Wrapping up coverage of things found, discovered and dug up in 2018, this second in our two-part Unearthed! episode includes a little potpourri, edibles and potables, shipwrecks, exhumations and repatriations.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for part two of Unearthed and eighteen. And this installment includes a lot of the favorites among our listeners. We've got the shipwrecks and the edibles and potables, and the exhumations and the repatriations, and every time I put one of these together, I also wind up with this collection of stuff that's not thematically related in any way, but it just seemed really cool. And I call that potpourri like the Jeopardy category, and that's where we're starting today. Archaeologists in Peru have found a thirty eight hundred year old wall with reliefs that depict four humans heads with snakes slithering between them. In the middle between the snakes heads and the humans heads is a face that looks like neither, with wide eyes and a very wide mouth and five fingerlike or perhaps tentacle like appendages underneath. And they have speculated that this represents a seed putting down roots and that the snakes represent a water deity that irrigates the crops after people plant the seeds. That's more likely hypothesis than what some of the Internet speculates, which is because it is obviously fulu. I mean, that's what I believe. But it's also just a really striking relief carving, because like the four human faces are all in a row, and then there are the sinuous snakes in between them, and this thing in between them that might be a seed. This area was home to the Caral civilization, which is also known as Norte Chico, and that's one of the oldest known civilizations in the Americas. I think part of why the association to Casulu is so strong is not just the tentacle mention, but also the relief mention, which comes up a lot in Lovecrafts writing he likes a shop particulity in like at the Mountains of mannis at all descriptions of reliefs. So there's a subconscious tie in. I think that people aren't aren't necessarily aware that they're making. Archaeologists with the National Institute of Anthropology and History that's i n a H in Mexico have been excavating a set of twenty six pits in Mexico City, They are about dred years old and are between one point two and three point three meters below street level. Some of these pits seem to have been used to bury human remains, so they were effectively graves, but others were used for storing things like grains and artifacts, and two of them might have been used for tasks related to caring for babies and young children. One example that was given in the write up of all of this was making steam bats for newborn babies. One hypothesis is that this whole area was used for activities related to pregnancy and child care. Backing up this hypothesis is the presence of more than one thirty figurines, a few of them representing babies, but most of them depicting pregnancy. So it's possible that the site was something along the lines of an ancient prenatal care center. I like that idea too, like the idea that there was a place where all the pregnancies were happening. Really, it's where Casulu was making, no idea. Archaeologists in China have found a miniature terra Cotta army. These are a lot like the famous terra Cotta warriors, but on a much smaller scale, so, for example, the infantry figurines are about eleven inches or twenty eight centimeters tall. These were probably created about years ago, roughly a hundred years after the Terracotta Army, and they might have been created for Emperor Wu's son Liu Hung. In eighteenth century, Mysore leader Hyder Ali developed rockets for use in warfare. His son and successor, Tipu Sultan, improved on his father's design to make a rocket that came to known as the Mysorean Tipoo Sultan used these to fight the British East India Company successfully until he was killed in seventeen. This year, excavators found what they believed to be Tippoo Sultan's rockets dash in an abandoned well. The well smelled of gunpowder and once they excavated it they found more than a thousand rockets. Uh. Now we are coming to the section of things that are unearthed by amateurs, starting with a dog named Monty, who dug up more than twenty Bronze Age objects while on a walk in the Czech Republic in March. In September, archaeologists who had examined the objects announced that they were all more than three thousand years old and included two spear points, three axes, several bracelets, and thirteen sickle shaped objects. The fact that there were so many objects so close together suggested to the team that they were probably buried for ritual reasons. Archaeologists are still examining the area where they were found. A mushroom picker who wished to remain anonymous, found two bronze helmets and took them to the Eastern Slovakia Museum. It is unclear where these helmets were initially made. They look more like decorative headgear than actual armor. They were probably imported to the side of the village where they were found by this mushroom picker. A metal detector iss named Mike Smith may have found Wales's oldest chariot burial. He found what he thought was a brooch, but after sending a picture to an expert, he learned that it was really part of a horse harness. Eventually, authorities were convinced that they should take a closer look, which led to a preliminary excavation of the area. A more complete study of that find is still to come. Speaking of metal detectorists, finds by amateur metal detectors come up pretty often on onearthed and overall, amateur detector ists have kind of a complicated relationship with museums and archaeologists. Amateurs have definitely found object x that otherwise would not have been found. Sometimes this has led scholars and curators and archaeologists to excavation sites that they would not have