Unearthed! in July 2022, Part 2

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of our regularly scheduled episode of Unearthed. To this swin covering Things that feed has things that were covered, things that were literally or figuratively uncovered in April, May and juneo and so in this episode we have some animal stuff and some arts stuff. A lot of times on and Earth we talked about exhumations didn't really have as much on the exclamation front. There were a couple of things that came up where I was like, this feels ghoulish to discuss. I think this needs to like stay where it is as always, though, we will start with some potpourri, which is just the stuff I had a hard time categorizing, right, and we're starting with a little bit of an accidental exhibition, so will kind of scratch that it for people that love exhumations. Teams working to rebuild the spire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris found a well preserved sarcophagus, which was removed from the cathedral in mid April. Although it was found among brick pipes that were part of a nineteenth century heating system. Researchers believed it dated back as far as the fourteenth century. It has already been confirmed that it contains at least part of a person's skeleton. That was confirmed using an endoscopic camera. There was also some plant matter suggesting that the sarcophagus may have been lined with boxwood, something that was done to try to preserve the bodies of wealthier and more powerful people. There were a lot of headlines in mid April saying that this was going to be open soon. But if it has been opened since then, I was not able to find anything about it. That's the good thing about soon. It does not have a finite amount attached to it, so you could just say it. We have talked at various points about residues inside ceramic vessels and what those residues have suggested about what those vessels contained. Usually this has been something like barley or makeup, or animal fat, or occasionally even parasite eggs. But in the case of some vessels found in Jerusalem which date back to the Crusades, they contained explosive materials, so they may have been hand grenades. This probably wasn't black powder that was introduced to the area from Asia by about the thirteenth century, but instead it was something flammable that was locally made. So to be super clear here, the idea that there were things that were basically hand grenades during the Crusades, that's not a new idea. These are not the first vessels ever to be found that were likely to have been used as hand grenades. But I didn't get really excited when the residues inside the containers were not cooking residues, which has been the case so many times, but instead explosion residues. Up next. Back in ten Laura Young, proprietor at Temple of Vintage, was that a goodwill in Austin, Texas and saw a marble bust under a table. She bought that marble bust for about thirty five dollars. It was clearly old and it weighed about fifty pounds, and in May it was announced that it was a two thousand year old sculpture that had originally been housed at the Pompeianum, which was a replica Roman villa commissioned by King Ludwig the First of Bavaria. But the Pompeianum was badly damaged during World War Two and much of its contents were looted by Nazis. It is a total mystery how this thing came to be at a good will in Austin, and there's also a lot of debate about exactly who it's meant to depict. But at the moment it is on loan to the San Antonio Museum of Art. It's not the first time there's been like a random thrift store or goodwill sale that has made news, but this one's backstory to me was like what a ride King Olympigs involved. It's just layer upon layer upon layer of nuttiness. Lastly, for our bit of potpoury, research from the University of Georgia Laboratory of Archaeology and its partners at the Muskogee Nation was published in the journal American Antiquity in May. This research involved the study of a site and what's now Cold Springs, Georgia that suggests the presence of a council house dating back at least fifteen hundred years there. To quote from the paper, we argue that council houses were the early manifestations of a form of collective governance that can be confidently documented in one form or another over the last fifteen hundred years among ancestral Muscogeean societies. Sources indicate that council houses were the hub of political life within communities and often across regions. And although council houses were in part a bridge to ceremonial worlds, they were key forums in which to discuss and debate the collective good and governance. So this is a shift away from an idea that's been a part of archaeological interpretations of these sites in North America for a long time. That idea is that until about the year one thousand, these communities were largely egalitarian, but then after the year one thousand they quickly transitioned into societies that had a hierarchy and ruling elite, in particular a chief. So this paper instead offers the interpretation that democratic institutions in North America instead date back to people like the ancestral Muskogean communities, and that then those institutions continued all through the development of the Muscogee Nation. This paper is titled the Early Materialization of Democratic institutions among the Ancestral Muscogeon of the America in Southeast and it is an open access paper, so you can read the whole thing if you wish. Yeah, we're gonna move on to edibles and potables now. