Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed. Hooray uh if you are brand new to the show. About four times a year, we take a look at things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So even though this is coming out later in October, UH, it does not include things that have been unearthed in October. It's just it ends at the end of September. UH. This episode, because it's two parter, we're gonna have lots of updates of previous episodes, some oldest things, animals. There were a lot of animal finds this time around, and the graves and the next time next episode will have the exclamations and shipwrecks, and the books and letters and the edibles and potables. A lot of long time favorite things are going to be in that episode as well. So let's get started, all right. So we've got a few updates to kick us off. Craft store chain Hobby Lobby has come up on Unearthed in and twenty first for agreeing to pay a fine for having acquired historical and cultural objects that had been brought into the US illegally, and then for those items being repatriated to a rock, and then most recently, for u S efforts to return one particular object, which is known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet to a rock. Some of these looted and stolen objects were intended for display at the Museum of the Bible, which is funded by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green, and in earlier installments of Unearthed, we also talked about the discovery that none of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in that museum's collection were actually authentic. So, yes, we've talked a lot about Hobby Lobby. The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet that's been part of that latest round of news. Hobby Lobby purchased that through Christie's auction House, and Christie's had documentations saying that the tablets purchasing history was all above board, but that documentation had been forged. That is something that Christie's has maintained that it did not know when it sold the tablet the Hobby Lobby. So the latest Hobby Lobby update, the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was delivered to a Rocky officials at a repatriation ceremony at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in September. It is one of more than seventeen thousand other looted objects that the US has agreed to return to a rock. That's a lot of stuff, so much stuff. And when the headlines first started floating around about all this, I was like, didn't we talked about returning that already? Yes, we did, but now it has been actually returned. Moving on, in August, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that Josephine Baker would be placed in the Pantheon this coming novem. The Pantheon became a monument for the great men of France after the French Revolution, and then Marie Curie became the first woman to be honored there based on her own achievements. Josephine Baker was born in the US but later moved to Paris, where she became a spy for France during World War Two. She will be the first black woman to be buried at the Pantheon, and previous hosts of the show did an episode on her in March. According to research published in the journal Heritage Science. An iconic portrait of past podcast subject Antoine Lovoisier and his wife mary Anne looked much different in an earlier version. In the finished painting is it's known today. The couple are dressed in relatively simple clothing. He is in black and she is in white, in a room with gray paneled walls. Antoine is sitting at a table covered in a red drape, writing with a quill and surrounded by scientific instruments. He's looking up at his wife, who is standing over him, and she is looking out at the viewer. They look very much like a scientifically minded couple embodying the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call their clothing in the setting austere, but it's more restrained. Researchers used macro x ray fluorescence spectroscopy and X ray spectrometry to see what was underneath the finished painting, so what it looked like in earlier revisions, and it appears that in an earlier version of the painting, this couple is in much richer surroundings than more elaborate clothing, including Marianne wearing a very large hat decorated with lots of flowers and plumes, so this earlier version is more of a depiction of Antoine Lavassier's role as a tax collector, somebody who was moving in a lot wealthier and more ostentatious rungs of society, rather than presenting him as an intellectual. Our episode on Lavoisier was most recently a Saturday Classic. In the Southern tomb in the funerary complex of King Joseph, who we covered on the show in March, has been open to the public after a restoration project. Although the site is referred to as a tomb, Joseph's actual burial place is a nearby step pyramid. We discussed that in that episode of the show. This restoration work on the tomb started back in two thousand and six. A lot of the tomb is underground and this work involves stabilizing and reinforcing the structure, installing lighting, and refurbishing the tiles, carvings, and other decorative elements. And in our last update, history Professor Cornelia Dayton of the University of Connecticut, who specializes in legal history, has unearthed new information about past podcast subject Phyllis Wheetley Peters and her husband John Peters, filling in some gaps in the knowledge we've had about their lives. As we talked about in that episode, we know virtually nothing about Phillis's life before she was enslaved and taken to Boston, and we also don't know much about her life between her marriage and her death, and a lot of what's been repeated about John Peters has been pretty conjectural and in some cases really unkind. Dayton found details that provide more specifics and contexts through eighteenth century legal papers. This research was published