Unearthed! in Autumn 2025, Part 2

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

00:00:11
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

00:00:14
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

00:00:16
Speaker 2: It is time for part two of our latest installment of Unearthed. This one has some animals and some swords, and some art, and some shoes and so many shipwrecks. It is another just bumper crop of shipwrecks. And to kick things off as usual, we're starting with the fines that I liked but didn't have a category four, which I call the potpoury uh.

00:00:42
Speaker 1: So here we go. Archaeologists in Turkia have found an iron scale and a set of weights that are about sixteen hundred years old. The scale is a balance style scale, so it has hooks on one side for the weights and hooks on the other side to hold a pan to contain the items to be weighed. The weights are also made of iron, and they're in the shape of five Greek letters. The area where the weights were found is full of shops that date back to the Hellenistic period, and most items sold there would have been sold by weight.

00:01:14
Speaker 2: Yeah. According to the article that I read about this, things were sold by weight that you might not expect to be sold by weight, like M for a kittens, So these weights were in multiples of a standard unit of weight, that being the letra. They ranged from half a letra up to five letras. Other scales have been found in the area that are also labeled with their weights using some kind of Greek letters, so it's possible that these letters represented some kind of mnemonic system to remember which weight was which if they know what it stands for. I did not find what they stand for. This is the first time that a scale has been found in the area that still had what appears to be a complete set of weights.

00:02:02
Speaker 1: Next, a knife made from the tibia of a cave lion has been found in Scladina Cave in Belgium. It's roughly one hundred and thirty thousand years old and it was probably used by Neanderthals. Although it does not have parts that fold open and shut, it is being described as a Swiss army knife. Since it's one utensil that's believed to have had multiple distinct functions, I wonder why they didn't just call it a multitool. It shows evidence of being reshaped and repurposed after being broken, and it's also the earliest known multifunctional tool to be made from a cave lion bone.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: I think why not call it a multitool traces back to some of what we talked about in Part one of like trying to write things in a way that's the most accessible to a general audience. I imagine a multi toool is also having things that fold in it out you do.

00:02:56
Speaker 1: That's just me. Yeah, Oh, I think of the flat like sometimes they come in the shape of like a credit card and they have all of the edges that you need to do all the stuff, or sometimes like they're unique ones that are like pop culturey and they're shaped like an X wing or what. Sure.

00:03:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'm thinking that because I always when I used to have a leatherman in my Oh yeah, they marketed as multitools. Yeah, it was markets. It's a multitude and multitool. I can't say words anyway. Back to the fines next, a team of researchers led by the Gunaikrini land in Waters Aboriginal Corporation has documented impressions from fingers that were left in the walls and ceilings of caves in the Mountains of Australia. The Gunaikrini elders refer to this cave as Warri Brook. The cave is made of limestone and it's been shaped and weathered by water over millions of years, and its surfaces have a really malleable, spongy texture. It's deeper parts do not receive any natural light, and it is also home to bacteria that produce luminescent crystals. So if somebody brings in a light source like a fire or a torch or something like that, these crystals sparkle and glitter.

00:04:16
Speaker 1: That sounds dreamy. Archaeologists haven't found evidence of fires built on the floor of this cave, but they have found fragments of charcoal and ash that suggest people navigating their way through with firesticks. The finger impressions on the walls likely would have been made as people walked. There are multiple sets of grooves, including sets that seem to have been made by a small child and sets that, based on their size and how high up they are, were probably made by adults.

