Stuff You Missed in History ClassIt’s time for the end-of-the-year edition of Unearthed! Today we have episode updates, books and letters, shipwrecks, and animal finds, among a few other categories. Next time we’ll have the edibles and potables, clothing and accessories, and exhumations, among others.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It's time for Unearthed. Here at the end of the year. Our most recent previous installment of Unearthed left off approximately in August, so for folks that are new to the show, this is the time of year when we talk about things that were literally or figuratively unearthed over the past however many months, and in this case to day, it's from approximately September until mid December, or at least that's when we found out about them. I think this episode is coming out at the very end of December beginning of January, so there's going to be just a week and a half or so gap between when we record and when it's actually coming out. If any gigantic news breaks and that time, it'll just go on the next one to late to like to get in there. So today we have a lot of different stuff, including updates to previous episodes, some books and letters, shipwrecks which are a big favorite, and some animal finds, along with some a few other categories. And then next time, we will have the edibles and potables and the clothing and accessories and the exclamations as examples of what we'll have next time. So first up, we're gonna talk about some episode updates, starting with a recent headline. On December sixteenth, officials in Oklahoma announced the results of ground penetrating radar scans that were used to look for signs of mass graves associated with the massacre in Greenwood, also known as the Tulsa Race Riot. The team had focused on areas that were mentioned as possible mass grave sites in the two thousand one report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot, and this included Oaklawn Cemetery, New Block Park, and an area near the Arkansas River known as the Canes. So nothing is official yet from this survey. This was one of those things that they were doing to see where they should look closer, and they did find two areas in Oaklawn Cemetery and one in the Canes that they said, we're consistent with a possible mass burial site on these sites warranted a closer look. Negotiations are also still ongoing with another cemetery that had been mentioned in that report that cemetery hadn't yet given permission for the work to take place, and this announcement was made just a couple of days before we recorded this episode, so this is still ongoing. I was driving back on a road trip from Florida to Atlanta when this news broke and my phone would not stop going off. Our episode on the Tulsa Massacre came out in and we re aired it as a Saturday Classic in November of this year, after it was featured in the opening episode of the HBO show Watchman. Yeah, if you have not watched the show Watchman, it sort of becomes uh part of the whole thread of the season, which I thought was really interesting. Um. This is also one where I first heard that the announcement was coming before the announcement had actually been made. But the article that I was reading about it made it sound like it wasn't coming out until the following Monday, rather than the Monday that it came out on, and I was like, Oh, I really wish we could talk about this, And then it turned out it was exactly the right time to get it into the episode. Previous hosts of our show to move on to something else talked about the Bayou Tapestry in July and that tapestry tells the story of the Norman conquest of England, but there's been some debate about where exactly it was made, who made it, and who they made it for. According to research published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association, the Baioux Tapestry was specifically designed to be displayed in the Baiou Cathedral in Normandy, France, on the north, south, and west walls of the cathedral's nave. We already knew that's where it hung in the fifteenth century, but according to this research, that wasn't just a place that someone figured out to put it where it would fit. That is where it was always supposed to go. So this doesn't answer ongoing questions about who exactly commissioned or made this piece, but it does suggest that whoever designed it and planned out its construction had at least visited this cathedral and either took measurements or had access to the dimensions of the nave. The cathedral as it stands today is very different from the way it looked when the Biou Tapestry was created, so this research required Christopher Norton from the University of York to figure out the naves earlier dimensions, including where the choir screen would have gone based on written documents and surviving architectural features, and another find. A team at Yama Gotta University in Japan studied the Nasca Lines between eighteen and in November of this year, they announced their findings, which included the presence of a hundred and forty three previously undocumented petroglyphs on the west inside of the Nasca plateau. One of them was detected through artificial intelligence and then confirmed by a human that particular petroglyph is about five meters tall and seems to represent a person. In addition to these discoveries, the team used artificial intelligence to analyze aerial footage and in the process they spotted at least another five hundred potential petroglyphs, which need to be evaluated by a human being before they can be confirmed. Our episode on the Nasca Lines came out in September, and there have been a few Unearthed episode updates on the line since then. In an update to a previous unearthed in the autumn of this year, and onearthed we talked about new evidence about the extent of the plague of Justinian, also called the justiniac plague, and according to research that was published in the December second issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it turns out that plague might not have been such a big deal. Actually, Researchers from the University of Maryland's nash nl Socio Environmental Synthesis Center concluded that reports of the plague's effects might have been exaggerated. Basically, it's