming that water nymphs are the same size as people,
dating back to about the second century. The only things
that are missing are the left side of her nose
and her right hand. This is a really beautiful statue.
(24:09):
This missing right hand would have been holding the handle
of what looks like a pitcher. Her left hand is
holding fabric that sort of draped around her lower hips.
This statue is going through a conservation process and there
are plans to place it in a museum. Back in
twenty twenty, we talked about a van go painting that
had been stolen from a museum on van Go's birthday
(24:31):
while the museum was closed due to the COVID nineteen pandemic.
We later had an update that art detective arsur Brand
had received proof of life photos of the painting, and
now the painting, which was Van Goes's the parsonage garden
at noonan in spring has been returned. An anonymous tipster
dropped it off at Brand's apartment, wrapped in bubble wrap
(24:54):
and carried in an Ikea bag. This was not the
person who had originally stolen it. That perpetrator was identified
through DNA evidence left behind at the scene and was
fined and imprisoned. Next, we have a few things that
are related to ancient art. Researchers from Spain and France
have been studying ochre from a cave in Ethiopia where
(25:17):
people processed it for at least forty five hundred years,
starting about forty thousand years ago. Ochre is a name
for mineral pigments, usually in tones of red and yellow,
and historically it's been used for a lot of different purposes,
including making art and bodily adornment. This research has documented
(25:38):
how people processing ochre in the cave gradually modified their
tools and techniques. During the earlier period that the cave
was in use, people seemed to have sought out the
highest quality raw materials that they could find, but over
time transitioned to lower quality materials that were more readily
available in their local environment, and then adjusted their techniques
(26:01):
to compensate for that difference. This is the only site
discovered so far that has preserved such a long time
span of continuous ochre production, so it's the first time
researchers have really been able to study this kind of progression. Next,
a cave in Spain known as Covidonus, which was already
well known to locals and hikers, has been discovered to
(26:23):
contain more than one hundred ancient paintings and engravings. The
first discovery of artwork in this cave was actually made
in twenty twenty one, but the findings weren't announced until
this year. This artwork is at least twenty four thousand
years old, with at least nineteen different types of animals depicted.
Researchers have described this find as particularly significant due to
(26:47):
the number of images, the variety of techniques used to
make them, and the fact that many of them were
made using clay rather than ocre or another mineral pigment.
People basically got red clay off the cave floor and
used it to paint with their hands and fingers, and
there are not many surviving examples of Paleolithic artwork that
was made this way, and in our last art find,
(27:11):
Researchers in Namibia have worked with indigenous tracking experts to
examine engravings of human and animal tracks in rock art
in the Doro Nawis Mountains, and they found that these
engravings of these tracks were just incredibly precise and detailed.
They analyzed five hundred and thirteen engravings and the indigenous
(27:34):
experts said they could identify a specific species, a sex,
and an age group for more than ninety percent of
the engraved prints. So these seem like very detailed, actual
engravings of prints that people would see, not as like
geometric patterns, which is how they had sort of been
classified previously. So with all of that information, some clear
(27:59):
patterns of our ed prints of adult animals were more
common than juveniles, and prints of male animals were more
common than female. But researchers don't know for sure what
was driving any of these preferences.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
That we can speculate, but it's speculation. Uh.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Last, we're going to close out this autumn installment of
Unearthed with a few things that seem thematically appropriate for
October when we often are talking about things that are
a little more eerie or macabre. First, researchers studying Roman
era artifacts in a cave in Israel believe that these
may have been used to try to speak with the
(28:40):
dead or to worship underworld deities. This site is home
to more than one hundred oil lamps, as well as
vessels and coins, and three human skulls. Many of these
items were in really hard to reach crevices in the cave.
The cave itself also has a really deep shaft at
one end, which may have been seen as an entrance
(29:02):
to the underworld. In last year's autumn installment of On Earth,
we talked about the discovery of a burial site in
Poland that was being described as a vampire burial. A
woman had been buried with a padlock on her big
toe and her neck pinned under a sickle. Another burial
from the same cemetery made headlines in August. This time
(29:24):
it's the body of a child, buried face down, also
with a padlock on his foot. This child's grave was
only about five feet from the one that we talked
about last year, and in both cases these were probably
precautions that were taken to try to prevent the deceased
from returning from the land of the dead. As we
(29:44):
talked about last time. Discoveries like this always get a
lot of vampire burial headlines. It's very likely that these
were just people whose community was regarding with distrust for
some reason. It's possible that both of them were just
being mistrue ostracized, and recent work at this specific burial
site suggests that other people buried there may have had
(30:08):
similar stories. One headline went so far as to call
this the grave of the damned. So far, more than
thirty burials have been discovered at this site, and a
lot of them are unusual in one way or another.
