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's time for Unearthed. Hooray, the favorite time a year for a lot of folks. For new listeners, this is when we take time about four times a year to talk about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed. Over the last few months, we've started doing this once a quarter. The number has gradually increased. I think this is probably the sweet spot at this point. So this episode today is generally covering stuff that happened in April, May and June. So today we have a ton of updates to previous episodes, along with some fines related to books and letters and edibles and potables and art. And then next time you will get into some exhamations, some mysteries that have been solved, and other stuff. Also, I know there are folks that kind of check out of episodes when we get to listener mail and they don't listen to that part, So just a heads up. Both of these installments of Unearthed have special Unearthed specific listener mail. Bump bump um uh so we have mentioned before the search for the remains of victims of the Tulsa Race massacre that's come up several times previously. The search of the Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa ended on June, having identified thirty five coffins and exhumed nineteen sets of remains from unmarked graves. Investigators do not believe that the people buried in all thirty five coffins were victims of the massacre, so they focused their exhimation efforts primarily on the ones who were buried in cheaper coffins, which they saw as more likely to be massacre victims. About half of their mains had been thoroughly examined by the seven and at least one of them showed obvious signs of trauma. This work included a section of the cemetery known as the Original Eighteen, believed to be the burial site of eighteen victims of the Tulsa Race massacre who had been listed on a funeral home ledger. And although this phase of the excavation at Oakland is complete now, work with the remains that were exhumed is still ongoing, including trying to identify exactly who these people were so Our episode on the Tulsa Race massacre was most recently a Saturday Classic on May twenty nine of this year. In June, the U S Office of Army Cemeteries announced a plan to exhume the bodies of ten children buried on the grounds of Carlisle, Indian Industrial School and returned them to their families. This is the U. S Army's fourth such project at Carlyle Barracks, some of which we have discussed on previous episodes of the show. This disinterment was affected to start in mid June and be completed by July eighteenth, so it is still ongoing as of when we're recording this episode. Yeah, and the US Army's announcement about this disinternment at Carlisle came amid several announced discoveries of mass graves and unmarked burial sites at former residential schools in Canada. We mentioned these on our recent Saturday Classic on the Fort show Indian Schoolgirls basketball team, and as of when we recorded this podcast, which is happening on July seven, uh this involved two different schools in British Columbia and one incests catch one, so this is something that's still ongoing as of when we're recording this. Based on what's happened so far, I would not be surprised, sadly if further discoveries were announced between July six, when we were recording and when this episode is actually coming out. Yeah, that's I would say, list that is more likely than unlikely at this point. Yeah, it's it's an ongoing and just truly horrific and and traumatizing to the people involved. Series of announced discoveries. So way back in previous hosts Sarah and Bablina did an episode on the pre Columbian Native American city of Khokia, which was home to at least fifteen thousand people at its peak in about the year eleven fifty. It's often described as being bigger than the city of London was at that time. One unanswered question about Kahokia is why the people living there ultimately abandoned it. So one proposed explanation, and one that was mentioned in that episode, has been that the residents of Kahokia used too much wood from the surrounding land, deforesting the area and contributing to runoff and flooding. But according to research that was published in the journal Geoarchaeology. While the reasons behind cohokias abandonment still aren't clear, it probably wasn't because of deforestation. In the world of Caitlin Rankin, who conducted this research as part of her graduate studies, quote, there's a really common narrative about land use practices that lead to erosion and sedimentation and contribute to all of these environmental consequences. When we actually revisit this, we're not seeing evidence of the flooding. So there was evidence of lots of wood use, including cutting down thousands of trees to build palisades, but there was not evidence that catastrophic flooding had followed that, and that was the thing that had theoretically led to Cokia's abandonment. Last year, we did an episode on beekeeping and its origins in honey and bee hunting. Researchers in West Africa have been studying the Central Nigerian Knock culture, which existed from about five hundred BC to two hundred CE, including carrying out chemical analysis on four hundred fifty pieces of pottery. The soil in the area is very acidic, so plant and animal remains have not survived the intervening two thousand years to be analyzed, so this pottery is archaeologist's primary tool to learn about how the Knock people ate and how it compares two groups living in the area today. About a third of the pottery studied in this research showed evidence of being used to store and process beeswax, and, in the words of co author Peter Britting of god University, quote, we originally started the study of chemical residues in pottery shirts because of the lack of animal bones at Knock sites, hoping to find evidence for meat processing in the pots that the Knock people exploited. Honey thirty five hundred years ago was completely unexpected and is unique in West African prehistory. Archaeologists believed that they have found the home that Harriet Tupman lived in when she was a teenager. The team had been fruitlessly searching Dorchester County in Maryland's eastern shore before a metal detect helped them spot a coin that was dated eighteen o eight. That coin led them to the likely site of a cabin owned by Tubman's father, Ben Ross, about a quarter of a mile away. Archaeologists have since found bricks, a drawer pull, a button and a pipe stem, among other artifacts. This search started last fall based on written records that pointed the team to the direction of attractive land that the US Fish and Wildlife Service purchased last year, and our two parter on Harriet's Subman was most recently a Saturday Classic Justice. Past June, we talked about the Philadelphia Move bombing. In May of Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a home members of the Move organization We're living in, and officials then allowed the resulting fire to burn unchecked through the neighborhood. Eleven people died, including five children. In April, news broke that the bones of two children killed in the bombing, likely belonging to twelve year old Delicia Africa and fourteen year old Tree Africa, were being held in the collections of University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, and that they were being used as a case study in an online forensic anthropology course. The course was originally filmed in twenty nineteen and was presented by Princeton University on the Coursera platform under the title Real Bones Adventures in Forensic Anthropology, but that has since been taken down. Maya Castudo broke this story in the Philadelphia publication Billy Penn on April, and from there it really became international news. Costudo, who had previously worked at the penn Museum, wrote about the careless and in different way, that these remains had been handled at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and that they had been transferred to Princeton, but a Princeton spokesperson later said the university no longer had them. It was really unclear where these bones were. When this story first broke in May, city officials announced that Philadelphia's Health Commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley had ordered the remains cremated and disposed of in ten rather than returning them to surviving members of the Africa family. Farley later resigned, with his resignation announced on the thirty sixth anniversary of the bombing, But then it was announced that the remains had been found in storage. The city announced that, after finishing an internal investigation into all of this, the remains would be returned to the children's surviving family members. And this is one of those things that's also still a developing story and situation as we are recording this um it's possible that there will be further developments in it over the next few weeks. We did a special Unearthed edition on Franklin's Lost Expedition back in and we've had some other updates on the expedition and finds from the rex involved in the expedition since