Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This is part two of our annual Unearthed Tradition. We've got a variety of things in this episode, including some fines from institutions, own collections, some exhumations, some repatriations, and a lot of prehistoric stuff. And then we're gonna finish off with some edibles and potables. Those are always favorite time. Now it's like exhamations and edibles are my two favorites. We're gonna start with two fines that have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that they're both women's graves. Researchers have confirmed that the body of a high ranking tenth century Viking warrior is female. The research, which was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, examined the skeletal remains of a warrior or that was buried with weapons, horses, a sword, armor, piercing arrows, and a gaming set, indicating that it belonged to an officer. So there were researchers who had previously suspected that this warrior was a woman based on bone morphology, and the research released this year confirmed that suspicion with the skeleton's DNA, which contained no Y chromosome. A couple of caveats though on this um. One is that there is an increasing body of evidence that the xx means female and x y means male model that most of us learned in elementary school is really oversimplified, and that there is a lot more to sex and gender than the simple presence or absence of a Y chromosome. And the other is that all we know about this person comes from their remains and their grave goods, which does not really tell us anything about how they saw themselves or much about how the world perceived them, right, so we have no idea how this person uh lived their life at all. It made me think of the sort of tragic stories that we have seen more recently in recent years, where someone like a transgendered person is buried according to the wishes of their family, with not the gender that they identified as. We have no way to know if any historical grave sites were part of the same kind of problem, right well, And then apart from all of that, some of the reporting on this find was really annoying. There was a lot of gloating along the lines of proving historians wrong on whether there were female Viking warriors. So, first of all, historians were part of this research. Yes, there have been historians who insisted that shield maidens were mythical and and not a role that women really played in the Viking world, but there were also historians who who argued the opposite. Aside from that, in any field, when somebody presents you with new evidence, being able to reassess and reevaluate your beliefs, that's an important thing. So they're like, there's the whole gloating strain of proving the historians wrong. Like that really got on my nerves. Well, it's weird, right, because most historians worth their salt will want to take in that new information. It's not like they're they're dug in and they're looking at evidence and going no, I don't believe that, right, They're like, oh, that's cool. Um. An excavation of a year old Chinese tomb has unearthed the collection of miniature looms, complete with tiny figures to work the looms. This sort of delights me, which I mean it completely delights me. This discovery was actually made in but the findings weren't published until seventeen. So these four model looms were in a compartment in the tomb of Wandanu, a woman who died in a bat about the age of fifty, and then along with the four looms were these fifteen painted miniatures. They are described in the write up of this find as four male weavers and nine female assistants. I'm guessing that is how weaving culture worked in uh In China thousands of years ago. Each of these figures is also marked with a unique name, so archaeologists think they might actually represent fifteen real weavers. They're also carved in positions that correspond to different parts of the weaving process. Aside from the inherently interesting tidbit of a woman being buried with sort of a dollhouse weaving factory in her tomb, which is a pretty great way to be buried in my book, archaeologists believe that full sized versions of the looms would have been capable of weaving patterns, and that suggests that such looms existed when the models were made and the woman was buried, which was sometime between a hundred and fifty seven and eighty eight BC. So now we're going to move on to things that people have found in their own collections. No shade to people who find things in their own collections. I'm not judging you. It happens all the time, but often when it does happen, it is either funny or particularly touching or serendipitous, like there's a lot going on. Yeah, I'll put in my little thing of you know, I worked in library cataloging for a very long time. We would often come across things in our stacks that were like, we have no record of this item, but it's marked as though we you know it was. It has an accession number that goes in our thing. We don't know what it is. It just happens when you're dealing with that kind of volume of stuff. Well, and also a lot of times there are things that were introduced in the collection decades ago. Whoever did that doesn't work here anymore. Well, and oftentimes those kinds of things are like part of an inherited lot, like someone leaves a library or a museum. They're cool collection of stuff and processing that is arduous and it's easy to miss things. So even if you have a success rate that's still a lot of errors, okay, So to get back to it. The National Museum of Scotland found a two thousand year old full length Egyptian mummy shroud in its collections. This had been in the collection for about eighty years and it was unearthed during this in depth stment sort of an audit of the museum's Egyptian holdings. It had been stored just wrapped in paper since the nineteen forties, so conservators had to very carefully rehumidify it before even being able to unfold and examine it. The shroud depicts the deceased person who was wrapped in it as the Goddess Cyrus, and curators have described it as a unique example of Roman era Egyptian burial shrouds. Uh. The University of Akron found a recording of what's known as the Hennonville Songs sung in Yiddish and German, and its collection of recordings from concentration camp survivors. These recordings were made by psychologist Dr David Voter at the end of World War Two, and this collection of recordings included songs and religious services and oral histories. Part of Voter's work has been archived at the University of Akron since the sixties, but it was only this year that this particular set of songs was found in a mislabeled container. The U S Holocaust Memorial in Washington, d C. Helped translate the recording and now there is a digital copy of those recordings in its collection. This is one of those recordings that people knew had been made, but they thought that it was lost, so they were really happy to discover that this copy survived in the collections. A special collections librarian at the University of Reading in England has found a previously unknown page of a medieval priest's handbook that was printed by William Caxton. This is a really rare find. Um it's it's you don't typically find previously unknown pieces of Caxton's work at this point, it's just too well documented. But in this case, a librarian back in twenty had pasted the page into another volume to try to stabilize its spine, and then from there this reinforced volume changed hands a few times before the university eventually bought it from a private collector. Hey, this is not a recommended way to use to handle print material. It dates back to the fourteen seventies. No, I've repaired library books. I've probably done something equally to live because you don't always understand the value of some of the things, you know, some of the things in your collection that look like trash and really are treasured. Yep, that's probably what happened here. So not exactly in their own collection, but along the same lines. The reemergence of a lost kind of an air quotes play by Edith Wharton made the rounds in May. This play, called Shadow of a Doubt, is one of Wharton's earlier works, and it's her only known finished play, but a lot of headlines that circulated about this made it sound like the play was a lot more lost than it really was. The manuscript was at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin, and it was included in the collections Finding Aid, but because the play was never actually performed, Wharton scholars didn't know to go looking for it. It had a scheduled performance in nineteen o one, but that was canceled for reasons that remain unclear. So scholars married Terry and Laura Ratu made the find after discovering a reference to the play in the New York Times online archive. Once they knew they was a play to go look for, they found it there and the Harry Ransom Center's collection listed in its finding aid. So the library knew about it, but scholars hadn't really acknowledged it because they didn't know too. They didn't know too. Yeah. Fascinating. Uh. This year has seen several stories about Indigenous persons remains being returned to their communities. So first, the remains of an Aboriginal Australian were returned and reburied this year after being found in nineteen seventy four and were kept for study at the Australian National University until two years ago. The university issued an official apology for the remains removal, and the Aboriginal community returned the remains to their forty two thousand year old resting place in a traditional ceremony on November seventeen. The remains of two Northern Arapaho boys, Little Chief and Horse, who died at Carlisle Indian School, who were finally returned to Win River Reservation in Wyoming, and they were buried at their family's cemetery in August. A third child Little Plume was also authorized to be returned