Unearthed! in Spring 2024, Part 1

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 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. It's time for the latest installment
in our series we call Unearthed, which is where we
talk about all the things that have been literally and
figuratively unearthed over the last few months. If you've been
listening to the show for a while, you're super familiar
with these and if you're brand new to the show.

(00:33):
We do this approximately four times a year. In Part one,
today's episode, we are going to talk about some updates
to previous episodes, some burial sites, walls which I think
is a new one, edibles and potables, and art and architecture.
And then we'll be back on Wednesday with Part two

(00:53):
that'll have some other stuff, including a lot of medical
finds and a lot of shipwrecks. So, as Tracy said,
we'll start with some updates to past episodes. Possibly the
biggest news story this quarter has been about Amelia Earhart's
plane maybe in January. Late January, specifically, private exploration company

(01:14):
Deep Sea Vision announced the possible discovery of the wreckage
of Earhart's plane on the floor of the Pacific Ocean,
sitting roughly between Hawaii and Papua New Guinea. So this
might be the first time that we have talked about
an Amelia Earhart announcement on Unearthed, and that announcement did
not come from an organization called the International Group for

(01:36):
Historic Aircraft Recovery. That organization has faced a number of
criticisms about its work on the Airheart mystery, So anytime
I see a new story, I'm just a little skeptical
to start with. It was nice to be sort of
starting from scratch, fresh clean slate with this one. In
terms of this specific discovery, though it is a little

(01:59):
too early to say whether it will hold up. Deep
Sea Vision released a sonar image of a blob on
the ocean floor that is kind of shaped like an airplane,
specifically a Lockheed Electra, which is what Earhart and navigator
Fred Noonan were flying in when they disappeared.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
At the same time. Most people's minds are wired for
spotting patterns and shape, so while yes, the sonar image
contains something that's kind of airplane shaped, it's also hard
not to see it as an airplane after being told
that's what it might be. In media coverage of this discovery,
Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo has also acknowledged that

(02:39):
it could just be some rocks in the shape of
a plane. So this announcement followed an underwater drone survey
that covered about six thousand square miles of seafloor in
the general area where most researchers believe this plane could
have gone down. The next step is to try to
get a closer look at it by sending a remotely

(02:59):
eye operated vehicle down there to try to get actual
photographs of the site that is currently shown as a
kind of orange blob on this sonar image. Past hosts
covered Amelia Earhart, including an update that came out on
July sixteenth, twenty twelve. Next, we haven't done a full
episode on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,

(03:23):
or NAGPRA, which was signed into law in the United
States in nineteen ninety, but it has come up in
a number of past episodes of the show, including several
episodes of Unearthed and our three part episode on Olympic
athlete Jim Thorpe. This is a law that applies to
agencies that receive federal funds, including museums, and it provides

(03:44):
a process for these agencies and institutions to transfer items
from their collections to Indigenous nations, Alaska Native Corporations, and
Native Hawaiian organizations. The law applies to funerary objects, sacred objects,
and human remains. Museums and agencies are required to identify
these items in their collections and collaborate with the appropriate

(04:07):
nations and peoples to repatriate them. So this law is
more than thirty years old at this point, but in
December of twenty twenty three, the US Department of the
Interior announced a final rule in the implementation of this law.
These changes followed a period of public comments and the
federal regulators tried to incorporate as many comments as possible

(04:29):
as came from tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. Basically, they
were trying to close a lot of loopholes that were
keeping items from actually being returned to the appropriate people
decades now after this law went into effect. To quote
from the press release from the Department of the Interior,
these changes included, quote strengthening the authority and role of

(04:52):
tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations in the repatriation process by
requiring deference to the indigenous knowledge of life, lineal descendants, tribes,
and nhos, requiring museums and federal agencies to obtain free,
prior and informed consent from lineal descendants, tribes, or nhos
before allowing any exhibition of access to or research on

(05:16):
human remains and cultural items, eliminating the category culturally unidentifiable
human remains, and resetting the requirements for cultural affiliation to
better align the regulations with congressional intent, increasing transparency and
reporting of holdings or collections, and shedding light on collections

(05:38):
currently unreported under the existing regulation, requiring museums and federal
agencies to consult and update inventories of human remains and
associated funerary objects within five years of this final rule.
In the words of the introduction of a three part
series on these changes published by Indian Country Today, quote,