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have conducted isotopic analysis of two thousand sets of skeletal remains dating back to the early medieval period, and their findings suggest that people in medieval Britain really weren't eating very much meat, and that included the skeletal remains of people who were probably nobles and royals who are imagined as having eaten a whole bunch of like turkey legs all the time. At the same time, though, we have food lists from royal feasts dating back to the same period, and those lists show lots of meat being served. So the basic conclusion here, kind of unsurprisingly is that those lists are for feasts that were really special occasions and not just regular occurrences. Key to this research was a food list for a banquet during the reign of King Aina of Wessex. When the team tallied up everything on that list, they found that meat accounted for more than half of the total number of calories served. They tried to estimate what one person's meal looked like based on the idea that each guest got one of the three hundred bread rolls shown on the list. Based on that calculation, each guest would have gotten five hundred grams each of mutton and beef, plus a total of five hundred grams of salmon, eel, and poultry, along with cheese, honey, and ale. Other lists used for other meals in other parts of what's now southern England also showed that same basic pattern. None of them mentioned any vegetables. Yeah, a lot of articles that I read about this were like, vegetables might have been served, they're just not on the list. It's okay, sure. So there's, aside from that, a fair amount of conjecture here, including the way that it rests on the idea that every person got one bread roll. Even if that's not quite right there, this does seem like the amount of food that was listed on all of these food lists that would have been meant for hundreds of people, not for just like the monarchs and their immediate court. I'm still tickled at the idea that there could have been secret Broccolini. Various reporting on this has compared it to a great, big barbecue hosted by the peasants for the royalty, probably with leftovers that were picked over and later turned into things like hardy stews. Next up, according to research from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University, olive trees were first domesticated about seven thousand years ago. They came to this conclusion by analyzing charcoal remains from an archaeological site and determining that the wood that had been burned at that site was from olive trees. This is in an area where olive trees don't grow naturally, and there was more olive wood among the charcoal than could logically be explained by somebody having just like brought some wood from somewhere else. They also found evidence of lots of small fig branches, which may have been evidence that people were cultivating fig trees there, since they resembled branches that would have been pruned off during the process of cultivation. Before we get into our next subject, which is animals, let's take a quick sponsor break. So next up we have some stuff about animals, and first we will talk about chickens today, domestic chickens or Gallus domesticus are found really all over a lot of the world, but it hasn't been totally clear where or when these birds were first domesticated. Researchers have suggested various parts of Asia as the likely starting point. To be clear, Asia is enormous, so that's not narrowing it down all that much. Uh. The time line has been similarly vague, with suggestions stretching all the way from more than ten thousand years ago to as recently as four thousand years ago. Even pinpointing the domesticated chickens likely wild ancestor has been pretty recent, with research suggesting that it is one species of Southeast Asian jungle foul published just two years ago. Two new studies may have brought this into more focus. The first was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers studied domestic chicken remains across more than six hundred archaeological sites in eighty nine countries. Together, this suggested that chickens were first domesticated in central Thailand sometime between sixteen fifty and twelve fifty BC. This was at about the same time that people were first cultivating greens like rice and millet, including cultivating a rice by scattering seed onto saturated soil rather than planting it in a totally submerged patty field. So wild birds may have been attracted to these fields or to grain storage areas is an easy food source, thus kickstarting the process of domestication. Another unanswered question has been how and when domestic chickens moved from where they were first domesticated to other parts of the world, and that's where the other paper comes in. It was published in the journal Antiquity, and this research used radio carbon dating to try to pinpoint when domesticated chickens first arrived in Europe and Northwest Africa. Based on this dating, domesticated chickens first arrived in Mediterranean Europe about hundred years ago and then in northern Africa between one thousand and eight hundred years ago. Our next animal find is frogs, specifically more than eight thousand frog and toad bones representing about three hundred fifty total animals, that were found in a ditch north of Cambridge, England. This ditch is adjacent to an iron age roundhouse and most of the bones are from common species of frogs, but it's unclear why there are so many of them in this particular location. The BBC described experts as baffled. There's been so much speculation about these frogs, like did they hold some kind of special symbolism for