looked at otherwise, and it's been meaningful and significant. But at the same time we have also talked about amateur detectorists damaging delicate historical sites or removing important fines without notifying authorities, things like that. In Denmark, amateur metal detectorists are mostly known for their positive contributions. They've been described as an international success story and have meaningfully contributed to the nation's understanding of its own history. To that end, this year, Denmark launched a tool called dime to help amateur metal detectorists register their fines in the field. This has been a collaborative process involving twenty seven museums, with the goal of making it easier for amateurs in Denmark to continue that work. We also have several things that have been unearthed by construction, as happens frequently workers digging a trench for a new a rear center at a school in sugar Land, Texas found a mass burial site earlier this year. In June, the school got permission to excavate and exhume the bodies, and the team has concluded that these burials at the site took place between eighteen seventy and nineteen ten, and that they were probably part of the state's convict lease system that followed the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The team that's working on it has talked about how important this find is and illustrating this transition from slave labor to prison labor after the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment, as we've said on the show, a lot before it, abolished slavery except in cases of punishment for a crime. A team doing preventative archaeological work in northern France unearthed a wheeled water mill dating back to the fourteenth century. We have written records of the mill dating back to sixteen fourteen, so the mill itself is much older than the records that we have of it. This mill seems to have been used for a lot of different purposes over the centuries, It was originally constructed as a flour mill, but archaeologists have found bolts there that were used for textile manufacturer. In the eighteen thirties, the mill was being used to make noodles and other pasta, but by about forty years later the area was being used as a farmstead rather than as a mill. Cruise working on Line four of Milan's Metro contacted archaeologists after hitting what appeared to be a wall. They concluded that it was the outer enclosure of the mausoleum of Emperor Maximian. This is one where I think the construction continued on after this discovery. But when you look at um the plan of how big this mausoleum was, it was huge, and so it was like the the metro line was sort of cutting through one edge of this much bigger potential find. Back in twenties seventeen, a team in Cologne found the remains of a building while excavating as a at a church, and then this year they figured out what that building was. It was a library which might have housed as many as twenty thousand scrolls, built almost two thousand years ago. And because this particular library was in what was then a public space. This was probably a public library, not just somebody's giant, personal private collection. And now we come to a series of stories where things were unearthed by climate. UH drought in Ireland revealed the existence of a Neolithic or early Bronze Age monument in a field. The dried out vegetation made the outline of the monument visible in drone footage. The grass is actually greener in the area over the monument. Steve Davis, an archaeologist at the University College Dublin, called the find internationally significant. I put that on the list and then I found other similar finds happening all over Britain and Ireland. Aerial footage has spotted burial monuments and settlements and burial sites all visible as green outlines and otherwise dry fields and Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Suffolk, Devon and Somerset, probably others too. I was like, how many counties are there and do all of them have one? To continue my paranormal intrusions into this, I'm like all those crop circles from the drought in Europe has also revealed stones known as hunger stones in the Elbe River in the Czech Republic. These are stones that people have used to record low water levels in the river for hundreds of years. The oldest one that was visible as of August dates back to nineteen sixteen and has an inscription in German that translates to when you see me weep. The last time we heard about somebody pulling a sword from a lake on unearthed, it was a prop sword. It was kind of silly but not historically significant. But this time it was an actual pre Viking Eero sword pulled from a lake in Sweden by eight year old Saga van Check. The is from the fifth or sixth century, and she found it while she was skipping stones in the water. The reason she was able to see it there was that the water level was very low because of all the dryness. At first she thought it was just a stick. Low water levels also led to the discovery of a stone covered in Pictish symbols in River Dawn in Aberdeen, Scotland. Unlike the Hunger stones which are left in the river, a team of archaeologists and academics worked together to raise this one from the river. As of August, they were working on where to permanently house it. And not a related but slightly different note from these fines that we have just talked about. There is a large collection of human footprints in Tanzania that are vanishing because of erosion. These footprints were made between five thousand and nineteen thousand years ago, and they're located in a mud flat that floods periodically and can also be very windy, so it's really difficult to try to protect and conserve the footprints. The prints themselves are extremely delicate, and then there's a variety of natural factors that are contributing to the erosion. Fortunately, there was a detailed three