For example, the bones of three other children were found
in an area not far from this one, and they
(30:29):
were all kind of scattered, suggesting that their bodies may
have been desecrated. Researchers also found part of a jawbone
with green staining on it that suggests that a person
may have been buried with a coin in their mouth.
Another similar burial made news in August as well. This
one onearthed during the National Highway A fourteen Cambridge to
(30:52):
Huntington improvement scheme. Excavations for this project took place between
twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen. The examination of the findings
has been ongoing. So this body, in particular was a teenager,
probably a girl of about fifteen, who was buried face
down and may have had her ankles bound together. Analysis
(31:15):
of her skeletons suggests that she was malnourished in her
childhood and also had a spinal joint disease that was
exacerbated by the manual labor she had to do to
survive from a very young age. So her being buried
face down, possibly with her feet bound together, similarly suggests
that she was seen as suspicious or somehow different from
(31:37):
the rest of the community, but she also seems to
have been buried as a symbolic act. The pit where
she was buried had previously held a post for the
entry gate of the early medieval community of Connington, but
this settlement was eventually abandoned, and as people moved away,
they dismantled and removed that gait. It's possible that this
(31:59):
pit that was left behind was used as a burial
site for the sake of convenience, since it had already
been dug, but it's also possible that she was buried
there as sort of a symbolic end to the community.
Regardless her burial seems to have been one of the
last things that the community did before abandoning the settlement.
(32:19):
And finally, an article published in the journal Analytical Chemistry
in August is titled Count Dracula Resurrected Proteomic Analysis of
Lad the Third the Impaler's Documents by EVA technology and
mass spectrometry. This article discusses the use of both ethylene
vinyl acetate and mass spectrometry to study the peptides in
(32:43):
proteins on three letters Vlad the Third wrote on rag
paper between fourteen fifty seven and fourteen seventy five. The
researchers include a pretty big caveat here, which is that
other people probably handled these letters and it is not
entirely part possible to separate any proteins they may have
left behind from Vlad the Thirds. So they found various
(33:07):
peptides and proteins related to environmental factors in Wilakia, where
Vlad lived. That includes peptides from various fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects,
and plants. But some of the proteins were definitely of
human origin, and those proteins suggested that Vlad experience some
(33:28):
inflammation of his respiratory tract or his skin. All three
of the letters also had peptides associated with blood, and
the letter from fourteen seventy five also had proteins associated
with tears, which, according to these researchers, suggested that he
may have experienced hemilacria. In other words, that the stories
(33:50):
about Vlad the Impaler crying tears of blood may actually
have been true. Bump, bump, bum, that's the best October
finish I can imagine. Yeah, that's uh uh. I have
a little piece of email listener mail to take us
(34:10):
out of this unearthed.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
This is one.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
It's from July and I just straight up overlooked it
and I did not see it until this morning.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Somehow.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
This is from Michael, and Michael said, hello, fellow history nerds.
So I was listening to your two parter on the
Dictionary Wars while flying back to Connecticut to visit family
a couple of weeks ago, and loved the part where
Noah Webster bought Benedict Arnold's old house because it was
unsurprisingly affordable. A few days later, we met up with
a friend who was the principal at a high school
(34:43):
in New Haven.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
She let us park at the school.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
After hours while we walked around the city, and when
we got there, she pointed over to a fenced off
area in the parking lot. Quote, that's where they're excavating
Noah Webster's house. It used to belong to Benedict Arnold too.
I totally flipped out and told them all about the
episode we just listened to. I present you now with
a very uninteresting picture of the spot, taken at night.
(35:08):
The tile floor was visible at the time, but the
rest still look like a parking lot at a random
high school. I know you all like pictures of furry creatures,
but hopefully an adorable and stoic bearded dragon will do instead.
