Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Oh, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. Today. It is Part two of Unearthed, and it is our annual roundup of stuff that literally and figuratively got unearthed this year. Part one of our annual roundup included three big subjects and they were Egypt, past podcast updates, and shipwrecks. And so today is a lot more of a hodgepodge. One note that I would like to give before we started, I originally had multiple stories in here that we're about people armed with metal detectors who found whole hordes of Viking coins. This happened on both sides of the North Sea. It happened a bunch of different times. I realized that they all sounded exactly the same, and this podcast episode was becoming very long. So what I basically want to do is just shout out to all the amateur archaeologists because the same theme came up again and again that they all called in the pros the minute they realized that they had something significant, which is awesome. Uh. It means that there are now a lot of uh really old coins that are in museums now for everybody to be able to learn from and be educated on. This was also true of the folks who found a couple of Bronze age axes using a metal detector. They contacted the authorities, and the find ultimately wound up doubling the number of discovered axes from that particular time period to a total of ten. So big applause, Yeah, big applies to the folks who go, hey, this coin looks valuable. Maybe I should contact someone who can do this a little more thoroughly than I can with my limited experience and knowledge. Indiana jets to be proud those things belong to museums. Uh oh, we're going to start out with this one. As you know, Tracy, when she puts these together, she groups them into similar like groupings as much as possible. And this one is going to start with things that are not remotely safe to leave lying around. So in January, news broke that National Park Service employees had found a Winchester Model eighteen seventy three repeating rifle leaning up against the juniper tree. The rifle was manufactured and shipped in eighteen eighty two, but otherwise we don't know who bought it when it was left by the tree, or why. At the time it was made, though it was a very popular firearm and was nicknamed the Gun that Won the West. It does appear that it was there against the tree for quite some time because the wooden stock had cracked due to exposure to the elements, the barrel itself had gotten rusted. The whole thing had kind of faded and weathered enough that it's kind of surprising that anyone thought against the tree. A couple of the pictures like, you gotta know it's there to reel eyes. There is a gun against the tree, and the National Park Service staff passed that find along to conservators. Also in the realm of things that you just should not leave lying out, archaeologists have been bringing a lot of stuff up from the wreckage of Blackbeards ship the Queen Ann's Revenge. A lot of them are medical implements. A lot of the medical implements look extremely scary. One of these is a urethral syringe, and this was used to inject mercury into the urethra the whole at the end of the penis probably as a treatment treatment for syphilis, and it looks as terrifying, as you might imagine based on the words that just came out of my mouth. That will make you tense up, whether you have a penis or not. That is attention making terror uh. But then moving on to the category of books, letters, and art. Uh. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town's herculaneum and Pompeii were buried. All of the graffiti, the bodies and artifacts that were there were preserved by the volcanic ash, and that is common knowledge at this point. But another thing preserved and left largely untouched until now was the library. Herculaneums library, buried in the year seventy nine, was unearthed by archaeologists in seventeen fifty two. So the trouble was that until very recently it was basically impossible to try to read any of the scrolls that were buried along with the rest of the town's was so impossible that in the eighties researchers decided to stop trying and leave it for future generations because basically all of the efforts that they had made up until that point destroyed the scrolls without actually being able to read anything on them. However, it is later now and the future generation is officially this one, and the method that's used is called X ray phase contrast tomography. It's also a brief it it as XPCT, and basically, this technique looks at the tiny, tiny difference between the thickness of plain papyrus in the thickness of papyrus with ink on top of it, and using this, researchers were able to piece together writing from an unrolled fragment and hope that the same methods will be able to have a look at the entire library. They published their initial findings in the journal Nature Communications, the much much easier to read category. Crews are placing blackboards at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City found an entire other set of blackboards, still with writing and lessons on them under the ones they were taking down. These old chalkboards have been covered over with new ones, but not erased beforehand in nineteen seventeen. They include drawings and multiplication wheel, musical notes, and writing. It seems like maybe they might have been covered up around Thanksgiving time, because all of the lessons include stuff about Thanksgiving, and that particular story actually made the rounds twice this year, once when the Washington Post picked up the story from local news and again when another website we will not name republished them all again uncredited and so they were brand new. Do not do that. It is plagiarism. So uh. In a sadder note that people have asked us to talk about on the show as a whole episode, and I have not really figured out how we might handle that. Bank employees stumbled across a note and other papers from Baroness Mary bet Sarah, who died along with Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria in January eight nine. At the time of their deaths, she was seventeen and he was thirty, And although their deaths have always been described as a murder suicide, her notes, which had been deposited in the bank in n and we're previously believed to have been destroyed, are essentially suicide notes. So any non clarity about whether she was a willing participant in this whole death basically obliterated with these notes. So moving on to our next discovery. While cleaning out their house, the family members of Victor Rothschild, who worked with m I five's counter sabotage unit, found a number of drawings he commissioned from artist Lawrence Fish depicting German booby trap bombs from World War Two. Rothschild's idea was to basically put together a manual for people needing to diffuse a number of innocuous looking items that could really contain explosives. There are twenty five different drawings documenting everything from an exploding chocolate bar which was purportedly part of a plot to kill Winston Churchill, and an exploding motor oil can. And the family was hoping that a museum or an archive would take these drawings because they're an interesting part of spy history, but we don't have any word yet on whether anyone has taken them up on this offer, and it has come to fruition that they've become part of a museum collection. Next, we have the fine that was the most exciting to me of all fines this entire year. It is a missing and newly found piece of the epic of Gilgamesh. Written in these notes in all capital letters. That's how excited I am Tracy has some Gilgamesh excitement. Basically, a museum in Iraq bought a collection of clay tablets from a smuggler inn. And this may seem shady, but it is actually a tactic that museums in the region have been using to try to reclaim artifacts that have previously been looted. Farouk al Rawie and Andrew George at the University of London works together to translate the text on this one cuneiform tablet that was found in the batch, and it contains twenty previously unknown lines of the epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh and Inky do you go to the Cedar forest to fight an ogre? Tracy is so excited over this one, which is grand. A paper outlining these fine things was published in