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 Frying. It's time for our latest installment of Unearthed. If you're new to the show, this is when, four times a year now we look at things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the last three months. Even though this episode is coming out at the start of November, the period of time that it is covering is July, August September. We're surprisingly several episodes ahead at this point, which does not happened that often on my first show. So today's episode, we're going to talk about some updates that have happened over the last few months, some old ist things, books and letters. We have a late entry into our Halloween stuff because this was originally going to come out in October, but as planned when we're recording, it's actually going to be November, and then in our second part of this two party will have some other things, including repatriations and artwork. We've got some edible and potable food and beverage stuff, which is always a favorite of mine. A few other things also here, is my take on late Halloween entries. Every day is Halloween to be. Someone asked me recently when Halloween season starts for me, and I was like November one, because it never ends. So we are as Tracy said. Starting with some updates, including updates to previous installments of Unearthed. Last time on Unearthed, we talked about a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio that was going up for auction. This was one of only about two d twenty known copies of the First Folio that have survived until today. Most of those are in museums, so they don't come up for auction very often. That auction took place in July at Sotheby's in New York City and that First Folio sold for almost two point five million dollars. We have also had several updates on Unearthed about work at Colonial Williamsburg's First Baptist Church, which was one of the earliest black church congregations in the United States. Exclamations have started there at the former side of the church in July that followed the approval of the First Baptist Church Descendant community. In addition to the exclamations themselves, there are plans for osteological and DNA analysis of the remains that they are exhuming, So, in addition to providing more information about who these people were, this research will hopefully allow surviving descendants of these people to make decisions about what their final resting place should be. Back in one of our twenty eighteen installments of On Earth, we talked about research into how dice have evolved over history, which noted that Roman dice tended to be visibly irregular at other points. We've also talked about how irregularly shaped dice in history may have been used to cheat at games because that irregular shape affects the probability of certain numbers being rolled. Another idea is that Romans didn't care about that, either because they didn't thoroughly understand probability or because they credited luck at dice as coming from the gods. But research published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences comes to a different conclusion that Roman dice are asymmetrical because it's easier to fit six pips on a bigger face. This whole study of delightful to me. To do this research. They quote conducted an experiment with naive die producers to see how they can figure pips on blank cubes with different degrees of asymmetry. In other words, they gave asymmetrical dice to twenty three volunteer psychology majors and asked them to mark eight dice apiece. Twelve of the students were specifically asked to mark the dice so that the number of dots on the two opposing faces added up to seven. Most of the time they marked one of the biggest faces on those dice with six dots, and for dice that were intentionally marked to have one and six on opposite sides, nearly nine of those folks did put the six on one of the two bigger sides of that asymmetrical dice. Makes sense. Some of the students said they marked their dice this way because they started with the one and put that on the largest side, but either way, among this group of students, there was a clear preference for putting the one and the six on the largest sides. Moving on to updates of actual past episodes rather than installments of Unearthed. On a team, we did an episode about the archaeological site known as Mahenjo Daro, which was one of the most important cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. That city was built around b c E and it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in this site suffered significant damage and the extreme flooding that struck Pakistan in August that regions saw about fourteen hundred millimeters or fifty five inches of rain during that month, and this is the most rainfall that has been reported in the area in the century since these ruins were rediscovered. Often when we talk about this kind of climate damage, the issue is flooding, but the drainage systems in and around Mahenjo Daro still function and there was far less standing water there than at other areas that were affected by the same weather events. Instead, the issue here is that the rain washed away sediments and outer coverings that were hecting the ruins. Repair work is ongoing and UNESCO is assisting with the effort. We mentioned this next one in a listener male segment, but today for a little more detail. Jim Thorpe, who we covered on the show over the course of three episodes in November, was stripped of his Olympic medals over claims that he was not really an amateur athlete. That's something that we talked about in those episodes. On the one anniversary of Thorpe's gold medal win in the decathlon, the International Olympic Committee announced that his record was being restored, so now he is recognized as the sole gold medal winner of both the decathlon and the pentathlon. The organization Bright Path Strong was heavily involved in advocacy for this. The family of Hugo K. Vicelander, who had been named gold medalist in the decathlon when Thorpe was stripped of his medals, was also involved in this advocacy. They confirmed that Vicelander had never considered himself to be the legitimate gold medalist. The National Galleries of Scotland announced the discovery of a self portrait by Vincent van Gogh behind one of Vango's other paintings. That other painting is head of a peasant woman, and it was discovered during an X ray in preparation for an exhibition. This find is not entirely surprising, as our episode on Vango discusses he often flipped his canvases over to paint on the other side to save money. We most recently aired our past episode on Vango as a Saturday Classic on June eighteenth of this year. Next up, we talked about the lynching of Emmett Till in our episode The Motherhood of Mamie Sell Mobil. We also have a more recent episode. We've talked about that a bit more. In recent installments of Unearthed, we have talked about efforts to bring charges against Caroline Bryant Donham, likely the last surviving person who was connected to the killing. Donham, who was then known just as Caroline Bryant, alleged that Emmett had physically grabbed her in a store in Money, Mississippi, and then at trial she testified that he had grabbed and threatened her. In seventeen, author Timothy Tyson published a book titled The Blood of Emmett Till, in which he quoted Donham as saying that her testimony in court was not true. Most recently, we talked about the discovery of an unserved warrant for Dunham's arrest and hopes that it might lead to legal action. In August, a Lafleur County, Mississippi grand jury ruled that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against Dunham for either kidnapping or manslaughter. Surviving family members of Emmett Till described this as disappointing but unsurprising. When we did an episode about sculptor Edmonia Lewis. On the show, we talked about her time at Oberlin