then. Now, for the first time a member of that expedition has been identified through DNA and genealogical analysis. It is Warrant Officer John Gregory, who was an engineer aboard the HMS Arabis whose tooth and bone samples were recovered in two from King William Island, none of it. Last fall we talked about some incredible fines from Oxboroh Hall in Norfolk, England, and we also talked in an earlier on Earth about the discovery of some chocolate from the Boer War that belonged to Australian poet and war correspondent Banjo Patterson. Queen Victoria had commissioned this chocolate as a morale booster for British troops. Well, now a ten of chocolates from the same commission has been found at Oxford Hall. This ten belonged to the eighth Baronet, Sir Henry Edward Paston Bettingfield, who served in the war, and it was among his daughter Francis Greathead's possessions found in the Hall's attic. Something we didn't get into when we talked about Banjo Patterson's chocolate. The Queen commissioned the chocolate from Britain's three top chocolate manufacturers, all of which had been started by Quakers. This led to some back and forth, as the leadership of each of the three companies was pacifist and didn't want to be associated with or to make money from the war, but the Queen wanted it to be clear to the troops that what they were receiving was British chocolate. In the end, the chocolate was distributed in unbranded tins, although some of the chocolate itself was brandon also. It turns out there were so many updates to talk about in this Unearth that we are going to continue them after we take a quick sponsor break. Last March, we talked about a cranium found near Pompey that may have belonged to Plenty the Elder. Now it is being speculated that a set of remains near Herculanum may belong to a soldier from Plenty's fleet, maybe even a high ranking officer. These bones were found among those of about three hundred people who had tried to flee the volcanic eruption, and they belonged to somebody who was probably a man in his early forties, in pretty good health, wearing some kind of armor, and carrying tools in his knapsack, so all of that suggests that he was some kind of a soldier. He was also wearing an ornate leather belt that was decorated with silver and gold, and that suggests that he was a soldier of some kind of rank. It is not clear what kind of soldier he was, though. Coins found next to the body total the monthly pay of a member of the Praetorian Guard, which were the household armies of Roman emperors. But some of his gear and tools he was carrying were commonly used by ships engineers and carpenters, suggesting that he might have been part of Plenty's relief force. So, as was the case with that cranium last time, headlines that make it sound like these remains have been conclusively identified as belonging to a soldier who came with Plenty's fleet to try to help in the aftermath of the eruption of Pompeii seem a bit overstated. Yeah, like that previous cranium, there were a lot of headlines that were like Poliny the Elder found and it was like maybe same with these remains. We talked about Antony von Levin Hook and his animal cule's back in March of and one lingering unknown has been exactly how he made the lenses for the microscopes that he used to make those observations. On leven Hook's microscopes were exceptionally good for the time. They delivered a magnification of up to two hundred and seventy times using a single lens, but he kept his lens making methods and recipes a secret. But now researchers at TU Delft in the Netherlands have used neutron tomography to try to crack that case. They needed a non invasive method to study the lenses because von leven Hook riveted his lenses between metal plates, so examining those lenses directly would require the microscopes to be taken apart. Yes, people are of course reluctant to take apart irreplaceable historical microscopes to see what the lenses are made of. Let me just tinker with this, I'll figure it out. So only eleven of the hundreds of microscopes that he made are known to have survived today. There could of course be more that we have not on earthed yet. This research, though, suggests that he used a unique lens for each one, depending on the purpose of each microscope. On Leven Hook's highest powered microscope that's still in existence today contains a ball shaped lens connected to a tiny, tiny last thread, and that would have been made by blowing the glass rather than by grinding it. And this seems to be a refinement of a recipe that was published by Robert Hook in sight. It's really not surprising that some of On Leavin Hook's lenses would build off of Hook's work, because he was a known admirer of Hook's micrographia. The authors of this paper suggests that one of the reasons on Leavin Hook was so secretive about his work was to conceal this inspiration. He kind of maintained this persona of a loan observer working in scientific isolation, based almost on a whim. But really these lenses suggest that he was pretty up to date on the latest developments in optics and he was incorporating them into his work. And for our last update this time around, we did an episode on the nineteen sixty four Mississippi Freedom Summer in February of this year, and one big piece of that episode was the murder of civil rights activist James Cheney, Drew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Records related to that case have now been open to the public for the first time. They are being housed and available for viewing at the William F. Winter Archives and History Building in Jackson, Mississippi. Moving on to a couple of fines related to books. Kate McCaffrey, who used to work as a steward at Haverdcastle, has researched two books that were inscribed by Anne Boleyn, one being the prayer book that she's believed to have carried to her execution. McCaffrey did this research as part of her master's thesis, so the prayer book was previously known to contain only one inscription that being written by Anne, and it included her signature and a rhyming couplet that said remember me when you do pray that hope doth lead from day to day. But McCaffrey found other inscriptions, including the family names of Gauge, West and Shirley, which centered around the name of the Guilfer family of Cranbrook. All of that had been erased, and McCaffrey had to use ultra violet photography and photo editing software to make it visible and to puzzle out what these words said. Through this work, McCaffrey traced how this book survived after Bolin's execution in fifteen thirty six, after which many of her possessions were destroyed. These inscriptions essentially trace a chain of people, mostly women, who passed the book from one to another and kept it concealed and safe, and in another book, story that I find equal parts sad and sweet. Ten extremely overdue books have been returned to the Somerville Public Library in Massachusetts after being discovered in an attic. They had been checked out of the Librari's West branch by Helen Godimus when she was a teenager in the nineteen thirties, but then she died of the flu in n seven at the age of only sixteen, at which point the book that she had checked out from the school library and the public library wound up in a box in the attic and then later in a relative's basement, where they were rediscovered in June. The books themselves date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ones from the Summerville Library included a nineteen oh three copy of Language Lessons from Literature Book one and a n copy of Carpenter's new geographical Reader Asia. So the Summerville West Branch Library actually used to be my branch of the library before I moved away from Somerville. H It's a Carnegie library that was originally built in nineteen o nine, and it reopens July twelfth after some really extensive renovation work. I think this episode will have come out by the time it reopens. Uh. There is no fine do for the massive lateness of these books, though the Summerville Public Library went fine free on July one, and before that point the maximum fine would have been ten dollars. So I know with some of these headlines about very overdue library books, there will be estimated fines do of like fifteen thousand dollars, and the summer Hill Library had a max of ten I have feelings about those kinds of headlines and libraries. I do too, and so does my spouse, who I discussed this story with. Now we are moving on to uh some of my favorites. A few fines related to food and drink. First up, teams in Oxford, England have confirmed that two medieval households in Oxford's Jewish Quarter were maintaining kosher dietary practices. Although Jewish dietary laws are much older than this, this is the first time they've been conclusively identified in British archaeology. So this team started with the remains of two houses which, based on a medieval census, appeared to have housed Jewish families, and while excavating those two holmes, they found a latrine that dated back to the eleventh or twelfth century, and that latrine contained lots of different animal bones, but no pig bones at