teen but it did not actually make headlines until this year. It was kind of the quiet discovery of last year. Yeah, this is the only one that is a thing that like, we should have heard about last year, but we didn't until suddenly this year people were doing news reports on it. Uh much more recently than very recently. This year, the contents of a trunk full of never delivered correspondence were unearthed in the Netherlands, and all of this correspondence dates back to between sixteen eighty and seventeen oh six. The trunk itself is leather and lined in Linen, and it was given to a museum in the Hague in nine But these letters were never opened and they're only just now being analyzed by an international team of experts and academics. And one of the things that they're doing that I thought was really cool is to use non invasive imaging to look inside uh the sealed envelopes without damaging them, and then also to look inside the letters where the paper of the letter themselves has been folded in an intricate way to make the envelope and the letters themselves are an assortment of things that just never made it to their recipients because those people moved, or they refused to accept them, or they refused to pay because at the time the recipient was the one who paid for postage. One theory is that the couple who collected them all did so in the hope of turning a profit once these pieces of correspondents were claimed and paid for. In February, the University of Cambridge and the Fifth Willion Museum announced that they had found compelling evidence that two bronze statues were the work of Michelangelo. Now lots and lots and lots of Michelangelo's work survives to this day, but until this particular discovery, the art world thought that all of his bronze work had been lost. And it's a pair of statues. It's two naked men riding panthers, and they were first attributed to Michelangelo in the nineteenth century. However, because there was no clear evidence linking them to michel Angelo, and because the statues themselves aren't signed in any way, a lot of academics dismissed that association. And now there is actually a link. One of his students had copied many of Michelangelo's sketches, and one of those is very similar to these two bronze statues. The idea here is that Michelangelo actually sketched his idea out before making the statue, and that his student copied that sketch. The last of our our Letters, books and art category photographer Louis Vain photographed Beirut, Lebanon and the Roman ruins of Palmyra, Syria in eighteen sixty four. So the photographs themselves are exceptionally well preserved, and in October this year, the Getty Research Institute announced that they had acquired them. What's really notable about them, besides the fact that they are very old photographs that are preserved extremely well, is that a lot of the locations that are in the photographs have since that time been damaged or destroyed through wars and other conflicts. This includes temples and Palmyra that were destroyed by Isis earlier this year. So these particular photographs, in addition to the very existence that they're old photographs that have been preserved well, are also documenting uh sites of national heritage that have since been lost. We're going to get to the fascinating but a little bit grim topic of mass graves in the moment, but first we are gonna pause for a word from a sponsor. So on to some mass graves. A crew working on a supermarket renovation in Paris found hundreds of bodies in what appeared to me a mass grave. The spot where the supermarket SIT's used to be Trinity Hospital, which was founded in twelve or two, and it opened a cemetery there about a hundred and fifty years later during the Black Death. Archaeologists working at the site have found eight different burial pits, very methodically buried in rows. They're both male and female bodies covering a wide range of ages without any clear indications of injuries or diseases, leading the team to suspect that there was some kind of epidemic. Although the most logical assumption might be that the bodies were from the Black Death, isotopic testing has not yet been done to determine their ages. Another thousand bodies were found buried under what's now old Divinity School at St. John's College. Although the site was really discovered three years ago, the findings were only announced this year. About four hundred of these skeletons were complete and perfectly preserved, with the rest of the remains more fragmented, like individual bones, disarticulated skeletons, Things like that the burials from the thirteenth to the fifteen centuries belonged to the hospital of St. John the Evangelist who which was for the care of quote poor scholars and other wretched persons. That was a description I did not have the heart to leave out that the scholars were poor and that there were other wretched persons as well. So in what feels a little bit like our rerun from last year, in which we talked about a whole lot of things that were unearthed thanks to Crossrail. A mass grave was found in central London during an excavation work at a crossrail station. This grave contains thirty suspected victims of the Great Plague, and the area being excavated was already known to be a burial site from the bed Lumb burial ground. However, most of what had been excavated at this site before this point uh These were individual burial sites from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not a mass burial with all of the bodies in one pit. In September, archaeologists confirmed that the burials in two mass graves at Durham University in northeast England are Scottish prisoners who died in sixteen fifty after Oliver Cromwell won the Battle of Dunbar. The ones whose sex could be determined were all male, and none seemed to have died from battle wounds. They all seemed to have died instead as a consequence of disease and being held in poor conditions after the battle had concluded. They also did some really extensive study on the skeletons themselves, including isotopic studies that were used to determine where they were from Scotland. These are the studies where they look at the isotopes that are in your body as indicative of what kind of food you ate and where you like, what your environment was like. They basically figured out that all of these bodies had been recruited from a very wide area of Scotland, which supports what was already previously suspected, and glean from written records about how officers and the men that they commanded were recruited from all over. And next we move on to the surprising fines category. So we will start in the Netherlands where at d Rents Museum, researchers ran a CT scan on a statue of a Buddha and inside that statue they found the one thousand a year old mummy of a monk sitting in lotus position. Based on characters on the roll of cloth in which the mummy is sitting, researchers believe it to be Li Kwon, a member of the Chinese Meditation school and the Double Take Department. Archaeologists in Gloucestershire found a Roman headstone belonging to a twenty seven year old woman named Boudica or Bodica, which led to a whole lot of no not that Boudica on our Facebook page. What caught the team's eye was not the name's similarity to the infamous warrior woman Boudica, but the fact that this stone was an excellent condition and also appears to have actually belonged to the skeleton that was found under it, which is just extremely rare and finds from that long ago, Like they find some stones and they find some bodies, but they don't often find that from that long ago, a stone and a body that actually go together. Moving on to Ireland, a large beech tree blew over there uh and in its roots system was entangled a medieval skeleton, So the skeleton's lower leg bones stayed in the ground. The force of the tree falling over effectively ripped this skeleton in half. Radio Carbon dating and other analysis suggests that this is a late teens early twenties male who was actually stabbed to death. Everything else about it's unclear. We we know that there was a church and a graveyard that were nearby, but it's not clear whether this person was buried in that church's graveyard or whether it was separate. We also don't know if these stab wounds were from a fight, or from a battle, or some other interesting third option. Not a