It does indeed love a bearded dragon. Yes, thank you
all for the entertainment. I never wanted to listen to
(35:29):
nonfiction podcast before you all. You were my first GRATZI,
So thank you so much Michael for this email. I
so we've talked about a number of different houses associated
with Noah Webster at this point. Some of them are
still standing, some of them are not. I didn't actually
realize that this was one that was no longer standing,
and there is.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Indeed archaeological work going on there.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Just at this high school parking lot, which I was
unaware of at all until getting this email. And then
we have just beautiful, beautiful bearded dragon Saudie Pie, hanging
out on some newspaper with what looks like a little
bull of snacks behind. So thank you so much for
(36:12):
sending this. I'm sorry that somehow I because I read
all of those other emails, and I even read some
of the other ones that were sort of arounded in
the inbox, and stumbled across this one this morning and
was like, I don't remember this at all. I somehow
overlooked it. If you would like to send us a
note about this or any other podcast, we're at history
Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media
(36:35):
at Missing History. It is where you will find our Facebook,
I keep saying Twitter, but it's not called that anymore, Pinterest,
and Instagram. We still have not started accounts on the
other ones yet. You can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
(37:01):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fry.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
It is time for Part two of this latest installment
of Unearthed. We talked about a lot of stuff with
animals and updates and other stuff in part one. Part two,
we've got some repatriations, just a whole bunch.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Of shipwrecks, a lot of shipwrecks. There's art.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
We're going to end with some things that seemed particularly
appropriate since it is October and Halloween season. As always,
we are starting off this second part of Unearthed with
the stuff that didn't categorize very well, but all seems
cool and interesting to me, and I always call that
the potpourri. An arrowhead dating back to between nine hundred
(00:59):
and eight hundred BCE, which has been in the collection
of Burn History Museum, was made of iron that came
from a meteorite. Although there are examples of people using
the metals from meteorites to make things in other parts
of the world, there have not been as many examples
from Central or Western Europe during this period. At least
there aren't that many yet. It is possible that other
(01:23):
examples have been overlooked, and this one was found as
teams intentionally tested objects from the collections of museums around Switzerland.
This particular one included aluminum twenty six isotopes that does
not occur naturally on Earth, but does exist in meteorites. Next,
archaeologists in Meredith, Spain, have unearthed an intricate for mosaic
(01:48):
featuring a depiction of Medusa's head, along with geometric patterns
and animal motifs all around the frame. The animals include
four peacocks, one for each season, and the depiction of
Medusa is believed to have been included as a protection
symbol for the household. Archaeologists in Peru have found what
(02:11):
they believed to be an open air dance floor that
could make a sound like thunder when it was danced on,
basically amplifying the sounds the dancers made as they moved
around that dance floor. It was built by layering clay
and guano, which left gaps that would reverberate when struck,
like by a dancer's foot. This platform was built sometime
(02:32):
between one thousand and fourteen hundred, not far from a
temple that may have been dedicated to a lightning deity.
So this is an interpretation of how this site may
have been used, but there's lots of existing evidence for
ritual dancing and belief in lightning and thunder deities in
the area next. Roughly one point four million years ago,
(02:55):
early human ancestors were making these limestone spears about the
size of a tennis ball, and there's been debate about
these things, like were our ancestors deliberately trying to shape
the limestone into spheres or was this the byproduct of
using stones as tools for pounding or grinding, sort of
(03:17):
like gradually forming them into spheres over time just by
using them for that purpose. New research at Hebrew University
of Jerusalems suggests that this was likely a deliberate effort
at sphere making. They came to this conclusion after using
three D analysis to reconstruct the geometry of one hundred
(03:37):
and fifty of these limestone spheroids. Over time, these pieces
of limestone became more and more spherical, but not smoother
like riverstones do, as they're shaped by sediment and running water.
It's still not known why these were made, though, like
they don't appear to have been an accidental byproduct of
(03:58):
tool making, but they could have been intended for use
as tools, or maybe they were projectiles, or maybe our
ancestors just thought they were neat like that. That's always
an option proto croquet. We have talked about archaeological sites
found ahead of the construction of stores and roads and railroads,
(04:20):
but now we have one discovered at the future site
of a rocket launch pad. This is on the island
of Unst Shetland in the UK and based on the
presence of burned bones, pits and arrangements of boulders, it
was likely a cremation cemetery. This is the first time
a cremation cemetery has been excavated in the Shetland Islands.
(04:43):
And in our last little bit of randomness, we have
this addition's installment of things discovered by children at school.
An eight year old in Bremen, Germany found an eighteen
hundred year old silver denarius while digging in the school sandbox.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
At least all the English.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Language reporting of this says it was in the school sandbox,
but there's also a video interview with him which is
in German, where he is digging as he sort of
shows the interview where what he was doing it doesn't
look like the kind of structured sandbox that you might
see it a playground, but just like in the dirt,
(05:22):
the boy whose name is Bjarn took the coin home,
but eventually he and his family contacted an archaeologist. Eventually
that coin was identified as from the reign of Emperor
Marcus Aurelius and it is one of only three such
coins to be found in Bremen. Next, we have some returns, repatriations,
(05:42):
and repatriations.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
It seems like.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
There have gradually been more of these as a trend
from one installment of on Earth to the next. Looking
back at some prior years of these episodes, sometimes there
were not any repatriations mentioned at all. Some of this
increase has come from criminal investigations to people who amassed
(06:06):
or sold large collections of illegally acquired objects. I think
there's been more effort into like pursuing criminal activity of
things that were more recently looted in recent years. Some
of this is also connected to institutions reevaluating their own
collections and how they acquired the objects in those collections.