00:04:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, they look sort of like if you were sitting at the beach and kind of dragging your fingers through the sand, sort of like that there are nine hundred and fifty sets of finger grooves and the cave, and they are only in the areas of the cave where the walls glitter because of these luminescent crystals. Based on this research and Gunnai Kernai accounts recorded by ethnographer Alfred Howitt in the nineteenth century, as well as conversations with Gurnai Kurnai knowledge keepers today, this is connected to powerful healers within their community. The cave's crystals were part of healing rituals, and knowledge of those rituals was passed down from parent to child. There's no evidence of like daily life going on at the cave, so this was probably a place that had a ceremonial use by healers rather than being a place that people lived in or visited day to day. So these finger grooves that are left in the surface of the cave are a record both of a physical act of leaving marks in the cave and also this spiritual and cultural knowledge that stretches back for centuries. And now we're going to move on to a couple of things about animals. According to research published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, Ancient Romans may have used fossils of extinct arthropods as adornments. The trilobite fossil in question dates back to the Paleozoic era, but it was found in an archaeological site dating back to between the first and third century CE. It has clear signs of having been modified to be worn as something like a pendant or a bracelet. This is only the eleventh trilobite ever found in an archaeological context, and the first known to have been intentionally collected and used during Roman times. And next, research published in the journal Ecology in September has looked at bearded vultures as accumulators of historical remains. This was based on bearded vulture nests in southern Spain that were analyzed between twenty eight and twenty four, and since these vultures are cliff nesting, doing this research required people to repel down the cliffs to see what was in these nests. This vulture species is extinct in Spain today, so the nests were not actively being used and had not been for probably roughly a century. Researchers found lots of stuff that you would expect a bird to use to build a nest, including pieces of cloth and string, and also lots of stuff that you would expect to be in a bird nest, like eggshells and bone and other debris from the animals that the birds eat.

00:07:38
Speaker 1: They also found two hundred and twenty six anthropogenic remains. Those are remains related to human activity, many of which were also probably part of the nest building process. This included pieces of baskets and leather, including pieces of sheep leather decorated with ochre. There was also a sandal made of grasses and twigs, but it's probably about six hundred and fifty years old, along with multiple other similar pieces of footwear that have not yet been dated.

00:08:07
Speaker 2: Researchers also found an as yet undated crossbow bolt, and it's not really clear whether the vultures picked that up somewhere like it was a stick and used it to build the nest, or whether it was in an animal that they brought to the nest to scavenge on, like someone else shot it and then the vultures were like, this is ours, and now we've got.

00:08:30
Speaker 1: A couple of swords up next. First, a metal detectorist in Gloucestershire found two Roman cavalry swords in a field. The swords had been damaged by farming equipment, and it's likely that they would have been destroyed within the next few years if no one had found them before then. This find led to a larger archaeological excavation, which has unearthed signs of an entire Roman villa built on what had previously been an Iron Age settlement. Other discoveries at the site include Roman roof tiles and other building materials, as well as the remains of a person who died as long as three thousand years ago and was buried wearing an iron band around their upper arm.

00:09:11
Speaker 2: And In other sword news, a fisherman was walking along the banks of the Vistula River in Warsaw, Poland and spotted something rusty sticking out of the bank. This turned out to be an almost entirely intact medieval sword, missing only the tip. The process of finding and retrieving this sword sounds like something out of a comedy. Fresh from the bank, it had leeches, snails, and freshwater shrimp on it. The man who found it recognized that it could be important and hid it so that he could go call a metal detectorist friend to ask for advice. The friend told him that since the sword had been in the river, it should be kept wet, which the fishermen did by wrapping the sword in wet t shirts and then leaving it in his car overnight before taking it to the Warsaw Conservator Monuments in the morning. We are absolutely not advising people to do this with random archaeological finds. This is just how it played out in this particular case. The sword is now in the Metal Conservation Workshop of the State Archaeological Museum for cleaning in conservation.

00:10:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think.

00:10:18
Speaker 2: Taking it there right away, like taking it to a conservator immediately. I don't think that was an option. They need to do something with it overnight, but the fact that it was wrapped in wet t shirts cracked me up. We are going to take a quick sponsor break and then move on to some art. Okay, time for art. First pieces found at two different charity thrift shops in the UK have turned out to be valuable pieces of Chinese porcelain. The first was found at a charity shop in Dorset and it is a blue ou plate depicting dragons that are chasing pearls. Based on some identifying marks that dates back to between eighteen twenty one and eighteen fifty. The other was found in Surrey. It is a blue and white bottle or maybe a vase. It is similarly decorated with dragons, this time clouds rather than pearls, and it also dates back to sometime in the nineteenth century. Both of these were recognized as potentially valuable and they were both taken to the same auction house, which is Willy and Wallace and that plans to auction them off in November.