(06:00):
the new rules are the first get tough regulations to
address collections of human remains and cultural artifacts since NAGRO
was passed more than thirty years ago, and museums and
universities are struggling to comply. Tribal leaders say it's about
time when these rules went into effect. Earlier this year,
a number of museums acknowledged that they did not have free,

(06:24):
prior and informed consents to display items from their collections.
Some high profile museums, including the Pevity Museum of Archaeology
and Ethnology at Harvard University and the Field Museum in Chicago,
have elected to close or cover exhibits that did not
meet this standard while they figure out what the next
steps are. In general, major museums receiving federal funding whose

(06:48):
exhibits are still viewable at this point have already worked
with indigenous communities to either revise existing exhibits or create
entirely new ones in a more collaborative way. Next, Archaeologists
in Boccoli in southern Italy have found the site of
a two thousand year old villa, and their speculation that
it may have belonged to Pliny the Elder, and that

(07:10):
he may have even been able to see the eruption
of Mount Vesuvius from there, since it offered a three
hundred and sixty degree view of the Gulf of Naples.
While we do know that Plenty was living in this
general area, his connection to this exact villa is not
definite at this point. This villa was found during construction
on a playground, and previous hosts talked about the city

(07:32):
of Pompeii and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius all the
way back on October nineteenth, two thousand and nine. Next,
we have a few updates to prior installments of Unearthed.
We've talked about discoveries at the Roman fort of Vindolanda
south of Hadrian's Wall in at least seven previous Unearthed episodes,
and the latest fine there is bed bugs. Katie Weiss Jackson,

(07:57):
a student at University College Dublin two insect thorises believed
to belong to the common bedbug in a layer dating
to about the year one hundred CE. If they're correctly identified,
these are the oldest bedbug parts found in Britain so far.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
This kind of feels like it combines with a previous
find that we talked about on Unearthed years ago, which
was evidence that areas that had a lot of Roman
influence also had a higher prevalence of intestinal parasites than
other places did. That discovery seemed to contradict the perception
that Romans were focused on cleanliness and introduced more hygienic

(08:38):
practices to the places that they invaded and occupied. This
same sort of irony applies with the bedbugs, although to
be clear, bedbugs are a very pernicious critter that can
infest somebody's living space really regardless of how fastidious they are.
Maybe they were fastidious because they just had problems with
bugs and parasitists. Remember last fall when we talked about

(09:02):
that stolen van goh painting that had been returned in
an Ikia bag. That painting was the parsonage garden at
Nuenen in spring, and it has now been restored and
is on display at the Groninger Museum as part of
a behind the scenes exhibition that's planned to run until
the spring of twenty twenty five. Moving on, we've also
recently talked a couple of times about a massive theft

(09:24):
or series of thefts of artwork and objects from the
British Museum. I think that's come up at least twice
on on Earth. Although some of these objects are believed
to be permanently lost at this point, some of the
ones that the museum has managed to recover are now
on display in an exhibition called Rediscovering Gems and the

(09:44):
plan is for that to run until June second, twenty
twenty four. Next.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
The human remains known as Utsey the Iceman have made
frequent appearances on on Earth, as well as being the
subject of a full episode. New research has been published
in the European journe of Archaeology in March under the
title Chalcolithic Tattooing Historical and Experimental Evaluation of the Terulean
Iceman's Body Markings. This paper pulls together a lot of

(10:11):
different information about Utsy's sixty one tattoos. It walks through
those sixty one tattoos in detail, and it covers all
of the existing ideas about what their purpose may have been.
This includes more recent interviews with Inuit culture members in
Canada and Greenland about the role that tattoos played in
their society prior to force to culturation. This paper, in

(10:35):
addition to sort of a survey of all of this knowledge,
also examines how the tattoos may have been made, and
that includes another lengthy overview of tattooing methods through history,
and it incorporates some experimental data as well from work
that was carried out by four tattoo experts in twenty
twenty and twenty twenty one, Machine free tattoo artist Danny

(10:58):
Riddet of New Zealand tattooed himself and also worked with
three other tattoo experts to create multiple versions of the
same motif on his body. This motif looks.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
Kind of like a stylized fir tree or some other evergreen.
The other tattoo experts included Inuit tattoo artist mayas Ulik
Yakobsen of Greenland, and archaeologists Aurelian Brelau and Benoit Robodai.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
The paper's authors compared Utsi's tattoos to the various tattoos
that were done as part of this project, concluding that
Utsi's tattoos were probably made with a single pointed hand
poke tool made of something like bone or metal, rather
than through incisions. Yeah, as I understand it, incisions had
been the going hypothesis before this comparison to this tattoo project.