the Iron age population of this area that has been true of other civilizations and other parts of the world during the same overall time period. Or maybe we're people eating the frogs. The bones don't show the kinds of charring or cut marks that would suggest that they had been a food source, but if people had prepared them by boiling, those wouldn't necessarily be there. Or this wasn't that far from an area that people were processing grain, So did the grain attract lots of insects and then the insects attracted lots of frogs If this was just a popular, you know, hangout place for frogs. That still doesn't explain why there were so many bones in one place. Some of the ideas there are that they got into the ditch and they couldn't get out again, or that having so many frogs together in a small space had led to the spread of a disease. Uh. It kind of cracks me up that there was a lot of coverage of these frogs and it all sort of landed on. There are a lot of frogs by this iron a rage roundhouse. Not totally sure why frog mysteries. Our last bit of animal research is circling back to domestication again. It is about domesticated dogs. We know that dogs were domesticated from wolves, but similarly to that whole thing with the chickens, there's been a lot of ongoing research into exactly when and where this first happened. This includes the possibility that dogs were domesticated in multiple places around the world, independently of each other. I feel like we've had various dog domestication things that have come up on on Earth before that suggests sometimes wildly different things. I'm telling you this is why I have not done a dog episode like I did when we talked about the domestication of the cap because there's so much conflicting stuff and just continually changing. A genomic history of gray wolves published in the journal Nature suggests that today's dogs are descended from two different wolf populations. This research involved analyzing seventy two ancient wolf genomes from Europe, Siberia, and North America, as well as the genomes of sixty eight modern wolves, one sixty nine modern dogs, and thirty three ancient dogs. All together, this represents animals that lived over the last one hundred thousand years. This research doesn't conclusively settle the question of when and where dogs were first domesticated. None of the wolf genomes that were part of the research per I'd like the exact match with today's modern dogs that would do that, But it does appear that in general today's dogs are more closely related to wolves from eastern Eurasia than to wolves from other parts of the world, So that suggests that dogs may have first been domesticated in Eastern Eurasia. At the same time, though, dogs in Western Asia and Northern Africa seem to have lots of connection to wolves from Southwest Eurasia, as much as half of their ancestry comes from the Southwest Eurasian population, so that is the basis for the idea that dogs came from two populations of wolves. Yeah, something that's come up on previous Unearthed has been about how dogs that were brought to North America from Europe during colonization like overtook dogs that had already been domesticated here. And I am not sure how this research incorporated that idea. UH tried to figure it out and could not. But anyway, we are going to move on now to some art finds. Workers replacing gas pipes outside of Verona, Italy have found a floor mosaic believed to have been part of a villa owned by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, also known as Theodoric the Great. This idea seems to connect mostly to how large and ornate the mosaic is, but in the words of Vincenzo Tone, Cultural Heritage Superintendent of Verona, quote, bits of mosaic, thermal facilities and residential complexes have been emerging in a scattered way at Montorio over the past decades, and it is now time to systematize them. Our next art find was also found under something. These are polychrome paintings that were found under the plaster at the Royal Salt Works Castle in Balitka, Poland during restoration work. The oldest of these newly discovered paintings date back to the seventeenth century, and they've been covered over with successive layers of plaster in the centuries since then. These paintings are spread across five rooms in the castle, and they show floral motifs, coats of arms, and Arabesque decorations, as well as some representational paintings. Some of them are realistic paintings of architectural or decorative features. So rather than having a carved column or a draped fabric to decorate the wall of a room, instead having a painting of the column or fabric to create the illusion of their being there. Some of these, just from my looking at them on a computer screen on a website, are really convincing. Like if I walked into a room with the whole thing exposed, I might have been like, what a great column over there. It's not a column, it's a painting. Next, researchers from the Universities of York and Durham have been studying engraved stones from the collections of the British Museum and have come to the conclusion that prehistoric people's carved these stones by firelight. These stones are known as plaquettes. They were made between twenty three thousand and fourteen thousand years ago, and there's heat damage on some of the stones that suggests that they were held close to a fire. Okay, you may be asking, couldn't people have just started with a rock that had already been near a fire, or left the rock near the fire when they weren't actively working on it, and that's the previous assumption of where the pinkish