College, Louis wasn't allowed a register for her final term there. She had to leave Oberlin in eighteen sixty three. Before being able to graduate. She had faced a series of accusations and rumors, including an allegation that she had poisoned her roommates. She was actually acquitted of that. As we talked about in those episodes, Lewis was one of only a very few people of color enrolled at Oberlin. She had both black and Indigenous ancestry, and she was harassed by other students because of her race. At its commencement, Oberlin awarded Edmonia Lewis with her degree. That was not an honorary degree. It was the degree she would have earned had she been allowed to complete her studies. Bobby Reno, who had advocated for the late Edmonia Lewis to be awarded her degree, spoke at commencement and read a quote that is attributed to Edmonia Lewis. Quote. Sometimes the times were dark, and the outlook was lonesome. But where there is a will, there is a way. I pitched in and dug it my work, and now I am what I am. It was hard work, though, but with color and sex against me, I have achieved success. That is what I tell my people whenever I meet them, that they must not be discouraged, but work ahead until the world is found to respect them for what they may have accomplished. Our episode on and Money and Lewis was most recently a Saturday Classic on February two. Moving on in March, we did an episode about Denmark's early royalty and the Yelling Stones, and one of the early royals that we talked about was King Harold Gormson, also known as Bluetooth. At least one chronicle describes Bluetooths burial place as Rescued Denmark. Two recent publications suggests he may really have been buried in va Jakovo in what's now northwest Poland. Now these publications don't agree on where in Vjakoho, though, according to maritkreta satellite imagery of a Roman Catholic church that was built in the nineteenth century suggests there's a Viking burial mound underneath, but Swedish archaeologists Van Rosbourne argues that Bluetooth had converted to Christianity by the time of his death, so he would have been buried somewhere that was already in use as a Christian burial site. In our year end Unearthed, for one, we talked about a canoe that had been found in Lake Mendota in Wisconsin. The person who spotted it originally thought it was just a log. It turned out to be a canoe that was about twelve hundred years old. Another even older canoe was found nearby in September, Although this is in pieces now, it was carved from a single piece of white oak about three thousand years ago. Members of the ho Chunk Nation and the Bad River Tribe were both present for the canoes retrieval. The Wisconsin Historical Society and tribal members are caring for both of these canoes until they can be conserved. If you're wondering why I didn't have this up with the other updates of previous episodes of Unearthed, the answer is I forgot to move it. And lastly, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has formally exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr. The last person convicted during the Salem witch Trials whose name had not yet been cleared. Johnson was one of eleven people who were convicted of witchcraft but not ultimately executed. She had been sentenced to death herself, but was then reprieved. Johnson was one of a small group of people convicted under a reformed court in sixteen nine three, and most of the others were pardoned or had their names cleared in the seventeenth century. Johnson did not, though, even after applying for restitution in seventeen twelve. Johnson's exoneration was part of a budget package that was passed in July. Prior. Hosts of the show talked about the Salem witch Trials in June of two thousand eight and October of That was the last of our updates. Now we can take a real quick sponsor break. Next up, we had just a few things that are the oldest, or at least they're a lot older than we previously understood. First up, Zanzibar's Stone Town is a coastal trading town made primarily from mangrove timber and coraline rag stone, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was previously believed to have been built by Omani Arabs in the eighteenth century, and a lot of its surviving buildings due date back to that period, but an international team has found evidence that this area was originally settled hundreds of years before that, all the way back in the eleventh century. This means that the town's origins trace back to local Swahili people. Researchers have found evidence of homes, cooking sites, a lot of pottery, both locally made pottery and pottery that had been imported from Asia. A find in Borneo has pushed back the timeline for the oldest known successful surgical amputation by roughly twenty thousand years thanks to bones that are about thirty one thousand years old. According to research published in the journal Nature, skeletal remains discovered in show evidence of an intentional amputation of a person's lower left leg. Researchers concluded that this was an intentional surgical amputation, not a congenital limb difference or the result of something like an animal attack, based on a lack of fractures and evidence of healing in the bone. This person was probably a child when the amputation was conducted, and in addition to surviving the surgery itself, they seem to have lived for another six to nine years. They were part of a hunter gatherer culture that lived in mountainous rainforests, so this suggests that in addition to having enough medical knowledge to conduct a successful amputation, this is a community that had a strong sense of social or family ties to provide support for somebody whose mobility would have made survival in this kind of environment more of a challenge. This person's remains were found in a cave adorned with rock art that dates back roughly forty thousand years, and as they were working, archaeologists nicknamed the find Scully and Their Last Oldest Thing. An archaeological dig in Cardiff, Wales has unearthed what maybe the city's earliest house. Archaeologists initially believed that this structure might have been built sometime between the Late Iron Age and the early Roman period, which is a window of time that is really not well documented in the currently known archaeological record, but a clay pot at the site suggests that this structure, known as the Trelli Enclosure, is really a lot older, dating back to the Bronze age between fifteen hundred and eleven hundred b c. At this point, there are only a couple of settlements that old that have been documented in Wales, and now it is time to move on to books and letters. An interdisciplinary team of researchers is trying to find out whether Johannes Guttenberg was aware of movable type printing presses that had already been developed in Eastern Asia centuries before he started working on a press of his own. To do this, they're using X ray fluorescence to study texts that were printed in Korea and ones that were printed in Europe, including parts of a Gutenberg Bible and a first edition copy of the Canterbury Tales. One of the things that's interesting about this work is that the researchers involved with it aren't completely sure what they're looking for or whether this work is going to lead them to an answer. What they're essentially doing is analyzing every inch of these texts and creating maps of all the elements that are present, whether they are from the ink or the page, or say something that somebody spelled on their hundreds of years ago. It's well established at this point that movable type existed in Eastern Asia long before Guttenberg was born. The earliest named person credited with developing movable type is be Shung sometime around the year ten forty, during the era of the Northern Song dynasty, but we don't really know whether Guttenberg knew about these earlier presses in China and Korea, or whether he developed his