all. They also used chemical and isotopic analysis to confirm what kinds of foods had been prepared in pottery at the site, and they found evidence that the vessels had been used to cook cattle, sheep, and goat, but again not pork. Pork residues have been found in cooking vessels from other homes dated back to the same time period, but those were located outside Oxford's Jewish Quarter. In the words of the papers, lead author Dr Julie Dunn, quote, this is a remarkable example of how biomolecular information extracted from medieval pottery and combined with ancient documents and animal bones, has provided a unique insight into eight hundred year old Jewish dietary practices. Similarly, archaeologists in Spain have unearthed evidence of Muslim dietary practices that persisted after Catholic space A finished its conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in fourteen At first, Muslims were allowed to continue their religious observances and practices, but the Catholic government soon outlawed the practice of Islam and began forcing people to convert. Various Spanish kingdoms then expelled their remaining Muslim populations in the early sixteen hundreds. Some evidence of Muslim customs and dietary practices that have been unearthed recently include the presence of atas, which were large communal bulls, and these were gradually replaced by small bowls for individual portions in the decades after the Catholic conquest. Among the Catholic community, the idea of a lot of people eating from one communal bowl was not great, and so that is what led to this shifting toward individually portioned poles. Another is the presence of sheep bones and the absence of pig bones around Muslim households, and that again persisted after the Catholic government uh started banning Muslim practices. As a side note, one thing that Tracy read when she was going through this research discussed how this fed into the popularity of pork in Spanish cuisine, as Christians signaled their religion by publicly displaying and consuming pork products, which also reinforced the idea that Muslims and Jews were not welcome and moving on. According to research that was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Neolithic farmers living seventy years ago altered the reproductive cycles of sheep, allowing these communities to have meat and milk throughout the year. The team came to this conclusion through stable isotope and dental microware analysis from sheep remains that were found in a cave in Spain. This was a really huge cave with about three thousand square meters of habitable space, which seems to have been home to just thousands of goats, sheep, and pigs. Their research suggested that lots of lambs were born in the fall in winter, rather than in the spring, which was typical in wild sheep in the same area and time period. Among other things, this would involve controlling when ewes and rams had contact with each other. The sheep also seemed to have been fed a pretty consistent diet rather than one with a lot of seasonal variability. And in our last fine before we take another quick break, CRUs working to restore Michigan Central Station found a beer bottle wedged into the ceiling containing a message. Once archivists worked to remove this and open up the paper, which took some doing. Its very old paper that had been a beer bottle for a very long time, it was found to read quote Dan Hogan and Geo Smith stuck this ceiling of Chicago July Michigan Central Station, by the way, is in Detroit, not Chicago. Correct. But I feel a kinships through time with Dan and Geo because that's the kind of garbage I would have done when I was young. Yeah, yeah, there was some speculation in one of the articles that I read about this that perhaps that was not their first beer of the day, considering that they appear to have possibly been confused about what city they were in, or maybe they were saying they were from. It's a little garbled in the way that it's written. Anyway, We're gonna take a quick break and then come back with some artwork. So we're kicking off the third act of this episode with some art. There is ancient cave art in just all kinds of places. We've talked about lots of cave art on the show before, and some of these places are fairly brightly lit places like rocky overhangs and near the mouths of caves. But some of this cave art is in really deep dark parts of cave system, and the artwork itself does not suggest that people were making it in the dark. Also doesn't necessarily suggest this was a part of the cave that they were like living in all of the time. So the question is, of course, why make art in a place you have to light a fire to see it, especially if it wasn't a place you lived in or routinely used for some other reason. A newly published paper puts forth one idea. That paper is called hypoxia and Paleolithic decorated caves. The use of artificial light in deep caves reduces oxygen concentration and induces altered states of consciousness. This was published in Time and Mind, the journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture. So the basic idea here is that ancient artists took torches or other fiery light sources into caves and notice that after a while they started to get lightheaded thanks to the dwindling oxygen supply and the build up of byproducts from the flame. And then they moved on to recreating this experience intentionally, using the cave art not only as a visual representation of something, but also as a more mind altering or transcendent experience. The authors of this paper argue that the caves were decorated because they were significant, rather than the artwork being what made the caves significant. I find this to be a very interesting idea. I have no idea if that's really what was going on, but I did find it fascinating to read about. It's like historical whippets in other news. One of the pieces of art that has previously been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci is the Flora wax bust in the Bodha Museum in Berlin. The key piece of evidence for that attribution was the fact that the face resembles faces from several of Leonardo's portraits. This is not really a lot of evidence, so people hotly debated whether Leonardo really made this bust after the museum first acquired it in nineteen o nine. And when we say hotly debating, there have been more than seven articles arguing both four and against this attribution. However, according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, this matter is now definitively and absolutely settled. The bust is made primarily from sperm st which comes from sperm whales, and carbon fourteen dating, which is routinely used to figure out the ages of things as long as they're not too old or too young. That works a little differently when it comes to something made from spermaceti. Radio carbon dating works off the idea that there's a consistent amount of carbon fourteen in the atmosphere, but that's not true when it comes to the ocean. The ocean surface layers get carbon fourteen from the atmosphere, but they also get it from the deeper regions of the ocean, which are basically giant carbon fourteen reservoirs. Generally speaking, if you carbon date marine animals, they seem a lot older than they really are, as much as four hundred years older because of the availability of carbon fourteen from both the atmosphere and the deeper ocean. So taking the marine reservoir effect into account, this research puts the Flora Busts creation is happening in the nineteenth century, almost three hundred years after Leonardo's death, and that adds to previously known evidence suggesting a nineteenth century creation. Some things that were backing that idea up include that spermacetti became a lot more common in the nineteenth century to do pieces like this than it had been during the Renaissance. There's also the fact that when the back of the bust was opened up at one point, it was found to contain nineteenth century would and newspapers. Uh supporters of the attribution that it had been created by Leonardo, suggested that this material might have been stuck into the bus later on. Sure that could happen, Yeah, that's like not that's another thing that's not a definitive proof in either direction. It kind of goes along with the face idea um. On top of all of that, British sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas's son Albert submitted an affidavid saying he had a quote perfect and vivid recollection of all the steps involved when his father made the bust in eighteen forty six. Richard Lucas's source for the sculpture was an oil painting then attributed to Leonardo which Albert had made. A watercolor copy of Albert Lucas's testimony, which was corroborated by another witness, has actually been around since nineteen ten. So honestly, it seems like this was pretty conclusive way before all of this carbon fourteen dating. Yeah to me, like the multiple witness statements and also the newspapers and also the prevalence of spermacette like that seems like a lot. But now we also have this new carbon fourteen analysis. But people wanted to believe, and that's very