Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed Part two. This part two of this Times Unearthed has the shipwrecks and the exhumations and some repatriations um more stuff than I was expecting about vikings, along with some other categories. Although this time around we did not have a standalone episode update section like we've been having for a while, we do still have Potpourri, which is where I just put all the stuff that I thought was cool but could not find a category that united all of it, and that is where we will start. So first up in Potpourri. The history of the British Royal Navy is often traced back to ninth century King Alfred the Great, noting that he launched a naval fleet to repel a Viking invasion, but according to research published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology in August, British naval warfare predates Alfred's reign. That paper by PhD candidate Matt First and Dr Aaron Cebow traces British naval warfare back to an engagement in eight fifty one, which is described in the Anglo Saxon Chronicles, whereas Alfred's first recorded sea battle was in eight se So, being not British, I have have no personal experience with uh this, but the headlines about this paper had the same sort of, um, sort of emotional tone as a United States headline might have, along the lines of We're sorry everyone. It turns out George Washington did not chop down the cherry tree. Um. So I'm under the impression that it is very commonly held and uh like important to people belief that the British Royal Navy was started by King Alfred the Great, which turns out not. I don't know that it's emotionally important to people to think that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, but that was the only example I could think of anyway. Uh. There's a project called Beacons of the Past that has been training volunteers, which the project calls citizens scientists to help look through large scale light our surveys of the Chiltern Hills. Um, just basically to make it feasible to go through all of that data and some of these volunteers spotted evidence of a hill fort, which the research team confirmed as really being there on August six of this year. This site dates back to between eight hundred and five hundred b C. And it was hidden under foliage. Its exact location has been kept secret in order to protect it, and while there are no current plans to excavate it, there are plans to preserve the site moving on. Also in August, the painting Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer by Franz Halls, who's a painter from the Dutch Golden Age, was stolen for the third time. This time thieves forced open the back door of the hofja ven Arden Museum. They stole the painting and then they were gone by the time police arrived. Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer had previously been stolen in along with another painting, and then it had been stolen again Inleven. Obviously, it was recovered both of those times. This latest theft took place on August. As of when we are recording this, it has not yet been recovered. The museum tightened up its security after that eleven theft, but when this most recent burglary happened, it was closed because of the pandemic. Moving on into a completely unrelated find, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced the discovery of a soap making word shop in southern Israel. This is a twelve hundred year old soapery and is the oldest ones to be discovered in the area. The soap that was made there was from olive oil mixed with ash, the ash being made from burning saltwork plants. And in addition to finding materials and objects related to the making of soap, other finds from the site included some game boards, one of them a strategy game called Windmill and the other for a game that was called either Hounds and Jackals or fifty eight holes Hounds and Jackal sounds cooler Um. Lastly, in Potpourri, archaeologists in Poland have found part of a bowl adorned with a human face. The bowl is about seven thousand years old and the parts that have survived include the eyes and the nose and the forehead, which in this case has would appear to be small horns. It's a pretty neat looking bowl, which makes it unfortunate that this is an audio podcast. We are going to move on to a couple of exhamations. First up, James Blessing, grandson of Warren G. Harding, is trying to have the former US President's remains exhumed for DNA testing so that Blessing can scientifically prove his ancestry. Blessings mother, Elizabeth Ann Blessing, was the daughter of Harding and Nan Brittain. Harding and Britain had an extramarital affair before and during Warren's presidency. Brittain had detailed their affair in a memoir called The President's Daughter In the Thing Is. At this point, no one is really questioning the idea that Blessing is Harding's descendant anymore. In ancestry, DNA confirmed a genetic link between James Blessing and two other Harding family members, and that was enough to establish the Blessing and the former president were related. But the one hundredth anniversary of Harding's election to the presidency is this year, and apparently Blessing didn't feel that he or his mother had gotten the recognition they were due at the Warring Y Harding presidential centers planned commemorations, thus this request for DNA testing. So at first some of the other Harding family members didn't seem to really object to this proposed declimation. That changed though, after it turned out that he was planning to have a reality TV crew on hand for it, because it seems like the biggest, most high profile exhumations we talked about on the show now are gonna be on tv UM. As of when this episode was researched in early October, this issue is still unsettled about whether that will all go forward. In other news, human remains were discovered in San Antonio, Texas on May thirteenth during an archaeological and cultural investigation in advance of some construction work. The remains were exhumed following a spiritual ceremony in September. Groups of people who may be descended by the people whose bodies were found were gathered for that ceremony, including the members of the San Antonio seventeen eighteen Founding Families and Descendants and Canary Islands Descendants Association. The remains will be reinterred after the construction is complete, and that is currently scheduled for summer of We have a few repatriations to talk about this time as well, and we are moving on to those. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science has returned a collection of thirty wooden statues to the Midge Canada tribe, which lives in Kenya and northern Tanzania. These carvings are meant as both memorials to people who were deceased and as the embodiment of those people's spirits. So, in the words of Stephen Nash, the museum's curator of anthropology, which was quoted by the Denver Post quote, once we realized that we were curating the physical embodiment of thirty dead people's souls, that's when we said, look, the Midget Canada never had a chance for informed consent like you and I enjoy when disposing of our loved ones. We should not be curating people's souls. The statues, known as the Gango, had been donated to the museum in by Gene Hackman, but when the museum tried to contact his representatives about it, they didn't have any record of the transaction. So with no documentation to go on, it took some time to figure out how they should be repatriated and to whom. An effort in was paused when the government of Kenya set a forty dollar import tariff on the statues. The government reversed that decision in and the repatriation was reported in the Denver Post. This July, the Museum of New Zealand has returned a woven cloak and helmet that belonged