lot known about this skeleton unearthed by a falling tree. Uh. And now we are shifting gears to the food and drink department of unearthed, which always sounds interesting, but sometimes it's a little um, a little tummy churning. However, h an excave aation at a building site in Tel Aviv this year uncovered pottery used to make beer in Egypt approximately five thousand years ago. So this beer would have been barley in water that had been left to ferment in the sun, with fruit concentrates added. A hundred and sixty eight intact bottles of champagne were found in a shipwreck off the coast of Finland. And but this year UH is the year that researchers actually published their findings on this wreck in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And also someone chose too on purpose drink some of it. It was described as being extremely sweet, with notes of smoke, leather, and tobacco. Apparently, the very cold temperatures of the sea, plus the fact that there was water on both sides of the cork kept it off from the grading two too badly, although it was not really effervescent anymore. And we have two stories about evidence of ancient people butchering some very very large animals for uses food. The first is that an excavator and a team of University of Michigan paleontologists joined forces to examine a mammoth unearthed in a field southwest of an Arbor, Michigan. So mammoth finds are reasonably common, although it's a lot more common to find mathodons in that part of the world. This one, in particular, though, shows clear evidence of humans having butchered the mammoth for its meat. The mammoth itself lived roughly eleven thousand, seven hundred to fifteen thousand years ago, although conclusive dating has not been done as of when this finding was written up, and the team believed that humans places placed the mammoth's carcass in a pond and weighed it down with boulders as a way to preserve it. To confirm this, researchers will further examine the mammoth. They're going to investigate its bones to see if they have evidence of the cuts that would have come along with butchering. And a somewhat similar but much older five and stone tools, and the remains of a straight test elephant, all of them dating back between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand years were unearthed at a site in Greece. The evidence suggests that this was a butchering site for elephants, and that's based on the remains of the elephants and the tools, as well as the types of cut marks on the bones that the mammoth researchers are going to be looking for themselves. That does not sound yummy to me me either, but you never know. None of the food sound yummy to me. This year. It seems like we've had some unearthing where that said, Oh, that seems like it could be interesting. No, this ancient extremely sweet, smoky, leathery champagne and uh, butchered elephant does not sound particularly delicious to me. Sounds interesting to me, sweet smoky champagne sounds fascinating to me. Actually. Well, And there was a um a researcher who did not elect to drink any of it, but he did get some of it squirted into the palm of his hand from a little pipe it and he said the smell of it stuck with him for hours, which I couldn't tell whether he was okay with that or not. Uh, but we're gonna take a brief break and then we were going to get back to the world of unearthing with some really old things, oldest known things that were unearthed this year. Now back to our story, so uh, jumping in to a little bit of ancient astronomy. The oldest known recording of a solar eclipse was discovered in Ireland. A carving on a rock cairn outside of Kills is reported to depict an eclipse that took place on November b c E. This recording is on three stones, depicting what the eclipse looked like from that location in a much grizzlier note. The oldest documented decapitation in the America's was discovered in Brazil this year. An international team working in east central Zil found a nine thousand year old set of remains that included a skull, six neck, vertebrae, and hands, and the skull that the head had been removed like the head and upber neck really had been removed from the rest of the body by pulling and rotating the very careful arrangement of the head and hands, combined with mass spectroscopy analysis of the bones themselves, led the team to conclude that this was a ritual enacted on a member of the community, not a punishment on an outsider, and this is about six thousand years before the previously known oldest decapitation. An ancient shard of pottery was discovered to contain the oldest known alphabet premier this year, so the pottery itself dates all the way back to the fifteenth century v C. The text on it is about thirty years old. Although this pottery shard itself has been known for a while, the script on it was only deciphered this year thanks to Dutch egypt College Ben Herring, who figured out that this was the alphabet and words and not someone's grocery list or something. The oldest named smoking pipe was found in Jamestown in September. Named smoking pipes were a thing during the colonization of Jamestown, and the pipes themselves are the oldest known examples of print in the North American colonies. Most of the names are those of important English figures, including Sir Walter Raleigh and prominent Jamestown colonists. This newly discovered oldest pipe carries the name William Faldo, who was a Swiss inventor in the Virginia Company. Has been a lot of time down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out why people were into having these pipes with names on, Like, was it sort of like the equivalent of wearing your football jersey or having a pint glass that had your favorite brewery on them. I don't know. It just seems to be a thing that the colonists like. We are going to move on to category the last category for our unearth this year, and it is another listener favorite, exhumations. So Chilean poet Pablo Naruta was exhumed in to try to determine if he had been poisoned. We're talking about it today because in May of this year, Chile's Naruta Foundation issued a demand that it be reburied immediately because it had not been. I had real trouble pinning down whether he has in fact been reinterred since this demand was issued. I could not find the answer. But in November, so just last month, according to the Associated Press, the Chilean government conceded that in spite of the fact that previous testing found no evidence of poison, he may actually have been murdered. So the judge presiding over the case has asked for another round of tests to look for substances that were not included in the prior round, suggesting that maybe he still has not been reinterred. In all this time, authorities pushed for an exhumation of a famous Australian cold case and an episode request we often get known as the Summerton Man. This year, his body was found in and he was determined to have died of poisoning, but he was never identified. And adding to this mystery was the fact that a piece of paper, apparently in code, was found in his pocket. A lot of people wonder if this was some sort of spy assassination based on that combination of unknown identity and weird scrap of code in his pocket. I think he talked about researching that one time. Am I am I making that up? You are not making that up? Did you find it? It was a nebulous well of not a lot of information. Uh No, I don't think I got that far. I think I've some other shiny object popped into my field of vision and I followed another path. So in the list for sure. Maybe in the future we'll talk about him. Maybe in the future we will have more episode or more information if they do in fact exhume him. Officials exhuming the body of serial killer John Wayne Gacy's victims wound up getting a break in a completely unrelated case during this process. This whole exhumation effort was started by County Sheriff Tom Dart to try to match unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy with DNA evidence provided by family members who were looking for their missing loved ones. So the DNA being matched came from relatives of young men who had vanished in the nineteen seventies. Dr Willow Wertheimer was one of the people who had a missing male loved one she was looking for. She submitted her DNA. It was uh not found to be related to the body of a John