to his family, but his remains couldn't actually be located in the Carlisle Indian Schools Cemetery. And this all came after about a year of active hearings and discussions with the Army, which has now taken over jurisdiction of the Carlisle Cemetery. And that year of activity followed about a decade of work and advocacy by family and tribal members, particularly Little Chief's great niece. So Little Chief, Little Plume, and Horse are hopefully the first three of an ongoing effort to return these children's bodies home. I will say I'm certain that there were attempts to have people's remains returned before this point, but like that year of dedicated activity, is the latest of that effort. Um The nine thousand year old remains, known as the Ancient One, also known as the Kennoic man Or returned to the Columbia Plateau and reburied in February. His remains had been found in a bank of the Columbia River in uh and they were one of the oldest and most complete human skeletons ever found in North America. The Columbia River tribes had expected that their request to have his remains returned to them would be honored under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of ninet but researchers argued that the remains weren't actually related to the indigenous peoples in the area. The remains were returned only after DNA tests confirmed that he was definitely an ancestor of the Columbia Plateau tribes. So those were a collection of remains human remains that were repatriated. We also have a whole bunch of objects that were recovered and repatriated, sometimes after having been recently stolen, sometimes after having been looted a long time ago. There's a lot um. So police and Italy recovered about two hundred Etruscan, Apuleian and Magna Gratia artifacts from the home of a former art dealer. These came from Illica at excavations in Puglia and Tuscany, and all of them were more than two thousand years old. The art dealer in question was eighty nine when all these looted artifacts were discovered in his home. He otherwise had no criminal record, and then the artifacts at that point were sent to a local museum, not quite determined what will happen with them from there. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned a stolen ancient Greek vase to Italy. The base depicts Dionysus riding in a cart pulled by a satyr and had been in the mets Greco Roman collection for more than twenty years. The museum had been informed that it was stolen in and after some back and forth, surrendered the vase to the Manhattan Day's Office after being issued a warrant. Four hundred Viking objects were stolen during a museum heist in Norway in August. Thieves entered the University Museum of Bergen via some scaffolding and they took the objects from temporary storage where they were waiting transfer into a more secure location, which was literally just a few days away. Doesn't make it seem like an inside. It definitely seemed like that to me. But I don't know yet. We're just armchair in that. We do have no information. Uh. Two men were arrested in connection with the theft in November, with at least some of the four items recovered. Yeah, that reporting on the two men being arrested did not say whether they worked at the museum or they knew someone who worked at the museum had knowledge that this giant collection of artifacts was just easily accessible via some scaffolding anyway. A glass spearhead was both found and returned on Rottnest Island in Australia. Students from the University of Western Australia were on a site visit there when one of them saw something sparkling on the ground, which turned out to be a bright green glass arrowhead that was likely at least a hundred years old. So the students reburied the arrowhead that they found, following an Aboriginal tradition of keeping the artifacts at their resting place. The Arts and Crafts retail chain hobby Lobby agreed to pay a million dollar fine and fourfeit thousands of artifacts that were smuggled into the United States. These artifacts included cylinder seals, clay tablets, and cuneiform blocks originally from a rock. They were purchased in the United Arab Emirates and labeled as things like quote ceramic tiles and clay tiles with sample in parentheses in shipping documents that they that were attached to them as they made their way to the US. In a statement, Hobby Lobby said that it was new to the process of acquiring these kinds of items and had made quote some regrettable mistakes. The Just Justice Department, on the other hand, countered that their buying process was quote fraught with red flags that should have been obvious. We're gonna go to a sponsor break. Returning from sponsor break, We're going to spend a little time, just a little time talking about privies and toilets. Yea, there was one unearthed here where I don't remember. It was like they found a toilet at Hadrian's Wall or somewhere, and I'm pretty sure it was Hadrian's Wall. The archaeologist was such a hoot that now every time I come across some weird toilet unearthing, I want to put it in. Archaeologists in Denmark found a two meter deep hole that turned out to be a privy, and it is possibly the oldest privy in Denmark. It is also shifting the way the archaeologists think that vikings approached the bathroom. They had previously thought that toilets were only really found in cities with country dwelling people using their feces as fertilizer, much like they did with livestock. The thought here was that they would just go squat in the barn where the animals went and put it all together. Uh. This privy, though, was out in the country, so at least some people were not doing this with their own waist. They were probably labeled as the pressy ones. I'm completely making that up. Don't anybody take that to heart. Apart from this potential revision in how people lived, the human waste preserved at the bottom of the privy is of course shedding some light about what people ate, most notably honey since it contains pollen. Also, we don't have a lot of details to contribute, but I just thought it was funny that crews working at Paul Revere's home in Massachusetts found what they believe to be his privy. In September, a team in Young Jews, South Korea, found an eighth century flush toilet. It also connected to a draining system, and it was housed within a bathroom structure. This is a first for so long ago in South Korea. Yeah, there are plenty of other South Korean privies that are older than that, but like a flesh toilet in a bathroom enclosure, that's the first for something from the eighth century. Uh So we have a number of things that are loosely connected into prehistoric updates. This year, according to Arian Burke at the University of Montreal, humans made their way into North America across the Barring Street about ten thousand years earlier than previously thought, and that fine. We used the date from about fourteen thousand years before the present to about twenty four thousand years before the present. That is thanks to more than two years of work at precisely dating artifacts from the Blue Fish River in northern Yukon near the Alaska border. Most of the artifacts are animal bones, some of which have marks suggesting that humans cut them with stone tools. This actually came close to confirming the hypothesis of Jacques sanc Mouse, who originally unearthed these artifacts in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. Using radio carbon dating. He had placed the arrival of humans in the region as thirty thousand years before the present, but at that time that was a really radical idea and no one really took him seriously. Those latest findings were published in the Journal plus one. If you are wondering if that contradicts the finding we were talking about about indigenous people having lived in an area since it was settled that was a slightly different part of North America, then this part is. Last year we talked about a couple of newly hypothesized Neanderthal behaviors, including collecting mag manganese, act side pigment and using toothpicks. This year we have added some more. According to findings published in a French journal in January, they may also have collected rocks just because they were interesting rocks. I like sparkly things. I understand this impulse. Uh. In this case, it is a limestone rock found in a sandstone cave in Croatia. It's not similar to the cave's geology, and its shape doesn't suggest that it was used as any sort of tool. There's a whole lot of conversation and the press release about this of the research is being like, yah, just a cool looking rock, Like it's like a brown rock with black veins running through it, then look like anything else in the cave. We think they just thought it was cool. Uh. In a separate study of Neanderthal toothplaque. Neanderthal's and the el cider own cave in Spain were discovered to have eaten mushrooms, moss, and pine nuts, but not really meat. That they also probably used molds and plants as medicine, and then based on analysis of their microbiomes, they might have been intimate with humans, including kissing. It is not news that humans and Neanderthals were intimate with each other, like there's a plenty of research about that, uh, But the fact that now there's some evidence of specifically kissing nice uh. And Neanderthals made glue specifically two hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthals made spears by using a glue to affix a point to a shaft. The new finding isn't the glue itself, but how they made it. Researchers figured out three different ways to extract tar from birch bark, one of them requiring only a roll of bark and an open fire. They don't know specifically which one Neanderthals might have been using, but they all had assumed that it would be a whole lot harder to get the glue out of the bark than actually turned out to be. Uh. We have. This is uh, this whole next thing we're gonna talk about is something I