press independently. Regardless, the influence of Guttenberg's press in Europe was different from these earlier presses in Asia. Overall, in Europe, movable type printing presses led to the mass production of materials that became widely available to the general public, while in Asia many presses printed work only for the upper classes. Next up, a man shopping at an estate sale in Maine in September bought a page from a medieval manuscript. He paid seven and five dollars for this. It was labeled as an illuminated manuscript on vellum dating to the year twelve eighty five, but when he took a picture of it and sent it to one of his old professors, with some help, they ultimately figured out that it was a page from a Catholic prayer book called the Beauvai Missile. This book previously belonged to William Randolph Hurst. I feel like he's like the recurring character of our show sometimes. Yeah. Hurst sold this book in the nineteen forties and art dealers took it apart and sold pages individually. That was something that was really common at the time. The page has been valued at between five thousand and ten thousand dollars by coincidence. Lisa Fagan Davis, who helped identify the photo of the page, has been trying to reunite all of the pages of the book and so far has tracked down more than one hundred of the roughly three hundred pages it originally contained. And for our last thing, under Books and Letters, a team in Istanbul has found the sixt hundred year old writing set. The set includes a dip pin made of bone, an ink well that still has traces of red and black ink, and a small dish. This was found at an archaeological site west of Istanbul and dates back to the Imperial Roman period. According to news coverage about this find, this is the first time an intact writing set has been found dating back to this era was a time when literacy would not have been particularly common. Next up, we have several fines related to tombs and burials. First, researchers and Argentinean Patagonia have found an example of a woman who was buried in a ceremonial canoe, which dates back about one thousand years. There's been some debate about this practice and whether it was performed before Spanish colonization of South America, with some researchers arguing that the Spanish introduced these canoes to the indigenous people of the area, but this research reaffirms ethnographic work and oral history suggesting that this practice was carried out for centuries before the Spanish arrived. In spite of that centuries long history, this is the first physical evidence of a pre Hispanic canoe burial. In this particular era, the practice was likely widespread and it carried symbolic and religious meaning, but it's challenging to find concrete evidence of it because these are wooden canoes and in this kind of environment they would rot apart really quickly. The local Mapuche people continue to make and use these kind of canoes, and this research was carried out with the consent of the Mapuche curl Quinca community. Archaeologists studying what they believed to be a woman's burial site in Germany have found an animal bone, some jewelry, a spindle whorl, a glass bead, and a medieval folding chair. The chair is made of iron, one of only two such chairs ever found in Germany and about thirty ever found in Europe. Of those thirty total chairs, only six of them are made of iron. This one was buried at the person's feet, and it's possible that this chair was meant as a marker of both social status and some kind of political office. I really like this one because folding chairs just seem like a more and maybe she was a medieval tailgater. Last October, archaeologists and Tussanenhausen in Germany found the burial chamber of a child dating back about hundred years. This is a stone burial chamber. It was in really good condition because a lot of times and these kinds of fines, water and sediment have penetrated into the chamber over time and then gradually filled it up with you know, soil and sediment that protects what's inside. Uh. And when that happens, researchers can sometimes cut out the whole block of soil and transport all of it back into a laborate can be studied and conserved. That was not possible in this case since nothing had ever filled up the burial site in that way, so the team carefully filled the chamber with water to stabilize everything in it, flash frozen in nitrogen and removed that this is so cool. The block was kept frozen in storage for several months before being thought out earlier this year. This involved a specially prepared room with temperature and humidity controls, heat guns and soldering irons and suction devices to remove moisture and condensation. The sawing started in June and was expected to take several days, so the results of this study after the thawing remains to be seen, but some things that we already know included. This child, who was nicknamed the Ice Prince, was probably around ten years old and was buried with a dog, a sword, a weapon belt, and silver bracelets. There were also gold crosses and a bronze bowl in the burial chamber. In July and archaeological work started at a site in England known as arthur Stone, and it ran for about four weeks. Although King Arthur may have been a legendary figure rather than a real historical monarch, the site has been associated with him since the thirteenth century. According to legend, King Arthur killed a giant there whose elbow left an impression in one of the stones. It is also the inspiration for the stone table in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Details of this excavation haven't been released yet as of when we're recording this, which again is October the fourth, so we don't have all the details yet, but this site is home to a Neolithic tomb dating back about five thousand years that has not been excavated before this point. Based on this in earlier work, archaeologists already believed that Arthur's Stone is connected to at least two other sites in the area. This dig was also open to the public and thousands of visitors from around the UK and elsewhere came to have a look at it. Also, just a mile south of this site, another team has found evidence of prehistoric use of transparent rock crystals to mark burial sites. These crystals had been shaped by napping, the same technique used to shape flint into projectile points and deposited at burial sites for as long as three hundred years. And lastly, before we take a break, research published in the journal Medieval Archaeology in June examines the practice of bed burials in early medieval Europe. Just like it sounds, these were burials in which the person was buried in a bed, usually a wooden bed, and there are examples of this from the fifth through the tenth centuries scattered all around most of Europe, including Britain. This search examined seventy two possible or definite bed burials, and they found that while the specifics of these burials varied from place to place and through the centuries, the ones in England were overall different from the rest. In England, the first bed burials appeared in the seventh century, and the known English bed burials involved women's graves. So this research concluded that in England bed burials were introduced from elsewhere in Europe, possibly brought to England by women who traveled there for religious reasons. They're going to take another quick sponsor break before we have some belated Halloween stuff, Okay, So, as I alluded to earlier, originally this episode was going to come out in October, and so I had made the selection of Halloween e type stuff. This so things related to the sorts of episodes we might spend more time talking about in October, and we had some schedule shuffling. This got pushed into November. But I had already come up with all this Halloween stuff, so I'm sticking to it. Why would you not? I don't. I don't understand this Halloween limitation. First, the