00:11:35
Speaker 1: Researchers working in the Arabian Desert have concluded monumental rock engravings there served a practical purpose, using detailed, life sized depictions of animals like camels, gazelles and aurex to mark locations of seasonal water sources and access routes to get to them. These engravings were made roughly twelve thousand years ago and they're highly weathered and eroded, so many of them are barely perceptible today. Researchers also found evidence of other human activity at the site, including projectile points and beads made from stone and shells.

00:12:12
Speaker 2: And lastly, archaeologists have found a mural that is between three thousand and four thousand years old in Peru. This is a three dimensional mural depicting fish and plants that are painted blue, yellow, and black, and it's also double sided, so designs are visible on both sides of the mural. It's also very large, measuring about sixteen feet wide and six and a half feet tall. There is speculation that this mural had some kind of ritual purpose and that it might have marked a sacred space that could have been used for observances and practices that were related to water or fertility.

00:12:52
Speaker 1: We really didn't have a whole lot of art finds to talk about this time, so now we're going to move on to some clothing. Specifically one of the best articles of clothing shoes, and that means those vulture nests that we talked about a little while ago actually could have gone here as well. The Vendalanda Trust has been excavating Magna Roman Fort and during that five year project they've unearthed thirty two shoes, and some of those shoes are unexpectedly large. One of the first big shoes to be unearthed was the equivalent to about a thirteen or fourteen men's shoe in UK sizes that correlates to about a fourteen or fifteen in the US and a forty eight or forty nine in the EU. More big shoes followed, with a total so far of eight shoes that measure thirty centimeters or more and one shoe that measures thirty two point six centimeters and is the largest shoe the Trust has found. The vast majority of shoes found at Vindalanda are not nearly this big.

00:13:53
Speaker 2: There are, of course, unanswered questions about these shoes, like were they worn by soldiers whose feet were comparatively a lot bigger, meaning they also probably would have been a lot taller than most of the people in the area. Or were these shoes that were meant to be worn with a lot of socks or padding in the wintertime to try to stay warm. Or were they shoes that were worn while people were recovering from injuries and their feet were swollen or bandaged. We don't really know.

00:14:25
Speaker 1: Maybe one day next. Archaeologists in Oslo have found more than two hundred leather shoes dating back to the Middle Ages. These shoes are made from handstitched leather, and while some of them are very simple and practical, others are intricately decorated. They include shoes for adults and children, as well as some boots.

00:14:46
Speaker 2: When I first started reading about all these shoes, I thought, did a shoemaker live here? Like was this a shoe shop? But these are shoes that were very worn. Some of them have holes or they've been repeatedly patched and repaired. These shoes are really scattered across a whole area that's being excavated in advance of construction of a new school. And it's possible that this large deposit of shoes and other everyday items came from a rubbish heap whose contents were carried into the area during flooding. Archaeologists have also found a lot of other goods in the area, like bags and scabbards. Rubbish heaps can be an amazing source of archaeological knowledge. The idea that this is like the remnants of a rubbish heap that got washed away in floodwaters is very interesting to me.

00:15:35
Speaker 1: And the last one is just sort of shoe adjacent. Archaeologists in Germany have found a workshop that was dedicated to producing the iron nails that were used to make shoes for the Roman military. These hob nails were used in the soles of the shoes to provide traction and durability. Since the nails would fall off through normal wear and tear, the nails were used to both make new shoes and to repair old ones. This find included a cash of more than one hundred nails in new condition, suggesting that they had been freshly made. There.