just found fascinating. Back in two thousand and five, archaeologists sink Freed Kurts found a golden brooch in a plowed field. This field was adjacent to a prehistoric hill fort that locals had known about for centuries, but which really hadn't been excavated until the nineteen fifties. There's nineteen fifties excavations had not yielded many artifacts, but after Kurtz's two thousand five discovery, he led another one that unearthed a child's grave and a bigger burial chamber. Worried that field cultivation would destroy the burial chamber, Kurts and his team led an effort to cut the entire eighty eight tons section out of the field. This massive piece of earth and whatever was in it was dubbed Kelton Block, and it was removed from the area in from their research into what it contained was conducted in a lab in the German state of Baden Wurtemburg. That's what I think is amazing, Like, we're afraid something's going to happen to this archaeological fine, so let's just cut the entire thing, like a giant piece of earth away somewhere else. Move it so. Findings from the Kelton Block project were published in the journal Antiquity in February. Inside this block was the timber burial chamber, belonging to a woman who was from an elite class of Central Europs Halstat culture. She might have been a priestess, but based on the artifacts they found with her, her body was adorned with all kinds of jewelry, including pieces made from gold, jet and amber. There were also furs and textiles and ornaments made from bors, tusts, and all of this is quite old. The trees that were used in the timber walls of the burial chamber date back to about five eighty three b C. And it's likely that we can think the nearby Danube River for how well preserved this find was. Regular flooding of the site seems to have preserved the timbers, and much the same way that seawater can help preserve shipwrecks. It's time for a little bit on UTSI, not a lot, still little. A little analysis of ut C the ice man's stomach contents suggests that his last meal was dried goat meat, which oddly researcher Albert Zinc described in interviews as bacon. I feel like maybe the bacon talk was to make the internet more interested in it, because bacon is not made of those ingredients, but it is delicious. People are excited by it, so I can understand it's a little license to garner some interest in in research. Yeah. So uh. We found a lot of news about ancient Mesoamerica this year, and findings published in February and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by University of Arizona archaeologists Takeshi and Amada describes an increasingly clearer understanding of exactly what caused the Maya civilization to collapse in Guatemala. These findings, they're based on more than a decade of work and a hundred and fifty four radio carbon dates, and they suggest that the civilizations to major collapses, which are known as the pre Classic and the Classic, followed very similar but highly complex patterns. In the case of both the pre Classic collapse in the second century and the Classic collapse in the ninth century, the Maya civilization went through periods of warfare, social instability, and political crisis, all and sometimes overlapping waves which ultimately led to the fall and desertion of the civilization's urban centers. Also connected to the Maya civilization, a team using light Detection and Ranging or LIGHTER has mapped a massive road network connected to the Maya settlement of El Mirador. Researchers have known about these roads since the nineteen sixties, because the first comprehensive map of the area so far, it maps more than four and thirty square miles of the Mirador basin, documenting seventeen different roads, along with canals, corrals, and other structures. To connect this to our previous unearthing, the team is hoping this comprehensive map will help provide a better understanding of exactly why the city of El Merador declined in the second century and in Aztec news, researchers have long been trying to pinpoint the cause of a great plague known as the Coco Leslie, which swept through the Aztec world in the mid to late sixteenth century, so not quite as long ago as the Maya civilization. This pestilence killed about eighty percent of the population in the years after the arrival of the Spanish. Research published in February points to a unique strain of salmonella, and there's some suggestion that it may have originated in Europe, but that is extremely preliminary. And now to move from Mesoamerica to farther south into South America, it's really easy to imagine the Amazonian rainforest as this pristine ecosystem that was never really affected by human influence until the modern area era, with deforestation a comparatively recent threat. But according to findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, at one point parts of what's now Brazil were already deforested and home to mound building people's who made massive geoglyphs that were eventually grown over and only very recently revealed. These are huge earthworks. The site examined in the paper spans about thirteen thousand square kilometers and it combines both ditches and mounds that were created about two thousand years ago, and they have found more than four hundred fifty of them. There's no indication that they were settlements or defensive structures, so the going hypothesis is that they were for ceremonial or ritual use. It took some effort to figure out whether this area was forested when the mounds were built. Seems like it would have been harder to do it if it were. They basically had to reconstruct the whole history of the vegetation and the periodic fires that swept through the area. It's a little early to draw concrete conclusions, but the evidence suggests that the indigenous people who built these structures were also practicing a form of forestry and vegetation management, carefully shaping the bamboo forests while also creating cultivated forests that had a higher than normal density of more valuable tree species. Apart from these earthworks, a completely different team looking at biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest came to the same basic conclusions. In a study co authored by the Field Museum, researchers looked at more than one thousand forest surveys and analyze them based on their proximity to archaeological sites. They found that there were more domesticated species of trees in parts of the Amazon basin previously believed to have been pristine and untouched by man. Yes, so, the reason that there are so many of these amazing trees that a lot of them produce fruits and nuts and things like that that people use the day because people literally planted them there on purpose. They didn't just grow there and to a lush resource on their own. We've got a couple of discoveries that have been unearthed by nature this year. Twenty eleven wildfire in the Oshaki Wilderness in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming unearthed a wealth of artifacts dating back to before the arrival of Europeans in that part of North America. These artifacts were discovered this year even though the fire happened back in eleven, because that's when the trails through the area were reopened. Although this area was probably used by indigenous peoples at various points for thousands of years, most of these artifacts are three four hundred years old. They include bone tools, projectile points, knives, and ceramics. These artifacts connect to the two Kadika people, whose descendants include the Shoshoni, Bannock and Eastern Shoshoni tribes, and the find is giving archaeologists a rare glimpse at such a huge site at such a high elevation. Also unearthed by nature, Hurricane Irma unearthed a log canoe in September, and research that has gone on in the following months have revealed some really contradictory results about this canoe. Basically, somebody saw the canoe there on the beach and went, WHOA, this is something important, we should save it. A lot of work has been done on it since then, So there's a fifty percent chance that the tree that was cut down to make this canoe was felled somewhere between sixteen forty and sixteen eighty, but there's a thirty seven percent chance that it came down much later, between seventeen sixty and eighteen eighteen. So that's a big disparity and when the tree might have been cut down. Plus, there are paint, wire and nails used in the canoe that suggests that it's more recent than that. So it's possible that the canoe itself was very old and then was used and modified long after its original construction. At this point, though, it's still kind of a mystery. I wonder if it could also be a case where the tree came down and then wasn't used for a long time. That also might work. Uh. In somewhat similar news, tropical storm Ophelia unearthed iron age human remains in coastal Ireland, and we're gonna get to some exclamations that people carried out rather than storms. After a quick sponsor break, Judy Garland's remains were exhumed from New York and moved to a mausoleum in Los Angeles in January. Garland's children live in southern California, and they wanted her near them. This simultaneously annoyed at least one Garland fan who had bought a plot in her prior resting place of Ferncliff Cemetery to be near her. According to the Ferncliff Cemetery manager, that was like I found several articles that were about the relocation of Judy Garland's remains, and then this one that was like this one person who literally bought his or her, I don't know, owned plot in that cemetery is now irritated that they don't get to be buried near Judy Garland anymore. Sorry, buddy, yeah, or lady. I don't know. That seems like a weird bet heage, but sure, what do I know? So headless corpse has been exhumed from a leadline coffin in a mausoleum near Inverness, Scotland, to try to determine whether it is the body of Simon Fraser, the eleventh Lord love