Wayne Gacy victim who had been unidentified, but to the body of a man who had been shot to death in San Francisco thirty six years ago. And this whole project, though we should note, did identify one of Gaycey's victims within weeks, as well as identifying other unidentified remains as well. Also in the realm of exhumations, people are asking for that uh, to my knowledge, have not happened yet. There's Little Nellie who is known as the patron Saint of Cork sometimes the unofficial patron Saint of Cork. She died of probably tuberculosis, in and she was exhumed at that point a year after she died so that her body could be moved to convent grounds. When she was exhumed, her body was found to be basically intact. So this fact, plus the fact that she had been described as just extremely devout and holy during her very brief life, led to her developing a posthumous following. People started making pilgrimages to her grave site. However, the convent where she had been buried was destroyed by a fire in two thousand and three, and now a bank owns that property and has been understandably reluctant to just allow people to come to her grave site and pray for security reasons. The bish up of Court and Ross has moved for her to be exhumed so that she can be reburied yet again in a place where people could visit her and pray to her. That request was from back in August, and I have no word yet about whether that exhumation would actually happen, but I was very fascinated by the story of Little Nellie and how she became this sort of unofficial patron saint based on her brief and apparently very devout life and in this year's biggest exhamation news and also to close things off, another past podcast is definitely that of the family of Czar Nicholas the Second. At this point, historians overwhelmingly believed that Zar Nicholas, his wife, and all of their children were all killed by a Bolshevik firing squad. However, Russia has been trying to determine conclusively that all the remains are genuine so that they can be interred together in St. Petersburg. There has been extensive testing on these remains believed to be the roman Offs as well already, but this time they sort of increased the pattern. They also exhumed Alexander the Third, who was Nicholas the Second father, to compare his DNA to the ported the purported remains of the roman Off children Alexei and Maria. The reason there were doubts about whether these two bodies in particular were genuine is because their remains were found separately from the rest of the family. And also the reason there's been some doubt about the identity of the bodies of the rest of the family is that they also were not excavated for years after they were originally found. Russia announced in November the DNA tests have confirmed that the remains are genuine. I think that might be the one conclusive answer of all the questions that were being raised in this year's Unearthed episodes. That's a lot of stuff that we on Earth. I'm sure there are things that people were hoping we would talk about that we have not talked about. They may be things that are on our pinboard of all of our unearthed and stuff. In January we will start another pen board for Unearthed and TwixT. It literally starts the minute a new year rolls around. I feel like this was a really busy year. Yeah. I do not recall having nearly this many findings that were related to past stuff in the archive before, and I don't know how much of that is because now that you and I have worked on the podcast for a few years, were a lot more familiar with all of the things that past hosts have worked on. Although I still perpetually stumble across stuff I had no idea was in there um or or if it really isn't. This year just saw a lot of discoveries that were coincidentally related to stuff we've talked about on the show. In any case, do you want to wrap up with a little bit of mail from one of our great listeners. I do. It's from Jessica, and Jessica says, Dear Tracy and Holly, thank you for doing this stuff you missed in history class podcast. I discovered it about a year ago while living in Oxford, and it has made walking around much more interesting. While a graduate student in archaeology, I focused primarily on the Bronze Age in the Near East hints, I always enjoyed learning about things more recent and in other regions. I've been looking for a good reason to write you, and it finally came. My current university had a graduate student symposium a few weeks ago, and one of the art history presentations made me think of your podcast on redlining. While the presentation was more generally about photography and associated racial stereotypes of pre nineteen o six earthquake San Francisco Chinatown. It included a fascinating map of Chinatown before the earthquake, which she attached. The map demonstrated some of the same qualities as redlining and was used to try to convince the city council not to rebuild Chinatown after the earthquake. The map shows old Chinatown to essentially be a den of iniquity. The pink, yellow, green, and blue squares represent buildings containing Chinese gambling houses, opium dens, Chinese prostitution, and white prostitution, respectively. I found it interesting that Chinese and white prostitution were listed separate, Lee, indicating that those are perceived differently. I hope you also find this interesting. I'm sure as common as I'm sure it's common. I will now suggest a topic for the podcast, and she suggests this history of archaeology or history of museums, both of which sound very large, especially when visiting museums. I find myself conflicted. I enjoy what was collected by old European antiquarians, but I don't like the fact that they essentially spole material cultural history. I hope you both have good holidays. Sincerely, Jessica, thank you, so much, Jessica. I wanted to read this for two reasons. One as I am definitely interested anytime somebody sends me a new example we had not previously seen about the types of of efforts that we talked about in our Redlining podcasts. The other is that we have um. One of the one of the other pin boards that I have that I used to try to corral things has to do with repatriations, which is when um one nation and who has been having holding something in a museum or another collection repatriates it back to its country of origin. I didn't have as many of these that I found this year that we're interested to talk about, so we didn't have a section on that in today's podcast. But I definitely understand that conflict. Uh We earlier this year had an interview with folks from the Pbody Museum at Harvard talking about the search for the Harvard Indian School. I got to go to the Pbody Museum earlier this year, and at several points in the museum there are signs explaining how the museum has been working to try to contact the especially indigenous cultures that some of the artifacts came from, and returning those cultures returning those artifacts to their home cultures where it's appropriate and desired. Um. So there are several places within the museum that you see these little signs that say, this artifact that previously was on display here has been returned to these people for from this place, based on this which I wound up sort of going on a treasure hunt through the museum and reading all of these signs as part of what I was looking at. So thank you so much Jessica for writing to us. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, were history podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is miss the Hisstory dot tumbler dot com and are also on Pinterest at Pentriess dot com slash miss in history. If you would like to learn more about what we have talked about today, you can come to our parent company website, which is how stuff Works dot com and put the word serial killers in the search bar. You will find an article about how serial killers work. We only talked about one of those and on Earth Things that that is a pretty old favorite of people's morbid curiosity. I think you can also come to our website, which is miss in history dot com and find show notes for all the episodes. Holly and I have worked on an archive of every episode ever, so you can do all these wonderful things and a whole lot more. How stuff works dot com or missing history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works dot com. Mmmmmm

Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Oh, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. Today. It is Part two of Unearthed, and it is our annual roundup of stuff that literally and figuratively got unearthed this year. Part one of our annual roundup included three big subjects and they were Egypt, past podcast updates, and shipwrecks. And so today is a lot more of a hodgepodge. One note that I would like to give before we started, I originally had multiple stories in here that we're about people armed with metal detectors who found whole hordes of Viking coins. This happened on both sides of the North Sea. It happened a bunch of different times. I realized that they all sounded exactly the same, and this podcast episode was becoming very long. So what I basically want to do is just shout out to all the amateur archaeologists because the same theme came up again and again that they all called in the pros the minute they realized that they had something significant, which is awesome. Uh. It means that there are now a lot of uh really old coins that are in museums now for everybody to be able to learn from and be educated on. This was also true of the folks who found a couple of Bronze age axes using a metal detector. They contacted the authorities, and the find ultimately wound up doubling the number of discovered axes from that particular time period to a total of ten. So big applause, Yeah, big applies to the folks who go, hey, this coin looks valuable. Maybe I should contact someone who can do this a little more thoroughly than I can with my limited experience and knowledge. Indiana jets to be proud those things belong to museums. Uh oh, we're going to start out with this one. As you know, Tracy, when she puts these together, she groups them into similar like groupings as much as possible. And this one is going to start with things that are not remotely safe to leave lying around. So in January, news broke that National Park Service employees had found a Winchester Model eighteen seventy three repeating rifle leaning up against the juniper tree. The rifle was manufactured and shipped in eighteen eighty two, but otherwise we don't know who bought it when it was left by the tree, or why. At the time it was made, though it was a very popular firearm and was nicknamed the Gun that Won the West. It does appear that it was there against the tree for quite some time because the wooden stock had cracked due to exposure to the elements, the barrel itself had gotten rusted. The whole thing had kind of faded and weathered enough that it's kind of surprising that anyone thought against the tree. A couple of the pictures like, you gotta know it's there to reel eyes. There is a gun against the tree, and the National Park Service staff passed that find along to conservators. Also in the realm of things that you just should not leave lying out, archaeologists have been bringing a lot of stuff up from the wreckage of Blackbeards ship the Queen Ann's Revenge. A lot of them are medical implements. A lot of the medical implements look extremely scary. One of these is a urethral syringe, and this was used to inject mercury into the urethra the whole at the end of the penis probably as a treatment treatment for syphilis, and it looks as terrifying, as you might imagine based on the words that just came out of my mouth. That will make you tense up, whether you have a penis or not. That is attention making terror uh. But then moving on to the category of books, letters, and art. Uh. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town's herculaneum and Pompeii were buried. All of the graffiti, the bodies and artifacts that were there were preserved by the volcanic ash, and that is common knowledge at this point. But another thing preserved and left largely untouched until now was the library. Herculaneums library, buried in the year seventy nine, was unearthed by archaeologists in seventeen fifty two. So the trouble was that until very recently it was basically impossible to try to read any of the scrolls that were buried along with the rest of the town's was so impossible that in the eighties researchers decided to stop trying and leave it for future generations because basically all of the efforts that they had made up until that point destroyed the scrolls without actually being able to read anything on them. However, it is later now and the future generation is officially this one, and the method that's used is called X ray phase contrast tomography. It's also a brief it it as XPCT, and basically, this technique looks at the tiny, tiny difference between the thickness of plain papyrus in the thickness of papyrus with ink on top of it, and using this, researchers were able to piece together writing from an unrolled fragment and hope that the same methods will be able to have a look at the entire library. They published their initial findings in the journal Nature Communications, the much much easier to read category. Crews are placing blackboards at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City found an entire other set of blackboards, still with writing and lessons on them under the ones they were taking down. These old chalkboards have been covered over with new ones, but not erased beforehand in nineteen seventeen. They include drawings and multiplication wheel, musical notes, and writing. It seems like maybe they might have been covered up around Thanksgiving time, because all of the lessons include stuff about Thanksgiving, and that particular story actually made the rounds twice this year, once when the Washington Post picked up the story from local news and again when another website we will not name republished them all again uncredited and so they were brand new. Do not do that. It is plagiarism. So uh. In a sadder note that people have asked us to talk about on the show as a whole episode, and I have not really figured out how we might handle that. Bank employees stumbled across a note and other papers from Baroness Mary bet Sarah, who died along with Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria in January eight nine. At the time of their deaths, she was seventeen and he was thirty, And although their deaths have always been described as a murder suicide, her notes, which had been deposited in the bank in n and we're previously believed to have been destroyed, are essentially suicide notes. So any non clarity about whether she was a willing participant in this whole death basically obliterated with these notes. So moving on to our next discovery. While cleaning out their house, the family members of Victor Rothschild, who worked with m I five's counter sabotage unit, found a number of drawings he commissioned from artist Lawrence Fish depicting German booby trap bombs from World War Two. Rothschild's idea was to basically put together a manual for people needing to diffuse a number of innocuous looking items that could really contain explosives. There are twenty five different drawings documenting everything from an exploding chocolate bar which was purportedly part of a plot to kill Winston Churchill, and an exploding motor oil can. And the family was hoping that a museum or an archive would take these drawings because they're an interesting part of spy history, but we don't have any word yet on whether anyone has taken them up on this offer, and it has come to fruition that they've become part of a museum collection. Next, we have the fine that was the most exciting to me of all fines this entire year. It is a missing and newly found piece of the epic of Gilgamesh. Written in these notes in all capital letters. That's how excited I am Tracy has some Gilgamesh excitement. Basically, a museum in Iraq bought a collection of clay tablets from a smuggler inn. And this may seem shady, but it is actually a tactic that museums in the region have been using to try to reclaim artifacts that have previously been looted. Farouk al Rawie and Andrew George at the University of London works together to translate the text on this one cuneiform tablet that was found in the batch, and it contains twenty previously unknown lines of the epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh and Inky do you go to the Cedar forest to fight an ogre? Tracy is so excited over this one, which is grand. A paper outlining these fine things was published in