powerful. It is um. Also, apparently that oil painting that was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was probably really by one of his students. Graduate student Aurelia Azama figured out that a bronze toe in the collection at the Louver was not a toe, it was a finger, and that it belonged to a statue that was at least twelve meters tall, and that finger has now been reunited with the statue that it came of. This was a statue of Constantine the Great and the Capitalina Museums of Rome. It's believed that this finger was taken off the statue in four and that was when a sphere that had also been part of the statue had been removed. The finger that everyone thought was a toe wound up in the Louver collection all the way back in eighteen sixty three. So it's like long time of the mystery of which body part we are talking about and what other pieces of art it came off of the mystery of the toe? Oh uh. Two off duty officers from the Italian Arts Squad discovered a first century Roman statue in an antique shop in Brussels. The officers were in Belgium on assignment when they happened to stroll into the shop after work one day. That statue had been stolen from the Villa Marini Datina archaeological site in two eleven kind of love the idea that they were just kind of wandering around town after work and went, oh, this shop has a stolen item. I love that art is their work, and then in their off time they go look at art in weird shop. So to move on. Researchers have been trying to figure out the age of the Cern Giant, which is a chalk figure on a hillside in Dorset, England. This chock figure is very large, It's fifty five tall. It's also very distinctive. It depicts a naked male figure wielding a very large club. It is also just very naked. You've ever seen this thing, it's super nude. The first written documentation of the figure is an account of it being repaired in sixteen ninety four, and there's no mention of the figure in a sixteen seventeen survey of the area. So there's you know, been some people who wondered if it was made in the seventeenth century, but it just seemed like something much older than that. Right, it appears, as Tracy said, so much older. And after finishing sentiment analysis, the National Trust has announced that the deepest oldest chock layers of the figure date to between the year seven hundred and eleven hundred, so it's possible that the figure was created during the medieval period but then forgotten about or neglected and allowed to grow over in grass before being rediscovered. There's no evidence that the grassing over was intentional though. One thing that they found when they were examining these choc layers, though, was microscopic stales, which I also love. These snails were introduced into Britain in the medieval period. There are still some un answered questions like who made this and why and who is it supposed to depict. Here's one idea, so in ven Certain Abbey was established to try to convert the local population to Christianity. They had previously worshiped a god known as Hyle or Heleth, so this may perhaps be meant to be a depiction of that god. And speaking of nudity, a carved piece of soap stone has been unearthed at vendor Landa, which is place that we've talked about a lot on unearthed before. This piece depicts a naked male figure in front of a horse or a donkey holding a spear, and this went on display at the vendor Landa Museum on July first, after having been found. It looks almost as though he has a pacifier in his mouth, but that is most likely just how it has worn over time, although how funny would it be it does yet. Uh, And that is where we are going to stop until next time, all right, as promised, Tracy Unearthed related email. I do have unearthed related email. This is from Katie, and Katie says, dear Tracy and Holly, greetings from Cardiff, Wales. I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and well at this point in the pandemic, and that things are looking up in Massachusetts and Georgia. I'll apologize in advance for the novel I have written below. I will pause and say, do not apologize for the novel is a really good novel. I'm not going to read a whole hundred percent of it um today, but I saved it for this because it is so unearthed specific um. So, Katie talks about being a bioarchaeologist and working on a PhD uh, and then says, not so recently, I was lucky enough to work with my friend and colleague Jess on her project, which very recently made headlines for her master's thesis. Jess examined die it and mobility of eight crew members of the mary Rose ship using isotope analysis. I then contributed further osteological analysis on three of them. I know the Mary Rose has appeared on the Six Impossible episodes about Shipwrecks, so I won't rehap it here, though I say as an archaeologist, it was an honor to analyze these men and help tell their individuals stories which are often swept up in the narrative of the ship and repopular tellings. Just discovered that three of the eight analyzed were not local to the British Isles, with possible origins in the Mediterranean, Spain Slash, the Iberian Peninsula and or North Africa. We also identified that three of the eight were people of color, one of whom was local to the British Isles. The peer reviewed publication attached of this work will come out later this month, and because of that it received some press on this side of the pond at least uh and then Katie linked to the the article all that introduction to say, as an Avid stuff you missing history class listener, I realized this may pop up on on Earth and if it does. I was hoping y'all might take the opportunity of highlighting a few things that some of the media missed out on and some of the public comments we received through that media. Mostly, I think some of the summaries in the news made it seem like the diverse origins were based on artifacts found near the remains alone, and I wanted to highlight that this absolutely is not the case. This work is based on stable isotope analysis elements extracted directly from the remains that are reflective of the food they ate in the environment where they grew up. The online comments were interesting to read and seemed to be a contrasting mix of people saying they already knew all this. The work was featured in a documentary in the updated museum exhibit in twenty nineteen, and people saying that we were forcing a quote woke agenda of diversity onto the past where it didn't belong. My favorite comment being a simple tweet the Mary woke ha ha ha. I can't believe I have to say it, but there was no ulterior agenda in this research to just felt passionately about this project because she grew up near Portsmouth, where the ship now resides and has had a lifelong interest in it, and as the lead researcher of this study, just was determined to make the article open access, meaning that the methods, results and interpretations are available for free to anyone interested. They're very transparent about all those steps in there, and our emails are easily searchable. Then Katie has a tip about how if there's ever a peer reviewed article that you really want to read and it's behind a paywall, a lot of the times the researchers will email you that PDF because they're not really making any money off of the journal publication process or the fact that the journal is trying to charge you fifty dollars to read one article one time. Then also Katie talks about the methods that were used for ancestry estimation. Um, there are lots of different conversations about how to do these kinds of studies and and whether there's methods are ethical, and so Katie says, quote, I understand if people have doubts or questions about them. In this case, we decided that not sharing the results of these methods would only feed white nationalist narratives that we have shown with the physical evidence is false. And then Katie goes on to say that was not the goal of quote forcing diversity into the past. They were not about to hide that diversity having actually found it. Um. So Katie goes on with a bit more that I'm not gonna read through our love because I want to kind of wrap up the episode at this point. Um, but this was a great email to receive. I don't think I had found this particular find when I got the email, and when I first looked at it, I did have the exact same response that that Katie mentions, of sort of saying, well, we already know that a lot of nautical crews were a lot more diverse because it was there was a more opportunity a lot of times for people to be able to rise through the ranks on a ship, then they might be able to do in a comparable job on land. Um. But having gone through and looked at the stable isotope analysis to really confirm where all of these people are from, like that is actually new research that was done. So thank you so much Katie for sending this and for sending all these links to the paper, and uh, if other folks would like to send us an email, were History podcast at i heart radio dot com and all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and really anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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's