as an open access paper, meaning everyone can read it for themselves. It is titled Lost Years Recovered John Peters and Phillis Wheetley, Peters and Middleton. That's in the New England Quarterly, and Dayton has also launched the Wheatly Peters Project to explore their lives while they were living in Middletown, Massachusetts. That was between seventeen eighty and seventeen eighty three. Our episode on Phillis Sweetly came out on March five. So moving on, we now have a few finds that are being described as the oldest. First researchers in the Balkans have unearthed the oldest cosmetics ever found in Europe, and there possibly even older than the oldest known cosmetics from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. These were in small six thousand year old ceramic bottles that were first found in ten and a recent analysis has shown that they contained traces of sara site also called white lead, along with animal fat, beeswax, and plant oils, so I'll suggest that this was a substance meant to be used on the skin. The team also found long sin stone tools nearby, which may have been used to extract the substance from these tiny models. When we say tiny, some of these measured just a couple of centimeters long. They're so small that at first researchers wondered if they might be some kind of a children's toy. Some of them also had holes in their handles, suggesting they might have been worn on a string, maybe as a necklace in my head, which is completely incorrect. By the way, these are the samples that the cosmetics lady left at their house. I like it. It's like prehistoric avon um. Researchers have found southern Italy's oldest genetic evidence of your senior pestus. That's the bacterium that causes plague. This find came from two individual graves dating back to the fourteenth century at the cemetery of the Abbey of San Leonardo, which was located along and important crossroads for pilgrims, traders, and other travelers. Analysis showed that they were both male. One was between thirty and thirty five years old and other was about forty five. There were coins on both of these bodies. They were hidden in the clothing of one and they were in a bag that was tied around the waist of the other. This is unusual because it suggested that nobody had looked at these bodies very carefully before they were buried. They probably would not have buried them with lots of money on them. So the conclusion was maybe these people had been sick and people were afraid of becoming infected themselves. So DNA analysis on the teeth of these two bodies did find you're sending a pestis DNA a very similar strain to what has been found in later victims of the Black Death from various parts of Italy. So we definitely knew that plague was around in Italy before this point, but this is the first genetic evidence. Archaeologists in China have unearthed the oldest known coin making facility in the world, one that is older than previous finds in what's now Turkey and Greece. The site is in Henon Province and was aided through ash residues at the site, which suggested that it was in use between six forty and five fifty b C. It appears that this started out as a tool making facility before they started using clay molds to fashion coins. The site is associated with the ancient city of Guangdong, which was founded around eight hundred BC. Moving on to our next topic. Several years ago, I sort of put a moratorium on talking about coin hords on Unearthed because there were just so many and unless there's something unusual about a coin horde, they all they really start to sound very similar. But there are a whole lot of people who listened to the show now who were not listening to the show back six or seven years ago when I made that decision. Uh. And also, there were so many coin hordes this time that it seemed like a good opportunity to both showcase them and demonstrate why I was ventually like, okay, no more, no more coin hords. So in July, archaeologists working along the high speed rail project known as HS two found a horde of hundreds of coins in West London. These Roman era coins date back to the first century BC, and they were found thanks to a heavy rainstorm. The metal in the coins caused a greenish blue discoloration in the soil. A metal detectorist unearthed a horde of Viking coins on the Isle of Man in April, but it didn't make headlines until July, when the Isle of Man Coroner of Inquests declared this horde to be a treasure. The horde contained eighty seven silver coins, thirteen pieces of cut coins, and some other items. This was actually the second Viking Age fine unearthed by detectorates Cath Giles on the Isle of Man over the span of about six months. Cath Giles seems to have some good luck and skill with the metal detector Right in July, archaeologists in Poland found more than one hundred ninth century Carolingian deniers, which may have been hidden from Viking raiders or collected as part of a ransom to try to keep the Vikings from invading Paris. The Israel Antiquities Authority announced the family on a camping trip, found a horde of seventeen hundred year old coins on a beach in August. These coins had been underwater for years and they had coalesced into a mass that weighed about six kilograms. In August, archaeologists in France announced the discovery of twenty Roman denari in a pot or vase which was hidden in a wall in the Ossitani region, and in September, archaeologists in France announced the discovery of more than two hundred gold coins during restoration work at a house in Brittany. These date back to the seventeenth century, during the reigns of Louis and fourteen. Archaeologists in the United Arab Emirates found a horde of one thousand year old silver coins which had been stored in an Abbysid style pot. These coins bear the images of five different caliphs. And lastly, amateur divers off the coast of Spain found a horde of more than fifty