teen but it did not actually make headlines until this year. It was kind of the quiet discovery of last year. Yeah, this is the only one that is a thing that like, we should have heard about last year, but we didn't until suddenly this year people were doing news reports on it. Uh much more recently than very recently. This year, the contents of a trunk full of never delivered correspondence were unearthed in the Netherlands, and all of this correspondence dates back to between sixteen eighty and seventeen oh six. The trunk itself is leather and lined in Linen, and it was given to a museum in the Hague in nine But these letters were never opened and they're only just now being analyzed by an international team of experts and academics. And one of the things that they're doing that I thought was really cool is to use non invasive imaging to look inside uh the sealed envelopes without damaging them, and then also to look inside the letters where the paper of the letter themselves has been folded in an intricate way to make the envelope and the letters themselves are an assortment of things that just never made it to their recipients because those people moved, or they refused to accept them, or they refused to pay because at the time the recipient was the one who paid for postage. One theory is that the couple who collected them all did so in the hope of turning a profit once these pieces of correspondents were claimed and paid for. In February, the University of Cambridge and the Fifth Willion Museum announced that they had found compelling evidence that two bronze statues were the work of Michelangelo. Now lots and lots and lots of Michelangelo's work survives to this day, but until this particular discovery, the art world thought that all of his bronze work had been lost. And it's a pair of statues. It's two naked men riding panthers, and they were first attributed to Michelangelo in the nineteenth century. However, because there was no clear evidence linking them to michel Angelo, and because the statues themselves aren't signed in any way, a lot of academics dismissed that association. And now there is actually a link. One of his students had copied many of Michelangelo's sketches, and one of those is very similar to these two bronze statues. The idea here is that Michelangelo actually sketched his idea out before making the statue, and that his student copied that sketch. The last of our our Letters, books and art category photographer Louis Vain photographed Beirut, Lebanon and the Roman ruins of Palmyra, Syria in eighteen sixty four. So the photographs themselves are exceptionally well preserved, and in October this year, the Getty Research Institute announced that they had acquired them. What's really notable about them, besides the fact that they are very old photographs that are preserved extremely well, is that a lot of the locations that are in the photographs have since that time been damaged or destroyed through wars and other conflicts. This includes temples and Palmyra that were destroyed by Isis earlier this year. So these particular photographs, in addition to the very existence that they're old photographs that have been preserved well, are also documenting uh sites of national heritage that have since been lost. We're going to get to the fascinating but a little bit grim topic of mass graves in the moment, but first we are gonna pause for a word from a sponsor. So on to some mass graves. A crew working on a supermarket renovation in Paris found hundreds of bodies in what appeared to me a mass grave. The spot where the supermarket SIT's used to be Trinity Hospital, which was founded in twelve or two, and it opened a cemetery there about a hundred and fifty years later during the Black Death. Archaeologists working at the site have found eight different burial pits, very methodically buried in rows. They're both male and female bodies covering a wide range of ages without any clear indications of injuries or diseases, leading the team to suspect that there was some kind of epidemic. Although the most logical assumption might be that the bodies were from the Black Death, isotopic testing has not yet been done to determine their ages. Another thousand bodies were found buried under what's now old Divinity School at St. John's College. Although the site was really discovered three years ago, the findings were only announced this year. About four hundred of these skeletons were complete and perfectly preserved, with the rest of the remains more fragmented, like individual bones, disarticulated skeletons, Things like that the burials from the thirteenth to the fifteen centuries belonged to the hospital of St. John the Evangelist who which was for the care of quote poor scholars and other wretched persons. That was a description I did not have the heart to leave out that the scholars were poor and that there were other wretched persons as well. So in what feels a little bit like our rerun from last year, in which we talked about a whole lot of things that were unearthed thanks to Crossrail. A mass grave was found in central London during an excavation work at a crossrail station. This grave contains thirty suspected victims of the Great Plague, and the area being excavated was already known to be a burial site from the bed Lumb burial ground. However, most of what had been excavated at this site before this point uh These were individual burial sites from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not a mass burial with all of the bodies in one pit. In September, archaeologists confirmed that the burials in two mass graves at Durham University in northeast England are Scottish prisoners who died in sixteen fifty after Oliver Cromwell won the Battle of Dunbar. The ones whose sex could be determined were all male, and none seemed to have died from battle wounds. They all seemed to have died instead as a consequence of disease and being held in poor conditions after the battle had concluded. They also did some really extensive study on the skeletons themselves, including isotopic studies that were used to determine where they were from Scotland. These are the studies where they look at the isotopes that are in your body as indicative of what kind of food you ate and where you like, what your environment was like. They basically figured out that all of these bodies had been recruited from a very wide area of Scotland, which supports what was already previously suspected, and glean from written records about how officers and the men that they commanded were recruited from all over. And next we move on to the surprising fines category. So we will start in the Netherlands where at d Rents Museum, researchers ran a CT scan on a statue of a Buddha and inside that statue they found the one thousand a year old mummy of a monk sitting in lotus position. Based on characters on the roll of cloth in which the mummy is sitting, researchers believe it to be Li Kwon, a member of the Chinese Meditation school and the Double Take Department. Archaeologists in Gloucestershire found a Roman headstone belonging to a twenty seven year old woman named Boudica or Bodica, which led to a whole lot of no not that Boudica on our Facebook page. What caught the team's eye was not the name's similarity to the infamous warrior woman Boudica, but the fact that this stone was an excellent condition and also appears to have actually belonged to the skeleton that was found under it, which is just extremely rare and finds from that long ago, Like they find some stones and they find some bodies, but they don't often find that from that long ago, a stone and a body that actually go together. Moving on to Ireland, a large beech tree blew over there uh and in its roots system was entangled a medieval skeleton, So the skeleton's lower leg bones stayed in the ground. The force of the tree falling over effectively ripped this skeleton in half. Radio Carbon dating and other analysis suggests that this is a late teens early twenties male who was actually stabbed to death. Everything else about it's unclear. We we know that there was a church and a graveyard that were nearby, but it's not clear whether this person was buried in that church's graveyard or whether it was separate. We also don't know if these stab wounds were from a fight, or from a battle, or some other interesting third option. Not a