embalved hearts of dom Pedro, the first first Emperor of Brazil, arrived in Brazil from Portugal in August. This was part of the commemoration of the two anniversary of Brazil's independence. This heart is preserved in a jar of amalde hyde, and it was returned back to Portugal after the independence commemorations were over. I don't know that we would have a whole episode's about preserved monarch's hearts in jars, But boy did it feel Halloween e to me. Uh, there are lots of good preserved hearts in history. One of the big headlines over the last few months has been the reported identification of the Somerton Man. That is the name people use for a body found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia, on December one. This history mystery is also known as the Tom and Should case because the contents of this person's pockets included a rolled up piece of paper with the words tom and should written on it. That is a Persian phrase meaning the end or finished, and it is also the last two words of the eleventh century Persian poem known as the Rubiatt. This later turned out to have been torn from a copy of the book that had what looked like a code written inside, so people started to wonder if this unidentified person had been a spy. It's this uh, something that we've gotten a lot of request to talk about on the show, and I think at various points have considered it and not done it for various reasons. According to Derek Abbott from the University of Adelaide and American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, this body belonged to Carl Webb known as Charles, who was born in Melbourne in nineteen o five. They had previously built an extensive family tree for Webb. As they were trying to solve this mystery, they compared DNA from strands of hair that had been caught in a death mask made of these remains back in the nineteen forties to DNA from a living relative who had been documented on this family tree. There are still some unanswered questions, though there are no known photographs of Charles Webb to compare to photos of the remains, and officials in Australia have not yet confirmed these reported results. If this is web, there may be some straightforward explanations for some of the things that have always been interpreted as particularly mysterious about the Summerton Man. Like there've always been questions about why was this person in Adelaide in the first place. Charles Webb, it turns out, had left his wife the year before, so he may have just been trying to get away. He also liked poetry and he liked betting on horses, so it's possible that that copy of the rubiat was just something that he had because he liked it, and that the handwritten code inside was something about horse races, not a wartime spy code, as has long been theorized. Examination of the grave goods that were included in one seventy seven burials on an island in Lake Onego, Russia has found that a striking number of bone and tooth pendants in these graves were made of human bones. These pendants were previously thought to have been made from the teeth or bones of other animals. While most of the rest of the pendants came from elk or some type of cattle, nearly a third of them were from humans. And Lastly, researchers from Nicolas Copernicus University in Thorin have documented a grave site in Poland that shows evidence of anti vampire burial practices. This grave is that of a young woman who was buried with a triangular padlock around her left big toe and a sickle pinning her neck to the ground. There were also greenish spots on the palette of her mouth, suggesting that something made of copper might have been put in there, maybe a coin. Although media reports quickly framed this as a vampire burial, researchers involved with the discovery stress that this was likely the grief of a woman who was being distrusted or mistreated by her community. She may have had a physical or mental disability or an illness that caused her neighbors to believe that they needed to take precautions to keep her from rising from the dead. One of her upper teeth protrudes in front of the others, so her facial appearance may have been a factor. They don't believe she was executed, though, apart from the padlock in the sickle, she seems to have been nicely dressed, with a pillow under her head and a bonnet covering her hair. This grave dates back to the seventeenth entry, so various headlines describing this as medieval are not correct. Whoops, yeah, uh and that was on my my little Halloween collection. I love it all Halloween collection all the time. Let's get more spooky things in our on earth. Uh. Do you have listener mail be at Halloween? You or no? I do. This is from Beth and bethroat High Holly and Tracy, longtime listener who has listened to the entire back catalog. Loved the podcast. My husband and I were listening to the episode on the Lowry War and you mentioned in the Friday wrap up about outdoor dramas and not being sure if there were other places other than North Carolina that have them. The answers yes, both my husband and I have spent much of our adult lives dabbling around the outer edges of the theatrical world, both acting and doing technical work, not professionals. We have a number of friends and colleagues who have worked for different outdoor dramas over the years. I know pre Pandemic that the Institute of Outdoor Theater was based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there used to be an annual gathering for actors and dancers to audition and technicians to find positions for the summer. Not sure if the institute or annual auditions are still a going concern. There are several outdoor dramas were aware of besides the ones you mentioned. My husband was the props master for Theater West Virginia's seven season, so we know about that one well. Theater West Virginia is based in Grand View National Park outside of Beckley and presents a season of three musicals each summer. Two are historical dramas about the area and one is a Broadway musical. Honey in the Rock is the story of the founding of the state of West Virginia during the Civil War and was recently replaced by Rocket Boys. The musical Hat Fields and McCoy's is based on the story of the feud between the two families. I also know of two in Ohio, two Comsa and Trumpet in the land. Know there's at least one in Kentucky. Thanks so much for the podcast, which I listened to you when walking and when traveling for work. Keep up the great and important work of sharing stories and events so many of us knows a little about. While we don't currently have pets, I do have a grand kitty, Lakshmi, and have attached photos of her. She's a rescued street cap my daughter adopted from a shelter two years ago. Beth, so Beth sent just the cutest pictures that I accidentally printed out with this email. Um and then this first one. I will see if I can just show it to Holly. Uh, look look at this like this kind of grump face. I love a grumpy face kitty, and I love that she calls him her grandkitties because that's what my mother in law calls our cats. I don't know if this kitty is really making a grumpy face, but there it's a It's like an orange tabby orange, or like an orange tabby ay with like a little slightly down turned frowned mouth which looks a little grumpy to me. I love it, so thank you so much for that. I think we've mentioned two kompsa in previous listener mails about the outdoor dramas, but not the other ones that were mentioned, So thank you for that and for that. There used to be a whole list too, where people would come together in audition and stuff. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at I heart radio dot com and we're all over social media ad Missed in History, which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or wherever else you like 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 I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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 Frying. It's time for our latest installment of Unearthed. If you're new to the show, this is when, four times a year now we look at things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the last three months. Even though this episode is coming out at the start of November, the period of time that it is covering is July, August September. We're surprisingly several episodes ahead at this point, which does not happened that often on my first show. So today's episode, we're going to talk about some updates that have happened over the last few months, some old ist things, books and letters. We have a late entry into our Halloween stuff because this was originally going to come out in October, but as planned when we're recording, it's actually going to be November, and then in our second part of this two party will have some other things, including repatriations and artwork. We've got some edible and potable food and beverage stuff, which is always a favorite of mine. A few other things also here, is my take on late Halloween entries. Every day is Halloween to be. Someone asked me recently when Halloween season starts for me, and I was like November one, because it never ends. So we are as Tracy said. Starting with some updates, including updates to previous installments of Unearthed. Last time on Unearthed, we talked about a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio that was going up for auction. This was one of only about two d twenty known copies of the First Folio that have survived until today. Most of those are in museums, so they don't come up for auction very often. That auction took place in July at Sotheby's in New York City and that First Folio sold for almost two point five million dollars. We have also had several updates on Unearthed about work at Colonial Williamsburg's First Baptist Church, which was one of the earliest black church congregations in the United States. Exclamations have started there at the former side of the church in July that followed the approval of the First Baptist Church Descendant community. In addition to the exclamations themselves, there are plans for osteological and DNA analysis of the remains that they are exhuming, So, in addition to providing more information about who these people were, this research will hopefully allow surviving descendants of these people to make decisions about what their final resting place should be. Back in one of our twenty eighteen installments of On Earth, we talked about research into how dice have evolved over history, which noted that Roman dice tended to be visibly irregular at other points. We've also talked about how irregularly shaped dice in history may have been used to cheat at games because that irregular shape affects the probability of certain numbers being rolled. Another idea is that Romans didn't care about that, either because they didn't thoroughly understand probability or because they credited luck at dice as coming from the gods. But research published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences comes to a different conclusion that Roman dice are asymmetrical because it's easier to fit six pips on a bigger face. This whole study of delightful to me. To do this research. They quote conducted an experiment with naive die producers to see how they can figure pips on blank cubes with different degrees of asymmetry. In other words, they gave asymmetrical dice to twenty three volunteer psychology majors and asked them to mark eight dice apiece. Twelve of the students were specifically asked to mark the dice so that the number of dots on the two opposing faces added up to seven. Most of the time they marked one of the biggest faces on those dice with six dots, and for dice that were intentionally marked to have one and six on opposite sides, nearly nine of those folks did put the six on one of the two bigger sides of that asymmetrical dice. Makes sense. Some of the students said they marked their dice this way because they started with the one and put that on the largest side, but either way, among this group of students, there was a clear preference for putting the one and the six on the largest sides. Moving on to updates of actual past episodes rather than installments of Unearthed. On a team, we did an episode about the archaeological site known as Mahenjo Daro, which was one of the most important cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. That city was built around b c E and it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in this site suffered significant damage and the extreme flooding that struck Pakistan in August that regions saw about fourteen hundred millimeters or fifty five inches of rain during that month, and this is the most rainfall that has been reported in the area in the century since these ruins were rediscovered. Often when we talk about this kind of climate damage, the issue is flooding, but the drainage systems in and around Mahenjo Daro still function and there was far less standing water there than at other areas that were affected by the same weather events. Instead, the issue here is that the rain washed away sediments and outer coverings that were hecting the ruins. Repair work is ongoing and UNESCO is assisting with the effort. We mentioned this next one in a listener male segment, but today for a little more detail. Jim Thorpe, who we covered on the show over the course of three episodes in November, was stripped of his Olympic medals over claims that he was not really an amateur athlete. That's something that we talked about in those episodes. On the one anniversary of Thorpe's gold medal win in the decathlon, the International Olympic Committee announced that his record was being restored, so now he is recognized as the sole gold medal winner of both the decathlon and the pentathlon. The organization Bright Path Strong was heavily involved in advocacy for this. The family of Hugo K. Vicelander, who had been named gold medalist in the decathlon when Thorpe was stripped of his medals, was also involved in this advocacy. They confirmed that Vicelander had never considered himself to be the legitimate gold medalist. The National Galleries of Scotland announced the discovery of a self portrait by Vincent van Gogh behind one of Vango's other paintings. That other painting is head of a peasant woman, and it was discovered during an X ray in preparation for an exhibition. This find is not entirely surprising, as our episode on Vango discusses he often flipped his canvases over to paint on the other side to save money. We most recently aired our past episode on Vango as a Saturday Classic on June eighteenth of this year. Next up, we talked about the lynching of Emmett Till in our episode The Motherhood of Mamie Sell Mobil. We also have a more recent episode. We've talked about that a bit more. In recent installments of Unearthed, we have talked about efforts to bring charges against Caroline Bryant Donham, likely the last surviving person who was connected to the killing. Donham, who was then known just as Caroline Bryant, alleged that Emmett had physically grabbed her in a store in Money, Mississippi, and then at trial she testified that he had grabbed and threatened her. In seventeen, author Timothy Tyson published a book titled The Blood of Emmett Till, in which he quoted Donham as saying that her testimony in court was not true. Most recently, we talked about the discovery of an unserved warrant for Dunham's arrest and hopes that it might lead to legal action. In August, a Lafleur County, Mississippi grand jury ruled that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against Dunham for either kidnapping or manslaughter. Surviving family members of Emmett Till described this as disappointing but unsurprising. When we did an episode about sculptor Edmonia Lewis. On the show, we talked about her time at Oberlin