to Hawaiian Chief Kolani Opo. They returned that back to Hawaii. So these items had been given to James Cook in seventeen seventy nine is an act of formal diplomacy, and then from there they had changed hands a few different times before being donated to the Ta Papa Museum's predecessor, which was the Dominion Museum back in nineteen twelve. So these items had gone through sort of a whole journey to get from Hawaii to New Zealand, and repatriation discussions had been ongoing for seven years, and in twos sixteen the Ta Papa Museum had sent them to Honoluluz Bernese Pawahi Bishop Museum as a long term loan. Now they will stay with the Honolulu Museum permanently. And our last repatriation, Belgium returned a Mayan jade mask to Guatemala this September. This mask was made of jade mosaic and dates back to between the years six hundred and nine hundred. It had been illegally trafficked out of the country. This mask represents the god Chuck, who is a Mayan reign deity, and the return of this mask also took a while. It was seased in Belgium in two thousand eight. We are going to have some shipwrecks in just a little bit, but before we get to those, we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. We have got several shipwrecks to talk about this time around, and this first one has some news that technically broke on October one, and this is technically an unearthed for July augustin September, but I'm counting it. I'm counting it for unearthed this time around. It was too big of a bit of news to just leave for later. Divers believe that they have found the wreck of the cargo steamer S S. Carl's Rule, which may help solve the mystery of what happened to the Amber Room. The Amber Room is a chamber made of amber panels which Nazis dismantled and looted from the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg have been given to Peter the Great as a gift in seventeen sixteen. There is an episode in the archive on what happened to the Amber Room. The Amber Room was last seen in the port of Conigsberg. The Carls Ruis set sail from that port in nineteen as part of Operation Hannibal, which was a mass evacuation of German troops and civilians. It was clearly laden with cargo and more than one thousand people, but it was sunk off the coast of Poland. So that's been a popular theory about what happened to the Amber Room. We don't know for sure whether the Amber Room is part of the cargo on this wreck, but it is an intriguing idea. Yes, changing gears a little bit. In September, photographs from a remote operated vehicle revealed the location of a different German ship, which, to make things confusing, is also called the Carl's Rule. The cruiser s S. Carl's Rule was sunk in nineteen forty off the coast of Norway. The remote operated vehicle surveys followed us so our survey that had been conducted by Norway's state run power grid operator Stott in it back in. The ship's features, including its gun turrets and swastikas, are clearly visible in the photos. So this ship had been part of the German invasion of Norway that had been damaged by Norwegian artillery and the British torpedo before being scuttled by the Germans on April nine of nine. It is not far away from an underwater power cable that runs between Denmark and Norway, which is how it was spotted. I know a lot of people at this stage of of all the many crises that have been simultaneously unfolding in the United States and around the world, have found themselves sort of like not really being able to think clearly. And I happened to read these two articles. I was going through the shipwreck part of my preparation and I read these I read these two articles back to back, and I was so oscillly confused and wondering whether somebody had made up the Amber Rooms story out of hull cloth, until I just finally figured out they were two different ships with the same name, just to confuse this. I mean, really, what are the odds, right, in the same year, within a few months of each other like, well they were, I think it was. It was the Amber Room ship was sunk a few years later, but it like was still within the same war. Oh no, I mean the discovery and discussion of them happening so close together is the what are the odds part for me? Yes, and I had just this baffling moment of staring at the screen like what is going on? Yeah? Uh? Moving on. In August, a team of divers announced that they had found the wreck of a seventeenth century Dutch merchantman off the coast of Finland. I wasn't fine. They came across by surprise while looking for rex from the First and Second World Wars. Their organization Batea Vena is Deadic needed to documenting shipwrecks from those eras. The wreck is a mostly intact flout, which was a style of ship that was built for efficiency and trade. It's rigging could be operated with a small crew, and that crew all lived together in the same space, instead of having their living space separated by where they were in the ship's hierarchy of command. Uh. It also sailed without guns, so it could devote all of its space to cargo. Researchers at East Carolina University have been studying shipwreck microbiology based on their study of the wreck of the Pappy Lane, which was built as a World War two warship and abandoned after running aground in the nineteen sixties. A wide range of micro organisms can live in one wreck. Some of these helped preserve the wreckage, while others are destructive. And to do this work, the team examined parts of the ship that were corroded and parts that were not, as well as the nearby sediment and seawater, and they found thousands of species of backt here area. Yeah, it's uh, it wasn't an entirely surprising number of species um, but they sort of found a surprising number of distinct ecosystems in different parts of the wreck and its surroundings. And the words of Dr Erin Field, Assistant professor in the Department of Biology at East Carolina University, quote, Historically shipwreck sites were treated as a single environment, but our research goes deeper showing that there are different microbial communities within single wreck sites and associated with the wreck itself. As such, we need a tailor conservation efforts to each shipwreck in order to more effectively mitigate bio corrosion and deterioration. Researchers have identified a shipwreck found off the coast of Mexico in seventeen as La Nion, a ship that was used to transport Maya people to Cuba to work as enslaved laborers in sugarcane fields. The ship sank after its boilers exploded in September of eighteen sixty one, so this ship itself had been part of the oral history of the region. This happened during an armed uprising known as the cast War of the Yuktahan. After Mexico had become independent from Spain, public land was redistributed to private citizens to establish new haciendas, and a lot of the people who had been living in farming that land were Maya. Without this land, they had no way to sustain themselves, and that led to a massive insurrection. Even though slavery was illegal in Mexico, authorities started capturing Maya and deporting them to Cuba. In some cases, the deported people had been part of this uprising, but in others they had been deceived into signing contracts to travel to Cuba to work, but the terms of those contracts were virtually indistinguishable from slavery, so when the la Junon sank, about half of the crew were killed, along with about sixty passengers. But one day that is not totally clear is whether any of those passengers on this particular voyage were Maya. This ship was definitely part of this slave trade, but we don't know whether any enslaved people were on board during this specific voyage because they would have been either listed as cargo or not listed at all in a find that also could have gone under