00:16:09
Speaker 2: Moving on, we have some historically relevant exhumations this time around. First, the governing council of Saint Dunstan's Church in Canterbury, England, has announced a proposal to exhume the skull of Sir Thomas Moore, who was beheaded in fifteen thirty five after being accused of treason for refusing to accept King Henry the Eighth as head of the Church of England. The Catholic Church used Moore as a martyr, and he was venerated as a saint in nineteen thirty five. After Moore's execution, his body was buried in an unmarked grave in a chapel at the Tower of London, but his head was boiled and tarred and placed on a spike on London Bridge as a warning to others. Moore's daughter later convinced a guard to release the skull to her, and it was eventually entombed in the family vault at Saint Dunstan's. The church has said that it would like to conserve and preserve the skull ahead of the five hundredth anniversary of mors beheading, which is in twenty thirty five, and we don't know yet for sure whether this will happen. There's an ecclesiastical court that has to give its permission before an exhumation can go ahead, so we might have an update on this at some point in the future. Last time, we talked about cooperation between Ukraine and Poland to allow the exhumation and relocation of Polish victims of the nineteen forty five Volan massacre, which was perpetrated by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army while the area was occupied by Nazi Germany. In July, Poland declared July eleventh to be a national Day of Remembrance for victims of the massacre, and during an address on that day, Polish President elect Carol Nuroki urged Ukrainian President Voladimir Zilenzai to allow these exhumations to continue and ask Ukraine to authorize exhumations at additional sites. Naraki has since taken office as President of Poland, and a number of commentators have remarked that his background as a historian plays a part on how he will lead Poland's interactions with Ukraine. And lastly, we have two exhumations that are related to attempts to solve two different cold cases. Authorities in Oregon have exhumed the remains of someone known as Oak Grove Jane Doe, whose dismembered body was found in the Willamette River south of Portland over a period of months in nineteen forty six. Her remains disappeared from law enforcement custody in the nineteen fifties, and the case was eventually closed without identifying.

00:18:49
Speaker 1: Her or her murderer.

00:18:52
Speaker 2: The case was reopened in two thousand and four, but officials didn't have much to go on until they learned that she may have been buried at Oregon City's Mountain View Cemetery. In addition to the unsolved crime, this is Oregon's oldest unidentified person case. This exhumation just happened in late September, so the results of it are still to come. And the other was another homicide victim whose body was found near railroad tracks outside Page, North Dakota, in October of nineteen seventy. Authorities believed that he had been assaulted and robbed, and then had either been thrown from or fallen from the train, and had been dead for about six weeks when his body was found. No suspect was ever named in the killing, and the body was buried at Saint James Cemetery with a marker that simply said unknown male. A lot of these types of cases in recent years have involved DNA research and investigative genetic genealogy, but in this case, the skeletal remains included a denture plate that read take w H along with the number. Investigators were able to trace that to a World War II enlistment record for a William Howard Tait, and they ultimately declared this identity to be conclusively confirmed. Authorities announced that they would be working with Cass County Veteran Services to have a new headstone made with the man's real name. It is not clear from news reporting whether he has living next of kin. Yeah, that was my first thought, right, what does his family think?

00:20:32
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:20:33
Speaker 2: And I was not able to figure out for sure. Weather they know or whether he does or does not. We will take one more sponsor break, and then we will have so many shipwrecks. Okay, we have so many shipwrecks. It's pretty much the whole rest of the episode. First conservation has been completed on a canoe that was unearthed in Florida during Hurricane Ian in twenty twenty two. I thought this was a canoe that we had talked about in a twenty twenty two installment of Unearthed, but it looks like not. This canoe had probably been in a riverbed before being dislodged by the hurricane, and it wound up in somebody's yard.

00:21:23
Speaker 1: Ancient canoes are fairly frequent fines in Florida. Canoes and log boats were a primary means of transport going back to prehistory. There are more than four hundred and fifty of them that have been preserved by the Florida Division of Historical Resources. But this one is unusual because it's made of mahogany. Some types of mahogany do grow in southern Florida, but this is the first mahogany canoe to be found there. It also maybe the first canoe found in Florida to originate from somewhere else, possibly the Caribbean. The canoe has not been conclusively dated yet, but it looks like it was worked with iron tools, meaning it may have been crafted by the Spanish sometime in the sixteenth century.