(06:29):
So what we are about to talk about is not
every single return that was mentioned over the course of
the last three months, but more of like a selection
of them. First, at the end of June, the Chrysler
Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia returned a monolith to Nigeria.
But what made headlines at the start of July was
(06:50):
what the museum received in return, which was a resin
facsimile from a not for profit organization called Factum Foundation
for Digital Technology and Preservation. As its name suggests, Factum
Foundation is devoted to digitally recording and preserving the world's
cultural heritage, including creating facsimiles of recorded objects that are
(07:13):
visually indistinguishable from the original. This monolith is a Bocor monolith,
and these are stone sculptures representing ancestors that were carved
between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. A lot of these
monoliths have been stolen from Nigeria and then placed in
museums in other countries, and this is the first one
(07:35):
to have been repatriated. The Chrysler Museum returned it after
finding photographic evidence that it had still been in Nigeria
in nineteen sixty one, meaning that its removal from the
country was illegal under Nigerian law. The Factum Foundation has
been recording and making facsimiles of these monoliths since twenty sixteen,
(07:56):
working very closely with Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments.
The Netherlands has repatriated more than four hundred and seventy
five objects to Sri Lanka and Indonesia, including the first
ever repatriations from the Reis Museum, where six of the
objects were being held. Many of these items were taken
(08:16):
to the Netherlands while these regions were under Dutch colonial authority.
This is part of an ongoing effort to return objects
that were taken from former colonies when they were under
Dutch control. In March, a woman in England sold the
contents of her garden shed to a salvage company, and
among the items in the shed were two stone statues.
(08:40):
The salvage company decided to research those statues before selling them,
and they turned out to be two tenth century stone
idols of female deities that had been stolen from a
temple in India. That theft happened sometimes between nineteen seventy
nine and nineteen eighty two. Both of these stats have
(09:00):
now been returned to India. They will likely be placed
in the National Museum in New Delhi, where two other
statues from the same temple currently are as. I understand
it like all of the statues from this temple were
stolen and it's not realistic to try to like return
them to that original site, so they're going to the museum.
(09:20):
The University of Manchester is returning one hundred and seventy
four items to the Aboriginal and Indiyaqua community of Groot Island,
off the northern coast of Australia. This follows years of
discussions with the Anandiyaqua Land Council and the Australian Institute
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. These items were
(09:40):
acquired in the nineteen fifties by Peter Worsley, who at
the time was a PhD student in anthropology. He bought
or traded for these items while building relationships with the
local people and andi Yaqua representatives have said people may
not have understood that from Worsley's point of view, he
was a quiet baring them permanently. This return took place
(10:03):
at Manchester Museum, but it followed a three year process
in which representatives from the museum had traveled to Groot
Island to speak with the Anendoyaqua people there. Australian National
University is repatriating an amphora to Italy, one depicting Heracles
an a lion that's been a key part of the
(10:24):
university's collection. The university bought this amphora in nineteen eighty
four in what's been described as a good faith purchase
from Sothebys, but eventually Italian authorities notified the university that
the amphora was connected to an art dealer who had
been selling illegally acquired art. An investigation into the rest
(10:45):
of the collection found other pieces that had also been
illegally removed from Italy, so plans are being made to
return those as well. While the university and the Italian
government are expected to finalize an agreement for the return
of this amphora by the end of year, the plan
is for it to remain at Australian National University for
(11:05):
four years for research and teaching purposes before it actually
goes back. And lastly, the National Museum of Scotland has
returned a totem pole that was stolen from the Nizga
First Nation in the nineteenth century. An anthropologist and museum
curator named Marius Barbo had been taking pictures of culturally
and historically interesting objects around Canada and sending those pictures
(11:28):
to museums around the world. The National Museum of Scotland,
then known as the Royal Scottish Museum, offered to pay
Barbou for the pole, and while most of the local
people were away hunting or fishing, he cut it down
and removed it from the area by raft. These totem
poles are regarded as living beings, so this was particularly egregious.
(11:51):
Last August, a delegation traveled to Scotland to ask for
the poll's return, and plans were underway to return it
by desc of twenty twenty two. About four hundred people
attended a welcoming ceremony at the end of September of
this year. This totem pole is now in the Niskan
Nation at the Niskan Museum, and its former space in
(12:14):
the National Museum of Scotland is going to remain empty,
sort of as a starting point for conversations about how
this totem pole was stolen and why it was returned.