It So. Lord Lovett was executed in seventy seven, and although official reports maintained that his body stayed at the Tower of London, there have been claims that he was returned to the Scottish Highlands and laid to resting Kirkhill. This exhamation has a connection to pop culture. Simon Fraser is in the fictional world of Outlander books and TV series, the grandfather of James Fraser. I mean, Jamie, I haven't watched it. Well it's I'm gonna say, uh, I'm not spoiling anything. The most recent UH season veered into some ridiculousness. I haven't read the books, so I was not prepared for it. But I was like, what is going on now? Anyway? Uh, we can have a side podcast that Tracy is a funnlement with Outlander um. Spain's parliament voted to exhume the remains of fascist dictator Francisco Franco and relocate them out of a state funded mausoleum. Back in May, I didn't find a report that the exhimation reinterment had actually been performed, though just that Parliament had voted on it. This is connected to an overall movement to try to turn that mausoleum site into a memorial for the Spanish Civil War. Along the same theme. In previous editions of Unearthed, we've talked about the exhimations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and efforts to identify remains and return them to family members. Much of that had been spearheaded in Catalonia, and on October Spain ended Catalonian self rule, with Madrid now controlling the Catalan administration. The organizations working on these efforts have expressed concerns about whether they will be allowed to continue. Yeah, that still seems maybe preliminary. I don't know enough about the political situation in Spain to know how how like Leader is to continue or not. But it is a thing that is connected to previous episodes that we've talked about and the people are worried about now. And we are going to wrap up this on Earth Year with some edibles and potables and the containers that they go in in the Coma land region in northern Ghana, uh One of the artifacts that people have found a whole lot of are these little, often hollow terra cotta terra cotta figurines. Hundreds of these figurines have been excavated in the area over the years, made by an unknown pre colonial people in dating back more than a thousand years. So a lot of the research into these figurines has looked at the figures themselves, what they're wearing, what they may represent, what they might indicate about the people who had made and used them. Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in March looked instead at what the figurines contained. Using DNA analysis, they found traces of banana and plantain, pine and grasses, many of which are not native to Ghana. So the researchers suggests that these figurines had a ritual use, with banana and pine brought into the region through trade with Northern Africa. This speaks to the complexity of the society that was using these figurines and its interconnectedness with other parts of the continent. Moving on crossrail tends to unearth all kinds of things which have been making regular appearances in an unearthed since which is the first time that Holly and I did this as host on the show. This time, excavations at the Tottenham Court Road Crossrail site unearthed more than thirteen thousand condiment jars, many of them quite well preserved and still intact. These would have been used for pickles, jams, mustards, marmalade's and other food stuffs. These jars and bottles date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and they were found in a cistern at what had been across in Blackwell Factory. Cross and Blackwell has been making condiments and other food products since seventeen oh six. In the years since the site stopped being a condiment factory, it had at one point become a nightclub the historia. Although the jars made all the headlines, archaeologists also unearthed kilns, furnaces, and refrigerators at the site. It's quite a lot of jars. Researchers from Tomsk State University found a sixteenth century roasted turnip while excavating a house in southwestern Siberia. This house is part of a military settlement that was established in fifteen ninety four, and this particular house was destroyed in a fire. The turnip was found in a pot, and researchers concluded that it had been stored there after the harvest, so that pot was for storage, not for cooking, and that the heat from the house fire is what baked it within the pot. I don't know why this just makes me giggle. I think because turnip is inherently a funny word. The idea that, like weird and catastrophic events, actually cooked food by accident, yeah, also funny. Also found at this site various imported glassware and a pair of woman's knit stockings another edible. Research from Illinois from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey has challenged the assumption that people living along the Mississippi River in Illinois were eating maize thousands of years ago. Previously, researchers thought that maize was grown and eaten in the area as far back as sixty b C, long before it became a staple around the year one thousand. The team did find plenty of corn cobs and kernels, and evidence of corn consumption in bones and teeth, but all of this dates back to only the year one thousand or later. This shift comes from a combination of better dating methods and cases of mistaken identity. Using multiple types of mass spectrometry, researchers realized that plant fragments previously identified as corn we're not actually corn, and in some cases were some other grass because corn is grass, bless you. Renovation workers in New Jersey found what's probably the largest and oldest madeira collection in the United States. These were found during a renovation at Liberty Hall Museum. They were hidden behind a plaster and plywood wall that was put up during Prohibition. Staff knew there was a wine cellar hidden back there, but it turned out to be a lot bigger and better stock than they expected, with more than fifty bottles, some dating back to the seventeen nineties and other wine news. A team testing residues in a copper age storage pot from Italy found evidence of wine. This goes back to about three thousand BC and is now the oldest evidence of wine in the Italian Peninsula. Conservators in Antarctica found an almost edible in quotes fruit cake in a building constructed by an eighteen ninety nine Norwegian expedition. That fruitcake is a hundred and six years old and was probably brought to the building by Robert Falcons Dots expedition in The fruitcake was wrapped in paper and stored in a tin, and Lizzie Meek of the Antarctic Heritage Trust described it as looking and smelling edible, apart from a slight rancid butter smell. I would just like to question whether anything that smells like rancid butter seems edible. I guess it depends on the strength of your gut microbes. Our last entry is notable not for what was in the vessel, but for what was on it. A team in Turkey claims to have found the oldest smiley face in the world. The smiley faces we know it with two dots for eyes and a swoop of a mouth, has generally been dated back to just the nineteen sixties, but a team excavating a Hittite settlement found a jar dating back to seventeen hundred b C. That has what definitely looks like a smiley face. If it turns out to be legitimate and not a coincidence or a later edition by someone who is trying to be cute, it would be the oldest only face in the world. It definitely looked like looks like somebody took their finger and went I eye mouth but you know, and then and then they also keep on trucking, have a nice day on there now. But simultaneously though, like we are trained to see faces and patterns and things. So it's I am I'm putting a little grain of song with this. But at the same time it does kind of delight me that maybe there is a jar from s s got will smiley faced John on there with somebody's finger. Yeah, I love it. Hey, do you have a listener mail to wrap up Unearthed for this round? I sure do you. This is another one going back to our aber Van disaster episode. Is it is not a particularly sad one. Now. This is from Anne and says, I was just listening to your podcast on the aber Van disaster and it made me think of the Frank slide and baby. This land slide buried half a mining town and it is the deadliest slide in Canadian history. Okay, that part is terrible. What makes this one a little interesting is the story of the Frank Slide baby, who apparently was thrown from her home and survived the slide because she had landed on a pile of hay that was also thrown by the force of the slide. In addition, this mountain, even before the mining occurred, was considered dangerous by the indigenous population, who mostly stayed away from it, calling it the mountain that walks. As you said, most mining accidents are all the same as and has a few interesting aspects to it. Maybe one day you can do a show on it. Thanks for all the learning, and thank you Anne for uh that email that has both a sad part and a kind of happy part with the baby uh. And thank you everyone who was has joined us for our unearthed episodes this year. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We are all over social media at the user name missed in History, so our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, those are almost in history. Uh. You can come to our website which is missed in history dot com and find an archive of all the episode we have ever done and show notes for all the episodes Holly and I have ever done together. That will have a gigantic list of literally not all the six centers in something things, not all the six centered and something pins from our unearthed pincers pinterest board, but all of the articles that went into this two part podcast will be on there. Uh you so come and see us missing history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Doesn't house to works dot com

Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This is part two of our annual Unearthed Tradition. We've got a variety of things in this episode, including some fines from institutions, own collections, some exhumations, some repatriations, and a lot of prehistoric stuff. And then we're gonna finish off with some edibles and potables. Those are always favorite time. Now it's like exhamations and edibles are my two favorites. We're gonna start with two fines that have nothing to do with each other except for the fact that they're both women's graves. Researchers have confirmed that the body of a high ranking tenth century Viking warrior is female. The research, which was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, examined the skeletal remains of a warrior or that was buried with weapons, horses, a sword, armor, piercing arrows, and a gaming set, indicating that it belonged to an officer. So there were researchers who had previously suspected that this warrior was a woman based on bone morphology, and the research released this year confirmed that suspicion with the skeleton's DNA, which contained no Y chromosome. A couple of caveats though on this um. One is that there is an increasing body of evidence that the xx means female and x y means male model that most of us learned in elementary school is really oversimplified, and that there is a lot more to sex and gender than the simple presence or absence of a Y chromosome. And the other is that all we know about this person comes from their remains and their grave goods, which does not really tell us anything about how they saw themselves or much about how the world perceived them, right, so we have no idea how this person uh lived their life at all. It made me think of the sort of tragic stories that we have seen more recently in recent years, where someone like a transgendered person is buried according to the wishes of their family, with not the gender that they identified as. We have no way to know if any historical grave sites were part of the same kind of problem, right well, And then apart from all of that, some of the reporting on this find was really annoying. There was a lot of gloating along the lines of proving historians wrong on whether there were female Viking warriors. So, first of all, historians were part of this research. Yes, there have been historians who insisted that shield maidens were mythical and and not a role that women really played in the Viking world, but there were also historians who who argued the opposite. Aside from that, in any field, when somebody presents you with new evidence, being able to reassess and reevaluate your beliefs, that's an important thing. So they're like, there's the whole gloating strain of proving the historians wrong. Like that really got on my nerves. Well, it's weird, right, because most historians worth their salt will want to take in that new information. It's not like they're they're dug in and they're looking at evidence and going no, I don't believe that, right, They're like, oh, that's cool. Um. An excavation of a year old Chinese tomb has unearthed the collection of miniature looms, complete with tiny figures to work the looms. This sort of delights me, which I mean it completely delights me. This discovery was actually made in but the findings weren't published until seventeen. So these four model looms were in a compartment in the tomb of Wandanu, a woman who died in a bat about the age of fifty, and then along with the four looms were these fifteen painted miniatures. They are described in the write up of this find as four male weavers and nine female assistants. I'm guessing that is how weaving culture worked in uh In China thousands of years ago. Each of these figures is also marked with a unique name, so archaeologists think they might actually represent fifteen real weavers. They're also carved in positions that correspond to different parts of the weaving process. Aside from the inherently interesting tidbit of a woman being buried with sort of a dollhouse weaving factory in her tomb, which is a pretty great way to be buried in my book, archaeologists believe that full sized versions of the looms would have been capable of weaving patterns, and that suggests that such looms existed when the models were made and the woman was buried, which was sometime between a hundred and fifty seven and eighty eight BC. So now we're going to move on to things that people have found in their own collections. No shade to people who find things in their own collections. I'm not judging you. It happens all the time, but often when it does happen, it is either funny or particularly touching or serendipitous, like there's a lot going on. Yeah, I'll put in my little thing of you know, I worked in library cataloging for a very long time. We would often come across things in our stacks that were like, we have no record of this item, but it's marked as though we you know it was. It has an accession number that goes in our thing. We don't know what it is. It just happens when you're dealing with that kind of volume of stuff. Well, and also a lot of times there are things that were introduced in the collection decades ago. Whoever did that doesn't work here anymore. Well, and oftentimes those kinds of things are like part of an inherited lot, like someone leaves a library or a museum. They're cool collection of stuff and processing that is arduous and it's easy to miss things. So even if you have a success rate that's still a lot of errors, okay, So to get back to it. The National Museum of Scotland found a two thousand year old full length Egyptian mummy shroud in its collections. This had been in the collection for about eighty years and it was unearthed during this in depth stment sort of an audit of the museum's Egyptian holdings. It had been stored just wrapped in paper since the nineteen forties, so conservators had to very carefully rehumidify it before even being able to unfold and examine it. The shroud depicts the deceased person who was wrapped in it as the Goddess Cyrus, and curators have described it as a unique example of Roman era Egyptian burial shrouds. Uh. The University of Akron found a recording of what's known as the Hennonville Songs sung in Yiddish and German, and its collection of recordings from concentration camp survivors. These recordings were made by psychologist Dr David Voter at the end of World War Two, and this collection of recordings included songs and religious services and oral histories. Part of Voter's work has been archived at the University of Akron since the sixties, but it was only this year that this particular set of songs was found in a mislabeled container. The U S Holocaust Memorial in Washington, d C. Helped translate the recording and now there is a digital copy of those recordings in its collection. This is one of those recordings that people knew had been made, but they thought that it was lost, so they were really happy to discover that this copy survived in the collections. A special collections librarian at the University of Reading in England has found a previously unknown page of a medieval priest's handbook that was printed by William Caxton. This is a really rare find. Um it's it's you don't typically find previously unknown pieces of Caxton's work at this point, it's just too well documented. But in this case, a librarian back in twenty had pasted the page into another volume to try to stabilize its spine, and then from there this reinforced volume changed hands a few times before the university eventually bought it from a private collector. Hey, this is not a recommended way to use to handle print material. It dates back to the fourteen seventies. No, I've repaired library books. I've probably done something equally to live because you don't always understand the value of some of the things, you know, some of the things in your collection that look like trash and really are treasured. Yep, that's probably what happened here. So not exactly in their own collection, but along the same lines. The reemergence of a lost kind of an air quotes play by Edith Wharton made the rounds in May. This play, called Shadow of a Doubt, is one of Wharton's earlier works, and it's her only known finished play, but a lot of headlines that circulated about this made it sound like the play was a lot more lost than it really was. The manuscript was at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin, and it was included in the collections Finding Aid, but because the play was never actually performed, Wharton scholars didn't know to go looking for it. It had a scheduled performance in nineteen o one, but that was canceled for reasons that remain unclear. So scholars married Terry and Laura Ratu made the find after discovering a reference to the play in the New York Times online archive. Once they knew they was a play to go look for, they found it there and the Harry Ransom Center's collection listed in its finding aid. So the library knew about it, but scholars hadn't really acknowledged it because they didn't know too. They didn't know too. Yeah. Fascinating. Uh. This year has seen several stories about Indigenous persons remains being returned to their communities. So first, the remains of an Aboriginal Australian were returned and reburied this year after being found in nineteen seventy four and were kept for study at the Australian National University until two years ago. The university issued an official apology for the remains removal, and the Aboriginal community returned the remains to their forty two thousand year old resting place in a traditional ceremony on November seventeen. The remains of two Northern Arapaho boys, Little Chief and Horse, who died at Carlisle Indian School, who were finally returned to Win River Reservation in Wyoming, and they were buried at their family's cemetery in August. A third child Little Plume was also authorized to be returned