lot known about this skeleton unearthed by a falling tree. Uh. And now we are shifting gears to the food and drink department of unearthed, which always sounds interesting, but sometimes it's a little um, a little tummy churning. However, h an excave aation at a building site in Tel Aviv this year uncovered pottery used to make beer in Egypt approximately five thousand years ago. So this beer would have been barley in water that had been left to ferment in the sun, with fruit concentrates added. A hundred and sixty eight intact bottles of champagne were found in a shipwreck off the coast of Finland. And but this year UH is the year that researchers actually published their findings on this wreck in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And also someone chose too on purpose drink some of it. It was described as being extremely sweet, with notes of smoke, leather, and tobacco. Apparently, the very cold temperatures of the sea, plus the fact that there was water on both sides of the cork kept it off from the grading two too badly, although it was not really effervescent anymore. And we have two stories about evidence of ancient people butchering some very very large animals for uses food. The first is that an excavator and a team of University of Michigan paleontologists joined forces to examine a mammoth unearthed in a field southwest of an Arbor, Michigan. So mammoth finds are reasonably common, although it's a lot more common to find mathodons in that part of the world. This one, in particular, though, shows clear evidence of humans having butchered the mammoth for its meat. The mammoth itself lived roughly eleven thousand, seven hundred to fifteen thousand years ago, although conclusive dating has not been done as of when this finding was written up, and the team believed that humans places placed the mammoth's carcass in a pond and weighed it down with boulders as a way to preserve it. To confirm this, researchers will further examine the mammoth. They're going to investigate its bones to see if they have evidence of the cuts that would have come along with butchering. And a somewhat similar but much older five and stone tools, and the remains of a straight test elephant, all of them dating back between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand years were unearthed at a site in Greece. The evidence suggests that this was a butchering site for elephants, and that's based on the remains of the elephants and the tools, as well as the types of cut marks on the bones that the mammoth researchers are going to be looking for themselves. That does not sound yummy to me me either, but you never know. None of the food sound yummy to me. This year. It seems like we've had some unearthing where that said, Oh, that seems like it could be interesting. No, this ancient extremely sweet, smoky, leathery champagne and uh, butchered elephant does not sound particularly delicious to me. Sounds interesting to me, sweet smoky champagne sounds fascinating to me. Actually. Well, And there was a um a researcher who did not elect to drink any of it, but he did get some of it squirted into the palm of his hand from a little pipe it and he said the smell of it stuck with him for hours, which I couldn't tell whether he was okay with that or not. Uh, but we're gonna take a brief break and then we were going to get back to the world of unearthing with some really old things, oldest known things that were unearthed this year. Now back to our story, so uh, jumping in to a little bit of ancient astronomy. The oldest known recording of a solar eclipse was discovered in Ireland. A carving on a rock cairn outside of Kills is reported to depict an eclipse that took place on November b c E. This recording is on three stones, depicting what the eclipse looked like from that location in a much grizzlier note. The oldest documented decapitation in the America's was discovered in Brazil this year. An international team working in east central Zil found a nine thousand year old set of remains that included a skull, six neck, vertebrae, and hands, and the skull that the head had been removed like the head and upber neck really had been removed from the rest of the body by pulling and rotating the very careful arrangement of the head and hands, combined with mass spectroscopy analysis of the bones themselves, led the team to conclude that this was a ritual enacted on a member of the community, not a punishment on an outsider, and this is about six thousand years before the previously known oldest decapitation. An ancient shard of pottery was discovered to contain the oldest known alphabet premier this year, so the pottery itself dates all the way back to the fifteenth century v C. The text on it is about thirty years old. Although this pottery shard itself has been known for a while, the script on it was only deciphered this year thanks to Dutch egypt College Ben Herring, who figured out that this was the alphabet and words and not someone's grocery list or something. The oldest named smoking pipe was found in Jamestown in September. Named smoking pipes were a thing during the colonization of Jamestown, and the pipes themselves are the oldest known examples of print in the North American colonies. Most of the names are those of important English figures, including Sir Walter Raleigh and prominent Jamestown colonists. This newly discovered oldest pipe carries the name William Faldo, who was a Swiss inventor in the Virginia Company. Has been a lot of time down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out why people were into having these pipes with names on, Like, was it sort of like the equivalent of wearing your football jersey or having a pint glass that had your favorite brewery on them. I don't know. It just seems to be a thing that the colonists like. We are going to move on to category the last category for our unearth this year, and it is another listener favorite, exhumations. So Chilean poet Pablo Naruta was exhumed in to try to determine if he had been poisoned. We're talking about it today because in May of this year, Chile's Naruta Foundation issued a demand that it be reburied immediately because it had not been. I had real trouble pinning down whether he has in fact been reinterred since this demand was issued. I could not find the answer. But in November, so just last month, according to the Associated Press, the Chilean government conceded that in spite of the fact that previous testing found no evidence of poison, he may actually have been murdered. So the judge presiding over the case has asked for another round of tests to look for substances that were not included in the prior round, suggesting that maybe he still has not been reinterred. In all this time, authorities pushed for an exhumation of a famous Australian cold case and an episode request we often get known as the Summerton Man. This year, his body was found in and he was determined to have died of poisoning, but he was never identified. And adding to this mystery was the fact that a piece of paper, apparently in code, was found in his pocket. A lot of people wonder if this was some sort of spy assassination based on that combination of unknown identity and weird scrap of code in his pocket. I think he talked about researching that one time. Am I am I making that up? You are not making that up? Did you find it? It was a nebulous well of not a lot of information. Uh No, I don't think I got that far. I think I've some other shiny object popped into my field of vision and I followed another path. So in the list for sure. Maybe in the future we'll talk about him. Maybe in the future we will have more episode or more information if they do in fact exhume him. Officials exhuming the body of serial killer John Wayne Gacy's victims wound up getting a break in a completely unrelated case during this process. This whole exhumation effort was started by County Sheriff Tom Dart to try to match unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy with DNA evidence provided by family members who were looking for their missing loved ones. So the DNA being matched came from relatives of young men who had vanished in the nineteen seventies. Dr Willow Wertheimer was one of the people who had a missing male loved one she was looking for. She submitted her DNA. It was uh not found to be related to the body of a John