hundred year old gold coins, which were as many of the coin hordes are Roman. And on that note, we will take a quick sponsor break. There are so many animal finds this time around. First, when archaeologists in Jerusalem found some shark teeth which were mixed in with fish bones and pottery bits and other materials that had been used to fill in a basement almost three thousand years ago, they thought they were just looking at food waste. Seems like a reasonable conclusion. But when it was time for them to publish their paper, one of the reviewers pointed out that one of the teeth could not have come from a shark that people living at that time might have eaten as food, because it was from the Late Cretaceous period, from a shark species that had been extinct for more than sixty million years. So the team took another look, and they discovered that all twenty nine of the shark teeth that they had found in this infill were fossils. They all dated back to the Late Cretaceous. It's not unusual at all for people to use all kinds of material as infill. Previous editions of on Earth have even included things like wrecked ships. But it is still not entirely clear why these fossils were gathered all in one place before being used that way. The nearest location where similar fossils have been found is about eighty kilometers away. These teeth don't have wear marks to suggest that they were ever used as tools, and they also don't have holes or other markings to suggest that they were mounted or used as jewelry. One idea is that they were just somebody's collection, which may be the most likely scenario, but there's really no hard evidence to back that up. There's also if it was someone's collection who decided to use that person's shark tooth collection as in phil they're like, Oh, that person's gone now and this stuff is in our way. Let's listen. It's going to happen to all my Star Wars stuff. I know it's going to happen. Next up, a team led by researchers from the University of York has been studying seventeenth century canine feces to learn more about the lives of sled dogs and the humans who worked with them. This work was part of ongoing work at the New Laktuk Archaeological Site and what's now Alaska Knektuk Incorporated, which is an Alaska Native village corporation, was part of this project along with the University of Copenhagen. The University of Aberdeen and the University of British Columbia. The team studied the proteins in frozen paleo feces to figure out what the dogs eat, finding evidence that they consumed the muscles, bones, and intestines of various species of salmon. One of the samples also contained a canid bone fragments, suggesting that the dogs consumed the meat of other dogs after they had died, or at least not on their bones. Some of these details are tricky to puzzle out, though an Arctic communities, dogs generally rely on humans for their food throughout the winter, and that's something that requires a lot of resources, So getting a sense of the diets of working sled dogs carries over to how humans used and allocated. There's resources, especially during the colder months, but during the summer the dogs may be fed less often or not at all. That means that their diets are made up of foods that they hunt or scavenge for themselves. So when looking at this species, it's not necessarily clear that what the dogs ate was something a person intentionally fed to them or something that they hunted or scavenge. Um. We really couldn't remember if the next thing is something we have ever talked about before, because we have talked about an assortment of different pigeons and several different lost battalions on the show. But on October four, nineteen eighteen, during World War One, a group of U. S troops later nicknamed the Lost Battalion had been cut off from the rest of their unit and surrounded by Germans. Soon they were caught in crossfire and being shelled by American artillery. Because they didn't realize they were there, Major Charles W. Whittlesey tried to use pigeons to send messages about what was happening. Finally, the battalion's last bird, which was a pigeon named Cheremi, made it, but only after being seriously injured. The message got through, though, and the Lost Battalion was relieved on October seven. Cheremy survived these injuries and lived for about another eight months, becoming something of a media sensation. A tax that ermisted at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History mounted the bird's remains in nine but there were discrepancies in descriptions of whether Jeremy was male or female. The Army Signal Corps referred to the bird as SHE, while Smithsonian Records used HE. Articles written in nineteen nineteen also disagreed with The Ladies Home Journal using HE and American Legion Weekly using SHE. And of course, there's also been some debate about whether this specific bird that wound up in the Smithsonian's collection really is the same bird that carried Major Wittlesey's message about the lost battalion. So earlier this year, coinciding with the centennial of Cheremy being put on display, the Smithsonian turned to DNA testing to settle at least the question of the pigeons sex. So, sex chromosomes in birds work a little differently than in humans, and in humans, sex chromosomes are really just one part of a complex process that involves other themes and hormones and other factors. In birds, females typically have W and Z chromosomes, while males have Z chromosomes only. Researchers looked at Jeremy's chromosomes as well as those of four other birds whose bodies were preserved at about the same time and whose sex was already known, and their conclusion Jeremy had only Z type chromosomes, so share I mean was male Researchers at Iowa State University and u C Riverside have looked into why humans have never domesticated the American cotton tale rabbit. For comparison, there are all kinds of