00:22:08
Speaker 2: Next, researchers from the Center for Historic Shipwreck Preservation say that a shipwreck they've been studying off the coast of Madagascar dates back to the Golden Age of piracy. It's believed to be the Nasa Sonora Dicabo or Our Lady of the Cape, which is a Portuguese ship that was attacked by pirate Olivier Levasseur in seventeen twenty one. Levasseur, also called the Buzzard, captured the ship near the island of La Reugnon and then took it toward Madagascar, where the pirates unloaded a lot of what was aboard before scuttling the ship.

00:22:45
Speaker 1: There was still a lot of cargo though. When the Nasa Sonara de Cabo sank, it was traveling from India and carrying goods that had been made there, as well as gold ingots, pearls, and other valuable objects. Thousands of objens have been brought up from the wreck and include religious objects that are believed to have been made in Goa, which was a Portuguese colony on the western coast of India. There are also coins with Arabic writing and pieces of porcelain. Underwater.

00:23:14
Speaker 2: Archaeologists in Wisconsin were looking for the wreck of a steamer called the Berlin City, which sank in eighteen seventy, and they were hoping to resurvey another wreck that had been mapped back in twenty sixteen. Unlike a lot of the Wisconsin shipwrecks we have talked about on the show, this project did not take place in the Great Lakes. It was in the Fox River near Oshkosh.

00:23:37
Speaker 1: Instead, they found something different, what they believed to be the wreck of the lw Ukraine, which caught fire, burned to the water level, and sank in eighteen eighty. This was a side wheel steamer that had carried cargo. In addition to the physical resemblance between the wreckage and historical documents about the lw Ukraine, the wreck is directly opposite to where historic accounts described the ship sinking.

00:24:03
Speaker 2: So while that was not in the Great Lakes, we do also have a Lake Michigan shipwreck to talk about the FJ King, which searchers had been looking for for so long that people had started calling it a ghost ship. The FJ King was a three masted cargo schooner that was carrying or to Chicago when it sank in a gale in eighteen eighty six. The crew tried to pump water out of the struggling ship for several hours until the order was given for them to evacuate. The crew did evacuate, they survived, and then they were picked up by another schooner. Like a lot of our sank in a storm in the dark shipwreck stories. Efforts to find the Fjking were hampered by unclear descriptions and contradictory information about exactly where the sinking happened. The captain, William Griffin reported that they were about five miles off shore, while a lighthouse keeper later reported seeing the masts extending above the water much closer to land. It was finally found through side scan sonar, just a couple of hours into an effort that sounds like it was undertaken without much hope of success. Yeah, quotes from people that were on it were sort of like, yeah, we didn't think we'd find anything, but we thought why not, and then two hours later, there it is.

00:25:20
Speaker 1: Let's give it a whirl. Hey uh.

00:25:23
Speaker 2: This summer was the final season of a five year international project at the site of the Antikytheris shipwreck in Greece. We have an episode of the show about the Antikythera device, which is an analog computer dating back to about the first century BCE, and other finds from the wreck have come up in prior installments of Unearthed. This summer's work at the wreck included excavation of a part of the ship's hull for the first time. This was carried out with specially designed machinery and a support structure. Bringing up that piece of the hull has helped to confirm the way the researchers believed this ship was originally built, which was by building the exterior first, followed by the interior structures. Other finds in this last season of the project include a clay mortar that was probably used for preparing food or medicines for the crew, as well as part of a statue and just an assortment of m fora moving on. Last year, a schoolboy in Scotland found the wreckage of a ship on the island of Sanday, Orkney after a storm, and that wreck has now been identified as a five hundred ton whaling ship known as the Earl of Chatham, which was wrecked in March of seventeen eighty eight. The Earl of Chatham had previously operated as the Royal Navy ship HMS Hind during the American Revolutionary War before being decommissioned and sold. This conclusion came from examination of the tree rings and the timbers used to build a ship, which suggested that they had been cut down in southern or southwestern England in the mid eighteenth century. This ship was en route from the River Thames to the Arctic on a whaling voyage when it was wrecked. This island is basically on the way. All of the crew survived the wrecking. Underwater archaeologists working near the Solomon Islands have found the wreck of a Japanese destroyer from World War II called the Terrazuki. The wreckage was first spotted using a remotely operated vehicle, and at first they didn't know what it was, so two other remote vehicles were deployed from the Ocean Exploration Trusts Nautilus to get a better look. They captured images of the ship, including its upward pointing gun turrets. The Terazuki was built specifically for anti aircraft work. American torpedoes sank the Tarazuki on December twelfth, nineteen forty two, and although most of the crew were successfully evacuated, nine people died when it sank. This expedition went well beyond the Terrazuki, surveying thirteen vessels that sank in the area during the Guadalcanal Campaign. The Tarazuki was one of four wrecks that were photographed for the first time during this work, another of them being the bow of the USS New Orleans. Other ships included the USS Vincennes, the USS Astoria, the USS Quincy, the USS Northampton, the USS Laffey, the USS de Haven, the USS Preston, the HMAS Camera, the USS Walkie, and another Japanese destroyer called the Yudachi. A sunken landing barge was surveyed as well. This sounds like a lot. So many ships went down in this area during World War Two that it's known as Iron Bottom Sound, and research has been going on there for decades. It was sort of a continuing research bringing in new and more advanced equipment than has been used before.