time for Unearthed. Hooray, the favorite time a year for a lot of folks. For new listeners, this is when we take time about four times a year to talk about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed. Over the last few months, we've started doing this once a quarter. The number has gradually increased. I think this is probably the sweet spot at this point. So this episode today is generally covering stuff that happened in April, May and June. So today we have a ton of updates to previous episodes, along with some fines related to books and letters and edibles and potables and art. And then next time you will get into some exhamations, some mysteries that have been solved, and other stuff. Also, I know there are folks that kind of check out of episodes when we get to listener mail and they don't listen to that part, So just a heads up. Both of these installments of Unearthed have special Unearthed specific listener mail. Bump bump um uh so we have mentioned before the search for the remains of victims of the Tulsa Race massacre that's come up several times previously. The search of the Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa ended on June, having identified thirty five coffins and exhumed nineteen sets of remains from unmarked graves. Investigators do not believe that the people buried in all thirty five coffins were victims of the massacre, so they focused their exhimation efforts primarily on the ones who were buried in cheaper coffins, which they saw as more likely to be massacre victims. About half of their mains had been thoroughly examined by the seven and at least one of them showed obvious signs of trauma. This work included a section of the cemetery known as the Original Eighteen, believed to be the burial site of eighteen victims of the Tulsa Race massacre who had been listed on a funeral home ledger. And although this phase of the excavation at Oakland is complete now, work with the remains that were exhumed is still ongoing, including trying to identify exactly who these people were so Our episode on the Tulsa Race massacre was most recently a Saturday Classic on May twenty nine of this year. In June, the U S Office of Army Cemeteries announced a plan to exhume the bodies of ten children buried on the grounds of Carlisle, Indian Industrial School and returned them to their families. This is the U. S Army's fourth such project at Carlyle Barracks, some of which we have discussed on previous episodes of the show. This disinterment was affected to start in mid June and be completed by July eighteenth, so it is still ongoing as of when we're recording this episode. Yeah, and the US Army's announcement about this disinternment at Carlisle came amid several announced discoveries of mass graves and unmarked burial sites at former residential schools in Canada. We mentioned these on our recent Saturday Classic on the Fort show Indian Schoolgirls basketball team, and as of when we recorded this podcast, which is happening on July seven, uh this involved two different schools in British Columbia and one incests catch one, so this is something that's still ongoing as of when we're recording this. Based on what's happened so far, I would not be surprised, sadly if further discoveries were announced between July six, when we were recording and when this episode is actually coming out. Yeah, that's I would say, list that is more likely than unlikely at this point. Yeah, it's it's an ongoing and just truly horrific and and traumatizing to the people involved. Series of announced discoveries. So way back in previous hosts Sarah and Bablina did an episode on the pre Columbian Native American city of Khokia, which was home to at least fifteen thousand people at its peak in about the year eleven fifty. It's often described as being bigger than the city of London was at that time. One unanswered question about Kahokia is why the people living there ultimately abandoned it. So one proposed explanation, and one that was mentioned in that episode, has been that the residents of Kahokia used too much wood from the surrounding land, deforesting the area and contributing to runoff and flooding. But according to research that was published in the journal Geoarchaeology. While the reasons behind cohokias abandonment still aren't clear, it probably wasn't because of deforestation. In the world of Caitlin Rankin, who conducted this research as part of her graduate studies, quote, there's a really common narrative about land use practices that lead to erosion and sedimentation and contribute to all of these environmental consequences. When we actually revisit this, we're not seeing evidence of the flooding. So there was evidence of lots of wood use, including cutting down thousands of trees to build palisades, but there was not evidence that catastrophic flooding had followed that, and that was the thing that had theoretically led to Cokia's abandonment. Last year, we did an episode on beekeeping and its origins in honey and bee hunting. Researchers in West Africa have been studying the Central Nigerian Knock culture, which existed from about five hundred BC to two hundred CE, including carrying out chemical analysis on four hundred fifty pieces of pottery. The soil in the area is very acidic, so plant and animal remains have not survived the intervening two thousand years to be analyzed, so this pottery is archaeologist's primary tool to learn about how the Knock people ate and how it compares two groups living in the area today. About a third of the pottery studied in this research showed evidence of being used to store and process beeswax, and, in the words of co author Peter Britting of god University, quote, we originally started the study of chemical residues in pottery shirts because of the lack of animal bones at Knock sites, hoping to find evidence for meat processing in the pots that the Knock people exploited. Honey thirty five hundred years ago was completely unexpected and is unique in West African prehistory. Archaeologists believed that they have found the home that Harriet Tupman lived in when she was a teenager. The team had been fruitlessly searching Dorchester County in Maryland's eastern shore before a metal detect helped them spot a coin that was dated eighteen o eight. That coin led them to the likely site of a cabin owned by Tubman's father, Ben Ross, about a quarter of a mile away. Archaeologists have since found bricks, a drawer pull, a button and a pipe stem, among other artifacts. This search started last fall based on written records that pointed the team to the direction of attractive land that the US Fish and Wildlife Service purchased last year, and our two parter on Harriet's Subman was most recently a Saturday Classic Justice. Past June, we talked about the Philadelphia Move bombing. In May of Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a home members of the Move organization We're living in, and officials then allowed the resulting fire to burn unchecked through the neighborhood. Eleven people died, including five children. In April, news broke that the bones of two children killed in the bombing, likely belonging to twelve year old Delicia Africa and fourteen year old Tree Africa, were being held in the collections of University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, and that they were being used as a case study in an online forensic anthropology course. The course was originally filmed in twenty nineteen and was presented by Princeton University on the Coursera platform under the title Real Bones Adventures in Forensic Anthropology, but that has since been taken down. Maya Castudo broke this story in the Philadelphia publication Billy Penn on April, and from there it really became international news. Costudo, who had previously worked at the penn Museum, wrote about the careless and in different way, that these remains had been handled at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and that they had been transferred to Princeton, but a Princeton spokesperson later said the university no longer had them. It was really unclear where these bones were. When this story first broke in May, city officials announced that Philadelphia's Health Commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley had ordered the remains cremated and disposed of in ten rather than returning them to surviving members of the Africa family. Farley later resigned, with his resignation announced on the thirty sixth anniversary of the bombing, But then it was announced that the remains had been found in storage. The city announced that, after finishing an internal investigation into all of this, the remains would be returned to the children's surviving family members. And this is one of those things that's also still a developing story and situation as we are recording this um it's possible that there will be further developments in it over the next few weeks. We did a special Unearthed edition on Franklin's Lost Expedition back in and we've had some other updates on the expedition and finds from the rex involved in the expedition since