(11:48):
To close out these updates, we've also got one from
the archaeological site known as must Farm, which has come
up on a couple of installments of Unearthed. This was
a stilt village dating to about eight fifty BCE. Roughly
eighty five miles or one hundred and thirty six kilometers
north of modern London, as the crow flies. It was

(12:09):
destroyed by a fire only about a year after it
was built, and because the burned remains of the buildings
and all of their contents sank down into the riverbed,
a lot of what was there is still very well preserved.
Two books were published on must Farm in March. One
is must Farm Pile Dwelling Settlement Volume one Landscape, Architecture

(12:32):
and Occupation. Volume two is Specialist Reports. These were published
as open access so anyone can read them, and you
can get to them from mustfarm dot com. Living in
a stilt village built over a river in Britain more
than twenty eight hundred years ago might conjure up ideas

(12:54):
of kind of a meager existence, but in a news
release about these books, researchers describe life at must Farm
is one of quote cozy domesticity. These homes had similar
layouts to modern homes, with different spaces used for different purposes.
The sixty or so people who lived in them dined
on foods like honey glazed venison, and those foods were

(13:17):
prepared in kitchens that were well appointed with bowls, cups,
storage jars and cooking pots that were made to stack
inside of each other to save space. The textiles made
in Wornut must Farm are described as the finest in
Britain during this period, including well made linen clothing. Several
of the structures contained items like spindle whirls and bobbins,

(13:38):
and one had a loom situated near a likely entryway,
which would have allowed for more light to work by,
and the building's construction meant that they were simultaneously well
insulated and well ventilated. The publication of these books followed
extensive research and archaeological work that took place in twenty
fifteen and twenty sixteen, and currently no for their excavations

(14:00):
are planned for this site. Archaeological material was removed from
the site and preserved, and then after these excavations were over,
the site was recovered and sealed. Objects from the site
are now in the collection of the Peterborough Museum and
Art Gallery, which is not far away, and an exhibition
called Introducing must Farm, a Bronze Age settlement is running

(14:24):
there through September twenty eighth, twenty twenty four. Hey, Tracy,
I know we have burial sites coming up, which thrills
me to the bone. But do you want to take
a break. First, let's do take a break. A lot

(14:45):
of what we've talked about on Unearthed, for you know,
beforehand today really has been things that were discovered at
a burial site. But this time we also have some
discoveries in which the burial sites themselves are what attracted attention. First,
archaeologists have found a burial site on the grounds of
Fawnman Castle near Bury, South Wales. This is one that

(15:08):
seems to have been used not just for burying the dead,
but also for feasts and other gatherings. There's evidence of
at least eighty graves there, along with pieces of imported glass,
drinking vessels and things that you would associate with things
like butchery and cooking. It doesn't seem like people were
living nearby, though, so they probably came together to bury

(15:30):
the dead and hold some kind of commemorative feast. This
site dates back to the early medieval period, and there
aren't many archaeological sites in Wales from this time, especially
not ones that have preserved bone. The burial sites also
include different types of burials, including some with stones lining
the graves, and some with the person buried in a

(15:51):
crouching position. In another discovery in Wales, some of our
listeners are probably familiar with ten Tern Abbey because of
having to read a poem by William Wordsworth in high
school or college.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
I know I did. Today. This is a ruin, but
it's still considered a national treasure and a Gothic masterpiece.
When it was functioning, it was a place where wealthy
and powerful people were buried. The abbey was shut down
during the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century,
and it seems like after that point there were some

(16:25):
people who had much less affluent lives who chose to
bury their loved ones on the abbey's grounds. This included
a woman who appears to have been disabled and probably
died in her thirties or forties, and two children who
seem to have signs of long term malnutrition and chronic
health conditions. It is possible that at least some of