to his family, but his remains couldn't actually be located in the Carlisle Indian Schools Cemetery. And this all came after about a year of active hearings and discussions with the Army, which has now taken over jurisdiction of the Carlisle Cemetery. And that year of activity followed about a decade of work and advocacy by family and tribal members, particularly Little Chief's great niece. So Little Chief, Little Plume, and Horse are hopefully the first three of an ongoing effort to return these children's bodies home. I will say I'm certain that there were attempts to have people's remains returned before this point, but like that year of dedicated activity, is the latest of that effort. Um The nine thousand year old remains, known as the Ancient One, also known as the Kennoic man Or returned to the Columbia Plateau and reburied in February. His remains had been found in a bank of the Columbia River in uh and they were one of the oldest and most complete human skeletons ever found in North America. The Columbia River tribes had expected that their request to have his remains returned to them would be honored under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of ninet but researchers argued that the remains weren't actually related to the indigenous peoples in the area. The remains were returned only after DNA tests confirmed that he was definitely an ancestor of the Columbia Plateau tribes. So those were a collection of remains human remains that were repatriated. We also have a whole bunch of objects that were recovered and repatriated, sometimes after having been recently stolen, sometimes after having been looted a long time ago. There's a lot um. So police and Italy recovered about two hundred Etruscan, Apuleian and Magna Gratia artifacts from the home of a former art dealer. These came from Illica at excavations in Puglia and Tuscany, and all of them were more than two thousand years old. The art dealer in question was eighty nine when all these looted artifacts were discovered in his home. He otherwise had no criminal record, and then the artifacts at that point were sent to a local museum, not quite determined what will happen with them from there. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned a stolen ancient Greek vase to Italy. The base depicts Dionysus riding in a cart pulled by a satyr and had been in the mets Greco Roman collection for more than twenty years. The museum had been informed that it was stolen in and after some back and forth, surrendered the vase to the Manhattan Day's Office after being issued a warrant. Four hundred Viking objects were stolen during a museum heist in Norway in August. Thieves entered the University Museum of Bergen via some scaffolding and they took the objects from temporary storage where they were waiting transfer into a more secure location, which was literally just a few days away. Doesn't make it seem like an inside. It definitely seemed like that to me. But I don't know yet. We're just armchair in that. We do have no information. Uh. Two men were arrested in connection with the theft in November, with at least some of the four items recovered. Yeah, that reporting on the two men being arrested did not say whether they worked at the museum or they knew someone who worked at the museum had knowledge that this giant collection of artifacts was just easily accessible via some scaffolding anyway. A glass spearhead was both found and returned on Rottnest Island in Australia. Students from the University of Western Australia were on a site visit there when one of them saw something sparkling on the ground, which turned out to be a bright green glass arrowhead that was likely at least a hundred years old. So the students reburied the arrowhead that they found, following an Aboriginal tradition of keeping the artifacts at their resting place. The Arts and Crafts retail chain hobby Lobby agreed to pay a million dollar fine and fourfeit thousands of artifacts that were smuggled into the United States. These artifacts included cylinder seals, clay tablets, and cuneiform blocks originally from a rock. They were purchased in the United Arab Emirates and labeled as things like quote ceramic tiles and clay tiles with sample in parentheses in shipping documents that they that were attached to them as they made their way to the US. In a statement, Hobby Lobby said that it was new to the process of acquiring these kinds of items and had made quote some regrettable mistakes. The Just Justice Department, on the other hand, countered that their buying process was quote fraught with red flags that should have been obvious. We're gonna go to a sponsor break. Returning from sponsor break, We're going to spend a little time, just a little time talking about privies and toilets. Yea, there was one unearthed here where I don't remember. It was like they found a toilet at Hadrian's Wall or somewhere, and I'm pretty sure it was Hadrian's Wall. The archaeologist was such a hoot that now every time I come across some weird toilet unearthing, I want to put it in. Archaeologists in Denmark found a two meter deep hole that turned out to be a privy, and it is possibly the oldest privy in Denmark. It is also shifting the way the archaeologists think that vikings approached the bathroom. They had previously thought that toilets were only really found in cities with country dwelling people using their feces as fertilizer, much like they did with livestock. The thought here was that they would just go squat in the barn where the animals went and put it all together. Uh. This privy, though, was out in the country, so at least some people were not doing this with their own waist. They were probably labeled as the pressy ones. I'm completely making that up. Don't anybody take that to heart. Apart from this potential revision in how people lived, the human waste preserved at the bottom of the privy is of course shedding some light about what people ate, most notably honey since it contains pollen. Also, we don't have a lot of details to contribute, but I just thought it was funny that crews working at Paul Revere's home in Massachusetts found what they believe to be his privy. In September, a team in Young Jews, South Korea, found an eighth century flush toilet. It also connected to a draining system, and it was housed within a bathroom structure. This is a first for so long ago in South Korea. Yeah, there are plenty of other South Korean privies that are older than that, but like a flesh toilet in a bathroom enclosure, that's the first for something from the eighth century. Uh So we have a number of things that are loosely connected into prehistoric updates. This year, according to Arian Burke at the University of Montreal, humans made their way into North America across the Barring Street about ten thousand years earlier than previously thought, and that fine. We used the date from about fourteen thousand years before the present to about twenty four thousand years before the present. That is thanks to more than two years of work at precisely dating artifacts from the Blue Fish River in northern Yukon near the Alaska border. Most of the artifacts are animal bones, some of which have marks suggesting that humans cut them with stone tools. This actually came close to confirming the hypothesis of Jacques sanc Mouse, who originally unearthed these artifacts in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. Using radio carbon dating. He had placed the arrival of humans in the region as thirty thousand years before the present, but at that time that was a really radical idea and no one really took him seriously. Those latest findings were published in the Journal plus one. If you are wondering if that contradicts the finding we were talking about about indigenous people having lived in an area since it was settled that was a slightly different part of North America, then this part is. Last year we talked about a couple of newly hypothesized Neanderthal behaviors, including collecting mag manganese, act side pigment and using toothpicks. This year we have added some more. According to findings published in a French journal in January, they may also have collected rocks just because they were interesting rocks. I like sparkly things. I understand this impulse. Uh. In this case, it is a limestone rock found in a sandstone cave in Croatia. It's not similar to the cave's geology, and its shape doesn't suggest that it was used as any sort of tool. There's a whole lot of conversation and the press release about this of the research is being like, yah, just a cool looking rock, Like it's like a brown rock with black veins running through it, then look like anything else in the cave. We think they just thought it was cool. Uh. In a separate study of Neanderthal toothplaque. Neanderthal's and the el cider own cave in Spain were discovered to have eaten mushrooms, moss, and pine nuts, but not really meat. That they also probably used molds and plants as medicine, and then based on analysis of their microbiomes, they might have been intimate with humans, including kissing. It is not news that humans and Neanderthals were intimate with each other, like there's a plenty of research about that, uh, But the fact that now there's some evidence of specifically kissing nice uh. And Neanderthals made glue specifically two hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthals made spears by using a glue to affix a point to a shaft. The new finding isn't the glue itself, but how they made it. Researchers figured out three different ways to extract tar from birch bark, one of them requiring only a roll of bark and an open fire. They don't know specifically which one Neanderthals might have been using, but they all had assumed that it would be a whole lot harder to get the glue out of the bark than actually turned out to be. Uh. We have. This is uh, this whole next thing we're gonna talk about is something I