We're going to get to shipwrecks next, Tracy, we are
We're going to take a quick break first though. Okay,
(12:39):
we've got a bunch of shipwrecks this time around.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
First.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
The latest dives at the Antikytheris shipwreck took place between
May nineteenth and June eighteenth of this year, with findings
being reported starting in July. A lot of this work
has been focused on surveying and mapping the wreck itself,
including areas that have not been explored before. Divers visited
(13:04):
the site and also used remote controlled drones to gather data.
The team has also continued to unearth things like statues, glassware,
and pottery from the reck site. One piece of marble
that they found might be the beard that goes to
the head of a Heracles statue that was discovered at
the site last year. Some newly discovered ceramic fragments also
(13:28):
suggest that there might be another wreck of an older,
smaller ship in this same area. This is part of
a five year study of the site, and all the
data being gathered now is being compiled with data from
earlier work at the wreck. The goal is to create
a comprehensive three D model of the site. Next, a
(13:49):
couple of Roman shipwrecks made the news this time around
One dates to the first or second century BCE and
was found off the port of Chivitevekya. It is one
of many ships that have been found full of hundreds
of mfoa. Most of thoseore intact. We don't yet know
(14:10):
what these particular ones are holding, but it's a type
of jar that was usually used for things.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Like wine or oil.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
The other is known as the Kappa Corso TiO and
it sank between Italy and France, also roughly two thousand
years ago. This wreck was discovered a little more than
a decade ago and has been explored since then. So
this work focused on documenting changes to the wreck over
time and removing some of its contents for analysis. There
(14:38):
were mphoa on this ship as well, along with a
lot of glass tableware like bowls and bottles. Researchers have
been studying the oldest known European shipwreck in South Australia.
That ship is called the South Australian. It is an
English bark that sank in eighteen thirty seven. The wreck
was found in twenty eighteen, but then the COVID nineteen
(15:01):
pandemic delayed plans to send people to study it. Although
this ship was originally a packet ship and it carried
about eighty people to the Australian colony, it mostly worked
as part of the whaling industry. It basically functioned as
a platform for removing the blubber from harpooned whales. Work
(15:22):
at this wreck is ongoing and it's historically and archaeologically
important in several ways, including the vessels overall age, the
fact that it was one of the earlier ships to
bring colonists to Australia, and its function as part of
the shore based whaling industry. It's also one of only
two English packet ships to go through this kind of
archaeological study. Next, divers in the Saint Lawrence River spotted
(15:46):
what turned out to be the compass platform from the
deck of the Empress of Ireland. That is a wreck
we have gotten requests to cover on the show. We
have not yet done an episode on that, so maybe
this discovery will bump that up the list. The sinking
of the Empress of Ireland has been described as the
(16:07):
worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
More than a.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Thousand people died after the Empress of Ireland collided with
another ship in May of nineteen fourteen. The compass platform
had been removed from the wreck in the nineteen nineties
and then dropped back into the water while it was
being brought back to shore. Efforts to find it at
the time were unsuccessful. If you're like, didn't they look
(16:33):
very hard? The river right there is really wide. It
was a month's amount of.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
River bottom to try to search.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
The divers who spotted this thought that it might be
just an upside down table, and photos made their way
to maritime historian David Sampierre, who had been studying the
Empress of Ireland for thirty years and immediately realized what
it was. After a two year search, maritime historians have
found the largely intact wreck of the Trinidad, which sank
(17:06):
about ten miles away from Algoma, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan.
The Trinidad was used to carry coal, iron, and grain
across the lake, although apparently its owners did not keep
up with its maintenance and repairs very well. It had
been leaky for years when it started seriously taking on
water in May of eighteen eighty one. Its crew decided
(17:27):
to abandon ship and escaped In a small boat, although
a dog who was on board sadly did not survive.