(16:46):
these burials happened in secret. This discovery is part of
ongoing restoration work on the abbey. The stone work at
the abbey is very soft and its roof is completely gone,
so there has been a lot of erosion. One of
the goals of this restoration project is to protect that stonework.
Moving on, archaeologists from the University of Barcelona and the

(17:10):
Institute of Ancient Near East have discovered some previously unknown
rock hewn tombs. They date back to the Ptolemaic and
Roman eras, so that stretches from about three h five
BCE to six forty one CE. This site is in
the Menya Governorate in Upper Egypt, on the banks of
the Nile River. There are spaces carved into the rock

(17:34):
that hold Roman era mummies, and two of them have
golden tongues in their mouths. There are also terra cotta
statues depicting Deity isis Aphrodite, and there aren't similar statues
in the historical record. Next, an early English cemetery was
unearthed during work on a project called Vikinglink, which I

(17:55):
find a delightful name if you're not local.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
To that area.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
This is an electricity line connecting the UK to Denmark.
The cemetery includes the remains of twenty three people, as
well as jewelry, pottery, and other items. They all date
back to the sixth and seventh centuries CE. This find
was also featured on BBC two's Digging for Britain. In January.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
Archaeologists have been excavating a Roman cemetery near Holborn Viaduct
in central London and have found five oak coffins there
along with a well preserved funeral bed. All of this
is very rare. Most wooden objects from the Roman era
in Britain have decayed at this point and there have
only been three timber coffins from that period found in

(18:40):
London before now. But the bed was a reticular surprise.
It was known that funeral observances could involve carrying someone
to their burial site on a bed, but not that
the bed might also be buried with them. These likely
date to between the years forty and eighty CE. Thousand

(19:00):
year old tomb has been rediscovered in Ireland. This tomb
is known as the alturna Granny and back in eighteen
fifty two antiquarian Richard Hitchcock visited the site and reported
that it was no longer there. At that point, most
people believed that all of its above ground elements must
have been taken apart, and that the stones that had

(19:22):
been used for that had been taken somewhere else and reused.
Irish folklorist and archaeologist Billy mcfloin was curious about whether
anything related to the tomb was still there. He eventually
spotted a stone that resembled one in a nineteenth century
sketch of the site by Georgiana Chatterton. He contacted Ireland's

(19:42):
National Monument Service and he went to the site with
archaeologist kaim And O'Brien. They eventually confirmed that they had
found the site of the tomb.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
So this was built as a wedge tomb with upright
stones and capstones across the top. And while only one
of these stones is still standing, others do appear to
still be there at the site, but now they are
buried or partially buried in the soil. So it seems
like rather than these being taken away and repurposed somewhere else,

(20:14):
someone may have knocked them over. Weather may have knocked
them over. A lot of it's still there. Last year,
some metal detectorists in Poland found some jewelry in a
dry lake bed. After further study, it turns out this
may be a site that was used for water burials.
Excavations have unearthed human remains from at least thirty three people,

(20:35):
along with more than five hundred and fifty bronze objects.
These are likely connected to the Lusatian culture, who lived
in what's now Poland from about thirteen hundred to five
hundred BCE. Most of the bronze objects are more recent
than the body, so ritual practices here may have shifted
over time and our next burial site. According to research

(20:58):
that was published in December but then picked up in
the media after the first of the year, archaeologists believe
they have found three tombs belonging to family members of
Alexander the Great, including his father, son, and half brother.
So these tombs themselves are not a new discovery. People
already knew about them. They also were already connected to

(21:20):
some of Alexander the Great's family, But this paper argues
that the previous work to identify the people in these
tombs was incorrect. Okay, so all of the writing about
this sounds extremely definite, including some portions of the actual paper,
but this still seems more like an argument than a
definitive conclusion. For example, toom Ie includes a skeleton with

(21:44):
a fused knee join and King Philip the Second of
Macedon Alexander the Great's father was known to have been
injured in the knee by a lance. Two other people
buried there are believed to be Philip's wife, Queen Cleopatra Eurydice,
and their newborn child based on the likely age of
the older skeleton. The second tomb is believed to contain

(22:04):
King Aridaeus and his wife Ada Eurydice, and the third
belongs to Alexander the Fourth. Again, this is based on
conclusions about things like the ages and sexes of the
people in the tombs and particular details about the bones.
So this is definitely a paper that adds to the
ongoing body of work about these tombs, not really one