then. Now, for the first time a member of that expedition has been identified through DNA and genealogical analysis. It is Warrant Officer John Gregory, who was an engineer aboard the HMS Arabis whose tooth and bone samples were recovered in two from King William Island, none of it. Last fall we talked about some incredible fines from Oxboroh Hall in Norfolk, England, and we also talked in an earlier on Earth about the discovery of some chocolate from the Boer War that belonged to Australian poet and war correspondent Banjo Patterson. Queen Victoria had commissioned this chocolate as a morale booster for British troops. Well, now a ten of chocolates from the same commission has been found at Oxford Hall. This ten belonged to the eighth Baronet, Sir Henry Edward Paston Bettingfield, who served in the war, and it was among his daughter Francis Greathead's possessions found in the Hall's attic. Something we didn't get into when we talked about Banjo Patterson's chocolate. The Queen commissioned the chocolate from Britain's three top chocolate manufacturers, all of which had been started by Quakers. This led to some back and forth, as the leadership of each of the three companies was pacifist and didn't want to be associated with or to make money from the war, but the Queen wanted it to be clear to the troops that what they were receiving was British chocolate. In the end, the chocolate was distributed in unbranded tins, although some of the chocolate itself was brandon also. It turns out there were so many updates to talk about in this Unearth that we are going to continue them after we take a quick sponsor break. Last March, we talked about a cranium found near Pompey that may have belonged to Plenty the Elder. Now it is being speculated that a set of remains near Herculanum may belong to a soldier from Plenty's fleet, maybe even a high ranking officer. These bones were found among those of about three hundred people who had tried to flee the volcanic eruption, and they belonged to somebody who was probably a man in his early forties, in pretty good health, wearing some kind of armor, and carrying tools in his knapsack, so all of that suggests that he was some kind of a soldier. He was also wearing an ornate leather belt that was decorated with silver and gold, and that suggests that he was a soldier of some kind of rank. It is not clear what kind of soldier he was, though. Coins found next to the body total the monthly pay of a member of the Praetorian Guard, which were the household armies of Roman emperors. But some of his gear and tools he was carrying were commonly used by ships engineers and carpenters, suggesting that he might have been part of Plenty's relief force. So, as was the case with that cranium last time, headlines that make it sound like these remains have been conclusively identified as belonging to a soldier who came with Plenty's fleet to try to help in the aftermath of the eruption of Pompeii seem a bit overstated. Yeah, like that previous cranium, there were a lot of headlines that were like Poliny the Elder found and it was like maybe same with these remains. We talked about Antony von Levin Hook and his animal cule's back in March of and one lingering unknown has been exactly how he made the lenses for the microscopes that he used to make those observations. On leven Hook's microscopes were exceptionally good for the time. They delivered a magnification of up to two hundred and seventy times using a single lens, but he kept his lens making methods and recipes a secret. But now researchers at TU Delft in the Netherlands have used neutron tomography to try to crack that case. They needed a non invasive method to study the lenses because von leven Hook riveted his lenses between metal plates, so examining those lenses directly would require the microscopes to be taken apart. Yes, people are of course reluctant to take apart irreplaceable historical microscopes to see what the lenses are made of. Let me just tinker with this, I'll figure it out. So only eleven of the hundreds of microscopes that he made are known to have survived today. There could of course be more that we have not on earthed yet. This research, though, suggests that he used a unique lens for each one, depending on the purpose of each microscope. On Leven Hook's highest powered microscope that's still in existence today contains a ball shaped lens connected to a tiny, tiny last thread, and that would have been made by blowing the glass rather than by grinding it. And this seems to be a refinement of a recipe that was published by Robert Hook in sight. It's really not surprising that some of On Leavin Hook's lenses would build off of Hook's work, because he was a known admirer of Hook's micrographia. The authors of this paper suggests that one of the reasons on Leavin Hook was so secretive about his work was to conceal this inspiration. He kind of maintained this persona of a loan observer working in scientific isolation, based almost on a whim. But really these lenses suggest that he was pretty up to date on the latest developments in optics and he was incorporating them into his work. And for our last update this time around, we did an episode on the nineteen sixty four Mississippi Freedom Summer in February of this year, and one big piece of that episode was the murder of civil rights activist James Cheney, Drew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Records related to that case have now been open to the public for the first time. They are being housed and available for viewing at the William F. Winter Archives and History Building in Jackson, Mississippi. Moving on to a couple of fines related to books. Kate McCaffrey, who used to work as a steward at Haverdcastle, has researched two books that were inscribed by Anne Boleyn, one being the prayer book that she's believed to have carried to her execution. McCaffrey did this research as part of her master's thesis, so the prayer book was previously known to contain only one inscription that being written by Anne, and it included her signature and a rhyming couplet that said remember me when you do pray that hope doth lead from day to day. But McCaffrey found other inscriptions, including the family names of Gauge, West and Shirley, which centered around the name of the Guilfer family of Cranbrook. All of that had been erased, and McCaffrey had to use ultra violet photography and photo editing software to make it visible and to puzzle out what these words said. Through this work, McCaffrey traced how this book survived after Bolin's execution in fifteen thirty six, after which many of her possessions were destroyed. These inscriptions essentially trace a chain of people, mostly women, who passed the book from one to another and kept it concealed and safe, and in another book, story that I find equal parts sad and sweet. Ten extremely overdue books have been returned to the Somerville Public Library in Massachusetts after being discovered in an attic. They had been checked out of the Librari's West branch by Helen Godimus when she was a teenager in the nineteen thirties, but then she died of the flu in n seven at the age of only sixteen, at which point the book that she had checked out from the school library and the public library wound up in a box in the attic and then later in a relative's basement, where they were rediscovered in June. The books themselves date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the ones from the Summerville Library included a nineteen oh three copy of Language Lessons from Literature Book one and a n copy of Carpenter's new geographical Reader Asia. So the Summerville West Branch Library actually used to be my branch of the library before I moved away from Somerville. H It's a Carnegie library that was originally built in nineteen o nine, and it reopens July twelfth after some really extensive renovation work. I think this episode will have come out by the time it reopens. Uh. There is no fine do for the massive lateness of these books, though the Summerville Public Library went fine free on July one, and before that point the maximum fine would have been ten dollars. So I know with some of these headlines about very overdue library books, there will be estimated fines do of like fifteen thousand dollars, and the summer Hill Library had a max of ten I have feelings about those kinds of headlines and libraries. I do too, and so does my spouse, who I discussed this story with. Now we are moving on to uh some of my favorites. A few fines related to food and drink. First up, teams in Oxford, England have confirmed that two medieval households in Oxford's Jewish Quarter were maintaining kosher dietary practices. Although Jewish dietary laws are much older than this, this is the first time they've been conclusively identified in British archaeology. So this team started with the remains of two houses which, based on a medieval census, appeared to have housed Jewish families, and while excavating those two holmes, they found a latrine that dated back to the eleventh or twelfth century, and that latrine contained lots of different animal bones, but no pig bones at