This wreck was spotted using sonar scans and then there
was a thorough survey. Apart from the masts and rigging
having fallen, this ship is largely intact, like when you
look at images of it, it just looks kind of
like a boat sitting there on the floor. This includes
(17:51):
the crew's personal effects, all still being in place, and
dishes are still stacked in the cabinets.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
No fish stole them.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Next, a piece of wood bought at a garage sale
has been identified as coming from the USS Main. It
had been donated to the Pascak Historical Society in New Jersey,
but there were no clear records about where it had
come from. Staff had doubts about whether it was authentic
or not. The word purported was even on the sign
identifying it in the museum's display. Retired history teacher Christopher
(18:24):
Kirsting decided to see if he could figure out the truth,
and his search wound up involving a curator at Arlington
National Cemetery, which is home to the USS Main Memorial,
and a retired Navy captain and USS Main expert named
Steve Whittaker. Whittaker examined the wood and the paint flex
and compared those to historical records, and then compared the
(18:46):
wood itself to photos of the main as it was
being salvaged. This piece of wood was a match for
a spar that had been cut from the mast during
salvage operations. The spar was returned to the Historical Societciety,
which then gave it to Arlington National Cemetery, seeing that
as a more.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Appropriate home for the artifact.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
In September, Ocean Exploration Trust's expedition vehicle Nautilus took an
expedition to Papahano Mokuakia Marine National Monument to study three
historically significant shipwrecks from the Battle of Midway. There was
the York Town, which was an American ship, and two
Japanese vessels, the Akagi and the Kaga. All three of
(19:28):
these were aircraft carriers. Remotely operated vehicles were used to
take high resolution photos and videos of all three of
the res This work was done in collaboration with the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the National Monument,
and was part of a greater effort to study the
area and guide decisions into how the monument should be
(19:49):
managed and conserved. The Akagi's location was determined during a
mapping survey in twenty nineteen, but this expedition was the
first time that anybody has actually wily seen it with
their eyes since it sank, and this was also the
first real time look at the Yorktown. There were more
than one hundred experts on hand watching the footage as
(20:12):
it was being recorded, to both offer interpretations of what
they were seeing and to guide where the vehicles and
the expedition should go from there. So this next discovery
isn't a shipwreck, but it came from one. Back in
two thousand and one, a recreational scuba diver off the
coast of Sweden found a metal object that turned out
(20:33):
to be a muzzle loading shipboard cannon. The wreck it
came from has not been found, but research published in
August suggests that this may be the oldest European cannon
ever found. This comes thanks to a piece of cloth
that was stuck in the powder chamber, probably left over
from the last charge loaded into it. That cloth dates
(20:54):
back to the fourteenth century, which makes this the oldest
shipboard cannon discovered to date. This research also looked at
the cannon itself, finding that it was made from a
copper alloy that really is not ideal for making cannons.
It probably would have cracked under intense use. In one
(21:14):
of my favorite quotes, I read this entire unearthed research
in the words of Steffen von Arben, maritime archaeologists at
the University of Guttenberg, quote, Clearly, the person who cast
the cannon did not have the necessary knowledge and understanding
of the properties of various copper alloys. And in one
(21:34):
last thing that also isn't a shipwreck, but is sort
of shipwreck adjacent divers have retrieved the engine from an
airplane from Lake Huron, one that was being flown by
Tuskegee airman Frank Moody when he was killed during a
training accident. One of the machine guns malfunctioned and damaged
the plane's propeller, and that is what caused the crash.
(21:56):
Although Moody's body washed ashore a few months after his
the wreckage of the plane was not found until twenty fourteen.
The retrieval of the engine is part of an ongoing
effort to bring all of the wreckage up from the
floor of the lake. And this has been a year's
long process, since pieces of this plane are scattered over about.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
A half a mile.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
The engine and the other parts of the plane will
eventually be on display at the Tuske Airman National Historical
Museum in Detroit. We have another quick break and then
talk about art. Now we have some art things. A
(22:45):
few years ago, a woman bought a painting at Savers,
which is a chain of secondhand stores. And I think
diehard Savers fans might be upset that I just called
it a chain of secondhand stores instead of the religious
experience that it can be right.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
She liked the frame, just thought it was frame. This
frame she liked.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
She put it in a closet, forgot about it until
doing some spring cleaning, and then, after finding it again,
posted a picture of it on a Facebook group, and
that wound up catching the eye of an art conservator
who realized this was a work by painter and illustrator N. C.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Wyeth.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
This was one of four possible cover designs for the
cover of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona. That novel came
out in eighteen eighty four, and that painting and that
frame were bought at Savers for four dollars, but the painting,
once it was recognized, sold at auction in September for
one hundred and ninety one thousand dollars. Next, excavations at
(23:46):
the ancient city of Maastris on the Black Sea have
found an almost complete life size statue of a water nymph,
assuming that water nymphs are the same size as people,
dating back to about the second century. The only things
that are missing are the left side of her nose
and her right hand. This is a really beautiful statue.
(24:09):
This missing right hand would have been holding the handle
of what looks like a pitcher. Her left hand is
holding fabric that sort of draped around her lower hips.
This statue is going through a conservation process and there
are plans to place it in a museum. Back in
twenty twenty, we talked about a van go painting that
had been stolen from a museum on van Go's birthday
(24:31):
while the museum was closed due to the COVID nineteen pandemic.