(22:26):
that answers all possible questions about who these remains belong to,
which is what some of the coverage suggests. And honestly,
the highlights section of the paper makes it sound like
a like that we've closed the deal on Uryah, and
I did not find it that certain reading the paper.
So moving on, Intel is planning to build semiconductor plants

(22:50):
near Magdenburg, Germany, and archaeological work ahead of that construction
has unearthed two Neolithic burial mounds covering wooden grave chambers
that each held multiple burials. These were built during the
Ballberg culture, which is forty one hundred to thirty six
hundred BCE, and while they're much smaller today because of erosion,

(23:11):
they would have been a dramatic part of the landscape
when they were first built. There's also an area where
two cattle were sacrificed and buried some time later between
thirty three hundred and twenty eight hundred BCE. A different
team also discovered a Neolithic burial site in France. This
one included multiple types of burials, including several mounds. This

(23:34):
site appears to have been used for about four thousand years,
or basically the whole Neolithic period. And lastly, archaeologists have
found a tomb in central China dating back to the
Warring States period from four seventy five to twenty one BCE.
There are one hundred.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Seventy six tombs at the site, mostly small pits. The
larger tombs at the site also include metalwares such as
horse bits, spoons, swords, and pots. They also found a
chariot burial at this site, with the partial skeletons of
two horses and a wooden chariot that has almost completely decayed.
We'll have some more after another sponsor break. In my memory,

(24:26):
we have never had a section of unearthed just called walls.
We might have if we did, it didn't stick in
my memory. But we've got a whole section of walls
this time. First, a team of researchers discovered a massive
fortification in northern Arabia that's about four thousand years old
and entirely encircles the Kabar Oasis. Only about half of

(24:51):
this wall still exists today, but originally that whole length
would have been about fourteen point five kilometers long, and
the the pleated wall was about five meters high with
a thickness of roughly two meters, So I feel like
meters to yards is a pretty easy conversion. But that's
about eight point seven miles long. Tracing the path of

(25:15):
where this wall was involved both surveys and remote sensing data.
This is one of the largest such fortifications ever found
on the the Arabian Peninsula. It most likely protected the
land and community within from a variety of threats, including
severe weather and raiders. Next, a sonar survey off the

(25:36):
coast of Germany has revealed a half mile long stretch
of wall made from boulders. This one is believed to
have been about ten thousand years old, and when it
was built, rather than being underwater, it was probably next
to a lake or a marsh. One of the researchers
connected to this work also suggested that it might have
been used for hunting purposes, basically creating kind of a

(26:00):
bottleneck or a barrier to keep reindeer running in a
specific direction. This wall has been named the Blinker Wall,
and it may be the oldest known megastructure in Europe.
We have another wall in Germany, this one found during
an excavation at Achm. This wall dates to the third
century and was likely built by Romans. The section that

(26:23):
was unearthed measures twenty three feet long and three feet thick,
and it is not known how long it originally was.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
Our fourth and final wall is a massive system of
walls in Mongolia, stretching four hundred and five total kilometers
or more than two hundred and fifty one miles. This
is actually a wall system that was known about before,
but this is the first time it's been really more
thoroughly studied and documented. This wall system was built between

(26:51):
the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and in addition to the walls,
there's a trench and at least thirty four other structures
all right. Now, moving on to edibles and potables, archaeologists
found what may be one of the oldest surviving royal
kitchens in Poland in the basement of a museum. The
museum is the Museum of Applied Arts in Post Nania,

(27:13):
and it's on the site of a royal castle that
went through various fires, restorations, and rebuilding over the course
of centuries. The kitchen area had a huge pillar that
would have supported a stove and a ventilation hood, along
with a well in one corner. According to the photos,
getting down to this space involves climbing ladders that are
perched on ledges and leaning across this giant shaft underneath,

(27:37):
and they frankly look utterly terrifying. Yeah, imagine looking down
a giant, big chimney kind of nope, and there's ladders
that are like perched on a ledge on one side
of the chimney interior and leaning against the wall of
the other side. And I was like, oh, I I'm
nervous just looking at the ladders there, not even thinking