all. They also used chemical and isotopic analysis to confirm what kinds of foods had been prepared in pottery at the site, and they found evidence that the vessels had been used to cook cattle, sheep, and goat, but again not pork. Pork residues have been found in cooking vessels from other homes dated back to the same time period, but those were located outside Oxford's Jewish Quarter. In the words of the papers, lead author Dr Julie Dunn, quote, this is a remarkable example of how biomolecular information extracted from medieval pottery and combined with ancient documents and animal bones, has provided a unique insight into eight hundred year old Jewish dietary practices. Similarly, archaeologists in Spain have unearthed evidence of Muslim dietary practices that persisted after Catholic space A finished its conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in fourteen At first, Muslims were allowed to continue their religious observances and practices, but the Catholic government soon outlawed the practice of Islam and began forcing people to convert. Various Spanish kingdoms then expelled their remaining Muslim populations in the early sixteen hundreds. Some evidence of Muslim customs and dietary practices that have been unearthed recently include the presence of atas, which were large communal bulls, and these were gradually replaced by small bowls for individual portions in the decades after the Catholic conquest. Among the Catholic community, the idea of a lot of people eating from one communal bowl was not great, and so that is what led to this shifting toward individually portioned poles. Another is the presence of sheep bones and the absence of pig bones around Muslim households, and that again persisted after the Catholic government uh started banning Muslim practices. As a side note, one thing that Tracy read when she was going through this research discussed how this fed into the popularity of pork in Spanish cuisine, as Christians signaled their religion by publicly displaying and consuming pork products, which also reinforced the idea that Muslims and Jews were not welcome and moving on. According to research that was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Neolithic farmers living seventy years ago altered the reproductive cycles of sheep, allowing these communities to have meat and milk throughout the year. The team came to this conclusion through stable isotope and dental microware analysis from sheep remains that were found in a cave in Spain. This was a really huge cave with about three thousand square meters of habitable space, which seems to have been home to just thousands of goats, sheep, and pigs. Their research suggested that lots of lambs were born in the fall in winter, rather than in the spring, which was typical in wild sheep in the same area and time period. Among other things, this would involve controlling when ewes and rams had contact with each other. The sheep also seemed to have been fed a pretty consistent diet rather than one with a lot of seasonal variability. And in our last fine before we take another quick break, CRUs working to restore Michigan Central Station found a beer bottle wedged into the ceiling containing a message. Once archivists worked to remove this and open up the paper, which took some doing. Its very old paper that had been a beer bottle for a very long time, it was found to read quote Dan Hogan and Geo Smith stuck this ceiling of Chicago July Michigan Central Station, by the way, is in Detroit, not Chicago. Correct. But I feel a kinships through time with Dan and Geo because that's the kind of garbage I would have done when I was young. Yeah, yeah, there was some speculation in one of the articles that I read about this that perhaps that was not their first beer of the day, considering that they appear to have possibly been confused about what city they were in, or maybe they were saying they were from. It's a little garbled in the way that it's written. Anyway, We're gonna take a quick break and then come back with some artwork. So we're kicking off the third act of this episode with some art. There is ancient cave art in just all kinds of places. We've talked about lots of cave art on the show before, and some of these places are fairly brightly lit places like rocky overhangs and near the mouths of caves. But some of this cave art is in really deep dark parts of cave system, and the artwork itself does not suggest that people were making it in the dark. Also doesn't necessarily suggest this was a part of the cave that they were like living in all of the time. So the question is, of course, why make art in a place you have to light a fire to see it, especially if it wasn't a place you lived in or routinely used for some other reason. A newly published paper puts forth one idea. That paper is called hypoxia and Paleolithic decorated caves. The use of artificial light in deep caves reduces oxygen concentration and induces altered states of consciousness. This was published in Time and Mind, the journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture. So the basic idea here is that ancient artists took torches or other fiery light sources into caves and notice that after a while they started to get lightheaded thanks to the dwindling oxygen supply and the build up of byproducts from the flame. And then they moved on to recreating this experience intentionally, using the cave art not only as a visual representation of something, but also as a more mind altering or transcendent experience. The authors of this paper argue that the caves were decorated because they were significant, rather than the artwork being what made the caves significant. I find this to be a very interesting idea. I have no idea if that's really what was going on, but I did find it fascinating to read about. It's like historical whippets in other news. One of the pieces of art that has previously been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci is the Flora wax bust in the Bodha Museum in Berlin. The key piece of evidence for that attribution was the fact that the face resembles faces from several of Leonardo's portraits. This is not really a lot of evidence, so people hotly debated whether Leonardo really made this bust after the museum first acquired it in nineteen o nine. And when we say hotly debating, there have been more than seven articles arguing both four and against this attribution. However, according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, this matter is now definitively and absolutely settled. The bust is made primarily from sperm st which comes from sperm whales, and carbon fourteen dating, which is routinely used to figure out the ages of things as long as they're not too old or too young. That works a little differently when it comes to something made from spermaceti. Radio carbon dating works off the idea that there's a consistent amount of carbon fourteen in the atmosphere, but that's not true when it comes to the ocean. The ocean surface layers get carbon fourteen from the atmosphere, but they also get it from the deeper regions of the ocean, which are basically giant carbon fourteen reservoirs. Generally speaking, if you carbon date marine animals, they seem a lot older than they really are, as much as four hundred years older because of the availability of carbon fourteen from both the atmosphere and the deeper ocean. So taking the marine reservoir effect into account, this research puts the Flora Busts creation is happening in the nineteenth century, almost three hundred years after Leonardo's death, and that adds to previously known evidence suggesting a nineteenth century creation. Some things that were backing that idea up include that spermacetti became a lot more common in the nineteenth century to do pieces like this than it had been during the Renaissance. There's also the fact that when the back of the bust was opened up at one point, it was found to contain nineteenth century would and newspapers. Uh supporters of the attribution that it had been created by Leonardo, suggested that this material might have been stuck into the bus later on. Sure that could happen, Yeah, that's like not that's another thing that's not a definitive proof in either direction. It kind of goes along with the face idea um. On top of all of that, British sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas's son Albert submitted an affidavid saying he had a quote perfect and vivid recollection of all the steps involved when his father made the bust in eighteen forty six. Richard Lucas's source for the sculpture was an oil painting then attributed to Leonardo which Albert had made. A watercolor copy of Albert Lucas's testimony, which was corroborated by another witness, has actually been around since nineteen ten. So honestly, it seems like this was pretty conclusive way before all of this carbon fourteen dating. Yeah to me, like the multiple witness statements and also the newspapers and also the prevalence of spermacette like that seems like a lot. But now we also have this new carbon fourteen analysis. But people wanted to believe, and that's very