D scan taken to the area when it was first described back in so we do have documentation of the site if preservation efforts fail. Uh, We're gonna have a little break before we get to the possibly yummy depending on your definition of that word. Section on edibles and potables. First, we are going to have a little sponsor break. We have so many edibles and potables to talk about that they are going to be almost the entire middle of this episode. First, a thirty six hundred year old tomb in Israel has revealed the oldest known use of vanilla vanilla's first use is often more associated with Mexico, and today the orchids that are used in commercial vanilla production are descended from species that are mostly native to Mexico, but the vanilla orchid genus exists all around the world, and in this case, it's chemical analysis of jugs in a tomb that found two of the major chemical components in vanilla extract, including vanillan. Most likely that or kids that were used to produce this vanilla grew in East Africa or the Indian subcontinent or Indonesia, and then we're brought to the Middle East via sea trade. This find predates the first known use of vanilla in Mexico by more than two thousand years. That's a pretty delicious fine that's not too too gruesome. Researchers in Ecuador announced that they have unearthed the oldest proof of cocoa use. This came from DNA analysis of the residues in fifties three hundred year old pots. This discovery is fift hundred years before the domestication of coco in Central America. Researchers believe they've also found the earliest known use of nutmeg as a food ingredient. Archaeologists found the residue and pottery from the Banda Islands in Polynesia. This was dated to thirty five hundred years old, and that's about two thousand years earlier than the previous oldest known use of nutmeg and food. I feel like if we could get all these discoveries together, we could make something yummy, be a delicious pie. I was thinking about a cookie. The world's oldest known champagne was found in a shipwreck off of Finland in it was purportedly still drinkable. This champagne dated back to roughly eighteen thirty and Zukiko planned to auction it off, but the champagne house wisely decided to have it analyzed first, and after sending a few bottles away to do that, they got the result that it was not in fact drinkable. I like that. The fine was from the news this year is please don't drink this too late. Yeah, we thought it would be a good idea, but we have determined it would not be a good idea. Researchers at the University of York have concluded that the development of ceramics may have been connected to an increase in fishing and the need to store and process fish. In particular, they looked at lipid residues from eight hundred pottery vessels, most of them made in Japan, which is quote a country recognized as being one of the earliest centers for ceramic innovation. The lipid residues in the vessels show that the types of fish stored and processed in them changed as fishing evolved, but even after shifts in the climate of Japan led to an increase in hunting and gathering, the pots continued to be used mostly for fish and not for other types of food. Archaeologists in China decanted some liquid from a Western Han dynasty tomb. I'm saying decanted. They really just poured it into a measuring glass as part of their analysis of it, and it seems like they have found some two thousand year old wine, at least based on what it smells like, but more research is needed to figure out its exact composition. Totally drinkable until a few years hrore now we go. No no no no. Archaeological research in northern Jordan's suggests that people were making bread thousands of years before they developed agriculture. They found fourteen thousand, four hundred year old bits of charred flatbread. The research suggests that people were making bread using wild cereals, which may have inspired them to try to cultivate cereals rather than first cultivating cereal and then figuring out how to make bread. This is the earliest known evidence of bread making, and the breads themselves resemble flatbreads from later sites in Europe and Turkey, and the words of Professor Dorian Fuller of the University College London Institute of Archaeology, quote bread involves labor intensive processing which includes the husking, grinding of cereals and needing and baking. That it was produced before farming methods suggests that it was seen as special and the desire to make more of this special food probably contributed to the decision to begin to cultivate cereals. All of this relies on new methodological developments that allow us to identify the remains of bread from very small charred fragments using high magnification. I love the idea that people had figured out how to make some bread and they found it so delicious that they were like, we've got to figure out how we can make more of this magical substance, keep it coming. What do we gotta do? Uh? You know what? Else predated agriculture, beer, at least in the Eastern Mediterranean. Archaeologists examined mortars from a cave in Israel that turned out to have been used for brewing with wheat and barley and for food storage. The site being studied was thirteen thousand years old, so this predates the advent of brewing in some other parts of the world and the development of agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean. I'm imagining the same thought process of this beer is great, how can we make more? Uh? We need more ingredients. Researchers have solved a mystery about the diets of some of the ancient pueblo in People's So from about four hundred b c E to about four hundred c E. The Pablo in People's and what's now the Four Corners region of the southwestern US had a very corn based diets, or technically it was a maze based diet. As much as eighty percent of their caloric intake