Behind the Scenes Minis: Late 2020 Wrap Up

Published Jan 15, 2021, 2:30 PM

Tracy and Holly talk about the travel thoughts that the show's recent Unearthed! episode brings up. Talk also turns to the various biases that people have had when looking at history, and how that can obscure the ways we interpret information.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Uh. And this week we had our year in Unearthed. In coming out the second week of so much stuff, so much stuff, we we needed a little break, so we took a little break. Um. And It's not totally uncommon for me to like start work on an episode and then say, take a vacation or have a couple of days out or whatever, and come back to it later on. But this was I think the lengthy ist break of such such circumstances that I have had, and it made it kind of weird because when I actually got back to my desk and started going back through stuff, I was like, I don't remember so much of this at all. Not what I expected. Plus us uh, then having three weeks of news to go through to see if anything else happened, which there were definitely interesting things that happened. Yes, that whole Pompeiian thing, the Pompeii thing. People were like tweeting at us about. Listen, I'm excited about a food stall for sure. Yeah. Uh. It kind of it made me miss various travels where I have you know, gone to food drucks or cookie restaurants or anything like that. Yeah, I am. I am definitely missing travels, which I know is like the most privileged place to sit to be like, oh I wish I could travel again. There are bigger issues that people are grappling with. I know, um, but I really do love the idea, my my whole thing. We're still it's been postponed a couple of times. We'll see when it happens, but we are still planning to do a history stuff you missed an history class trip to Italy when the pandemic is over and it's safe. And I keep being like, I gotta make a side trip to Pompeii. I wanted to do it already, but now I'm like, I gotta see this food stand if I can. Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure. I mean this this all folds into the question of, um, when that trip might ever happen. Uh. I feel like when I was looking at stuff, like a lot of that stuff is currently closed because of the pandemic. Um. It continues to be interesting to me which things, uh stay stay closed in which things are open, and how places are trying to mitigate risk. Um. The next thing that we are going to record in this recording session involves a park, and when I was just looking at a map of it, um, I was also seeing the information about which parts of the park are closed, which, uh, yeah, that's the whole thing. I've been spending a lot of my time um in very expansive parks uh that are still open to the public because being outdoors is generally a little less risky. Um. But the Massachusetts I can't remember which department it is that's in charge of all of that tweets out like the parking lot at this place is closed for the next three hours because the park is at its like maximum safe capacity. It's just just the whole thing. None of that's related to Unearthed there, just related to Our're still having a pandemic, right, We're still trying to figure out when we can do history things and visit places that come up unearthed. Yeah, and many of them, like you said, are closed, So it's related ish Yeah. Plus a tiny sneak peak of something that's coming next week on the show. Yeah, I really really loved the section that you include. Did hear about bias and assumption? When analyzing bodies, I should say, because it is one of those things that people UH often think about certain things that have been related as fact as settled history. But we can't always do that because you have to remember that specific lenses were being applied, and we have to you know, kind of backwards engineer, like did that lens end up possibly misidentifying something? Yeah? Well, and we also we have UM cultures from more recent history than that section was about that do generally roughly speaking, have like a gender dichotomy. Where As a general rule, it is more of the men men's responsibility to hunt and more the women's responsibility to gather. But when you go farther and farther back in in prehistory and like there's no there's not a living culture to talk to people about. We don't really have any kind of written records UM, there becomes a point where it's like we're just sort of assuming that the way it works now is also the way that it worked then, which is not necessarily true. And it is one of the really interesting things that they talked about on the podcast that I mentioned in that, which is the Men series from the podcast Scene on Radio UM. Because they talked to anthropologists and other experts about the evolution of that whole thing and how like how and when the idea evolved that there that these jobs were separated by gender. There was also one point, like we had a similar conversation on the show at one point that we got some you know, kind of frustrated emails from people about and then shortly thereafter there was an archaeologist who sort of tweeted out this series of like, these are the things we really have to think about when we're doing this kind of work. And I was like, well, I feel incredibly vendicated because these are the same points that I was trying to make. I am not an archaeologist, so I'm glad to like continue to hear people having these conversations and uh, you know, trying to make it clear that there's stuff that like your upbringing in your culture and your perspective affects all of these things, regardless of you know, how much you want to try to believe that there's an impartiality to it. Right. I Also my thing too is that and I tend to do it as well, right because we're trying to parse difficult subject matter just in terms of like understanding how other things worked, and sometimes the strokes get so broad that we forget that almost every I mean, I can't think of a single example of a society or a culture that we know of that doesn't have outliers, right right right, there's all as people. Even if you say, well, most women in this culture do this, there's always an exception. Yeah, and most men in this culture do this, but there's always some exception, and so noting as much as we study history that there seems to be an exception everywhere to something, Uh, I start to think about, like how much of this is exceptions and just like a more of a proportion analysis that we haven't really taken into account because we're oversimplifying when we are like, no men in this culture did it, well maybe maybe even sixty, but there could have been others. So yeah, well, and the Grave Goods conversation is so like if we just think about people living today, like as a totally made up example of a person might say like, I really want to be buried with my grandmother's ring because I loved my grandmother so much and it's gonna like it makes me feel comforted to think that I will have her with me when I go to my final rest. Uh. And then you know, three d years later, somebody digs up that grave and says, this ring must have been a high mark of status, was really valuable. Um. You know, it's like there's there's a we were learning things all the time and and and reevaluating how we've drawn conclusions all the time, and that's like an important and necessary part of the study of history and archaeology and anthropology and everything everything all fields, all fields, evolving all the time. They don't just stop. I also had a funny random thought while we were recording that I didn't mention because it would have taken us woefully off track about the beads that were so fine that they had to be sifted with mosquito net. Yeah, and how they were found up near what would have been that that person's shoulder. And in my head, because I am a crafty person who has done a lot of beating in my time, I imagined this person that was working with taty tiny beads and like they dropped their thing and they were they just died of anger at the moment, like, oh Dan it beads everywhere we've opened beads all over. The beads all over seems like a good stopping point. Death by bead frustration. Yeah yeah, oh man, somehow it reminded me of I was making myself some hot cocoa while I was on a break, and it's like a particular hot coco that I really like. That it is is a mix um and I don't remember what I did, but I did something that just like flung a table spoon of the powder all over and the sound I made was so dismayed that from the other room I heard, are you all right anyway? Welcome to the new year of recording and year. I know this is now a couple of years or a couple of year, a couple of weeks into the new year as this episode comes out, but we're recording it literally right after. So I hope everyone who had has some kind of a break over the holiday time had as good of a break as possible. Uh Yeah, If you want to write to us, we're a history podcast that I heart radio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast and the I Heart Radio app and anywhere else to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in history class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Join Holly and Tracy as they bring you the greatest and strangest Stuff You Missed In History Class  
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,481 clip(s)