00:28:56
Speaker 1: Underwater archaeologists are working off the coast of Kent in England to study the wreck of the HMS Northumberland, which was built in sixteen seventy nine at a time when past podcast subject Samuel Peeps was reforming and expanding the English Navy. It later sank in a massive weather disaster known as the Great Storm of seventeen oh three. This ship has been buried in the sand for centuries and its hull is very well preserved, so efforts are underway to thoroughly survey and study it before it is damaged or reburied. We will very likely have fines from this work at some point in the future.

00:29:34
Speaker 2: Archaeologists and students from East Carolina University's Maritime Studies program have been working at Brunswick Town Fort Anderson State Historic Site and have found waterfront features dating back to colonial times, as well as four different shipwrecks. One is believed to be La Fortuna, which was a Spanish privateer that was destroyed near the end of King George's War in September of seventeen forty eight eight. This id still needs to be confirmed, but the wreckage is not far from where a diver found a cannon believed to be from La Fortuna back in the nineteen eighties. All of these finds are at risk due to erosion from nearby dredging operations, sea level rise, and larger and more frequent storms due to climate change. And lastly, artifacts have been recovered from the wreckage of the HMHS Britannic for the first time. The Britannic was, of course a sister ship to the RMS Titanic and was serving as a hospital ship during World War One when it struck a mine and sank in the aeg and c In nineteen sixteen, an eleven member dive team brought up a number of objects, including the ship's bell and a navigation light. These objects are undergoing conservation in Athens, Greece. Since it's October, I looked for something creepy or ghostly is a final thing for this episode. Sometimes we look out on you have like a whole collection of ghosts or witch bottles or something seasonally fun. Didn't really have that this time, so I went with something more ghost adjacent. Archaeologists that ealing Dunin Castle in Scotland have found a hair styling tool called a gravoire, dating back to the thirteenth century. This is made from red deer antler and it shaped to a point at one end and carved with the likeness of a hooded figure holding a book.

00:31:29
Speaker 1: On the other end.