was coming from corn, supplemented with small amounts of other plants and very rarely some wild rabbit. But corn isn't nutritionally complete enough to make up that much of a person's diet. People whose diet is nearly all corn are prone to a range of conditions, including pelagra, which can lead to things like diarrhea and dementia. But researchers had plenty of evidence that the ancient Puebloans were eating mostly corn, but nearly no evidence of pelagra or other conditions in the remains of those same people. The possible answer to this mystery is corn fungus, also known as corn smut. In Mexico, corn fungus as a delicacy known as sweetly coach, and it's consumed in other parts of Central America as well, But until now, there was not a lot of evidence suggesting that it was being consumed by the pueblo in peoples of the American Southwest, and that changed with the analysis of some paleo feces or poop Number one, there are a lot of corn fungus spores in the paleopecs that they examined enough to suggest that the ancient Puebloans were eating corn fungus intentionally, and number two, there is also evidence that corn fungus changes the nutritional makeup of corn increases protein levels and the balance of amino acids, which would help prevent some of these conditions that we have discussed. According to research that was published in August, a lot of the fruits and nuts that we consume today we're being cultivated along the Silk Road. We normally talk about the Silk Road in terms of the trade in textiles and spices and the spread of disease, so I found it thing that we're also talking about the cultivation of foods specifically. A medieval agricultural site in the Pamir Mountains of Uzbekistan shows evidence of cultivated apples, apricots, melons, grapes, almonds, and pistachios, along with other food crops. M Archaeologists found a thirty two year old piece of cheese in a tomb in Egypt. It belonged to a high ranking official in the thirteenth century b c. E. And this may be the oldest solid cheese residue ever found, and it was probably also contaminated with Brucella melitensis based on protein analysis, and if so, not only is it the oldest solid cheese ever found, it's the oldest evidence of that particular disease. Please do not eat three thousand year old cheese. You have to combine it with the sarcophagus juice for the true um uh effects to take Yes, and the undrinkable champagne and other cheese. New researchers have found what they believed to be the oldest examples of cheesemaking in the Mediterranean, thanks to samples from seven thousand year old pottery. Those pots were found on Croatia's Dalmatian coast. Before we get to our next break, we're going to talk about a few things from the world of arts and letters. Researchers at the University of Exeter found a collection of poetry dating back to the US Civil War, but not written in the United States, written in Lancashire, England, which was stricken by famine because of the war. Before the war, Lancashire had been home to a thriving cotton industry, and it was using cotton that was being grown in the United States. This industry was of course, completely disrupted by the war and the period there came to be known as the Cotton Famine. Most of these are really heartbreaking poems about hunger and poverty, and the university has made a publicly available database of them if you wish to peruse it at Cotton Famine Poetry dot Exeter dot ac dot UK. We will also have that link in the show notes. Archaeologists may have unearthed the oldest known copy of Homer's Odyssey and the ancient city of Olympia. It's definitely from the Odyssey, but it is not yet clear exactly how old it is, whether it is actually the oldest one or not. A research team from the University of Basil has identified a papyrus whose contents have been a mystery since the sixteenth century. This papyrus has mirror writing on both sides, and using ultra violet and infrared imagery, the researchers found that it's not one papyrus. It is actually several layers that have been glued together. So after very very carefully separating these layers, they discovered that it's an ancient medical text, probably by Galen or by somebody commenting on Galen's work, and the condition that it describes is hysterical apnea. So the sixteenth century mystery is in fact misogyny. So that's annoying. A nine five letter from Suffrage Annie Kenny to her sister was unearthed in a Canadian archive, and it's being described as the oldest letter from a woman involved in the movement for women's suffrage and the oldest firsthand account of a woman's imprisonment for her voting advocacy. That letter starts quote, you may be surprised when I tell you I was released from strange ways yesterday morning. I love that very matter of fact, just by the way, I might surprise you to learn I was in prison. Why I Kenny's sister Nell later emigrated to Canada, and that's how the letter came to be in a Canadian archive while it was about the movement in Britain. And we are going to take another quick sponsor break before we get on to some exhumations. So we're going to finish today's episode with several other listener favorites, starting with the exhumations. Although some of these exhumations are quite tragic. The Bond Sea Corps Mother and Baby Home in tomb Ireland has been in the news repeatedly since Catherine Corliss has been researching the home, including obtaining death certificates for as many as possible of the seven hundred nineties children who died there while the home was operating. A lot of the reporting that has come out over the last few years took a much more sensationalized turn than Corliss's actual work. She had talked about the fact that there were no burial records for these children and that part of the burial site appeared to be a disused septic tank, and then these two threads got kind of mixed together into headlines