edibles and potables. Researchers have used DNA to figure out what kind of fish was on board the Danish flagship grib Shunden when it caught fire and sank in King Hans was traveling to Sweden with the hope of claiming the Swedish throne, but on the way to do that, the grib Shunden sank. All the board were lost, along with all of the expensive cargo that the king was planning to use to back up his claim to the throne. And this wreckage was actually discovered about fifty years ago. So included in all this cargo was a two meter long fish that had been cut into pieces and stored in a wooden barrel, and thanks to this DNA study we now know that it was an Atlantic sturgeon. The sturgeon was a particular mark of status. It was very sought after for its meat and its row and its swim bladder which was used to make a glue called eisnglass. In another combination of shipwrecks and edibles and potables, a bottle of whiskey from the wreck of the s S. Politician was sold at auction for more than seven thousand dollars. The Politician ran aground in the Outer Hebrides in nineteen forty one while hauling twenty eight thousand cases of whiskey. Efforts to salvage the whiskey while getting around salvage and tax laws were later turned into a book called Whiskey Galore, which is also a great pen name if anybody wants to use it, which later became a movie in nineteen nine, and even later than that was remade in two So, unlike so many other times when we talk about somebody unearthings some alcohol and then tasting it, the auction site has a particular note for this bottle of whiskey which read quote this bottle is not suitable for human consumption. So with that in mind, doesn't I mean nobody's going to try it, but the auction side advises you not to. They got to cover their basis. Man, Uh, we are going to cover our bases. Take a quick break, and then we'll be back in just a bit to talk about Vikings. So I found several things related to Vikings this time around. First up, while working on his master's thesis, Norwegian Arctic University student Tor Kettle chromer Doll found evidence connected to the oldest known trading place in northern Norway. He unearthed these Viking era artifacts using a metal detector and they included jewelry, weights and silver. He had found a reference to to a marketplace in the area in a book, and he'd searched the general area with a metal detector before and hadn't found anything impressive, so he really wasn't expecting to find anything significant. But this time he found artifacts pinpointing a market that had not been previously been part of the archaeological record, and another Viking find. An international team of scientists has unearthed some evidence that Viking raids helped spread smallpox. They found evidence of the virus and skeletal remains from multiple sites around northern Europe. This particular smallpox strain is genetically different from what eventually proliferated around the globe and was eradicated in the twentieth century, although there's written evidence of diseases that are interpreted as being about smallpox. When it comes to DNA evidence, the oldest before this point dated back to the seventeenth century. The Viking era spanned from about the ninth through the eleventh centuries, so that's a big jump back. Yeah. Another news. Back in the nineteen fifties, workers digging a trench in Yarm in northern England found a helmet. Locals started calling it the Viking helmet and it was placed in the Preston Park Museum. But even though people were calling it the Viking helmet, it wasn't totally clear whether it had actual connections to the Vikings. Thanks to analysis of the helmet and the material that it's made of, yes, it does seem to be an actual Viking helmet. It's made of iron and it dates back to the early medieval period, with a design that suggests an Anglo Scandinavian origin. This is the first mostly complete Viking helmet found in the region. Our next find is a farmer living outside of Loftahammer, Sweden, who plowed up a large flat stone while working out in the fields and planned to use it as a stepping stone until he realized that it was covered in runs. That point contacted some experts. Rhnologist Magnus Alstrom examined the stone and determined that it dated back to the early eleventh century and also deciphered some of the runes as reading quote. Garder raised this stone after Sigjarv's father, oh Guard's husband. There are plans at this point they have the stone preserved and cleaned and then placed somewhere on public display. And now we are getting to what was probably the most widely reported Viking story of the quarter. A project to sequence the DNA of Viking remains from all across Europe has confirmed the idea that Viking was more of a job title than a race or an ethnicity, and that not all Vikings hailed from Scandinavia. This research was published in the journal Nature in September under the title Population Genomics of the Viking World. To do this work, the team spent ten years studying burial sites in Scandinavia from the eight through eleventh centuries, as well as Viking style burial sites from elsewhere in Europe and burials that included Viking grave goods. So this included, for example, forty men who were buried in two Viking ships on a beach in Estonia who had apparently died in a botched raid. This was the largest study of Viking DNA to date, and it allowed researchers to see patterns and how people moved from Scandinavia into other parts of Europe. For example, in the words of lead author as Shot Margarian quote, the Danish Vikings went to England, while the Swedish Vikings went to the Baltic and Norwegian Vikings went to Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. However, the Vikings from these three quote nations only very rarely mixed genetically. Perhaps they were enemies, or perhaps there is some other valid explanation we just don't know. The team also mapped how parts of southern Scandinavian near the coast became more genetically diverse, while peasants living Inland remained a lot more isolated, and the words of Eska Villerslav, who is another of the papers authors, quote the Vikings had a lot more genes from southern and Eastern Europe than we anticipated. They frequently had children with people from other parts of the world. In fact, they tend to be dark haired rather than blonde, which is otherwise considered an established Viking trait. And now we've got a few CT scans of mummies to talk about. There was a surprising number of those also jumping from Vikings to mummies. In nineteen o two, a shepherd stumbled into a tomb in Siberia containing the remains of several people wearing death masks. The tomb was excavated in nineteen sixty nine, unearthing mummified remains dating back to the third or fourth century. They belonged to the Tashta culture, which was known for elaborate funeral and burial rituals, including the creation of death masks. Scientists that Russia's State Hermitage Museum have conducted a CT scan of one of the heads from this tomb, allowing them to visualize and analyze face that is underneath the mask. That's something that otherwise would have been impossible to do without damaging it. The mask itself was already damaged, with the area around the mouth and one ear of it missing, and then trying to take it off of the skull would have damaged to the tissue underneath. They found evidence of a scar running from the left eye to the left ear, something that may have been sewn shut after the person's death. While preparing the body, they also discovered that a hole had been made through the skull with a chisel like tool, probably to remove the brain. Also as part of preparing the body, another body from the same tomb appears to be that of a woman, and that death mask is a lot more