long been described as a pandemic that killed between a third and a half of the population of the Mediterranean, but there's no evidence of that scale of death. For example, such a huge death toll would have affected agricultural output, which would have affected pollen levels, but that doesn't seem to be reflected in the physical records. They also couldn't see any shifts in burial practices, which often come about after a plague because of the huge numbers of bodies that need to be buried. So between these two uh findings that we've talked about, it seems like maybe this plague reached farther than was previously believed, but might not have been as lethal as it has been reported. According to a different paper in the journal Current Biology, DNA research has confirmed that the Carolina parakeet became extinct due to human activity. Researchers sequenced the parakeets full genome along with the DNA of the sun parakeet, which is a related bird that still lives today, and they wanted to figure out when these two species diverged from each other and also look for evidence of what caused the Carolina parakeets extinction. When they sequenced the Carolina parakeets DNA, they didn't find evidence of inbreeding or population decline that would be expected if the bird had been threatened or endangered for some time before going extinct, so they concluded that the extinction was sudden and abrupt, which means it was probably caused by humans. We talked about the Carolina parakeet and its extinction in our episode on end Lings, and then to finish out the updates just last week, we talked about Ethiopia's rock hewn churches and the introduction of Christianity to Ethiopia during the time of the Oxymite Empire, and then the exact same day as we recorded that episode, a paper was published in the journal Antiquity that detail the excavation of the oximate town of Beta Somati. I feel like sometimes all we need to invoke a study publishing is to record an episode about a topic that does feel that way sometimes. Uh. This excavation unearthed a part of the city that showed signs of both domestic life and commercial activities like manufacturing and trade. It also on earth a basilica that shows evidence of both religious and administrative activities, along with some blending of pagan and early Christian traditions. Various items at the basilica date back to between the years two d fifty eight and sixty five, and archaeologists who worked on the excavation believe that it may be one of the first churches constructed outside the capital of Axum after the introduction of Christianity. Another notable find at this site is a gold and Carnelian ring. The rings design is described as really Roman, but the insignia that is carved into it is a bull's head that looks a lot more African. This paper was published, as Tracy had said, in the journal Antiquity, and the authors noted that there is still a lot more research to be done at the site, but that so far it suggests a lot of blending and overlap between Oxomite and Preoxomite culture and pagan and Christian religions, rather than a sudden shift that followed changes in the ruling dynasty of the region. To move on to the books and letters in this edition of Unearthed, Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh century The Tale of Ganji is a classic in Japanese literature, but there aren't any copies of it that date back to her lifetime. The oldest and most complete surviving version of it that we have today is called the Aobyoshiban or Blue Cover Book, and that has become the standard text for most translations of her work. Four of its chapters are confirmed to have been handwritten by the man who compiled it in the thirteenth century. That was the poet Fujiwara no Taka. Now there is a fifth chapter thanks to a newly unearthed manuscript. Apart from so minor copying errors, the other four chapters seemed to be identical to previously known copies, and this newly confirmed fifth chapter details Genji's meeting his future wife, a character named Mourasaki. The manuscript that this chapter was found in had been passed down through the Okochee family, who were descended from a Japanese feudal lord. This manuscript had been in the family's possession since seventeen forty three, so the manuscript itself wasn't something that was previously unknown. In April, though, the family asked for experts to evaluate the manuscript, and the announcement that it contained this fifth chapter of the Tale of Genji came in October. So if you're thinking I wish I knew more about this Murasaki Shikibu person and the Tale of Genji, just stay tuned. Yeah, stay tuned pretty soon. Actually. Uh. Chris Rolston at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University to move on to another story, is using advanced imaging to study notes that were on two thousand year old pottery fragments. So pottery fragments that contain some kind of inscriptions are writing on them are called ostrica, and these ostrica in particular were excavated in Jordan's in Night, but they were thought to have been subsequently lost until more recently in Ralston's own words. These were like the post it notes of antiquity. When a useful pot or vessel broke, people would keep the pieces and then use them to jot down things they needed to remember temporarily, like ancient shopping lists or reminders of errands that they needed to run. The notes on these fragments were made with an ash based ink that is largely faded now, so multi spectral imaging is being used to try to get a better look. Even though these fragments of pottery don't contain what we might really think of as important information, there's still a potential source of new knowledge about the past, so called important official documents. At the time, we're mostly written down on things like papyrus and animal skin, so thanks to climate conditions and the passage of time, a lot of them have not survived until the present. The site where the fragments were found is also associated with a lot of historical figures like King Herod and John the Baptists, so who knows. It may turn out that even though these are sort of jotted down personal notes, they may actually wind up containing some references to people or