along the lines of eight hundred children dumped in septic tank at Mother and Baby Home. So what happened at the Mother and Baby Home was appalling. This was a place where unmarried mothers and their children were sent, usually against their will, because their pregnancies were so stigmatized. Children die they're at a rate of about one every two weeks, often of malnutrition. But it was slightly different from those headlines. So further study and further excavation have gone on since it really started to make headlines, and authorities have been trying to figure out exactly what to do about these unmarked and unrecorded burials. This October, it was announced that plans are in the works to fully excavate the site to try to exhume all the bodies, to identify as many of them as possible, and if possible, to return them to families. Archaeologists in West Flanders have been excavating World War one's Hill eighty, which was a German stronghold. This excavation effort was largely crowdfunded and used largely volunteer labor, so those funds mostly paid for expenses. In December, when the team issued their final report of the previous season's work, they said that they had uncovered the remains of one ten people that included seventy Germans, nine British, three French, one South African, and twenty seven others who could not be identified. This team really wanted to identify the remains and return them to their families wherever possible. But while most of the Germans were identified as being from the twenty first Reserve Regiment, as of December eighteen, only one set of remains had been personally and conclusively identified, not quite an exhumation or a repatriation, which is what we're talking about next. But in seventeen eighty three, a man named Charles Byrne died at the age of twenty two. He was seven feet seven inches tall that's two point three one meters and he was nicknamed the Irish Giant. And when he died, he asked his friends to seal him in a lead coffin, weigh it down and bury him at sea because based on his life experience so far, he feared his body being stolen and dissected. This was at a time when there was no honor in donating your body to science or medicine. Uh there is more detail about that in our episode on the Doctor's Riot of seventeen eighty eight, which is in our archive. He had been really viewed as a medical curiosity and he was he was very concerned that something was going to happen to his body after his death. However, while Burns friends made the arrangements for the burial that he asked for, surgeon and anatomus John Hunter stole his body, possibly switching it with another body, and then after removing the flesh from the body, Hunter kept the skeleton in his personal collection. The British government later purchased the collection and gave it to the Company of Surgeons, which became the Royal College of Surgeons, and that became part of the Royal College of Surgeons Hunter Harryan Museum. Burns remains made a meaningful contribution to medical science, including helping doctors understand how pituitary tumors can lean to giants um and the discovery of genetic links to giant is um. But this was not what Burne wanted. Hunter's treatment of his body was the exact opposite of what he had asked for, and he definitely did not consent to being put on display in a museum. So over the years the museum has resisted calls to abide by burns wishes about the treatment of his body. Excited the medical importance of these remains, but the museum closed for renovations this year. It's going to remain closed for three years, and a spokesman issued a statement that quote, the Hunterian Museum will be closed until and Charles burns skeleton is not currently on display. The board of Trustees of the Hunterian Collection will be discussing the matter during the period of closure of the museum. So that's not a definitive statement that they are going to bury him as he requested. But there are people who are like, now that you've said this publicly, it's going to be real hard for you to walk it back. Uh. Yeah, Basically, they've just committed to discussing it further outside of the public eye. Right now, we're moving on to repatriations. In Earnest in ninety six, a relief carving of an acimmened soldier was stolen from Persepolis. It was later donated to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and then it was stolen from there in eleven. In September, it was returned to Iran following an order from a New York Supreme Court judge. This return happened after it was seized in October of seventeen when somebody was trying to sell it at an art fair. Its owners argued that they had legally purchased it, but once investigators traced out the whole history of this relief, including the fact that it was stolen, they agreed to return it. A collection of antiquities was returned to Iraq after British authorities were able to trace where that they had come from. They had been looted from Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein and brought to London, where they were later seized from a dealer Identifying where these pieces had come from was the work of the British Museum. After examining all these pieces and the inscriptions on them, they were able to pinpoint exactly which temple they came out of. It was the any New Temple at Tello, which is in southern Iraq today. These pieces that were turned include pottery, a cuneiform covered cone, and a little amulet that shaped like a bull. In nineteen sixty one, fourteen statues were stolen from the Archaeological Survey of India's Site museum. One turned up in London this year and that was returned to India and this one was a twelve century bronze statue of Buddha and it was reported to authorities after being seen at a trade fair. The Birmingham Museum of Art returned a four foot statue of Shiva to India after it learned that it had been stolen. This