domesticated breeds of European rabbit which can have very different traits, but are all the same species. In particular, the team looked at the use of rabbits in the city of teot Wakan in what's now Mexico, where people clearly lived with rabbits for more than a thousand years, feeding them, housing them, using them as food or to feed to carnivorous animals, and use in their fur, but never truly domesticating them. So this team's conclusion is that it's all about the rabbits social behavior, not the humans treatment of them. European rabbits are social, they lived together in warrens in a way that people can reasonably replicate for rabbits in captivity, but American cotton sale rabbits are more solitary. They tend to fight with each other if they are housed together, and American cotton sales reproductive cycle also isn't as predictable as it is for European rabbits, and that makes it a lot harder for people to intentionally breed them. Researchers on the Pacific Northwest coast have studied evidence of sea otter prevalence in the area, something that connects to the way First Nations people's managed both shellfish and their predators during the Late Holocene era, and which is still relevant to indigenous peoples who live in the area today. See Honors were nearly eliminated from the area due to the fur trade, but their number rebounded after they were protected under conservation laws in both the US and Canada, but that has made it difficult for indigenous peoples to use shellfish as a food source because the increasing sea otter population eats the shellfish before they come grow big enough for humans to effectively use them as food. Indigenous communities who live in this part of North America have maintained that for centuries, they managed both the shellfish population and the population of their predators, including sea otters. This included hunting sea otters to lower their population in areas where people were living, and also keeping the otters out of areas that contained important shellfish beds. Researchers confirmed this by comparing muscle shell sizes from six archaeological sites to shell sizes in areas where sea otters do and don't live today, and they found that the ancient muscle shells were comparable to today's muscles from locations where there aren't many sea utters. Basically, if there are lots of sea otters, the muscles don't get as big because, as we said, the otters eat them before they have a chance to the shot Healsuck and Wakino First Nations provided logistical support in this research, and some indigenous leaders from those nations also shared knowledge that informed this study and in our last animal signed researchers believe people in New Guinea may have been collecting casuary eggs and raising the birds after they hatched as long as eighteen thousand years ago, thousands of years before people domesticated chickens or geese, and in the words of lead author Christina Douglas, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Penn State, quote, this is not some small foul. It is a huge ornary, flightless bird that cannavissarate you. So doing this would have required people to find the castawary nests and remove the eggs just before it was time for them to hatch, and then intense only cracked the eggs open so that the chicks would imprint on human beings rather than on a mother bird. Although people would also boil eggs that were close to hatching and then eat the embryo inside, most of the eggshells in this study did not have any signs of burning or being cooked, meaning that most likely they were indeed cracked open to retrieve the living chickenside not to be used as food. Thinking about food and eggs, do you want to take a quick sponsor break before we come back for this last segment, let's do next up. We have several fines that are related to graves and grave sites. First, some children playing in a sandbox in Poland found a burial site dating back to some time between eleven hundred and seven hundred BC. This site included human remains as well as pottery. A lot of the pottery had been broken, probably during the construction of this play area that the sandbox was in, according to locals. A nearby archaeological site was discovered years ago during construction of a pond and a fence for a farm, but the map used to market its location was not particularly precise. It is possible, although not yet confirmed, that these two sites are related. The news coverage that I found of this didn't say what the children's reaction was when they found human remains in their sandbox. I mean, it depends on the kid, right, I really think it does. Some kids are ghoulish Halloween children from day one, and others grew into it. Back in nine, a crew digging for a water pipe in Finland found a very old sword, and that discovery led archaeologists to a grave site. The gray site was nearly a thousand and years old, but it was not entirely typical of similar graves in the area. It appeared to contain one set of remains dressed in clothing that was typical of women at the time, but the person had also been buried with a sword, something that was more associated with men's graves. Interpretations varied on whether that first sword that was found was also part of this same grave. This also seemed to be someone who was buried with a lot of care, maybe someone wealthy. They were buried in furs and feather bedding, and the sword, which had no hilt was inlaid with silver. You know, they're not sure if it was intentionally without a hilt, or if the hilt had maybe been wooden and had rotted away. Early interpretations of this grave site included that it had really been the grave of two people, one a man and one a woman, but that the man's remains hadn't been found yet, or that that one person was a woman and was buried in the grave with the sword as an indication that she had been a leader or maybe even a warrior. But new research in the European