events that are still more known about today. Moving on, Dr John Mark Philo, an honorary fellow in English Studies at the University of East Anglia, has unearthed Queen Elizabeth the first translations of the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus. At least there is a lot of evidence to suggest that that's what he found. It's written on paper that Elizabeth's secretaries were fond of using, and it has corrections in what looks to be the Queen's handwriting and Filo's words quote. The corrections made to the translation are a match for Elizabeth's late hand which was, to put it mildly idiosyncratic. The higher you are in the social hierarchy of Tutor England, the messier you can let your handwriting become. For the queen. Comprehension is somebody else's problem. A paper published on November twenty nine in the Review of English Studies details some other clues as to why this is believed to be Elizabeth's work. This includes water marks in the paper and some comparisons to the handwriting of people who were known to have worked as scribes for the Queen. And after we take a quick sponsor break, we're gonna move on to shipwrecks. And there are a lot of them, so to move on to the shipwrecks. The remains of the schooner's Pestigo and St. Andrew's have been found in northern Lake Michigan. These two vessels collided and sank in eighteen seventy eight. They were basically headed in opposite directions, with the Pastigo loaded with coal and the St. Andrew's loaded with corn, and the two of them apparently collided due to misunderstood torch signals. Bernie Hellstrom first spotted the find in June using a bottom sounder and then took pictures of it with a submersible camera, but it wasn't immediately clear what vessels these were because they were about fifty miles from where the Pestigo and the St. Andrews were believed to have collided. Divers has since been to the site with cameras and the schooners are described as being in an amazing state of preservation. In other news, maritime archaeologists in Sweden have discovered two wrecks that they think date back to the seventeenth century. Both of them are warships, and one of them maybe the sister ship to the Vassa which sank on its maiden voyage and was also covered in our previous episode More Shipwrecked Stories Battleships. Back in twleven, three four hundred year old shipwrecks have been unearthed in central Gothenburg, Sweden, during construction work on a new railway line. It wasn't an altogether surprising find. The area that they were discovered used to be a harbor in the sixteen hundreds, but it was filled in in the eighteen hundreds. What is not known is whether these ships were wrecked accidentally or if they were deliberately scuttled for some reason. They were made of oak and measured fifteen to twenty meters in length, and based on their size, they are believed to have been cargo ships. In other news, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk at the Battle of Midway in nineteen forty two, and in October it was announced that two of them have been found, the Kaga and the Akagi. Until this point, the only sunken vessel from the Battle of Midway to be discovered was the Yorktown, which was found in nine and as was the case with some of the other shipwrecks we have talked about, on the show. The Kaga and the Akagi were found by researchers using the research vessel Petrol, which was owned by the late Paul Allen, and they were working in conjunction with the U. S. Navy. Uh, it seems like we somehow missed this one, But the r V Petrol also found the wreck of the USS Hornet in late January. The Hornet was part of the Doolittle Raid, which we talked about on the show in February of sixteen, and it sank during the Battle of Santa Cruz Island in nineteen forty two. When we were on tour in Texas, one of my lift drivers asked me about this fine, and I felt silly because I didn't know what to tell him. Yeah, it's like I don't recall, but that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, we have a lot of different ways of trying to keep track with all of these different fines during the year. But I really think we somehow just missed this one, Maybe because it was in January and there's kind of a lot going on at the very start of the year. I don't know. Yeah, that was a case where I had mentioned to this driver. I don't even know how we got on it that I had grown up in northwest Florida for part of my life, and we talked about Hurlbert Field and he said, oh, and then he wanted to talk about Jimmy Doolittle a lot, and that's how we landed. So Ken, should you be listening? Thank you? That was a lovely riding conversation. Oh good. Another nineteen forty two shipwrecks the HMS Urge, which was part of the British tenth submarine Floortill. It departed from Malta on April seven, nineteen forty two, but then it never made it to Alexandria, Egypt, and its fate was unknown until this year's discovery. Off the coast of Malta. They found the Urge in about four hundred feet of water. That discovery was announced in November, and it appears that the vessel was sunk by a mine. In a somewhat similar mystery, the USS gray Back left Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on January for a combat patrol, but it never made it back. And before that point, the gray Back had been regarded as one of the most successful submarines in the U. S. Navy, based on Japanese war records. US officials thought they had an approximate idea of where this vessel might have been sunk, but it turned out that the translation of the longitude and latitude in those Japanese documents wasn't correct. When officials began going back through old records last year, they found a reference to a Japanese bomber striking a submarine on February. It turns out that this was the Gray Back, more than one hundred miles from where the U s had previously thought that it had gone down. Private explorers with the Lost fifty two project, which was founded to try to find missing US World War two submarines, made the discovery. Based on that new information, a team from Bournemouth University and the Marine Archaeology c Trust, supported by the National Museum of the Royal Navy, has been excavating the wreck of the h M S Invincible. This