powerful. It is um. Also, apparently that oil painting that was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was probably really by one of his students. Graduate student Aurelia Azama figured out that a bronze toe in the collection at the Louver was not a toe, it was a finger, and that it belonged to a statue that was at least twelve meters tall, and that finger has now been reunited with the statue that it came of. This was a statue of Constantine the Great and the Capitalina Museums of Rome. It's believed that this finger was taken off the statue in four and that was when a sphere that had also been part of the statue had been removed. The finger that everyone thought was a toe wound up in the Louver collection all the way back in eighteen sixty three. So it's like long time of the mystery of which body part we are talking about and what other pieces of art it came off of the mystery of the toe? Oh uh. Two off duty officers from the Italian Arts Squad discovered a first century Roman statue in an antique shop in Brussels. The officers were in Belgium on assignment when they happened to stroll into the shop after work one day. That statue had been stolen from the Villa Marini Datina archaeological site in two eleven kind of love the idea that they were just kind of wandering around town after work and went, oh, this shop has a stolen item. I love that art is their work, and then in their off time they go look at art in weird shop. So to move on. Researchers have been trying to figure out the age of the Cern Giant, which is a chalk figure on a hillside in Dorset, England. This chock figure is very large, It's fifty five tall. It's also very distinctive. It depicts a naked male figure wielding a very large club. It is also just very naked. You've ever seen this thing, it's super nude. The first written documentation of the figure is an account of it being repaired in sixteen ninety four, and there's no mention of the figure in a sixteen seventeen survey of the area. So there's you know, been some people who wondered if it was made in the seventeenth century, but it just seemed like something much older than that. Right, it appears, as Tracy said, so much older. And after finishing sentiment analysis, the National Trust has announced that the deepest oldest chock layers of the figure date to between the year seven hundred and eleven hundred, so it's possible that the figure was created during the medieval period but then forgotten about or neglected and allowed to grow over in grass before being rediscovered. There's no evidence that the grassing over was intentional though. One thing that they found when they were examining these choc layers, though, was microscopic stales, which I also love. These snails were introduced into Britain in the medieval period. There are still some un answered questions like who made this and why and who is it supposed to depict. Here's one idea, so in ven Certain Abbey was established to try to convert the local population to Christianity. They had previously worshiped a god known as Hyle or Heleth, so this may perhaps be meant to be a depiction of that god. And speaking of nudity, a carved piece of soap stone has been unearthed at vendor Landa, which is place that we've talked about a lot on unearthed before. This piece depicts a naked male figure in front of a horse or a donkey holding a spear, and this went on display at the vendor Landa Museum on July first, after having been found. It looks almost as though he has a pacifier in his mouth, but that is most likely just how it has worn over time, although how funny would it be it does yet. Uh, And that is where we are going to stop until next time, all right, as promised, Tracy Unearthed related email. I do have unearthed related email. This is from Katie, and Katie says, dear Tracy and Holly, greetings from Cardiff, Wales. I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and well at this point in the pandemic, and that things are looking up in Massachusetts and Georgia. I'll apologize in advance for the novel I have written below. I will pause and say, do not apologize for the novel is a really good novel. I'm not going to read a whole hundred percent of it um today, but I saved it for this because it is so unearthed specific um. So, Katie talks about being a bioarchaeologist and working on a PhD uh, and then says, not so recently, I was lucky enough to work with my friend and colleague Jess on her project, which very recently made headlines for her master's thesis. Jess examined die it and mobility of eight crew members of the mary Rose ship using isotope analysis. I then contributed further osteological analysis on three of them. I know the Mary Rose has appeared on the Six Impossible episodes about Shipwrecks, so I won't rehap it here, though I say as an archaeologist, it was an honor to analyze these men and help tell their individuals stories which are often swept up in the narrative of the ship and repopular tellings. Just discovered that three of the eight analyzed were not local to the British Isles, with possible origins in the Mediterranean, Spain Slash, the Iberian Peninsula and or North Africa. We also identified that three of the eight were people of color, one of whom was local to the British Isles. The peer reviewed publication attached of this work will come out later this month, and because of that it received some press on this side of the pond at least uh and then Katie linked to the the article all that introduction to say, as an Avid stuff you missing history class listener, I realized this may pop up on on Earth and if it does. I was hoping y'all might take the opportunity of highlighting a few things that some of the media missed out on and some of the public comments we received through that media. Mostly, I think some of the summaries in the news made it seem like the diverse origins were based on artifacts found near the remains alone, and I wanted to highlight that this absolutely is not the case. This work is based on stable isotope analysis elements extracted directly from the remains that are reflective of the food they ate in the environment where they grew up. The online comments were interesting to read and seemed to be a contrasting mix of people saying they already knew all this. The work was featured in a documentary in the updated museum exhibit in twenty nineteen, and people saying that we were forcing a quote woke agenda of diversity onto the past where it didn't belong. My favorite comment being a simple tweet the Mary woke ha ha ha. I can't believe I have to say it, but there was no ulterior agenda in this research to just felt passionately about this project because she grew up near Portsmouth, where the ship now resides and has had a lifelong interest in it, and as the lead researcher of this study, just was determined to make the article open access, meaning that the methods, results and interpretations are available for free to anyone interested. They're very transparent about all those steps in there, and our emails are easily searchable. Then Katie has a tip about how if there's ever a peer reviewed article that you really want to read and it's behind a paywall, a lot of the times the researchers will email you that PDF because they're not really making any money off of the journal publication process or the fact that the journal is trying to charge you fifty dollars to read one article one time. Then also Katie talks about the methods that were used for ancestry estimation. Um, there are lots of different conversations about how to do these kinds of studies and and whether there's methods are ethical, and so Katie says, quote, I understand if people have doubts or questions about them. In this case, we decided that not sharing the results of these methods would only feed white nationalist narratives that we have shown with the physical evidence is false. And then Katie goes on to say that was not the goal of quote forcing diversity into the past. They were not about to hide that diversity having actually found it. Um. So Katie goes on with a bit more that I'm not gonna read through our love because I want to kind of wrap up the episode at this point. Um, but this was a great email to receive. I don't think I had found this particular find when I got the email, and when I first looked at it, I did have the exact same response that that Katie mentions, of sort of saying, well, we already know that a lot of nautical crews were a lot more diverse because it was there was a more opportunity a lot of times for people to be able to rise through the ranks on a ship, then they might be able to do in a comparable job on land. Um. But having gone through and looked at the stable isotope analysis to really confirm where all of these people are from, like that is actually new research that was done. So thank you so much Katie for sending this and for sending all these links to the paper, and uh, if other folks would like to send us an email, were History podcast at i heart radio dot com and all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and really anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.