intact, but that one has not gone through a CT scan as of yet another CT scan in a different project of an Egyptian mummy who is nicknamed the Mummy of the Screaming Woman, has revealed that the woman probably died in her sixties, likely from a heart attack. There was evidence of advanced a through sclerosis throughout the circulatory system. The money was given this nickname because her mouth is open as though she's screaming, and the position of her body suggests a sense of pain or terror. The team believes that she was mummified while in a state of rigor mortis, preventing the people who were preparing her body from being able to close her mouth or adjust her positioning. It's still not completely clear whose mummy this was, though there's writing on the linen used to wrap the body that reads the Royal Daughter, the Royal sister of merit Amand, but there were several Egyptian princesses named merit Amands, so it's not clear exactly who this is. It is believed that ancient Egyptians mummified as many as seventy million animals as votive offerings, and researchers have used X ray micro CT scanning to examine three such animals. They were a snake, a bird, and a cat from the collection held by the Egypt Center at Swansea University. So X ray microcy he scanning allows the creation of incredibly detailed images. It's a lot higher resolution than a medical CT scan and so some of the things that they were able to determine from doing this include that the cat was a kitten whose adult teeth hadn't come in yet, the snake was a juvenile Egyptian cobra, and the bird may have been a Eurasian kestrel. So this last one does not involve CT scans, but we still got some mummy action for you. In September, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery of thirteen unopened coffins that have been found at the bottom of a well. That well is almost forty feet that's roughly twelve meters deep, and the conditions at the bottom have kept the coffins very well preserved. Since this find is so recent, there's no other information yet about whose coffins these might be, but they're believed to be at least twenty years old and still contain human mummies. And as uh we come to the end of this session of Unearthed, we just have a cool random thing to end on, and that is the latest discovery of a medieval sword pulled out of a lake. This time the lake is led Nica Lake in Poland. Archaeologists from the Nicholas Copernicus University and the Museum of the First Pst made this fine while they were mapping the bottom of the lake. This is the eighth sword to be found in the lake, but the first one in the last twenty years. The sword is fully intact, and adorned with a Jerusalem cross, and remnants of its leather scabbard were found as well. So that brings us to the end of our Unearthed in October uh, which is really coming out in November. We will do some more unearthed. Our year in Unearthed has generally been coming out approximately the very first week of January, so probably we will try to stick to that timing again, even though this one's coming out a little later in the fall uh than last time. And I have some listener mail. Is it about a CT scan on a mummy or a Viking? Michelle's It's about none of that. Oh my goodness, this is from Emily. Emily says, good day, ladies. I hope this finds you both wonderfully well. Thank you so much for all your work on the podcast, which is something I'm especially grateful for during this crazy year. Both it's entertainment and its educational value are much appreciated. In case someone hasn't affirmed that for you. Today, I'm writing from New York, where, during the pandemic, my dance company has been rehearsing on Zoom and learning more dance history, including about a dance called the shim Sham during your Q and A episode sometime back. I had a true record scratch moment when Tracy said her favorite research read was Frankie Manning, the Ambassador of LYNDI hop not only was the book sitting on my desk, but I had just spoken with Cynthia Millman about aaking with the group, which she graciously did. The next time I talked to her, I passed on your kind words. She was delighted and expressed her thanks in a return. She's truly dedicated to Frankie Manning's legacy and education in general, still serving as a full time librarian at a school in New York City, and it is incredibly generous with her time and her stories. Given how whitewashed Lindy Hop has become since its revival, her work keeping Frankie's memory and contributions in the foreground is something to greatly respect. So thanks for a nice shout out to a really lovely woman and the joy it brought me once I picked myself then my jaw up off the floor. Attached as a photo we took while reading it that I thought you might enjoy. I hope you're having fun soaking up spooky season. Perhaps purple hair can increase one's absorption rate question mark warm regards, Emily, Thank you so much, Emily. So The picture that accompanied this was like a screenshot of the Zoom meeting with every I don't know if it was specifically Zoom but because I don't remember, but with everybody holding up their copies of that Frankie Manning memoir, it was absolutely precious to look at. So thank you so much, Emily. I feel like we're continuing to do as well as one might be expected to do in the times that we are living in. Yeah, you know, I mean it's interesting, right. I feel like, I don't know if you have this moment. We have been very much home all the time, like we're not going out. We have gone out maybe seven times total since this whole thing started. And when I say seven times, I mean like those are like necessary things like a doctor's appointment or something that we shouldn't miss. So then there are times when I see people who are like, oh, I just went to Target, and I like, am I the only fool that's still just like locking myself in my house like some weird postmodern Rapunzel story. M Our Big Big treats has been going to the farmers market. Because the farmer's market is out doors. Everyone's in a mask. Um, everyone has to say six ft apart. There's like usually weather permitting. There's little lines on the ground marking how far apart that is, so it feels pretty safe. And that's like our big, our big treat. We're coming up on the end of farmers market season, so I don't know what our big treat is going to be after that. Um. Most of my doing of things outside of the house has been, um, hiking on unpopular trails so that I can go, Yeah I can. I Also I do this by myself a lot instead like be uh be sharing my location with with my husband just in case something happens to me out in the woods. Um yeah, yeah, same. We also are not I don't know an answer is to whether purple hair augments your absorption of hall weenacity. Uh. I mean it's definitely born of the same seed, right for sure? For sure. I don't know if i've if we've ever talked about it, that I died my hair all over purple for the first time. Yes, I'm acknowledging it is not natural. Um. On the Haunted Mansion's birthday. Oh I didn't know that, which was like, when did I start doing it five years ago or something? If you had ever told me that, I forgot. Yeah, so it's directly related. Um, but I am doing lots of Halloween fun things just by myself with my husband. Yep, yep. So thank you Emily for writing. Thanks to all the folks who have written in just to check in on how we're doing. We're hanging in there. If you would like to write to us about this or anither podcast or at history podcast at I heart radio dot com. We're all over social media as miss in History, so that's where you'll find our Facebook and the pinterest on Twitter and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts and I heart radio app and anywhere else that you get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed Part two. This part two of this Times Unearthed has the shipwrecks and the exhumations and some repatriations um more stuff than I was expecting about vikings, along with some other categories. Although this time around we did not have a standalone episode update section like we've been having for a while, we do still have Potpourri, which is where I just put all the stuff that I thought was cool but could not find a category that united all of it, and that is where we will start. So first up in Potpourri. The history of the British Royal Navy is often traced back to ninth century King Alfred the Great, noting that he launched a naval fleet to repel a Viking invasion, but according to research published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology in August, British naval warfare predates Alfred's reign. That paper by PhD candidate Matt First and Dr Aaron Cebow traces British naval warfare back to an engagement in eight fifty one, which is described in the Anglo Saxon Chronicles, whereas Alfred's first recorded sea battle was in eight se So, being not British, I have have no personal experience with uh this, but the headlines about this paper had the same sort of, um, sort of emotional tone as a United States headline might have, along the lines of We're sorry everyone. It turns out George Washington did not chop down the cherry tree. Um. So I'm under the impression that it is very commonly held and uh like important to people belief that the British Royal Navy was started by King Alfred the Great, which turns out not. I don't know that it's emotionally important to people to think that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, but that was the only example I could think of anyway. Uh. There's a project called Beacons of the Past that has been training volunteers, which the project calls citizens scientists to help look through large scale light our surveys of the Chiltern Hills. Um, just basically to make it feasible to go through all of that data and some of these volunteers spotted evidence of a hill fort, which the research team confirmed as really being there on August six of this year. This site dates back to between eight hundred and five hundred b C. And it was hidden under foliage. Its exact location has been kept secret in order to protect it, and while there are no current plans to excavate it, there are plans to preserve the site moving on. Also in August, the painting Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer by Franz Halls, who's a painter from the Dutch Golden Age, was stolen for the third time. This time thieves forced open the back door of the hofja ven Arden Museum. They stole the painting and then they were gone by the time police arrived. Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer had previously been stolen in along with another painting, and then it had been stolen again Inleven. Obviously, it was recovered both of those times. This latest theft took place on August. As of when we are recording this, it has not yet been recovered. The museum tightened up its security after that eleven theft, but when this most recent burglary happened, it was closed because of the pandemic. Moving on into a completely unrelated find, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced the discovery of a soap making word shop in southern Israel. This is a twelve hundred year old soapery and is the oldest ones to be discovered in the area. The soap that was made there was from olive oil mixed with ash, the ash being made from burning saltwork plants. And in addition to finding materials and objects related to the making of soap, other finds from the site included some game boards, one of them a strategy game called Windmill and the other for a game that was called either Hounds and Jackals or fifty eight holes Hounds and Jackal sounds cooler Um. Lastly, in Potpourri, archaeologists in Poland have found part of a bowl adorned with a human face. The bowl is about seven thousand years old and the parts that have survived include the eyes and the nose and the forehead, which in this case has would appear to be small horns. It's a pretty neat looking bowl, which makes it unfortunate that this is an audio podcast. We are going to move on to a couple of exhamations. First up, James Blessing, grandson of Warren G. Harding, is trying to have the former US President's remains exhumed for DNA testing so that Blessing can scientifically prove his ancestry. Blessings mother, Elizabeth Ann Blessing, was the daughter of Harding and Nan Brittain. Harding and Britain had an extramarital affair before and during Warren's presidency. Brittain had detailed their affair in a memoir called The President's Daughter In the Thing Is. At this point, no one is really questioning the idea that Blessing is Harding's descendant anymore. In ancestry, DNA confirmed a genetic link between James Blessing and two other Harding family members, and that was enough to establish the Blessing and the former president were related. But the one hundredth anniversary of Harding's election to the presidency is this year, and apparently Blessing didn't feel that he or his mother had gotten the recognition they were due at the Warring Y Harding presidential centers planned commemorations, thus this request for DNA testing. So at first some of the other Harding family members didn't seem to really object to this proposed declimation. That changed though, after it turned out that he was planning to have a reality TV crew on hand for it, because it seems like the biggest, most high profile exhumations we talked about on the show now are gonna be on tv UM. As of when this episode was researched in early October, this issue is still unsettled about whether that will all go forward. In other news, human remains were discovered in San Antonio, Texas on May thirteenth during an archaeological and cultural investigation in advance of some construction work. The remains were exhumed following a spiritual ceremony in September. Groups of people who may be descended by the people whose bodies were found were gathered for that ceremony, including the members of the San Antonio seventeen eighteen Founding Families and Descendants and Canary Islands Descendants Association. The remains will be reinterred after the construction is complete, and that is currently scheduled for summer of We have a few repatriations to talk about this time as well, and we are moving on to those. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science has returned a collection of thirty wooden statues to the Midge Canada tribe, which lives in Kenya and northern Tanzania. These carvings are meant as both memorials to people who were deceased and as the embodiment of those people's spirits. So, in the words of Stephen Nash, the museum's curator of anthropology, which was quoted by the Denver Post quote, once we realized that we were curating the physical embodiment of thirty dead people's souls, that's when we said, look, the Midget Canada never had a chance for informed consent like you and I enjoy when disposing of our loved ones. We should not be curating people's souls. The statues, known as the Gango, had been donated to the museum in by Gene Hackman, but when the museum tried to contact his representatives about it, they didn't have any record of the transaction. So with no documentation to go on, it took some time to figure out how they should be repatriated and to whom. An effort in was paused when the government of Kenya set a forty dollar import tariff on the statues. The government reversed that decision in and the repatriation was reported in the Denver Post. This July, the Museum of New Zealand has returned a woven cloak and helmet that belonged to Hawaiian Chief Kolani