We later had an update that art detective arsur Brand
had received proof of life photos of the painting, and
now the painting, which was Van Goes's the parsonage garden
at noonan in spring has been returned. An anonymous tipster
dropped it off at Brand's apartment, wrapped in bubble wrap
(24:54):
and carried in an Ikea bag. This was not the
person who had originally stolen it. That perpetrator was identified
through DNA evidence left behind at the scene and was
fined and imprisoned. Next, we have a few things that
are related to ancient art. Researchers from Spain and France
have been studying ochre from a cave in Ethiopia where
(25:17):
people processed it for at least forty five hundred years,
starting about forty thousand years ago. Ochre is a name
for mineral pigments, usually in tones of red and yellow,
and historically it's been used for a lot of different purposes,
including making art and bodily adornment. This research has documented
(25:38):
how people processing ochre in the cave gradually modified their
tools and techniques. During the earlier period that the cave
was in use, people seemed to have sought out the
highest quality raw materials that they could find, but over
time transitioned to lower quality materials that were more readily
available in their local environment, and then adjusted their techniques
(26:01):
to compensate for that difference. This is the only site
discovered so far that has preserved such a long time
span of continuous ochre production, so it's the first time
researchers have really been able to study this kind of progression. Next,
a cave in Spain known as Covidonus, which was already
well known to locals and hikers, has been discovered to
(26:23):
contain more than one hundred ancient paintings and engravings. The
first discovery of artwork in this cave was actually made
in twenty twenty one, but the findings weren't announced until
this year. This artwork is at least twenty four thousand
years old, with at least nineteen different types of animals depicted.
Researchers have described this find as particularly significant due to
(26:47):
the number of images, the variety of techniques used to
make them, and the fact that many of them were
made using clay rather than ocre or another mineral pigment.
People basically got red clay off the cave floor and
used it to paint with their hands and fingers, and
there are not many surviving examples of Paleolithic artwork that
was made this way, and in our last art find,
(27:11):
Researchers in Namibia have worked with indigenous tracking experts to
examine engravings of human and animal tracks in rock art
in the Doro Nawis Mountains, and they found that these
engravings of these tracks were just incredibly precise and detailed.
They analyzed five hundred and thirteen engravings and the indigenous
(27:34):
experts said they could identify a specific species, a sex,
and an age group for more than ninety percent of
the engraved prints. So these seem like very detailed, actual
engravings of prints that people would see, not as like
geometric patterns, which is how they had sort of been
classified previously. So with all of that information, some clear
(27:59):
patterns of our ed prints of adult animals were more
common than juveniles, and prints of male animals were more
common than female. But researchers don't know for sure what
was driving any of these preferences.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
That we can speculate, but it's speculation. Uh.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Last, we're going to close out this autumn installment of
Unearthed with a few things that seem thematically appropriate for
October when we often are talking about things that are
a little more eerie or macabre. First, researchers studying Roman
era artifacts in a cave in Israel believe that these
may have been used to try to speak with the
(28:40):
dead or to worship underworld deities. This site is home
to more than one hundred oil lamps, as well as
vessels and coins, and three human skulls. Many of these
items were in really hard to reach crevices in the cave.
The cave itself also has a really deep shaft at
one end, which may have been seen as an entrance
(29:02):
to the underworld. In last year's autumn installment of On Earth,
we talked about the discovery of a burial site in
Poland that was being described as a vampire burial. A
woman had been buried with a padlock on her big
toe and her neck pinned under a sickle. Another burial
from the same cemetery made headlines in August. This time
(29:24):
it's the body of a child, buried face down, also
with a padlock on his foot. This child's grave was
only about five feet from the one that we talked
about last year, and in both cases these were probably
precautions that were taken to try to prevent the deceased
from returning from the land of the dead. As we
(29:44):
talked about last time. Discoveries like this always get a
lot of vampire burial headlines. It's very likely that these
were just people whose community was regarding with distrust for
some reason. It's possible that both of them were just
being mistrue ostracized, and recent work at this specific burial
site suggests that other people buried there may have had
(30:08):
similar stories. One headline went so far as to call
this the grave of the damned. So far, more than
thirty burials have been discovered at this site, and a
lot of them are unusual in one way or another.
For example, the bones of three other children were found
in an area not far from this one, and they
(30:29):
were all kind of scattered, suggesting that their bodies may
have been desecrated. Researchers also found part of a jawbone
with green staining on it that suggests that a person
may have been buried with a coin in their mouth.