just found fascinating. Back in two thousand and five, archaeologists sink Freed Kurts found a golden brooch in a plowed field. This field was adjacent to a prehistoric hill fort that locals had known about for centuries, but which really hadn't been excavated until the nineteen fifties. There's nineteen fifties excavations had not yielded many artifacts, but after Kurtz's two thousand five discovery, he led another one that unearthed a child's grave and a bigger burial chamber. Worried that field cultivation would destroy the burial chamber, Kurts and his team led an effort to cut the entire eighty eight tons section out of the field. This massive piece of earth and whatever was in it was dubbed Kelton Block, and it was removed from the area in from their research into what it contained was conducted in a lab in the German state of Baden Wurtemburg. That's what I think is amazing, Like, we're afraid something's going to happen to this archaeological fine, so let's just cut the entire thing, like a giant piece of earth away somewhere else. Move it so. Findings from the Kelton Block project were published in the journal Antiquity in February. Inside this block was the timber burial chamber, belonging to a woman who was from an elite class of Central Europs Halstat culture. She might have been a priestess, but based on the artifacts they found with her, her body was adorned with all kinds of jewelry, including pieces made from gold, jet and amber. There were also furs and textiles and ornaments made from bors, tusts, and all of this is quite old. The trees that were used in the timber walls of the burial chamber date back to about five eighty three b C. And it's likely that we can think the nearby Danube River for how well preserved this find was. Regular flooding of the site seems to have preserved the timbers, and much the same way that seawater can help preserve shipwrecks. It's time for a little bit on UTSI, not a lot, still little. A little analysis of ut C the ice man's stomach contents suggests that his last meal was dried goat meat, which oddly researcher Albert Zinc described in interviews as bacon. I feel like maybe the bacon talk was to make the internet more interested in it, because bacon is not made of those ingredients, but it is delicious. People are excited by it, so I can understand it's a little license to garner some interest in in research. Yeah. So uh. We found a lot of news about ancient Mesoamerica this year, and findings published in February and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by University of Arizona archaeologists Takeshi and Amada describes an increasingly clearer understanding of exactly what caused the Maya civilization to collapse in Guatemala. These findings, they're based on more than a decade of work and a hundred and fifty four radio carbon dates, and they suggest that the civilizations to major collapses, which are known as the pre Classic and the Classic, followed very similar but highly complex patterns. In the case of both the pre Classic collapse in the second century and the Classic collapse in the ninth century, the Maya civilization went through periods of warfare, social instability, and political crisis, all and sometimes overlapping waves which ultimately led to the fall and desertion of the civilization's urban centers. Also connected to the Maya civilization, a team using light Detection and Ranging or LIGHTER has mapped a massive road network connected to the Maya settlement of El Mirador. Researchers have known about these roads since the nineteen sixties, because the first comprehensive map of the area so far, it maps more than four and thirty square miles of the Mirador basin, documenting seventeen different roads, along with canals, corrals, and other structures. To connect this to our previous unearthing, the team is hoping this comprehensive map will help provide a better understanding of exactly why the city of El Merador declined in the second century and in Aztec news, researchers have long been trying to pinpoint the cause of a great plague known as the Coco Leslie, which swept through the Aztec world in the mid to late sixteenth century, so not quite as long ago as the Maya civilization. This pestilence killed about eighty percent of the population in the years after the arrival of the Spanish. Research published in February points to a unique strain of salmonella, and there's some suggestion that it may have originated in Europe, but that is extremely preliminary. And now to move from Mesoamerica to farther south into South America, it's really easy to imagine the Amazonian rainforest as this pristine ecosystem that was never really affected by human influence until the modern area era, with deforestation a comparatively recent threat. But according to findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, at one point parts of what's now Brazil were already deforested and home to mound building people's who made massive geoglyphs that were eventually grown over and only very recently revealed. These are huge earthworks. The site examined in the paper spans about thirteen thousand square kilometers and it combines both ditches and mounds that were created about two thousand years ago, and they have found more than four hundred fifty of them. There's no indication that they were settlements or defensive structures, so the going hypothesis is that they were for ceremonial or ritual use. It took some effort to figure out whether this area was forested when the mounds were built. Seems like it would have been harder to do it if it were. They basically had to reconstruct the whole history of the vegetation and the periodic fires that swept through the area. It's a little early to draw concrete conclusions, but the evidence suggests that the indigenous people who built these structures were also practicing a form of forestry and vegetation management, carefully shaping the bamboo forests while also creating cultivated forests that had a higher than normal density of more valuable tree species. Apart from these earthworks, a completely different team looking at biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest came to the same basic conclusions. In a study co authored by the Field Museum, researchers looked at more than one thousand forest surveys and analyze them based on their proximity to archaeological sites. They found that there were more domesticated species of trees in parts of the Amazon basin previously believed to have been pristine and untouched by man. Yes, so, the reason that there are so many of these amazing trees that a lot of them produce fruits and nuts and things like that that people use the day because people literally planted them there on purpose. They didn't just grow there and to a lush resource on their own. We've got a couple of discoveries that have been unearthed by nature this year. Twenty eleven wildfire in the Oshaki Wilderness in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming unearthed a wealth of artifacts dating back to before the arrival of Europeans in that part of North America. These artifacts were discovered this year even though the fire happened back in eleven, because that's when the trails through the area were reopened. Although this area was probably used by indigenous peoples at various points for thousands of years, most of these artifacts are three four hundred years old. They include bone tools, projectile points, knives, and ceramics. These artifacts connect to the two Kadika people, whose descendants include the Shoshoni, Bannock and Eastern Shoshoni tribes, and the find is giving archaeologists a rare glimpse at such a huge site at such a high elevation. Also unearthed by nature, Hurricane Irma unearthed a log canoe in September, and research that has gone on in the following months have revealed some really contradictory results about this canoe. Basically, somebody saw the canoe there on the beach and went, WHOA, this is something important, we should save it. A lot of work has been done on it since then, So there's a fifty percent chance that the tree that was cut down to make this canoe was felled somewhere between sixteen forty and sixteen eighty, but there's a thirty seven percent chance that it came down much later, between seventeen sixty and eighteen eighteen. So that's a big disparity and when the tree might have been cut down. Plus, there are paint, wire and nails used in the canoe that suggests that it's more recent than that. So it's possible that the canoe itself was very old and then was used and modified long after its original construction. At this point, though, it's still kind of a mystery. I wonder if it could also be a case where the tree came down and then wasn't used for a long time. That also might work. Uh. In somewhat similar news, tropical storm Ophelia unearthed iron age human remains in coastal Ireland, and we're gonna get to some exclamations that people carried out rather than storms. After a quick sponsor break, Judy Garland's remains were exhumed from New York and moved to a mausoleum in Los Angeles in January. Garland's children live in southern California, and they wanted her near them. This simultaneously annoyed at least one Garland fan who had bought a plot in her prior resting place of Ferncliff Cemetery to be near her. According to the Ferncliff Cemetery manager, that was like I found several articles that were about the relocation of Judy Garland's remains, and then this one that was like this one person who literally bought his or her, I don't know, owned plot in that cemetery is now irritated that they don't get to be buried near Judy Garland anymore. Sorry, buddy, yeah, or lady. I don't know. That seems like a weird bet heage, but sure, what do I know? So headless corpse has been exhumed from a leadline coffin in a mausoleum near Inverness, Scotland, to try to determine whether it is the body of Simon Fraser, the eleventh Lord love