Opo. They returned that back to Hawaii. So these items had been given to James Cook in seventeen seventy nine is an act of formal diplomacy, and then from there they had changed hands a few different times before being donated to the Ta Papa Museum's predecessor, which was the Dominion Museum back in nineteen twelve. So these items had gone through sort of a whole journey to get from Hawaii to New Zealand, and repatriation discussions had been ongoing for seven years, and in twos sixteen the Ta Papa Museum had sent them to Honoluluz Bernese Pawahi Bishop Museum as a long term loan. Now they will stay with the Honolulu Museum permanently. And our last repatriation, Belgium returned a Mayan jade mask to Guatemala this September. This mask was made of jade mosaic and dates back to between the years six hundred and nine hundred. It had been illegally trafficked out of the country. This mask represents the god Chuck, who is a Mayan reign deity, and the return of this mask also took a while. It was seased in Belgium in two thousand eight. We are going to have some shipwrecks in just a little bit, but before we get to those, we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. We have got several shipwrecks to talk about this time around, and this first one has some news that technically broke on October one, and this is technically an unearthed for July augustin September, but I'm counting it. I'm counting it for unearthed this time around. It was too big of a bit of news to just leave for later. Divers believe that they have found the wreck of the cargo steamer S S. Carl's Rule, which may help solve the mystery of what happened to the Amber Room. The Amber Room is a chamber made of amber panels which Nazis dismantled and looted from the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg have been given to Peter the Great as a gift in seventeen sixteen. There is an episode in the archive on what happened to the Amber Room. The Amber Room was last seen in the port of Conigsberg. The Carls Ruis set sail from that port in nineteen as part of Operation Hannibal, which was a mass evacuation of German troops and civilians. It was clearly laden with cargo and more than one thousand people, but it was sunk off the coast of Poland. So that's been a popular theory about what happened to the Amber Room. We don't know for sure whether the Amber Room is part of the cargo on this wreck, but it is an intriguing idea. Yes, changing gears a little bit. In September, photographs from a remote operated vehicle revealed the location of a different German ship, which, to make things confusing, is also called the Carl's Rule. The cruiser s S. Carl's Rule was sunk in nineteen forty off the coast of Norway. The remote operated vehicle surveys followed us so our survey that had been conducted by Norway's state run power grid operator Stott in it back in. The ship's features, including its gun turrets and swastikas, are clearly visible in the photos. So this ship had been part of the German invasion of Norway that had been damaged by Norwegian artillery and the British torpedo before being scuttled by the Germans on April nine of nine. It is not far away from an underwater power cable that runs between Denmark and Norway, which is how it was spotted. I know a lot of people at this stage of of all the many crises that have been simultaneously unfolding in the United States and around the world, have found themselves sort of like not really being able to think clearly. And I happened to read these two articles. I was going through the shipwreck part of my preparation and I read these I read these two articles back to back, and I was so oscillly confused and wondering whether somebody had made up the Amber Rooms story out of hull cloth, until I just finally figured out they were two different ships with the same name, just to confuse this. I mean, really, what are the odds, right, in the same year, within a few months of each other like, well they were, I think it was. It was the Amber Room ship was sunk a few years later, but it like was still within the same war. Oh no, I mean the discovery and discussion of them happening so close together is the what are the odds part for me? Yes, and I had just this baffling moment of staring at the screen like what is going on? Yeah? Uh? Moving on. In August, a team of divers announced that they had found the wreck of a seventeenth century Dutch merchantman off the coast of Finland. I wasn't fine. They came across by surprise while looking for rex from the First and Second World Wars. Their organization Batea Vena is Deadic needed to documenting shipwrecks from those eras. The wreck is a mostly intact flout, which was a style of ship that was built for efficiency and trade. It's rigging could be operated with a small crew, and that crew all lived together in the same space, instead of having their living space separated by where they were in the ship's hierarchy of command. Uh. It also sailed without guns, so it could devote all of its space to cargo. Researchers at East Carolina University have been studying shipwreck microbiology based on their study of the wreck of the Pappy Lane, which was built as a World War two warship and abandoned after running aground in the nineteen sixties. A wide range of micro organisms can live in one wreck. Some of these helped preserve the wreckage, while others are destructive. And to do this work, the team examined parts of the ship that were corroded and parts that were not, as well as the nearby sediment and seawater, and they found thousands of species of backt here area. Yeah, it's uh, it wasn't an entirely surprising number of species um, but they sort of found a surprising number of distinct ecosystems in different parts of the wreck and its surroundings. And the words of Dr Erin Field, Assistant professor in the Department of Biology at East Carolina University, quote, Historically shipwreck sites were treated as a single environment, but our research goes deeper showing that there are different microbial communities within single wreck sites and associated with the wreck itself. As such, we need a tailor conservation efforts to each shipwreck in order to more effectively mitigate bio corrosion and deterioration. Researchers have identified a shipwreck found off the coast of Mexico in seventeen as La Nion, a ship that was used to transport Maya people to Cuba to work as enslaved laborers in sugarcane fields. The ship sank after its boilers exploded in September of eighteen sixty one, so this ship itself had been part of the oral history of the region. This happened during an armed uprising known as the cast War of the Yuktahan. After Mexico had become independent from Spain, public land was redistributed to private citizens to establish new haciendas, and a lot of the people who had been living in farming that land were Maya. Without this land, they had no way to sustain themselves, and that led to a massive insurrection. Even though slavery was illegal in Mexico, authorities started capturing Maya and deporting them to Cuba. In some cases, the deported people had been part of this uprising, but in others they had been deceived into signing contracts to travel to Cuba to work, but the terms of those contracts were virtually indistinguishable from slavery, so when the la Junon sank, about half of the crew were killed, along with about sixty passengers. But one day that is not totally clear is whether any of those passengers on this particular voyage were Maya. This ship was definitely part of this slave trade, but we don't know whether any enslaved people were on board during this specific voyage because they would have been either listed as cargo or not listed at all in a find that also could have gone under edibles and potables. Researchers