College, Louis wasn't allowed a register for her final term there. She had to leave Oberlin in eighteen sixty three. Before being able to graduate. She had faced a series of accusations and rumors, including an allegation that she had poisoned her roommates. She was actually acquitted of that. As we talked about in those episodes, Lewis was one of only a very few people of color enrolled at Oberlin. She had both black and Indigenous ancestry, and she was harassed by other students because of her race. At its commencement, Oberlin awarded Edmonia Lewis with her degree. That was not an honorary degree. It was the degree she would have earned had she been allowed to complete her studies. Bobby Reno, who had advocated for the late Edmonia Lewis to be awarded her degree, spoke at commencement and read a quote that is attributed to Edmonia Lewis. Quote. Sometimes the times were dark, and the outlook was lonesome. But where there is a will, there is a way. I pitched in and dug it my work, and now I am what I am. It was hard work, though, but with color and sex against me, I have achieved success. That is what I tell my people whenever I meet them, that they must not be discouraged, but work ahead until the world is found to respect them for what they may have accomplished. Our episode on and Money and Lewis was most recently a Saturday Classic on February two. Moving on in March, we did an episode about Denmark's early royalty and the Yelling Stones, and one of the early royals that we talked about was King Harold Gormson, also known as Bluetooth. At least one chronicle describes Bluetooths burial place as Rescued Denmark. Two recent publications suggests he may really have been buried in va Jakovo in what's now northwest Poland. Now these publications don't agree on where in Vjakoho, though, according to maritkreta satellite imagery of a Roman Catholic church that was built in the nineteenth century suggests there's a Viking burial mound underneath, but Swedish archaeologists Van Rosbourne argues that Bluetooth had converted to Christianity by the time of his death, so he would have been buried somewhere that was already in use as a Christian burial site. In our year end Unearthed, for one, we talked about a canoe that had been found in Lake Mendota in Wisconsin. The person who spotted it originally thought it was just a log. It turned out to be a canoe that was about twelve hundred years old. Another even older canoe was found nearby in September, Although this is in pieces now, it was carved from a single piece of white oak about three thousand years ago. Members of the ho Chunk Nation and the Bad River Tribe were both present for the canoes retrieval. The Wisconsin Historical Society and tribal members are caring for both of these canoes until they can be conserved. If you're wondering why I didn't have this up with the other updates of previous episodes of Unearthed, the answer is I forgot to move it. And lastly, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has formally exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr. The last person convicted during the Salem witch Trials whose name had not yet been cleared. Johnson was one of eleven people who were convicted of witchcraft but not ultimately executed. She had been sentenced to death herself, but was then reprieved. Johnson was one of a small group of people convicted under a reformed court in sixteen nine three, and most of the others were pardoned or had their names cleared in the seventeenth century. Johnson did not, though, even after applying for restitution in seventeen twelve. Johnson's exoneration was part of a budget package that was passed in July. Prior. Hosts of the show talked about the Salem witch Trials in June of two thousand eight and October of That was the last of our updates. Now we can take a real quick sponsor break. Next up, we had just a few things that are the oldest, or at least they're a lot older than we previously understood. First up, Zanzibar's Stone Town is a coastal trading town made primarily from mangrove timber and coraline rag stone, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was previously believed to have been built by Omani Arabs in the eighteenth century, and a lot of its surviving buildings due date back to that period, but an international team has found evidence that this area was originally settled hundreds of years before that, all the way back in the eleventh century. This means that the town's origins trace back to local Swahili people. Researchers have found evidence of homes, cooking sites, a lot of pottery, both locally made pottery and pottery that had been imported from Asia. A find in Borneo has pushed back the timeline for the oldest known successful surgical amputation by roughly twenty thousand years thanks to bones that are about thirty one thousand years old. According to research published in the journal Nature, skeletal remains discovered in show evidence of an intentional amputation of a person's lower left leg. Researchers concluded that this was an intentional surgical amputation, not a congenital limb difference or the result of something like an animal attack, based on a lack of fractures and evidence of healing in the bone. This person was probably a child when the amputation was conducted, and in addition to surviving the surgery itself, they seem to have lived for another six to nine years. They were part of a hunter gatherer culture that lived in mountainous rainforests, so this suggests that in addition to having enough medical knowledge to conduct a successful amputation, this is a community that had a strong sense of social or family ties to provide support for somebody whose mobility would have made survival in this kind of environment more of a challenge. This person's remains were found in a cave adorned with rock art that dates back roughly forty thousand years, and as they were working, archaeologists nicknamed the find Scully and Their Last Oldest Thing. An archaeological dig in Cardiff, Wales has unearthed what maybe the city's earliest house. Archaeologists initially believed that this structure might have been built sometime between the Late Iron Age and the early Roman period, which is a window of time that is really not well documented in the currently known archaeological record, but a clay pot at the site suggests that this structure, known as the Trelli Enclosure, is really a lot older, dating back to the Bronze age between fifteen hundred and eleven hundred b c. At this point, there are only a couple of settlements that old that have been documented in Wales, and now it is time to move on to books and letters. An interdisciplinary team of researchers is trying to find out whether Johannes Guttenberg was aware of movable type printing presses that had already been developed in Eastern Asia centuries before he started working on a press of his own. To do this, they're using X ray fluorescence to study texts that were printed in Korea and ones that were printed in Europe, including parts of a Gutenberg Bible and a first edition copy of the Canterbury Tales. One of the things that's interesting about this work is that the researchers involved with it aren't completely sure what they're looking for or whether this work is going to lead them to an answer. What they're essentially doing is analyzing every inch of these texts and creating maps of all the elements that are present, whether they are from the ink or the page, or say something that somebody spelled on their hundreds of years ago. It's well established at this point that movable type existed in Eastern Asia long before Guttenberg was born. The earliest named person credited with developing movable type is be Shung sometime around the year ten forty, during the era of the Northern Song dynasty, but we don't really know whether Guttenberg knew about these earlier presses in China and Korea, or whether he developed his