Journal of Archaeology comes to a different conclusion. DNA analysis revealed that the person's sex chromosomes were x x Y, also known as klein Felter syndrome. We don't really know what this person's body looked like. Klein Felter syndrome doesn't necessarily look the same from one person to another, and the remains in that grave were skeletal, but the researchers concluded that the person's gender identity might not have fit into a binary model, something we don't really have a way to confirm at this point. But the items that were placed in the grave and the care with which the person was buried do suggest that they were very highly respected in their community. Next up, back in, a crew working at a golf course and Lincolnshire, England found a Bronze age coffin. A team of archaeologists and archaeology students happened to be doing field work in the area and they came to assist. Historic England announced the results of re ceercha into this find in September. The coffin had been made from a hollowed out oak tree and an axe was placed in it along with the person being buried. The acts in particular is a rare find, since both the wooden halft and the stone heads survived. The coffin is about four thousand years old, and it's one of only about sixty five similar coffins found in Britain. Preservation work is ongoing for both the coffin and the axe, something that is time consuming because both of those items were water logged. We have talked about people buried together on the show before this time. A burial found this year in Shanshi Province seems to be that of a couple who were buried together and intentionally posed in a loving embrace. This fine dates back to some time between the fourth and sixth centuries, and it's believed to be the first burial of its kind discovered in China. There are at least two other joint burials from the same period that have been discovered in China, but not with this apparently intentional positioning. This fine was written up in a paper titled Eternal Love Locked in an Embrace and sealed with a ring a Sindbay couple's joint burial in north Way era, China that was in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. Back researchers found a Byzantine warrior skull in the grave of a five year old child who was buried at a fort. It's not known whether the warrior and the child were connected to each other in some way, or if the child's grave was just a convenient place to bury the head. The warrior had likely been killed and decapitated when the Ottoman army took the fort roughly six d fifty years ago, and their friends or family probably didn't have access to the rest of the body and had to bury that head in secret. Paper about this burial site was published back in but a paper in the Journal Mediterranean archaeology and archaeometry in set Timber looked at this skull, specifically that the warrior had successfully recovered from having a badly broken jaw. The jawbone had been broken into, but somebody had stabilized the bone as it healed by threading wire around this person's teeth. Based on the lack of discoloration around the teeth from the wire, it was probably made of gold. This basic technique was described in writings that were attributed to Hippocrates that were written centuries before this warrior's injury was treated based on the condition of the jaw. This warrior lived for another ten years after the jaw bone break, moving from graves to gravestones. In August, an auctioneer planning in a state auction discovered that a marble slab that had been used to make fudge it was actually a gravestone. I feel like that's a business model right there. It's really not clear exactly how the gravestone came into the family's possession. The woman who was using it was still living but had Alzheimer's and her family was going through her belongings after she had been moved into long term care. The gravestone belonged to Peter J. Weller, who had died in Lansing, Michigan, in eighteen forty nine. A little less than thirty years later, his grave had been moved from Oak Park Cemetery to Mount Hope Cemetery, and for some reason, the gravestone did not make the move along with the body. When the family and the auctioneer realized that they had his gravestone, they contacted Friends of Lansing's Historic Cemeteries for help. Although the organization was not able to find any living relatives of Peter Weller, they did discover that he had two daughters and a daughter in law buried at Mount Hope Cemetery. They have now restored his gravestone and returned it to the cemetery and restored his daughter's headstones as well. The daughter in law stone had already been restored, and our last thing to discuss us in this first part of our Autumn Unearthed. The Colombian Harmony Cemetery was a black cemetery established in Washington, d C. In eighteen fifty nine. Some pretty prominent people were buried there, including past podcast subject Maryanne shad Carry, who was a writer a lawyer and an activist, and Elizabeth Keckley, who had been enslaved from birth but purchased her own freedom in eighteen fifty five and later became Mary Todd, Lincoln's dressmaker. More than thirty five thousand people were ultimately buried at Columbian Harmony Cemetery. In the nineteen sixties, the cemetery was closed and all of the bodies buried there were moved to Maryland, in part to make way for a metro station, But the gravestones were not moved with the bodies. They were sold or given away, and most of them were lost. Then in twenty sixteen, Virginia Senator Richard Stewart discovered some of them on property that he had purchased. They had been used to control erosion a along the Potomac River. This is obviously an appalling situation, and in August fifty five of those gravestones were moved to National Harmony Memorial Park in Prince George's County, Virginia, where they will be part of a memorial garden. Restorative justice nonprofit