have used DNA to figure out what kind of fish was on board the Danish flagship grib Shunden when it caught fire and sank in King Hans was traveling to Sweden with the hope of claiming the Swedish throne, but on the way to do that, the grib Shunden sank. All the board were lost, along with all of the expensive cargo that the king was planning to use to back up his claim to the throne. And this wreckage was actually discovered about fifty years ago. So included in all this cargo was a two meter long fish that had been cut into pieces and stored in a wooden barrel, and thanks to this DNA study we now know that it was an Atlantic sturgeon. The sturgeon was a particular mark of status. It was very sought after for its meat and its row and its swim bladder which was used to make a glue called eisnglass. In another combination of shipwrecks and edibles and potables, a bottle of whiskey from the wreck of the s S. Politician was sold at auction for more than seven thousand dollars. The Politician ran aground in the Outer Hebrides in nineteen forty one while hauling twenty eight thousand cases of whiskey. Efforts to salvage the whiskey while getting around salvage and tax laws were later turned into a book called Whiskey Galore, which is also a great pen name if anybody wants to use it, which later became a movie in nineteen nine, and even later than that was remade in two So, unlike so many other times when we talk about somebody unearthings some alcohol and then tasting it, the auction site has a particular note for this bottle of whiskey which read quote this bottle is not suitable for human consumption. So with that in mind, doesn't I mean nobody's going to try it, but the auction side advises you not to. They got to cover their basis. Man, Uh, we are going to cover our bases. Take a quick break, and then we'll be back in just a bit to talk about Vikings. So I found several things related to Vikings this time around. First up, while working on his master's thesis, Norwegian Arctic University student Tor Kettle chromer Doll found evidence connected to the oldest known trading place in northern Norway. He unearthed these Viking era artifacts using a metal detector and they included jewelry, weights and silver. He had found a reference to to a marketplace in the area in a book, and he'd searched the general area with a metal detector before and hadn't found anything impressive, so he really wasn't expecting to find anything significant. But this time he found artifacts pinpointing a market that had not been previously been part of the archaeological record, and another Viking find. An international team of scientists has unearthed some evidence that Viking raids helped spread smallpox. They found evidence of the virus and skeletal remains from multiple sites around northern Europe. This particular smallpox strain is genetically different from what eventually proliferated around the globe and was eradicated in the twentieth century, although there's written evidence of diseases that are interpreted as being about smallpox. When it comes to DNA evidence, the oldest before this point dated back to the seventeenth century. The Viking era spanned from about the ninth through the eleventh centuries, so that's a big jump back. Yeah. Another news. Back in the nineteen fifties, workers digging a trench in Yarm in northern England found a helmet. Locals started calling it the Viking helmet and it was placed in the Preston Park Museum. But even though people were calling it the Viking helmet, it wasn't totally clear whether it had actual connections to the Vikings. Thanks to analysis of the helmet and the material that it's made of, yes, it does seem to be an actual Viking helmet. It's made of iron and it dates back to the early medieval period, with a design that suggests an Anglo Scandinavian origin. This is the first mostly complete Viking helmet found in the region. Our next find is a farmer living outside of Loftahammer, Sweden, who plowed up a large flat stone while working out in the fields and planned to use it as a stepping stone until he realized that it was covered in runs. That point contacted some experts. Rhnologist Magnus Alstrom examined the stone and determined that it dated back to the early eleventh century and also deciphered some of the runes as reading quote. Garder raised this stone after Sigjarv's father, oh Guard's husband. There are plans at this point they have the stone preserved and cleaned and then placed somewhere on public display. And now we are getting to what was probably the most widely reported Viking story of the quarter. A project to sequence the DNA of Viking remains from all across Europe has confirmed the idea that Viking was more of a job title than a race or an ethnicity, and that not all Vikings hailed from Scandinavia. This research was published in the journal Nature in September under the title Population Genomics of the Viking World. To do this work, the team spent ten years studying burial sites in Scandinavia from the eight through eleventh centuries, as well as Viking style burial sites from elsewhere in Europe and burials that included Viking grave goods. So this included, for example, forty men who were buried in two Viking ships on a beach in Estonia who had apparently died in a botched raid. This was the largest study of Viking DNA to date, and it allowed researchers to see patterns and how people moved from Scandinavia into other parts of Europe. For example, in the words of lead author as Shot Margarian quote, the Danish Vikings went to England, while the Swedish Vikings went to the Baltic and Norwegian Vikings went to Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. However, the Vikings from these three quote nations only very rarely mixed genetically. Perhaps they were enemies, or perhaps there is some other valid explanation we just don't know. The team also mapped how parts of southern Scandinavian near the coast became more genetically diverse, while peasants living Inland remained a lot more isolated, and the words of Eska Villerslav, who is another of the papers authors, quote the Vikings had a lot more genes from southern and Eastern Europe than we anticipated. They frequently had children with people from other parts of the world. In fact, they tend to be dark haired rather than blonde, which is otherwise considered an established Viking trait. And now we've got a few CT scans of mummies to talk about. There was a surprising number of those also jumping from Vikings to mummies. In nineteen o two, a shepherd stumbled into a tomb in Siberia containing the remains of several people wearing death masks. The tomb was excavated in nineteen sixty nine, unearthing mummified remains dating back to the third or fourth century. They belonged to the Tashta culture, which was known for elaborate funeral and burial rituals, including the creation of death masks. Scientists that Russia's State Hermitage Museum have conducted a CT scan of one of the heads from this tomb, allowing them to visualize and analyze face that is underneath the mask. That's something that otherwise would have been impossible to do without damaging it. The mask itself was already damaged, with the area around the mouth and one ear of it missing, and then trying to take it off of the skull would have damaged to the tissue underneath. They found evidence of a scar running from the left eye to the left ear, something that may have been sewn shut after the person's death. While preparing the body, they also discovered that a hole had been made through the skull with a chisel like tool, probably to remove the brain. Also as part of preparing the body, another body from the same tomb appears to be that of a woman, and that death mask is a lot more intact, but that one has not