press independently. Regardless, the influence of Guttenberg's press in Europe was different from these earlier presses in Asia. Overall, in Europe, movable type printing presses led to the mass production of materials that became widely available to the general public, while in Asia many presses printed work only for the upper classes. Next up, a man shopping at an estate sale in Maine in September bought a page from a medieval manuscript. He paid seven and five dollars for this. It was labeled as an illuminated manuscript on vellum dating to the year twelve eighty five, but when he took a picture of it and sent it to one of his old professors, with some help, they ultimately figured out that it was a page from a Catholic prayer book called the Beauvai Missile. This book previously belonged to William Randolph Hurst. I feel like he's like the recurring character of our show sometimes. Yeah. Hurst sold this book in the nineteen forties and art dealers took it apart and sold pages individually. That was something that was really common at the time. The page has been valued at between five thousand and ten thousand dollars by coincidence. Lisa Fagan Davis, who helped identify the photo of the page, has been trying to reunite all of the pages of the book and so far has tracked down more than one hundred of the roughly three hundred pages it originally contained. And for our last thing, under Books and Letters, a team in Istanbul has found the sixt hundred year old writing set. The set includes a dip pin made of bone, an ink well that still has traces of red and black ink, and a small dish. This was found at an archaeological site west of Istanbul and dates back to the Imperial Roman period. According to news coverage about this find, this is the first time an intact writing set has been found dating back to this era was a time when literacy would not have been particularly common. Next up, we have several fines related to tombs and burials. First, researchers and Argentinean Patagonia have found an example of a woman who was buried in a ceremonial canoe, which dates back about one thousand years. There's been some debate about this practice and whether it was performed before Spanish colonization of South America, with some researchers arguing that the Spanish introduced these canoes to the indigenous people of the area, but this research reaffirms ethnographic work and oral history suggesting that this practice was carried out for centuries before the Spanish arrived. In spite of that centuries long history, this is the first physical evidence of a pre Hispanic canoe burial. In this particular era, the practice was likely widespread and it carried symbolic and religious meaning, but it's challenging to find concrete evidence of it because these are wooden canoes and in this kind of environment they would rot apart really quickly. The local Mapuche people continue to make and use these kind of canoes, and this research was carried out with the consent of the Mapuche curl Quinca community. Archaeologists studying what they believed to be a woman's burial site in Germany have found an animal bone, some jewelry, a spindle whorl, a glass bead, and a medieval folding chair. The chair is made of iron, one of only two such chairs ever found in Germany and about thirty ever found in Europe. Of those thirty total chairs, only six of them are made of iron. This one was buried at the person's feet, and it's possible that this chair was meant as a marker of both social status and some kind of political office. I really like this one because folding chairs just seem like a more and maybe she was a medieval tailgater. Last October, archaeologists and Tussanenhausen in Germany found the burial chamber of a child dating back about hundred years. This is a stone burial chamber. It was in really good condition because a lot of times and these kinds of fines, water and sediment have penetrated into the chamber over time and then gradually filled it up with you know, soil and sediment that protects what's inside. Uh. And when that happens, researchers can sometimes cut out the whole block of soil and transport all of it back into a laborate can be studied and conserved. That was not possible in this case since nothing had ever filled up the burial site in that way, so the team carefully filled the chamber with water to stabilize everything in it, flash frozen in nitrogen and removed that this is so cool. The block was kept frozen in storage for several months before being thought out earlier this year. This involved a specially prepared room with temperature and humidity controls, heat guns and soldering irons and suction devices to remove moisture and condensation. The sawing started in June and was expected to take several days, so the results of this study after the thawing remains to be seen, but some things that we already know included. This child, who was nicknamed the Ice Prince, was probably around ten years old and was buried with a dog, a sword, a weapon belt, and silver bracelets. There were also gold crosses and a bronze bowl in the burial chamber. In July and archaeological work started at a site in England known as arthur Stone, and it ran for about four weeks. Although King Arthur may have been a legendary figure rather than a real historical monarch, the site has been associated with him since the thirteenth century. According to legend, King Arthur killed a giant there whose elbow left an impression in one of the stones. It is also the inspiration for the stone table in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Details of this excavation haven't been released yet as of when we're recording this, which again is October the fourth, so we don't have all the details yet, but this site is home to a Neolithic tomb dating back about five thousand years that has not been excavated before this point. Based on this in earlier work, archaeologists already believed that Arthur's Stone is connected to at least two other sites in the area. This dig was also open to the public and thousands of visitors from around the UK and elsewhere came to have a look at it. Also, just a mile south of this site, another team has found evidence of prehistoric use of transparent rock crystals to mark burial sites. These crystals had been shaped by napping, the same technique used to shape flint into projectile points and deposited at burial sites for as long as three hundred years. And lastly, before we take a break, research published in the journal Medieval Archaeology in June examines the practice of bed burials in early medieval Europe. Just like it sounds, these were burials in which the person was buried in a bed, usually a wooden bed, and there are examples of this from the fifth through the tenth centuries scattered all around most of Europe, including Britain. This search examined seventy two possible or definite bed burials, and they found that while the specifics of these burials varied from place to place and through the centuries, the ones in England were overall different from the rest. In England, the first bed burials appeared in the seventh century, and the known English bed burials involved women's graves. So this research concluded that in England bed burials were introduced from elsewhere in Europe, possibly brought to England by women who traveled there for religious reasons. They're going to take another quick sponsor break before we have some belated Halloween stuff, Okay, So, as I alluded to earlier, originally this episode was going to come out in October, and so I had made the selection of Halloween e type stuff. This so things related to the sorts of episodes we might spend more time talking about in October, and we had some schedule shuffling. This got pushed into November. But I had already come up with all this Halloween stuff, so I'm sticking to it. Why would you not? I don't. I don't understand this Halloween limitation. First, the