00:31:30
Speaker 2: It's not clear who this depicts, but it could be Celtic missionary Saint Donnan. This tool was used to part the hair and to help in creating elaborate hairstyles. Elin Dunin Castle is on a tiny island where three locks come together, and it's reported to be haunted. One of the reported ghosts is of a Spanish soldier who was stationed at the castle during the Jacobite Rising of seventeen nineteen, and he died when English forces tacked the castle. This ghost is nicknamed Carlos and he's often reported in the gift shop carrying his head. Another is known as Lady Mary, and she is described as haunting the bedrooms. Tried to get more information about who Lady Mary is and I was even like googling Mary along with the names of people who have lived in this castle. I don't know, but Lady Mary haunts the bedroom apparently. That is the end of Part two. Of our unearthed. I'm sure we'll talk about things related to it on Friday, and in the meantime, I do have listener mail. The listener mail is from Julia. Julia said, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I was driving home late one night and listening to the Anna Maria von Sherman Star of U Treckt episode and it was mentioned a few times that her letters were shared and published. In my experience of writing letters as a child pre Internet, once the letter was in the envelope, you never saw it again. Was it standard to make copies of letters before you sent them and or of the letters you received? Can you please explain how personal correspondence became public documentation. My poor brain can't comprehend how this happened in an age before carbon paper, photocopiers, or sent folders attached as my pet tax of our cat and Ayah. She technically belongs to my daughter, but has picked me as her favorite person. She loves to sleep in her beanbag and loudly ask retreats every morning as soon as I wake up, sometimes even before I'm awake. Thanks for bringing so much history information into our lives in such an interesting way, Julia. Thank you so much, Julia for this email. So yes, people did, a lot of people kept some kind of copy of their correspondence, and in the age of handwritten letters, a lot of times people would like write out their draft letter and kind of perfect what they wanted to say, and so that copy would have like crossouts or rewritten bits or little notations of things to add, and then they would write out the neat copy to actually be sent, and a lot of people kept that note copy for their own records, and it might not be completely identical to the final copy that was sent out, but it was pretty close. People who wrote a lot for business often had a copying clerk whose job was to copy the correspondence, and like they sort of would keep the copy of all of the outgoing mail for the business that they.

00:34:39
Speaker 1: Were working for.

00:34:41
Speaker 2: Eventually, different methods were made to create what was basically a carbon copy using some kind of carbon paper. There were various innovations around this, some of them fairly like earlier than a person might think. Unfortunately, when I was thinking about this, I did not go the up specific dates. But there were various ways like inks that could be used that you lay a piece of paper down and it lifted up. A copy sort of might not be a very great copy, but eventually sheets of carbon paper that could go between the pages that you could keep a copy of, or like a book that had carbon paper in it. That was sort of its purpose was to capture your copy of your outgoing mail. Some people who were historically notable the recipients of their mail would also keep it because they knew that it might be valuable one day, and so when later on it became there was a want or need to publish somebody's letters, there would be an effort to like bring these copies together. Some of the collections of letters that we have today are that have sort of come from like multiple different people donating the letters that they have come into possession of to the same academic institution or library or archive or something like that, and then an editor goes through and like pairs up all of the different ones. So there were lots of different ways that a person could be keeping a copy of their correspondence. Before there was just a scent item folder in your email that kept all of it. I sent more, you know, handwritten letters and things when I was a younger person, before the development of email. That was something I never personally did either, and I don't if I had been living in you know, the nineteenth or eighteenth or seventeenth century, I might have been raised differently to keep a copy of all of my stuff. So, yeah, there were lots of ways. Not necessarily everyone did this, but there were a lot of different ways that people kept a copy of their outgoing correspondence. We have more black cat pictures. I did not, on purpose pick two different lists. Her mails with black cats lies in deception. Tracy has a black cat agenda I love, which I suppose much. Yes, you have talked about how my black cats are the sweetest things. One of them has figured out how to press a button. After not caring about buttons for a very long time, we gave them a button that says treat ONYX loves the treat button. What treat has come to actually mean because we cannot give her nearly as many treats as she demands. She really just wants to chase a piece of her regular kibble that has been thrown across the room and pounce on it and eat it.

00:37:44
Speaker 1: My black cat is just a barfly. Yeah, she just cries outside the door to our little home. Bar and until somebody lets her in there and goes and sits in there and pets her. Yeah, that's her favorite room in the house.

00:37:58
Speaker 2: For a good couple of years after getting these cats, you and I were able to record podcasts without really special measures needing to be taken to contain them. But at some point Onyx decided she really hated closed doors that have people on the other side of them, and so she would sit outside of the door to this office and she would reach up and pound on the doorknob with her paw and yell so loud. Anyway, I love these pictures that Julia sent, and I love all kitty cats. They're all great. They mind bring me so much joy. Hope everyone's cats are bringing them joy. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, where at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd 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.