was originally a French ship called Love on Ceb and it was captured by the British Navy in seventeen forty seven before running aground and sinking in seventeen fifty eight. Fines from this excavation included a lot of objects that point to everyday life on the ship, including wig curler's clay pipes, bottles, and a mop head and bucket. Many of these items will ultimately go on display at the National Museum of the Royal Navy. The water level markers that had been hand cut into the side of the ship are still also visible more than two hundred sixty years after it went down. And in our last shipwreck of this edition, a team of divers from Sweden has salvaged hundreds of bottles of liquor from a World War One era shipwreck. The Cryos, was in route to Russia when it was sunk by a German submarine in nineteen seventeen, carrying all that liquor. The salvage group that did this work is known as Ocean X and specializes in salvaging alcohol from shipwrecks. It's a very niche career, uh. They brought up six hundred bottles of Kognac and three hundred bottles of an herbal liqueur known as benedictine. According to the rite up, they planned to have the salvage tested to see if it was still fit to drink. That amuses me because sometimes we have updates where people there was. The test was they tried to drink it de termined that it was undrinkable. I'm I it's not an appeal for me, which may surprise people since we do history for a living. But like, there's plenty of perfectly fine alcohol if you would like a cocktail available to you, Like, I don't necessarily understand the draw of a historical liquor that may or may not hurt you yet and also may or may not be any good anymore. Um. Yeah, So to move on to our next subject, we have lots of fines related to animals. Thanks to a combination of DNA analysis and carbon fourteen dating, an interdisciplinary team of scientists in Iceland has confirmed that Iceland's now extinct population of walruses was genetically distinct, and that they went extinct not long after the North first settled Iceland. It was already known, or at least strongly suggested that there were once walruses in Iceland. Aside from the remains that were studied in this research, the Icelandic sagas and other literature include references to walrus hunting, and there are also places that are named for walruses. In other news researchers in Junan Province, China have looked at fishbones to determine that people there have been practicing aquaculture for eight thousand years, specifically with car farming dating all the way back to between sixty two d and fifty hundred BC. There were already known written references to carp farming going back to the first millennium b C, but it wasn't clear how long before that it had existed, and it is still unclear exactly when and where aquaculture first started. For this research, the team looked at fish remains, specifically the remains of five hundred and eighty eight fish. They studied how old and how large these carp were when they died, and their findings suggested that the majority of them were at their peak in terms of maturity, which would be a really unusual age for them to have all died naturally in the wild. They also found areas where the concentration of carp versus other fish was a lot higher than would occur naturally in the wild. After examining all of this, an international team put together a three phase model of the development of aquaculture in Hunan Province. First, people fished in marshy areas during the carp spawning season. Then they started digging channels and employing other water management techniques to encourage the carp to spawn in certain places, and then in the last phase, people started managing carp spawning from beginning to end, with humans caring for both spawning beds and ponds for growing fish or fish habitats in patty fields. Researchers in Egypt have been studying the sacred mummified ibises that are found in Egyptian catacombs, and there are a lot of these mummified birds. That's led to questions about how exactly Egyptians got so many of them. Some ancient texts suggest that they might have been domesticated and raised specifically so that they could be sacrificed and mummified, but like that wasn't completely certain. According to DNA studies of birds from six Egyptian catacombs, these mummified birds were really diverse, far more diverse than might be expected from an ongoing captive breeding population and comparable to what would be expected in the wild. So it's possible at these birds were captured rather than farmed, or that they were farmed for brief periods when they were needed for these mummifications, and in our last animal update, the ARC Center of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage has been trying to determine what exactly caused Australia's mega fauna to go extinct. Their research included mathematical models, climate research, fossil studies and archaeological records, and their conclusion was that human activity was a big part of this. Not all that surprisingly that comes up a lot, but there was also probably a connection to the reduced availability of drinking water because of a shifting climate. The lead author of the paper noted that this is particularly important work because this is one of the oldest extinctions to begin after the spread of modern humans out of Africa. We're gonna have a little bit more on Unearthed. After we first paused for a little sponsor break. We have a few a sort of random medieval era finds. Next. First, the Archbishop of London has donated a handbell known as the Naka Temple Handbell to the National Museum of Ireland. That bell is believed to date back to the eighth or ninth century, and it's been in possession of the archdiocese since the nineteen twenties. It is not clear how this bell came to be in the possession of the archdiocese, but it's believed that a priest bought it at an auction. In nineteen fifteen. Cormack Bork, a curator of medieval antiquities at the Ulster Museum of Belfast, managed to track down the bell by going through archival records. Once the archdiocese released what they had, they offered to donate it. In a totally different story, thieves broke into a medieval cathedral in all Aron Samarine in