gone through a CT scan as of yet another CT scan in a different project of an Egyptian mummy who is nicknamed the Mummy of the Screaming Woman, has revealed that the woman probably died in her sixties, likely from a heart attack. There was evidence of advanced a through sclerosis throughout the circulatory system. The money was given this nickname because her mouth is open as though she's screaming, and the position of her body suggests a sense of pain or terror. The team believes that she was mummified while in a state of rigor mortis, preventing the people who were preparing her body from being able to close her mouth or adjust her positioning. It's still not completely clear whose mummy this was, though there's writing on the linen used to wrap the body that reads the Royal Daughter, the Royal sister of merit Amand, but there were several Egyptian princesses named merit Amands, so it's not clear exactly who this is. It is believed that ancient Egyptians mummified as many as seventy million animals as votive offerings, and researchers have used X ray micro CT scanning to examine three such animals. They were a snake, a bird, and a cat from the collection held by the Egypt Center at Swansea University. So X ray microcy he scanning allows the creation of incredibly detailed images. It's a lot higher resolution than a medical CT scan and so some of the things that they were able to determine from doing this include that the cat was a kitten whose adult teeth hadn't come in yet, the snake was a juvenile Egyptian cobra, and the bird may have been a Eurasian kestrel. So this last one does not involve CT scans, but we still got some mummy action for you. In September, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery of thirteen unopened coffins that have been found at the bottom of a well. That well is almost forty feet that's roughly twelve meters deep, and the conditions at the bottom have kept the coffins very well preserved. Since this find is so recent, there's no other information yet about whose coffins these might be, but they're believed to be at least twenty years old and still contain human mummies. And as uh we come to the end of this session of Unearthed, we just have a cool random thing to end on, and that is the latest discovery of a medieval sword pulled out of a lake. This time the lake is led Nica Lake in Poland. Archaeologists from the Nicholas Copernicus University and the Museum of the First Pst made this fine while they were mapping the bottom of the lake. This is the eighth sword to be found in the lake, but the first one in the last twenty years. The sword is fully intact, and adorned with a Jerusalem cross, and remnants of its leather scabbard were found as well. So that brings us to the end of our Unearthed in October uh, which is really coming out in November. We will do some more unearthed. Our year in Unearthed has generally been coming out approximately the very first week of January, so probably we will try to stick to that timing again, even though this one's coming out a little later in the fall uh than last time. And I have some listener mail. Is it about a CT scan on a mummy or a Viking? Michelle's It's about none of that. Oh my goodness, this is from Emily. Emily says, good day, ladies. I hope this finds you both wonderfully well. Thank you so much for all your work on the podcast, which is something I'm especially grateful for during this crazy year. Both it's entertainment and its educational value are much appreciated. In case someone hasn't affirmed that for you. Today, I'm writing from New York, where, during the pandemic, my dance company has been rehearsing on Zoom and learning more dance history, including about a dance called the shim Sham during your Q and A episode sometime back. I had a true record scratch moment when Tracy said her favorite research read was Frankie Manning, the Ambassador of LYNDI hop not only was the book sitting on my desk, but I had just spoken with Cynthia Millman about aaking with the group, which she graciously did. The next time I talked to her, I passed on your kind words. She was delighted and expressed her thanks in a return. She's truly dedicated to Frankie Manning's legacy and education in general, still serving as a full time librarian at a school in New York City, and it is incredibly generous with her time and her stories. Given how whitewashed Lindy Hop has become since its revival, her work keeping Frankie's memory and contributions in the foreground is something to greatly respect. So thanks for a nice shout out to a really lovely woman and the joy it brought me once I picked myself then my jaw up off the floor. Attached as a photo we took while reading it that I thought you might enjoy. I hope you're having fun soaking up spooky season. Perhaps purple hair can increase one's absorption rate question mark warm regards, Emily, Thank you so much, Emily. So The picture that accompanied this was like a screenshot of the Zoom meeting with every I don't know if it was specifically Zoom but because I don't remember, but with everybody holding up their copies of that Frankie Manning memoir, it was absolutely precious to look at. So thank you so much, Emily. I feel like we're continuing to do as well as one might be expected to do in the times that we are living in. Yeah, you know, I mean it's interesting, right. I feel like, I don't know if you have this moment. We have been very much home all the time, like we're not going out. We have gone out maybe seven times total since this whole thing started. And when I say seven times, I mean like those are like necessary things like a doctor's appointment or something that we shouldn't miss. So then there are times when I see people who are like, oh, I just went to Target, and I like, am I the only fool that's still just like locking myself in my house like some weird postmodern Rapunzel story. M Our Big Big treats has been going to the farmers market. Because the farmer's market is out doors. Everyone's in a mask. Um, everyone has to say six ft apart. There's like usually weather permitting. There's little lines on the ground marking how far apart that is, so it feels pretty safe. And that's like our big, our big treat. We're coming up on the end of farmers market season, so I don't know what our big treat is going to be after that. Um. Most of my doing of things outside of the house has been, um, hiking on unpopular trails so that I can go, Yeah I can. I Also I do this by myself a lot instead like be uh be sharing my location with with my husband just in case something happens to me out in the woods. Um yeah, yeah, same. We also are not I don't know an answer is to whether purple hair augments your absorption of hall weenacity. Uh. I mean it's definitely born of the same seed, right for sure? For sure. I don't know if i've if we've ever talked about it, that I died my hair all over purple for the first time. Yes, I'm acknowledging it is not natural. Um. On the Haunted Mansion's birthday. Oh I didn't know that, which was like, when did I start doing it five years ago or something? If you had ever told me that, I forgot. Yeah, so it's directly related. Um, but I am doing lots of Halloween fun things just by myself with my husband. Yep, yep. So thank you Emily for writing. Thanks to all the folks who have written in just to check in on how we're doing. We're hanging in there. If you would like to write to us about this or anither podcast or at history podcast at I heart radio dot com. We're all over social media as miss in History, so that's where you'll find our Facebook and the pinterest on Twitter and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts and I heart radio app and anywhere else that you get podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H