called the History, Arts and Science Action Network has also been looking for the living descendants of the people whose gravestones. These are to research their histories. Virginia has approved a four million dollar expenditure to recover and restore the headstones and to create a memorial to the people who were originally buried at the Columbian Harmony Cemetery. More work on this project is expected this fall, and that is where we are going to leave off for this installment of On Earth, and we will pick up with lots more stuff on Wednesday. Do you have a listener mail in the meantime? I do. This is from Laura and it's about our Alistair Crowley episode, and Laura wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy, it was very exciting to hear your recent episode on Alistair Crowley. I will confess that I knew very little about him before this episode, other than that he was an owner of the Boleskin House, which I happened to visit a few years ago on a trip to Scotland. I thought you might find it interesting to know that the house has a nearby cemetery where the Fraser clan of Outlander fame has their family burial plots. Right near the Fraser gravestones is a small shed which is rumored to have been used for black magic rituals. Of course, we stuck our heads in and took some pictures. There were some symbols on the walls of the shed, but I truly couldn't tell if they had been there for decades, where if a recent visitor had made them. I found it to be a delightful mashup of magic lore, outlander history, and a bonus of loch Ness as the backdrop. My friend and I only happened to discover this place because of our Airbnb host, who wanted to make sure we took the most interesting drive to our next station. I truly appreciate the insight of locals on road trips. Later that day, we also happened to see our first white, Harry cou the only white when we saw during the trip a photo of this cow is attached. We had been looking to see Harry COO's the whole trip, and I happened to spot this one on a hill while we were driving past. I made sure to do a quickie turn and go back for a photo. Thank you for you your work on stuff you miss in history class. I love learning from you both, and it's clear to me as a listener how much effort and attention you put into your work, Laura. So thank you Laura for this email number one. This picture of the Harry cou Uh. If you have not seen Harry Coo, it is a very a cow with very long hair, which you know it doesn't resemble most of the cows that I have seen, uh in my life. Um. It reminded me a bit of when I was in i Sland back some years ago. Um. There are feral sheep in Iceland and we saw one, I think only one the whole time we were there. That looked like something out of a Miyazaki movie. And like the look of its face and the like the sheer. Uh Like it wasn't a like a densely packed well, it looked more hairy like this like this cow does. Anyway, it reminded me a bit of that. Also, Moleskan House a word that I could swear I either looked up or heard someone say. But if I did that, they were wrong because we said it wrong on the show. Uh. So again, thank you Laura for sending all of these pictures. I could just look at this Harry coop all day. Uh. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast. We're at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're also all over social media at miss and Street. 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 or wherever else you'd like to get your podcast. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed. Hooray uh if you are brand new to the show. About four times a year, we take a look at things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So even though this is coming out later in October, UH, it does not include things that have been unearthed in October. It's just it ends at the end of September. UH. This episode, because it's two parter, we're gonna have lots of updates of previous episodes, some oldest things, animals. There were a lot of animal finds this time around, and the graves and the next time next episode will have the exclamations and shipwrecks, and the books and letters and the edibles and potables. A lot of long time favorite things are going to be in that episode as well. So let's get started, all right. So we've got a few updates to kick us off. Craft store chain Hobby Lobby has come up on Unearthed in and twenty first for agreeing to pay a fine for having acquired historical and cultural objects that had been brought into the US illegally, and then for those items being repatriated to a rock, and then most recently, for u S efforts to return one particular object, which is known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet to a rock. Some of these looted and stolen objects were intended for display at the Museum of the Bible, which is funded by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green, and in earlier installments of Unearthed, we also talked about the discovery that none of the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments in that museum's collection were actually authentic. So, yes, we've talked a lot about Hobby Lobby. The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet that's been part of that latest round of news. Hobby Lobby purchased that through Christie's auction House, and Christie's had documentations saying that the tablets purchasing history was all above board, but that documentation had been forged. That is something that Christie's has maintained that it did not know when it sold the tablet the Hobby Lobby. So the latest Hobby Lobby update, the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was delivered to a Rocky officials at a repatriation ceremony at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in September. It is one of more than seventeen thousand other looted objects that the US has agreed to return to a rock. That's a lot of stuff, so much