(28:01):
about getting up and down them. Archaeologists in Germany have
identified the charred remains inside of a Neolithic cooking pot,
concluding that it was porridge. We've definitely had some Neolithic
porridge on unearthed before, but this analysis revealed some pretty
specific ingredients, including emmer wheat, barley, and white goosefoot. The

(28:24):
barley and the wheat were probably grown by farmers, while
the white goosefoot would have been a wild plant, so
this is an example of both cultivated and wild grains
in the same dish. These grains had sprouted, which the
researcher said suggested this had been a meal that was
made in the early summer. Speaking of stuff made of wheat,

(28:46):
archaeologists working at the Neolithic city of Catajuk have identified
an item from the site as an unbaked loaf of bread.
Its ingredients included wheat, barley, and pea seeds, and it
was in a corner of a clay oven that dated
back to eight thousand, six hundred years ago. Next, some
research into Roman clay jars suggests that some Roman wines

(29:09):
may have had what was described as a spicy character.
These were porous egg shaped vessels called Dohlia, which would
have been partially buried and sealed up while the wine
fermented and aged. According to the researchers, this finished product
would have had notes of quote, toasted bread, apples, roasted walnuts,

(29:30):
and curry, but this could have been just a sample
of all the different flavors that could have been found
in wines in the area. Also, curry is not just
one flavor. It's not clear what this note was meant
to have tasted like, unless they were meaning curry as
in like store bought curry powder from a major national brand,

(29:55):
which I would say like that might have a relatively
standard flavor, but like curry is a whole style of cuisine.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yeah. Archaeologists in Barcelona have found the remains of a
nineteenth century chocolate factory. This site was discovered during a
building renovation in the Old City, which was then paused
so that the site could be investigated. It turned out
elements of this structure were roughly six hundred years old,
and like that royal kitchen that we mentioned earlier, there

(30:23):
had been various buildings and expansions over the centuries. The
nineteenth century factory was for Catalonian chocolateier Clemente Guerria findings
included tongs and lead plates that would have been used
to label the chocolate, and this last one is more
potable adjacent. Guinness has digitized its archival records, which are

(30:44):
now searchable at ancestry dot com. And this might seem
like kind of a weird connection, but there is a
gap in genealogical research that's available in Ireland because of
fire at the Public Records Office in Dublin in the
nineteen twenties destroyed a lot a lot of official records
from things like the census. This Guinness archive spans from

(31:05):
seventeen ninety nine to nineteen thirty nine and it includes
mostly employee records and trade ledgers, so those employee records
might include things like the birth dates of people whose
census files and other documents are no longer accessible through
the Public Records Office. Ancestry dot com is a paid service,

(31:25):
but these records were available free of charge for the
first two weeks after.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
They were announced. Moving right along to art and architecture,
builders working in a roof space at Christ's College, Cambridge
have found medieval wall paintings celebrating the college's royal patron
Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry the seventh. These paintings
are thought to have been created in the sixteenth century,
and they have been covered up for at least three

(31:51):
hundred years. They depict a red Lancastrian rose a portcullis,
which was the emblem of the Beaufort family and what
may be of to Lee. Next, it's possible that ancient
artists who created petroglyphs in Brazil were inspired by fossilized
footprints of dinosaurs. This conclusion comes from the work of

(32:13):
archaeologists and paleontologists who found petroglyphs and preserved dinosaur footprints
in close proximity to one another, and this was described
in a paper in the journal Scientific Reports in what
to me is a delightfully titled composition. It is called
quote a remarkable assemblage of petroglyphs and dinosaur footprints in

(32:36):
Northeast Brazil. The petroglyphs are primarily circular motifs that are
similar to ones found at other sites in the region,
but until now there haven't been examples of petroglyphs and
fossilized footprints in the same place. In this way, it
suggests that ancient artists saw these footprints as important enough

(32:57):
to incorporate them into their art. Other researchers elsewhere in
Brazil also found sixteen previously unknown rock art sites which
featured both paintings and engravings. These sites shared some features
and motifs with other rock art sites in the area
that were already known about, so researchers believe all of

(33:19):
these sites might have been created by people who all
shared a similar culture and belief system. We have talked
about the Paleolithic art in Covadonus in Spain before. These
caves are home to at least one hundred ten paintings,
many of them made by scooping clay from the floor
and using it to create images on the walls. Clay