Wayne Gacy victim who had been unidentified, but to the body of a man who had been shot to death in San Francisco thirty six years ago. And this whole project, though we should note, did identify one of Gaycey's victims within weeks, as well as identifying other unidentified remains as well. Also in the realm of exhumations, people are asking for that uh, to my knowledge, have not happened yet. There's Little Nellie who is known as the patron Saint of Cork sometimes the unofficial patron Saint of Cork. She died of probably tuberculosis, in and she was exhumed at that point a year after she died so that her body could be moved to convent grounds. When she was exhumed, her body was found to be basically intact. So this fact, plus the fact that she had been described as just extremely devout and holy during her very brief life, led to her developing a posthumous following. People started making pilgrimages to her grave site. However, the convent where she had been buried was destroyed by a fire in two thousand and three, and now a bank owns that property and has been understandably reluctant to just allow people to come to her grave site and pray for security reasons. The bish up of Court and Ross has moved for her to be exhumed so that she can be reburied yet again in a place where people could visit her and pray to her. That request was from back in August, and I have no word yet about whether that exhumation would actually happen, but I was very fascinated by the story of Little Nellie and how she became this sort of unofficial patron saint based on her brief and apparently very devout life and in this year's biggest exhamation news and also to close things off, another past podcast is definitely that of the family of Czar Nicholas the Second. At this point, historians overwhelmingly believed that Zar Nicholas, his wife, and all of their children were all killed by a Bolshevik firing squad. However, Russia has been trying to determine conclusively that all the remains are genuine so that they can be interred together in St. Petersburg. There has been extensive testing on these remains believed to be the roman Offs as well already, but this time they sort of increased the pattern. They also exhumed Alexander the Third, who was Nicholas the Second father, to compare his DNA to the ported the purported remains of the roman Off children Alexei and Maria. The reason there were doubts about whether these two bodies in particular were genuine is because their remains were found separately from the rest of the family. And also the reason there's been some doubt about the identity of the bodies of the rest of the family is that they also were not excavated for years after they were originally found. Russia announced in November the DNA tests have confirmed that the remains are genuine. I think that might be the one conclusive answer of all the questions that were being raised in this year's Unearthed episodes. That's a lot of stuff that we on Earth. I'm sure there are things that people were hoping we would talk about that we have not talked about. They may be things that are on our pinboard of all of our unearthed and stuff. In January we will start another pen board for Unearthed and TwixT. It literally starts the minute a new year rolls around. I feel like this was a really busy year. Yeah. I do not recall having nearly this many findings that were related to past stuff in the archive before, and I don't know how much of that is because now that you and I have worked on the podcast for a few years, were a lot more familiar with all of the things that past hosts have worked on. Although I still perpetually stumble across stuff I had no idea was in there um or or if it really isn't. This year just saw a lot of discoveries that were coincidentally related to stuff we've talked about on the show. In any case, do you want to wrap up with a little bit of mail from one of our great listeners. I do. It's from Jessica, and Jessica says, Dear Tracy and Holly, thank you for doing this stuff you missed in history class podcast. I discovered it about a year ago while living in Oxford, and it has made walking around much more interesting. While a graduate student in archaeology, I focused primarily on the Bronze Age in the Near East hints, I always enjoyed learning about things more recent and in other regions. I've been looking for a good reason to write you, and it finally came. My current university had a graduate student symposium a few weeks ago, and one of the art history presentations made me think of your podcast on redlining. While the presentation was more generally about photography and associated racial stereotypes of pre nineteen o six earthquake San Francisco Chinatown. It included a fascinating map of Chinatown before the earthquake, which she attached. The map demonstrated some of the same qualities as redlining and was used to try to convince the city council not to rebuild Chinatown after the earthquake. The map shows old Chinatown to essentially be a den of iniquity. The pink, yellow, green, and blue squares represent buildings containing Chinese gambling houses, opium dens, Chinese prostitution, and white prostitution, respectively. I found it interesting that Chinese and white prostitution were listed separate, Lee, indicating that those are perceived differently. I hope you also find this interesting. I'm sure as common as I'm sure it's common. I will now suggest a topic for the podcast, and she suggests this history of archaeology or history of museums, both of which sound very large, especially when visiting museums. I find myself conflicted. I enjoy what was collected by old European antiquarians, but I don't like the fact that they essentially spole material cultural history. I hope you both have good holidays. Sincerely, Jessica, thank you, so much, Jessica. I wanted to read this for two reasons. One as I am definitely interested anytime somebody sends me a new example we had not previously seen about the types of of efforts that we talked about in our Redlining podcasts. The other is that we have um. One of the one of the other pin boards that I have that I used to try to corral things has to do with repatriations, which is when um one nation and who has been having holding something in a museum or another collection repatriates it back to its country of origin. I didn't have as many of these that I found this year that we're interested to talk about, so we didn't have a section on that in today's podcast. But I definitely understand that conflict. Uh We earlier this year had an interview with folks from the Pbody Museum at Harvard talking about the search for the Harvard Indian School. I got to go to the Pbody Museum earlier this year, and at several points in the museum there are signs explaining how the museum has been working to try to contact the especially indigenous cultures that some of the artifacts came from, and returning those cultures returning those artifacts to their home cultures where it's appropriate and desired. Um. So there are several places within the museum that you see these little signs that say, this artifact that previously was on display here has been returned to these people for from this place, based on this which I wound up sort of going on a treasure hunt through the museum and reading all of these signs as part of what I was looking at. So thank you so much Jessica for writing to us. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, were history podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is miss the Hisstory dot tumbler dot com and are also on Pinterest at Pentriess dot com slash miss in history. If you would like to learn more about what we have talked about today, you can come to our parent company website, which is how stuff Works dot com and put the word serial killers in the search bar. You will find an article about how serial killers work. We only talked about one of those and on Earth Things that that is a pretty old favorite of people's morbid curiosity. I think you can also come to our website, which is miss in history dot com and find show notes for all the episodes. Holly and I have worked on an archive of every episode ever, so you can do all these wonderful things and a whole lot more. How stuff works dot com or missing history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works dot com. Mmmmmm