stuff. And when the headlines first started floating around about all this, I was like, didn't we talked about returning that already? Yes, we did, but now it has been actually returned. Moving on, in August, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that Josephine Baker would be placed in the Pantheon this coming novem. The Pantheon became a monument for the great men of France after the French Revolution, and then Marie Curie became the first woman to be honored there based on her own achievements. Josephine Baker was born in the US but later moved to Paris, where she became a spy for France during World War Two. She will be the first black woman to be buried at the Pantheon, and previous hosts of the show did an episode on her in March. According to research published in the journal Heritage Science. An iconic portrait of past podcast subject Antoine Lovoisier and his wife mary Anne looked much different in an earlier version. In the finished painting is it's known today. The couple are dressed in relatively simple clothing. He is in black and she is in white, in a room with gray paneled walls. Antoine is sitting at a table covered in a red drape, writing with a quill and surrounded by scientific instruments. He's looking up at his wife, who is standing over him, and she is looking out at the viewer. They look very much like a scientifically minded couple embodying the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call their clothing in the setting austere, but it's more restrained. Researchers used macro x ray fluorescence spectroscopy and X ray spectrometry to see what was underneath the finished painting, so what it looked like in earlier revisions, and it appears that in an earlier version of the painting, this couple is in much richer surroundings than more elaborate clothing, including Marianne wearing a very large hat decorated with lots of flowers and plumes, so this earlier version is more of a depiction of Antoine Lavassier's role as a tax collector, somebody who was moving in a lot wealthier and more ostentatious rungs of society, rather than presenting him as an intellectual. Our episode on Lavoisier was most recently a Saturday Classic. In the Southern tomb in the funerary complex of King Joseph, who we covered on the show in March, has been open to the public after a restoration project. Although the site is referred to as a tomb, Joseph's actual burial place is a nearby step pyramid. We discussed that in that episode of the show. This restoration work on the tomb started back in two thousand and six. A lot of the tomb is underground and this work involves stabilizing and reinforcing the structure, installing lighting, and refurbishing the tiles, carvings, and other decorative elements. And in our last update, history Professor Cornelia Dayton of the University of Connecticut, who specializes in legal history, has unearthed new information about past podcast subject Phyllis Wheetley Peters and her husband John Peters, filling in some gaps in the knowledge we've had about their lives. As we talked about in that episode, we know virtually nothing about Phillis's life before she was enslaved and taken to Boston, and we also don't know much about her life between her marriage and her death, and a lot of what's been repeated about John Peters has been pretty conjectural and in some cases really unkind. Dayton found details that provide more specifics and contexts through eighteenth century legal papers. This research was published as an open access paper, meaning everyone can read it for themselves. It is titled Lost Years Recovered John Peters and Phillis Wheetley, Peters and Middleton. That's in the New England Quarterly, and Dayton has also launched the Wheatly Peters Project to explore their lives while they were living in Middletown, Massachusetts. That was between seventeen eighty and seventeen eighty three. Our episode on Phillis Sweetly came out on March five. So moving on, we now have a few finds that are being described as the oldest. First researchers in the Balkans have unearthed the oldest cosmetics ever found in Europe, and there possibly even older than the oldest known cosmetics from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. These were in small six thousand year old ceramic bottles that were first found in ten and a recent analysis has shown that they contained traces of sara site also called white lead, along with animal fat, beeswax, and plant oils, so I'll suggest that this was a substance meant to be used on the skin. The team also found long sin stone tools nearby, which may have been used to extract the substance from these tiny models. When we say tiny, some of these measured just a couple of centimeters long. They're so small that at first researchers wondered if they might be some kind of a children's toy. Some of them also had holes in their handles, suggesting they might have been worn on a string, maybe as a necklace in my head, which is completely incorrect. By the way, these are the samples that the cosmetics lady left at their house. I like it. It's like prehistoric avon um. Researchers have found southern Italy's oldest genetic evidence of your senior pestus. That's the bacterium that causes plague. This find came from two individual graves dating back to the fourteenth century at the cemetery of the Abbey of San Leonardo, which was located along and important crossroads for pilgrims, traders, and other travelers. Analysis showed that they were both male. One was between thirty and thirty five years old and other was about forty five. There were coins on both of these bodies. They were hidden in the clothing of one and they were in a bag that was tied around the waist of the other. This is unusual because it suggested that nobody had looked at these bodies very carefully before they were buried. They probably would not have buried them with lots of money on them. So the