It So. Lord Lovett was executed in seventy seven, and although official reports maintained that his body stayed at the Tower of London, there have been claims that he was returned to the Scottish Highlands and laid to resting Kirkhill. This exhamation has a connection to pop culture. Simon Fraser is in the fictional world of Outlander books and TV series, the grandfather of James Fraser. I mean, Jamie, I haven't watched it. Well it's I'm gonna say, uh, I'm not spoiling anything. The most recent UH season veered into some ridiculousness. I haven't read the books, so I was not prepared for it. But I was like, what is going on now? Anyway? Uh, we can have a side podcast that Tracy is a funnlement with Outlander um. Spain's parliament voted to exhume the remains of fascist dictator Francisco Franco and relocate them out of a state funded mausoleum. Back in May, I didn't find a report that the exhimation reinterment had actually been performed, though just that Parliament had voted on it. This is connected to an overall movement to try to turn that mausoleum site into a memorial for the Spanish Civil War. Along the same theme. In previous editions of Unearthed, we've talked about the exhimations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and efforts to identify remains and return them to family members. Much of that had been spearheaded in Catalonia, and on October Spain ended Catalonian self rule, with Madrid now controlling the Catalan administration. The organizations working on these efforts have expressed concerns about whether they will be allowed to continue. Yeah, that still seems maybe preliminary. I don't know enough about the political situation in Spain to know how how like Leader is to continue or not. But it is a thing that is connected to previous episodes that we've talked about and the people are worried about now. And we are going to wrap up this on Earth Year with some edibles and potables and the containers that they go in in the Coma land region in northern Ghana, uh One of the artifacts that people have found a whole lot of are these little, often hollow terra cotta terra cotta figurines. Hundreds of these figurines have been excavated in the area over the years, made by an unknown pre colonial people in dating back more than a thousand years. So a lot of the research into these figurines has looked at the figures themselves, what they're wearing, what they may represent, what they might indicate about the people who had made and used them. Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in March looked instead at what the figurines contained. Using DNA analysis, they found traces of banana and plantain, pine and grasses, many of which are not native to Ghana. So the researchers suggests that these figurines had a ritual use, with banana and pine brought into the region through trade with Northern Africa. This speaks to the complexity of the society that was using these figurines and its interconnectedness with other parts of the continent. Moving on crossrail tends to unearth all kinds of things which have been making regular appearances in an unearthed since which is the first time that Holly and I did this as host on the show. This time, excavations at the Tottenham Court Road Crossrail site unearthed more than thirteen thousand condiment jars, many of them quite well preserved and still intact. These would have been used for pickles, jams, mustards, marmalade's and other food stuffs. These jars and bottles date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and they were found in a cistern at what had been across in Blackwell Factory. Cross and Blackwell has been making condiments and other food products since seventeen oh six. In the years since the site stopped being a condiment factory, it had at one point become a nightclub the historia. Although the jars made all the headlines, archaeologists also unearthed kilns, furnaces, and refrigerators at the site. It's quite a lot of jars. Researchers from Tomsk State University found a sixteenth century roasted turnip while excavating a house in southwestern Siberia. This house is part of a military settlement that was established in fifteen ninety four, and this particular house was destroyed in a fire. The turnip was found in a pot, and researchers concluded that it had been stored there after the harvest, so that pot was for storage, not for cooking, and that the heat from the house fire is what baked it within the pot. I don't know why this just makes me giggle. I think because turnip is inherently a funny word. The idea that, like weird and catastrophic events, actually cooked food by accident, yeah, also funny. Also found at this site various imported glassware and a pair of woman's knit stockings another edible. Research from Illinois from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey has challenged the assumption that people living along the Mississippi River in Illinois were eating maize thousands of years ago. Previously, researchers thought that maize was grown and eaten in the area as far back as sixty b C, long before it became a staple around the year one thousand. The team did find plenty of corn cobs and kernels, and evidence of corn consumption in bones and teeth, but all of this dates back to only the year one thousand or later. This shift comes from a combination of better dating methods and cases of mistaken identity. Using multiple types of mass spectrometry, researchers realized that plant fragments previously identified as corn we're not actually corn, and in some cases were some other grass because corn is grass, bless you. Renovation workers in New Jersey found what's probably the largest and oldest madeira collection in the United States. These were found during a renovation at Liberty Hall Museum. They were hidden behind a plaster and plywood wall that was put up during Prohibition. Staff knew there was a wine cellar hidden back there, but it turned out to be a lot bigger and better stock than they expected, with more than fifty bottles, some dating back to the seventeen nineties and other wine news. A team testing residues in a copper age storage pot from Italy found evidence of wine. This goes back to about three thousand BC and is now the oldest evidence of wine in the Italian Peninsula. Conservators in Antarctica found an almost edible in quotes fruit cake in a building constructed by an eighteen ninety nine Norwegian expedition. That fruitcake is a hundred and six years old and was probably brought to the building by Robert Falcons Dots expedition in The fruitcake was wrapped in paper and stored in a tin, and Lizzie Meek of the Antarctic Heritage Trust described it as looking and smelling edible, apart from a slight rancid butter smell. I would just like to question whether anything that smells like rancid butter seems edible. I guess it depends on the strength of your gut microbes. Our last entry is notable not for what was in the vessel, but for what was on it. A team in Turkey claims to have found the oldest smiley face in the world. The smiley faces we know it with two dots for eyes and a swoop of a mouth, has generally been dated back to just the nineteen sixties, but a team excavating a Hittite settlement found a jar dating back to seventeen hundred b C. That has what definitely looks like a smiley face. If it turns out to be legitimate and not a coincidence or a later edition by someone who is trying to be cute, it would be the oldest only face in the world. It definitely looked like looks like somebody took their finger and went I eye mouth but you know, and then and then they also keep on trucking, have a nice day on there now. But simultaneously though, like we are trained to see faces and patterns and things. So it's I am I'm putting a little grain of song with this. But at the same time it does kind of delight me that maybe there is a jar from s s got will smiley faced John on there with somebody's finger. Yeah, I love it. Hey, do you have a listener mail to wrap up Unearthed for this round? I sure do you. This is another one going back to our aber Van disaster episode. Is it is not a particularly sad one. Now. This is from Anne and says, I was just listening to your podcast on the aber Van disaster and it made me think of the Frank slide and baby. This land slide buried half a mining town and it is the deadliest slide in Canadian history. Okay, that part is terrible. What makes this one a little interesting is the story of the Frank Slide baby, who apparently was thrown from her home and survived the slide because she had landed on a pile of hay that was also thrown by the force of the slide. In addition, this mountain, even before the mining occurred, was considered dangerous by the indigenous population, who mostly stayed away from it, calling it the mountain that walks. As you said, most mining accidents are all the same as and has a few interesting aspects to it. Maybe one day you can do a show on it. Thanks for all the learning, and thank you Anne for uh that email that has both a sad part and a kind of happy part with the baby uh. And thank you everyone who was has joined us for our unearthed episodes this year. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We are all over social media at the user name missed in History, so our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, those are almost in history. Uh. You can come to our website which is missed in history dot com and find an archive of all the episode we have ever done and show notes for all the episodes Holly and I have ever done together. That will have a gigantic list of literally not all the six centers in something things, not all the six centered and something pins from our unearthed pincers pinterest board, but all of the articles that went into this two part podcast will be on there. Uh you so come and see us missing history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Doesn't house to works dot com