embalved hearts of dom Pedro, the first first Emperor of Brazil, arrived in Brazil from Portugal in August. This was part of the commemoration of the two anniversary of Brazil's independence. This heart is preserved in a jar of amalde hyde, and it was returned back to Portugal after the independence commemorations were over. I don't know that we would have a whole episode's about preserved monarch's hearts in jars, But boy did it feel Halloween e to me. Uh, there are lots of good preserved hearts in history. One of the big headlines over the last few months has been the reported identification of the Somerton Man. That is the name people use for a body found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia, on December one. This history mystery is also known as the Tom and Should case because the contents of this person's pockets included a rolled up piece of paper with the words tom and should written on it. That is a Persian phrase meaning the end or finished, and it is also the last two words of the eleventh century Persian poem known as the Rubiatt. This later turned out to have been torn from a copy of the book that had what looked like a code written inside, so people started to wonder if this unidentified person had been a spy. It's this uh, something that we've gotten a lot of request to talk about on the show, and I think at various points have considered it and not done it for various reasons. According to Derek Abbott from the University of Adelaide and American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, this body belonged to Carl Webb known as Charles, who was born in Melbourne in nineteen o five. They had previously built an extensive family tree for Webb. As they were trying to solve this mystery, they compared DNA from strands of hair that had been caught in a death mask made of these remains back in the nineteen forties to DNA from a living relative who had been documented on this family tree. There are still some unanswered questions, though there are no known photographs of Charles Webb to compare to photos of the remains, and officials in Australia have not yet confirmed these reported results. If this is web, there may be some straightforward explanations for some of the things that have always been interpreted as particularly mysterious about the Summerton Man. Like there've always been questions about why was this person in Adelaide in the first place. Charles Webb, it turns out, had left his wife the year before, so he may have just been trying to get away. He also liked poetry and he liked betting on horses, so it's possible that that copy of the rubiat was just something that he had because he liked it, and that the handwritten code inside was something about horse races, not a wartime spy code, as has long been theorized. Examination of the grave goods that were included in one seventy seven burials on an island in Lake Onego, Russia has found that a striking number of bone and tooth pendants in these graves were made of human bones. These pendants were previously thought to have been made from the teeth or bones of other animals. While most of the rest of the pendants came from elk or some type of cattle, nearly a third of them were from humans. And Lastly, researchers from Nicolas Copernicus University in Thorin have documented a grave site in Poland that shows evidence of anti vampire burial practices. This grave is that of a young woman who was buried with a triangular padlock around her left big toe and a sickle pinning her neck to the ground. There were also greenish spots on the palette of her mouth, suggesting that something made of copper might have been put in there, maybe a coin. Although media reports quickly framed this as a vampire burial, researchers involved with the discovery stress that this was likely the grief of a woman who was being distrusted or mistreated by her community. She may have had a physical or mental disability or an illness that caused her neighbors to believe that they needed to take precautions to keep her from rising from the dead. One of her upper teeth protrudes in front of the others, so her facial appearance may have been a factor. They don't believe she was executed, though, apart from the padlock in the sickle, she seems to have been nicely dressed, with a pillow under her head and a bonnet covering her hair. This grave dates back to the seventeenth entry, so various headlines describing this as medieval are not correct. Whoops, yeah, uh and that was on my my little Halloween collection. I love it all Halloween collection all the time. Let's get more spooky things in our on earth. Uh. Do you have listener mail be at Halloween? You or no? I do. This is from Beth and bethroat High Holly and Tracy, longtime listener who has listened to the entire back catalog. Loved the podcast. My husband and I were listening to the episode on the Lowry War and you mentioned in the Friday wrap up about outdoor dramas and not being sure if there were other places other than North Carolina that have them. The answers yes, both my husband and I have spent much of our adult lives dabbling around the outer edges of the theatrical world, both acting and doing technical work, not professionals. We have a number of friends and colleagues who have worked for different outdoor dramas over the years. I know pre Pandemic that the Institute of Outdoor Theater was based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there used to be an annual gathering for actors and dancers to audition and technicians to find positions for the summer. Not sure if the institute or annual auditions are still a going concern. There are several outdoor dramas were aware of besides the ones you mentioned. My husband was the props master for Theater West Virginia's seven season, so we know about that one well. Theater West Virginia is based in Grand View National Park outside of Beckley and presents a season of three musicals each summer. Two are historical dramas about the area and one is a Broadway musical. Honey in the Rock is the story of the founding of the state of West Virginia during the Civil War and was recently replaced by Rocket Boys. The musical Hat Fields and McCoy's is based on the story of the feud between the two families. I also know of two in Ohio, two Comsa and Trumpet in the land. Know there's at least one in Kentucky. Thanks so much for the podcast, which I listened to you when walking and when traveling for work. Keep up the great and important work of sharing stories and events so many of us knows a little about. While we don't currently have pets, I do have a grand kitty, Lakshmi, and have attached photos of her. She's a rescued street cap my daughter adopted from a shelter two years ago. Beth, so Beth sent just the cutest pictures that I accidentally printed out with this email. Um and then this first one. I will see if I can just show it to Holly. Uh, look look at this like this kind of grump face. I love a grumpy face kitty, and I love that she calls him her grandkitties because that's what my mother in law calls our cats. I don't know if this kitty is really making a grumpy face, but there it's a It's like an orange tabby orange, or like an orange tabby ay with like a little slightly down turned frowned mouth which looks a little grumpy to me. I love it, so thank you so much for that. I think we've mentioned two kompsa in previous listener mails about the outdoor dramas, but not the other ones that were mentioned, So thank you for that and for that. There used to be a whole list too, where people would come together in audition and stuff. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at I heart radio dot com and we're all over social media ad Missed in History, which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or wherever else you like 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 I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.