heat damage on these stones came from. But after coming to this conclusion, researchers tried to confirm it using three D models and virtual reality software, and the results supported the idea that the pattern of the heat damage suggested that the stones had been held near the fire intentionally. We've talked about some other research recently that suggests that prehistoric people's created art by firelight. In the case of that other research, we were talking about cave art and the likelihood that the fumes and the lack of oxygen from the smoke might have created another psychological dimension to the creation process for this artwork, and that is the case here too. Dr Andy Needham was quoted as saying, quote, creating art by the firelight would have been a very visceral experience, activating different parts of the human brain. We know that flickering shadows and light enhance our evolutionary capacity to see forms and faces in inanimate objects, and this might help explain why it's common to see plaquette designs that have been used or integrated natural features in the rock to draw animals or artistic forms. Moving on. A team off the coast of southern France is trying to preserve and document a cave system full of prehistoric art before it is lost to plastic pollution and climate change. The coscy cavern system is reachable only through a treacherous dive into a ca burned that is increasingly submerged. This site is the only known location of cave art of prehistoric marine animals. Yeah, and we say it's treacherous, like there have been people who have drowned trying to get to the site to pinpoint where it was to explore it. The artwork in this cave date dates back about thirty thousand years, and efforts to document it have really been escalating since a rise in sea levels started threatening the site in twleven. This was likely home to more than five hundred works of art originally, but as more of the cave has become submerged and damaged, only about a hundred and fifty of those images remain. Only about twenty of the cave system is still dry today. The work to document this cave has included extensive three D mapping, and a replica of the cave opened as a museum in Marseille in June. Our last art find is also about rock art. Griffith University Center for Social and Cultural Research has been working with the traditional elders of Katakut National Park in Australia to train a machine learning model to detect rock art that a human might miss. This might help researchers find and identify rock art in places that are treacherous or difficult to reach, so they could work from photos and then decide whether they need to go in for further exploration. At this point, the machine learning model is correctly detecting the presence of rock art about eight nine percent of the time, so again, the idea here is that once the model picks up the presence of rock art from a photo, researchers can then visit that area in person to study the artwork more closely. We've got more on Earth coming up, but first we are going to pause for a little sponsor break. The last few things we're going to talk about aren't exactly discoveries. There are reports that have been released over the last few months, So first Harvard University has released a report detailing the school's historical involvement in slavery and the slave trade. Mr report also details the university's involvement in race science and the eugenics movement in the decades after slavery. Harvard is not unique at all in its connections to slavery, nor is it the first university in the US do this kind of work. It's been going on at some of the nation's oldest and most prestigious universities for more than a decade. The committee that produced this report also made a series of recommendations for reparations. The recommendations include things like steps to engage and support descendant communities, honor enslaved people whose lives and labor were connected to Harvard, connect with historically black colleges and universities, and implement steps to hold the university accountable. The university has committed one hundred million dollars to carry out those recommendations, and the full paper, recommendations, and other materials are available at Legacy of Slavery dot Harvard dot DU. Another report from Harvard was not released voluntarily, an unfinalized draft report on human Remains in Harvard's collections was leaked to the Harvard Crimson Student newspaper, which reported on it in June. According to this draft report, the remains of at least nineteen people who may have been enslaved, and the remains of almost seven thousand Indigenous people are still in Harvard's collections as of when we are recording this. The committee has not yet released its finished work on this, and committee members expressed frustration and disappointment with the leak of the draft version, saying that that version did not reflect week's worth of ongoing work into this. In May, the U s Department of the Interior released the first volume of an investigative report from the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, detailing the system of boarding schools that operated in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These schools, as we have discussed on the show before, intentionally separated Indigenous children from their families and communities as an act of cultural genocide. This investigation documented four hundred eight schools, as well as marked or unmarked burial sites at fifty three of the schools in the system. And this report is really just a first step documenting where the schools were