Another similar burial made news in August as well. This
one onearthed during the National Highway A fourteen Cambridge to
(30:52):
Huntington improvement scheme. Excavations for this project took place between
twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen. The examination of the findings
has been ongoing. So this body, in particular was a teenager,
probably a girl of about fifteen, who was buried face
down and may have had her ankles bound together. Analysis
(31:15):
of her skeletons suggests that she was malnourished in her
childhood and also had a spinal joint disease that was
exacerbated by the manual labor she had to do to
survive from a very young age. So her being buried
face down, possibly with her feet bound together, similarly suggests
that she was seen as suspicious or somehow different from
(31:37):
the rest of the community, but she also seems to
have been buried as a symbolic act. The pit where
she was buried had previously held a post for the
entry gate of the early medieval community of Connington, but
this settlement was eventually abandoned, and as people moved away,
they dismantled and removed that gait. It's possible that this
(31:59):
pit that was left behind was used as a burial
site for the sake of convenience, since it had already
been dug, but it's also possible that she was buried
there as sort of a symbolic end to the community.
Regardless her burial seems to have been one of the
last things that the community did before abandoning the settlement.
(32:19):
And finally, an article published in the journal Analytical Chemistry
in August is titled Count Dracula Resurrected Proteomic Analysis of
Lad the Third the Impaler's Documents by EVA technology and
mass spectrometry. This article discusses the use of both ethylene
vinyl acetate and mass spectrometry to study the peptides in
(32:43):
proteins on three letters Vlad the Third wrote on rag
paper between fourteen fifty seven and fourteen seventy five. The
researchers include a pretty big caveat here, which is that
other people probably handled these letters and it is not
entirely part possible to separate any proteins they may have
left behind from Vlad the Thirds. So they found various
(33:07):
peptides and proteins related to environmental factors in Wilakia, where
Vlad lived. That includes peptides from various fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects,
and plants. But some of the proteins were definitely of
human origin, and those proteins suggested that Vlad experience some
(33:28):
inflammation of his respiratory tract or his skin. All three
of the letters also had peptides associated with blood, and
the letter from fourteen seventy five also had proteins associated
with tears, which, according to these researchers, suggested that he
may have experienced hemilacria. In other words, that the stories
(33:50):
about Vlad the Impaler crying tears of blood may actually
have been true. Bump, bump, bum, that's the best October
finish I can imagine. Yeah, that's uh uh. I have
a little piece of email listener mail to take us
(34:10):
out of this unearthed.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
This is one.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
It's from July and I just straight up overlooked it
and I did not see it until this morning.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Somehow.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
This is from Michael, and Michael said, hello, fellow history nerds.
So I was listening to your two parter on the
Dictionary Wars while flying back to Connecticut to visit family
a couple of weeks ago, and loved the part where
Noah Webster bought Benedict Arnold's old house because it was
unsurprisingly affordable. A few days later, we met up with
a friend who was the principal at a high school
(34:43):
in New Haven.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
She let us park at the school.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
After hours while we walked around the city, and when
we got there, she pointed over to a fenced off
area in the parking lot. Quote, that's where they're excavating
Noah Webster's house. It used to belong to Benedict Arnold too.
I totally flipped out and told them all about the
episode we just listened to. I present you now with
a very uninteresting picture of the spot, taken at night.
(35:08):
The tile floor was visible at the time, but the
rest still look like a parking lot at a random
high school. I know you all like pictures of furry creatures,
but hopefully an adorable and stoic bearded dragon will do instead.
It does indeed love a bearded dragon. Yes, thank you
all for the entertainment. I never wanted to listen to
(35:29):
nonfiction podcast before you all. You were my first GRATZI,
So thank you so much Michael for this email. I
so we've talked about a number of different houses associated
with Noah Webster at this point. Some of them are
still standing, some of them are not. I didn't actually
realize that this was one that was no longer standing,
and there is.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Indeed archaeological work going on there.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Just at this high school parking lot, which I was
unaware of at all until getting this email. And then
we have just beautiful, beautiful bearded dragon Saudie Pie, hanging
out on some newspaper with what looks like a little
bull of snacks behind. So thank you so much for
(36:12):
sending this. I'm sorry that somehow I because I read
all of those other emails, and I even read some
of the other ones that were sort of arounded in
the inbox, and stumbled across this one this morning and
was like, I don't remember this at all. I somehow
overlooked it. If you would like to send us a
note about this or any other podcast, we're at history
Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media
(36:35):
at Missing History. It is where you will find our Facebook,
I keep saying Twitter, but it's not called that anymore, Pinterest,
and Instagram. We still have not started accounts on the
other ones yet. You can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
(37:01):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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