(33:41):
paintings like this are fairly uncommon, and they've only survived
until today because the walls and water in the caves
are full of calcium carbonate, which acts as a preservative.
Attempts to use radiocarbon dating to determine the age of
the paintings has been ongoing, but there are also a
couple of other clues. One is that some of the
artwork in these caves uses motifs that are also present

(34:04):
at other sites, with those sites dating back to between
twenty one thousand and forty thousand years ago. And another
is that one of these paintings in the cave, it
turns out, has been damaged by a scratch from a
cave bear, and cave bears became extinct about twenty four
thousand years ago, so this would have been made before

(34:25):
that point. Next, archaeologists at POMPEII have found a fresco
depicting Greek mythological siblings Phrixus and Hale. In this story,
Phrixus and Hale were fleeing their stepmother by sea and
hele fell into the water and drowned. The fresco depicts
Phrixus reaching for his sister as she reaches out from

(34:45):
the water. The colors of this fresco are still really vibrant,
and authorities at POMPEII hope the home it is part
of will be accessible to visitors at some point in
the future. And we're going to end this installment of
unearthed and this art and architecture with a call for
help from a museum. National Museum's Liverpool is trying to

(35:06):
determine the identity of the subject of a painting by
William Lindsay Windiss. This was painted around eighteen eighty four
and is known just as the Black Boy. This painting
is currently in the collection of Liverpool's International Slavery Museum,
and it is the only painting in the collection that
depicts a single black child. This painting depicts a black

(35:30):
boy looking directly at the viewer. His feet are bare
and his clothing is torn. We don't know who he is,
and there's also not a ton of information about the
painter aside from the fact that William Lindsay Windiss was
born in Liverpool and was seen as a respected artist.
It is possible that more information about the artist could
eventually lead to information about the people who modeled for him.

(35:54):
The URL for more information about this is at www
dot Liverpool Museums dot org dot UK. Slash call out
information about Black Boy with each of those words separated
by dashes. It seems like trying to read all of
those dashes would just be confusing, so folks can also

(36:14):
get to that page from the Liverpool Museums dot org
dot UK homepage. Do you have some listener mail to
wrap this one up? I do have some listener mail
to wrap this one up. This this email is from Wren,
who sent us a message after our episode where we
talked about historical etiquette manuals and I really loved this story.

(36:38):
Wren wrote to say, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I can't
believe it was your etiquette episode that finally got my
button gear to email you. I often think of etiquette
as a classist endeavor, but your words about simply not
being a jerk really spoke to me. I grew up
with a single mom who was a former hippie and
an outspoken leftist, so I never really had house rules

(36:59):
as a kid, except for two don't hit and hold
hands in the parking lot. I'm sure she meant that literally,
since I was a very exuberant kid and prone to
excitability and skipping or dancing away from her. However, as
I've grown into an adult with no religion or faith
and thus no formal commandments to live by, I've often

(37:20):
thought about her rules more abstractly. Be kind to others
even if you yourself are hurting, and stick together with
the people you loved. Thank you for the thoughtful, nuanced,
interesting research you do in stories you tell as an
editor with a history degree. I cannot tell you how
much I admire you both and how much your work
and your career journeys have inspired me. All the best

(37:40):
reren ps and lieu of a pet tax. Please see
a selection of memes you may enjoy. I did, for
sure enjoy these memes. On one of them is I'm
just going to have one of an example, because there
were several. One is it looks like a medieval illuminating
sort of and there is someone sitting with a book

(38:03):
and that's labeled writers doing their thing. And then there's
some devils over in the corner of the room and
they are labeled devils putting typos in and then up
in the heavens editors being busy. I did find that
very funny. I liked all of these memes. I want
them to write an autobiography called Hold Hands in the

(38:23):
parking Lot. That's my input on all this. Yeah, I
love this whole story, I really did. I loved it
when I read it, I loved it when I reread
it just now. It got me a little bit choked up.
And thank you also for the memes. I do love
to be delighted by humorous or insightful memes. So thank

(38:45):
you again Wren for this email. If you would like
to send us a note about this or any other podcast,
we are at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and
we're all over social media that miss in History and
that is where you can find our Facebook, Bok and
Pinterest and Instagram and the X thing. And you can

(39:05):
subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever
you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

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