and what the conditions were like there. One point that has made in the report is to quote from the Department of the Interiors released about it quote despite assertions to the contrary, The investigation found that the school system largely focused on manual labor and vocational skills that left American, Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian graduates with employment options often irrelevant to the industrial US economy, further disrupting tribal economies. If you listen to the earlier episodes where we've talked about this, like part of the whole set up of these was supposedly like giving people skills for their future employment, and that is confirmed in this not what was happening at all. Following the report, Secretary of the Interior deb Holland announced what she described as a year long essential listening tour called the Road to Healing. This will involve visiting indigenous communities across the country, including Alaska, Native and Hawaiian communities, to both connect communities, to support and to create a permanent collection of oral histories. There are also steps in place for a second volume of the report, and lastly, not exactly a report, but in a similar Vein to all of this, the Smithsonian has adopted a new policy on ethical collecting, which went into effect in April. This is connected to the Smithsonian's announced of returning items from its collection known as Benin Bronzes, which we've talked about on the show previously. This policy covers all of the museums that are part of the Smithsonian, but since those museums are pretty broad in terms of the time period and types of objects, they include the details of how it will be put into place will vary from one museum to another, like the standards for the National Air and Space Museum and the standards for the National Museum of Natural History. They would have some places where they would logically overlap, but also some places where they would need to address like very different ideas. Now we are moving on to repatriations, and we talked about quite a few repatriations back in April, but things have been a little quieter on that front this time around, so we're gonna end on this. The Museum of Rescued Art opened in Rome's Ancient Beths of Diocletian in June. This is a museum where Italy is going to display artwork that has been illegally looted or sold but then covered. So the plan is for this museum's exhibits to change every few months as the items are then sent back to the regions that they were originally taken from. So when Italian authorities recover something that's illegally made its way into a museum collection somewhere else in the world or to an auction house or a private collection, that object may spend some time on public display in this museum before then being returned to where it came from. A lot of these objects came from illegal digs, which a lot of the times to destroy important context to pinpoint where something came from. So authorities can't actually tell specifically where an object originated, they will return it to some place in that general area. The museum's first exhibition includes about one hundred of two hundred sixty objects that were brought back to Italy from the United States last December. This particular set of objects is thousands of years old, predating the room An era. They're terra cotta heads, ceramic jars, and atruscan funeral boxes in the current display. Yeah, I am sure we will have some more repatriations to talk about next installment of on Earth, because I know of one that was announced just this morning. See your next quarter, See your next quarter when we talk about things that happened in July. UM, so yeah, that is what has been unearthed this time or around. We will talk about various behind the scenes details of this in our Friday episode, but for now, I have some listener mail. Um. This is from Lori, and Lori wrote, I love, love, love your podcast. I have so many episodes left for my PhD, but maybe I'm up to a bachelor's I love that idea. Anyway, I loved hearing about the tour guide who pronounced chaos as cows. I had a professor of Russian literature who had the same alternate pronunciation, but I feel like it took the class as a whole a bit longer to decipher the intended word, mostly because of the piece of literature being discussed didn't seem to have any relation to either cows or chaos at the time the mid nineties, so no Google in the classroom. I wrote the word as a name and planned to look it up later. The professor must have appreciated all the glazed looks on our faces and wrote the word on the chalkboard to a collective sigh of recognition. It was great. I love this story, um. LORI also sent lots of animal pictures. One of these pictures is of a dog named Stevie, as in Stevie Nicks, who is hiding in the bathtub because Stevie dislikes rain and loathe thunderstorms, and I really wanted to hug Stevie. I know, I know some folks who have a dog who was terrified of thunderstorms, um, and one of their nicknames for their dog came from the fact that one day there was a thunderstorm and he was scared, so he pete in his bed, But then he didn't want to be in a wet bed, so he went over to his dry bed and then pete and that one also, and it was like, oh, buddy, I'm so sorry, so sorry for the thunderstorm fear. UM. So we have also cat pictures as part of these. Thank you so much Laurie for this story, UH and for this uh collection of animal pictures. Most of them are napping, which I really appreciated. Uh. I love to look at a napping animal. UM. 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