statue was one of many, many many pieces that were illegally acquired and sold by Sabash Kapoor, who was extradited to India in twenty eleven to face charges that he illegally sold millions of dollars worth of artifacts to museums around the world. A lot of the museum that he sold these stolen artifacts, too, were very very well known that they included the met, the Boston m f A, and the l A County Museum of Art. A relief of a Menhotep, the first, which was found in a London auction house, was returned to Egypt after it was discovered that it had been stolen from the Temple of karnak In. So we could have included a whole lot more of these because there were a lot of headlines like this this year. They were mostly institutions in North America and Europe agreeing to return artwork and artifacts that had been stolen at some point in the last few decades. What we really did not see as much of was institutions agreeing to return artifacts that had been in their collections for a lot longer than that. And that doesn't mean that nothing like that happened, but if it did, it just wasn't really reported in the sources that I was using to put together this episode. It also doesn't mean that there were no calls for institutions to return long standing parts of their collections. For example, Italy Supreme Court ordered the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to return a statue known as the Losippo Statue or the Statue of the Victorious Youth. That statue is nearly twenty hundred years old, and it was pulled out of the water by fishers in nineteen sixty four. The Getty bought it from an art dealer in nineteen seventy seven, and Italy started asking for its return in nineteen eighty nine. In two thousand seven, an Italian court cleared the Getty of wrongdoing, but also affirmed that the statue was the property of Italy. The Getty has refused to return the statue, though, and plans to appeal this decision. News also broke in November that an Egyptian museum had called for the British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was discovered by a French soldier in seventeen ninety nine during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. The Rosetta Stone has been in the British Museum since eighteen o two, although it was removed for security reasons for part of World War One. The proposal from the museum in Egypt is that basically the British Museum should send back the original Rosetta stone and replace it in the Air Museum with like a c G I rendering of it rather than the actual stone itself. Now shipwrecks, uh uh. Tracy thinks we said this already in a listener mail segment, but in case people missed it, that bone that was found near the widow that were we talked about in July was not black Sam Bellamy, Nope, I was. I was skeptical about that when we talked about it. Then that skepticism was warranted. In twenties sixteen we talked about the discovery of forty shipwrecks and the Black Sea. Then that fine came from the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project, which has continued to survey the shipwrecks of the Black Sea in the years since then. This October, the team announced that they had mapped sixty Black Sea shipwrecks over the course of this project, and one of them is being described as the world's oldest intact shipwreck. It is a Greek trading vessel that's about twenty four hundred years old. A joint US Australian Expedy s has surveyed the wreck of the h M A S A E one. This was Australia's first submarine and it disappeared while on patrol in September of nineteen fourteen. This made it the first Allied submarine lost in World War One, and its wreckage was discovered at the end of seventeen. The survey conducted this year was done aboard the late Paul Allen's RV Petrol which we used a remote operated vehicle to get a lot of high definition images and video of the wreck. The team is hoping to use this footage to try to reconstruct what happened to the submarine, which has been a mystery since the vessels lost. They also left the flags of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom at the site on the ocean floor to honor the dead who are still there in the submarine. A team from the scripts Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Delaware located the stern of the U S. S. Abner read the Abner Reid struck a Japanese mine off the coast of a Alaska after the Battle of at two. Although men aboard the ship were able to pull survivors out of the water and return to port, they were only able to recover the body of one of the seventy one men killed. There aren't currently plans to try to raise the stern of this ship from the seafloor, and the research team lowered a wreath into the water to honor the dead. Similarly to the fine that we just talked about, archaeologists in Poland have started an eight year conservation project on a massive barge that is being unearthed from an apple orchard. The barge was actually found thirty years ago during an attempt to deepen a pond adjacent to the orchard, and most likely the pond had been part of the Vistula River, which has since changed course, and that is how that barge came to be in an apple orchard. Fortunately, the owner of the orchard contacted authorities and it was quickly determined that not only did the barge date all the way back to four eight one, but it was also one of the largest vessels of its type ever discovered. A more thorough study was conducted in two thousand nine, and while archaeologists wanted to remove and conserve the barge they had nowhere to put it. It's huge. It's one long, seven ms wide and about one point five meters deep, with room for a crew of about twenty. However, a special basin has been constructed at the State Archaeology Museum, which is why the excavation got started. Just this year, a four hundred year old shipwreck was found off the coast of Portugal and described as the