Behind the Scenes Minis: October Unearthed!

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This week we had our latest installment of Unearthed and which I encountered a new and unexpected research Ticcup tell me about it. There is a website called eurek Alert, and eurik Alert is a place where researchers, the institutions that they work for those kinds of people in places, post the press releases for their research. It is a very helpful place to find information for this because the most of the time you have something that was written by the researchers themselves or by somebody representing them. There's usually a link directly to the paper in quite sen to go get more information. It's all there together. And the way that I've been researching this starting in because I did not do any advanced work and that caused a problem. And I put all of these things together in an RSS reader and then periodically I go through them over the course of the quarter, and I bookmark all the stuff that I am going to refer back to you later to possibly talk about on Unearthed. And as the end, of September was approaching, I was doing this task and I kind of went, I haven't seen anything from eurek alert in a while. And it turned out that during this quarter of the year, eurik alert had put out a new update to its website with a totally new design, and they got rid of all of their RSS feeds, and so I had not seen anything from there and probably a month. So I have not figured out a better solution than just periodically going directly to eurek alert and looking at things there. It was not the most joyous part of this research experience. I was very disappointed at the loss of the eurek Alert rsspeed don't don't Yeah, yeah, I remember you messaging me kind of a DEMI frantic. There's no horriss on Eureka never fun the bookmark plug in that I've been using to keep all of the stuff organized. Also, I can exports an HTML file of all of the links, and that's what I used to keep up with what I've looked at and what I have not And for whatever reason, um it did not promptly email me the exported thing like it normally does, and I was like, oh no, I hope this isn't broken too, but it was not broken. It just took longer than torrible. That's like a harrowing moment, right of like everything is falling out from under me. Yeah, And that's by really with you know, episodes that I enjoy working on. That the fact that I have done this advanced legwork through the course of the quarter, like it makes the process of pulling it together a little mentally easier than some of the like let's research a whole original thing starting from scratch. Um. So I'm sure I will figure out a good EUREK alert solution right now, I'm not sure. Another thing that I meant to talk about last time and didn't do, but is related to those couple of papers that we talked about about, like the ethics of doing remote sensing and the language we used to talk about stuff. One of the things that has shifted and how I have talked about stuff and working on these episodes and how I've done the research um is especially when researchers have been working on something that is related to indigenous people, making sure that the researchers asked, like back in and fourteen and more earlier time of working on the show, like sometimes I would find a paper it was like, Oh, this is really interesting, this thing that they discovered about how this indigenous society operated. And now I'm like, did you ask though, like, did you have permission to be working with this nation's artifacts that you have input from them on your research at all? And it has become way more of a hard and fast rule of if I find a paper that is about an indigenous nation and it doesn't seem like they had that indigenous nation's cooperation and collaboration at all, like I'm really reluctant to get into that work. One of the papers that I found when preparing this particular installment of Unearthed was about one particular I don't want to I don't want to drag any researchers because I haven't talked directly to them. I did not seek comment from them, so I don't want to reveal a bunch of identifying stuff about their paper. But what they were working on was related to ancestral Pabloans, and it did not seem like they had talked to any pablo In people living currently. And most of their work was involving looking at early archaeological work that earlier generations of mostly white archaeologists have done, and I was like, I'm not confident that this was all handled ethically right, and like that has just been one of the ways that these episodes have evolved over the years. I have funnier things to discuss. Oh yeah, yes, the gut contents of Tollent Man. But part of me is like, one, we don't know. Maybe his fish was just seared on the outside. Oh maybe, and the inside was tender and perfect and not overcooked. But two, did that not like shake you in a way where you're like, please, dear universe, don't let someone investigate my stomach contents and publish about it after I am deceased. Well, now that you mention it, they're gonna be like, she drank like two gallons of coffee a day and clearly had a very strange and wonky diet, and then everyone will be like, oh, you ate like a child, and I'll be like I did, but I'll be dead, so I can't say that I'm more In this particular case, was just sad at the idea that maybe Tall and Man's last meal had been a sad, slightly burned porridge, because that doesn't sound very appetizing. But now I'm like, yeah, future archaeologists might be like, there's a lot of cheese in here, right, They'll be like, girl, I don't know what you're eating. I worry. These are the things that worry me. I have another thing that um is perhaps strange, but it is related to that slab that was used for culinary purposes that was a tombstone, really a gravestone. Yeah. Yes, this is a little bit of a walk elsewhere, but it's such a good story and it's keeping alive the memory of someone who is gone that I thought was hilarious, So I'm gonna try it. Did you I think you watched the show Angel when it was on h Do you remember the character of Louren, who was like the demon Lounge singer Andy Hallett, the actor who played that role was hilarious and we um. I don't know if you went to the talk that he gave like a panel a Dragon Con one year, where he talked about I don't remember how it even came up, but it delighted me so that I wrote it all down so I would always remember it then, not knowing that he would not be with us very long. But he talked about his teenage job, which was working in his aunt's store, which was called Cones and Stones, which sold ice cream and gravestones, and I was like, wow, this is that his aunt and it was so funny and he was so hilarious and charming when he told it that. I just wanted to mention it because it was a great, very funny memory. And he unfortunately died I think when he was thirty three. I think he was very young. Heart condition like, it was very sudden and troubling. It was very sudden, and he was very young. He was very young, and it stunk. But I thought that would be a fun way to remember what a funny and incredibly talented person he was, because he was also a spectacular singer. But yeah, the marble gravestone being used to make fudge, I was like, is this Cones and Stones too well? And it made me think about my grandmother making mints using a slab of marble and having this moment where I was like, was my grandma Jenny's I was my grandma Jenny's marble slab a gray of stone? Pretty sure it was not? I mean, that would delight me to no end to discover but that's because I'm you know, that is exactly the kind of thing that would delight me. But sure, sure, um. I did try to look up whether Cones and Stones was legit or anything that he had concocted for our entertainment. I didn't find anything, but it would have been long enough back that it might. It would be hard without visiting that town and going through their their records, which I have no real interest in doing just for the sake of a comedy bit. So thanks so much everybody for joining us for this week's Unearthed episodes. We will be back tomorrow with a Saturday classic and then Monday with something else brand new and drop us a note if you like history podcast at i heart radio dot com. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H