southern France by tying a log to the roof of their car and then ramming the door with it. This cathedral was previously named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That happened in and the things that the thieves stole from it included gold and silver chalices and crosses, a Nativity scene, and a sixteenth century cape that had been donated by King Francis the First along with other artifacts. That makes me real mad. Yeah, it made a lot of people really mad. Like I saw so many outraged tweets about the ramming with the log car. Yeah, that's just jerkery. We are moving on to medieval Japan. Large parts of Shouty Castle in Okinawa were destroyed in a fire in October. This complex of buildings was actually a reconstruction, as the original fourteenth century buildings had been destroyed in World War Two during the Battle of Okinawa, but the reconstruction was determined to be authentic enough that it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in two thousand. As of the day of the fire, the plan was to rebuild the site again. And our last grouping of topics for this first part of Unearthed is historical inequality. Several papers published over the last few months have looked at the historical roots of social and economic inequality, and we're going to just hit some of the highlights. First up. Researchers from the Santa Fe Institute are challenging the long held idea that social and economic inequality started to evolve really as soon as societies started transitioning from hunting and gathering to agriculture. In this research, the team studied information from a hundred and fifty different archaeological sites, and they looked at different types of wealth across different societies. They concluded that economic inequality didn't really develop until several millennia after the development of agriculture. They concluded that the likely shift was the introduction of the ox drawn plow, which was used mostly or exclusively for plowing and similar work, rather than people cultivating their land by hand with hose or occasionally by using a milk cow or other cattle to try to plow. In addition to the fact that only the more affluent could afford the cost associated with an and a plow, the ox also replaced human labor, and that made land more valuable than the human labor that was needed to work it. Samuel Bowls, who co authored this study, compared neolithic oxen to today's robots, saying quote the effect was the same as today, growing economic disparities between those who owned the robots and those who's worked the robots displaced moving on. According to a paper published in the Journal of Political Economy called the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the Origins of Private Property, the establishment of private property may have been connected to the rise of agriculture in Mesopotamia. The papers authors cited a number of studies suggesting that the first farmers actually had a harder time than hunter gatherers, with a day's work in agriculture initially yielding fewer calories than a day of hunting or foraging, So then why do it. Their interpretation is that private property might have encouraged people who had the means to have that private property to make that ship. With the idea of private property established, it was easier to also establish who had the right to harvest and benefit from a cultivated crop, or who had the rights to the meat, milk, and other products from domestic animals that were raised on that property. A paper published in the journal Science also looks at inequality, this time within the same household. This team studied grave goods in grave sites in southern Germany dating back to about four thousand years ago. These were small burial areas associated with single homesteads, and they found that the people buried in each homestead often included three groups. Biologically related people of a high social status, women who were not related to that family, and we're not local to the area, but we're also high status and local people also unrelated to the family, who were not as well off. So the team noted that they could only speculate as to whether the households, unrelated people were servants or enslaved, but that there was this path and of inequality within the households. In the words of one of the authors of the paper, quote wealth was correlated with either biological kinship or foreign origin. The nuclear family passed on their property and status over generations, but at every farm we also found poorly equipped people of local origin. Based on the genetic analysis of more than one skeletons, it also appears that these farms were passed out through generations through the mail line, with adult women leaving the household and the remaining men marrying women who had moved in from elsewhere. So that's a wrap on our first part of our two part Unearthed this winter time. We'll have more next time. I also have a little listener mail fabulous that is particularly apt as related to Unearthed. This is actually a Facebook comment from Tim tim is Uh. The comment was on our post about um the episode about the Italian Hall disaster, and Tim said thanks for mentioning the role that our theology played in the process of installing the new monument and improving the memorials landscape. Here are some articles and essays about the survey. Please understand that the idea was to map and identify the layers and features, but then to avoid digging into them. We were essentially identifying the depth of the soil and the sediment brought in to cover the rubble after the building was demolished in the late nineteen eighties. So thanks so much for that, Tim. If you go to our Facebook page and you scroll down until you get to the post that is um that episode about the Italian Hall disaster, uh Tim provided us with i think three different links to blog posts that were all about this archaeology work, as well as a video of a local newscast about it. So thanks so much, Tim. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com, and then we're all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple, podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and anywhere else to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