find of a decade. The identity of the ship isn't yet clear, but it was probably used in the spice trade with India between fifteen seventy five and sixteen twenty five. A shipwreck off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island, maybe Captain James Cook's HMS Endeavor, which had been sold and renamed the Lord Sandwich. Cook sailed around the world aboard the Endeavor and then it was scuttled by the British Navy during the Revolutionary War. The anniversary of Cook's voyage is in so the team is hoping to confirm and excavate it. By then. A lot of the coverage that went around after this fine described the ship as conclusively definitely found, except in National Geographic which appended this to an article it had previously published in twenties six quote. Once again, despite recent news claims that Captain Cook's HMB Endeavor has been found, it still actually remains undiscovered. According to a press release from the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, they have narrowed the search for the ship to possibly one or two archaeological sites that will be excavated in twenty nineteen. Previous claims that the HMB Endeavor may have been found were made in nine thousand to two thousand six, two thousand twelve, and twenties sixteen. Divers have found the Danish warship Prince Friedrich, which sank in seventeen eighty in the Kodagut straight between Denmark and Sweden. There were six hundred sixty seven sailors aboard, but only eight were killed when the ship went down, thanks to people from a nearby island mounting a rescue effort. Finding this ship required more than two hundred dives and a ten year search. Yeah, they had been looking for that ship for a long time and as kind of a shipwreck side note, The mal Fisher Marine Museum in Key West, Florida used to have a seventeenth century gold bar on display. Fisher himself had recovered the bar from a shipwreck in nineteen eighty, and the bar had been housed in a case that let visitors reach in and touch it and lift it up to see how heavy it was, which was about four and a half pounds. On August, two thieves stole the bar from the museum, and they were caught on camera, but it wasn't until law enforcement received an anonymous tip in the fall of seventeen that they were identified. Richard Stephen Johnson and Jared Goldman were charged with the crime in January and sentenced in July. The bar was not recovered, though the two men had chopped it up and sold off the pieces in Las Vegas. And we will end this years Unearthed with a little bit of utsy news, because there's always some utsy news. Researchers had previously concluded that Utsi's sixty one tattoos might have some kind of a medical purpose, basically that they were the result of a form of acupuncture. This year, research looked at all of these tattoos, plus the herbs and fungi that were present in and near his body, and compared that to all the various ailments that are evident in Utsie's remains, and what they concluded is that the society that Utsy was living in had an established idea of medical care and disease treatment. It wasn't just a random, haphazard situation. It was an organized system of medical care. Oh, thank you for all that unearthed research. You're very welcome. Do you also have listener mail? I sure do, and this is from Margie and it goes back to our Crystal Knocked episode. I know that is a while ago at this point, but we keep getting these very lovely photos and remembrances from people. And Margie says, first of all, let me say just how much I adore your podcast. Your thorough and thoughtful and take on global historical events makes my inquisitive and curious heart happy. I moved to Hamburg, Germany, from the American South to be with my German partner about two years ago. Side note, I never knew how much I didn't know about German and European history until I moved here. Your backlog has been super helpful in trying to catch up. I listened to your episode on Crystal Knocked with my boyfriend and I thought you might be interested in our experience. We live in a Jewish neighborhood in Hamburg. Every year, on November night, they hold a remembrance of Crystal Knock. I've included some photos, but essentially the event consists of placing candles around the buildings rans act or destroyed during Krystal Knocked and every stumbling stone there's the stones outside a building denoting a person who lived or worked there and who was deported or murdered during the Holocaust in the area. I do hope you enjoy this little glimpse into German remembrance. Thank you so much for all that you do. All the best, Margie. And then Margie sent these very lovely and moving pictures of all of these candlelit areas where the remembrance was going on um and one of the things that she noted is that one of the places is a Jewish school that actually survived. Crystal Nocton is still open today, but there are armed guards twenty four hours a day, which is now required for synagogues and Jewish schools in Germany because anti Semitism has continued to rise in recent years. So thank you so much. Margie for those photos and for that information. UM, happy belated New Year to everyone. I think these are actually coming out right at the turn of the new year, so we will look forward to some new topics in and if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast at how stuff works dot com. And then we are all over social media at missed in History. That's our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. You can come to our website, which is Missed in History dot com and find the incredibly long list of sources for this episode. If you want to look further into any of these stories, and there is a searchable archive of every episode we have ever done, you can find and subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you get podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.