conclusion was maybe these people had been sick and people were afraid of becoming infected themselves. So DNA analysis on the teeth of these two bodies did find you're sending a pestis DNA a very similar strain to what has been found in later victims of the Black Death from various parts of Italy. So we definitely knew that plague was around in Italy before this point, but this is the first genetic evidence. Archaeologists in China have unearthed the oldest known coin making facility in the world, one that is older than previous finds in what's now Turkey and Greece. The site is in Henon Province and was aided through ash residues at the site, which suggested that it was in use between six forty and five fifty b C. It appears that this started out as a tool making facility before they started using clay molds to fashion coins. The site is associated with the ancient city of Guangdong, which was founded around eight hundred BC. Moving on to our next topic. Several years ago, I sort of put a moratorium on talking about coin hords on Unearthed because there were just so many and unless there's something unusual about a coin horde, they all they really start to sound very similar. But there are a whole lot of people who listened to the show now who were not listening to the show back six or seven years ago when I made that decision. Uh. And also, there were so many coin hordes this time that it seemed like a good opportunity to both showcase them and demonstrate why I was ventually like, okay, no more, no more coin hords. So in July, archaeologists working along the high speed rail project known as HS two found a horde of hundreds of coins in West London. These Roman era coins date back to the first century BC, and they were found thanks to a heavy rainstorm. The metal in the coins caused a greenish blue discoloration in the soil. A metal detectorist unearthed a horde of Viking coins on the Isle of Man in April, but it didn't make headlines until July, when the Isle of Man Coroner of Inquests declared this horde to be a treasure. The horde contained eighty seven silver coins, thirteen pieces of cut coins, and some other items. This was actually the second Viking Age fine unearthed by detectorates Cath Giles on the Isle of Man over the span of about six months. Cath Giles seems to have some good luck and skill with the metal detector Right in July, archaeologists in Poland found more than one hundred ninth century Carolingian deniers, which may have been hidden from Viking raiders or collected as part of a ransom to try to keep the Vikings from invading Paris. The Israel Antiquities Authority announced the family on a camping trip, found a horde of seventeen hundred year old coins on a beach in August. These coins had been underwater for years and they had coalesced into a mass that weighed about six kilograms. In August, archaeologists in France announced the discovery of twenty Roman denari in a pot or vase which was hidden in a wall in the Ossitani region, and in September, archaeologists in France announced the discovery of more than two hundred gold coins during restoration work at a house in Brittany. These date back to the seventeenth century, during the reigns of Louis and fourteen. Archaeologists in the United Arab Emirates found a horde of one thousand year old silver coins which had been stored in an Abbysid style pot. These coins bear the images of five different caliphs. And lastly, amateur divers off the coast of Spain found a horde of more than fifty hundred year old gold coins, which were as many of the coin hordes are Roman. And on that note, we will take a quick sponsor break. There are so many animal finds this time around. First, when archaeologists in Jerusalem found some shark teeth which were mixed in with fish bones and pottery bits and other materials that had been used to fill in a basement almost three thousand years ago, they thought they were just looking at food waste. Seems like a reasonable conclusion. But when it was time for them to publish their paper, one of the reviewers pointed out that one of the teeth could not have come from a shark that people living at that time might have eaten as food, because it was from the Late Cretaceous period, from a shark species that had been extinct for more than sixty million years. So the team took another look, and they discovered that all twenty nine of the shark teeth that they had found in this infill were fossils. They all dated back to the Late Cretaceous. It's not unusual at all for people to use all kinds of material as infill. Previous editions of on Earth have even included things like wrecked ships. But it is still not entirely clear why these fossils were gathered all in one place before being used that way. The nearest location where similar fossils have been found is about eighty kilometers away. These teeth don't have wear marks to suggest that they were ever used as tools, and they also don't have holes or other markings to suggest that they were mounted or used as jewelry. One idea is that they were just somebody's collection, which may be the most likely scenario, but there's really no hard evidence to back that up. There's also if it was someone's collection who decided to use that person's shark tooth collection as in phil they're like, Oh, that person's gone now and this stuff is in our way. Let's listen. It's going to happen to all my Star Wars stuff. I know it's going to happen. Next up, a team led by researchers from the University of York has been studying seventeenth century canine feces to learn more about the lives of sled dogs and the humans who worked with them. This work was part of ongoing work at the New Laktuk Archaeological Site and what's now Alaska Knektuk Incorporated, which is an Alaska Native village corporation, was part of this project along with the University of Copenhagen. The University of Aberdeen and the University of British Columbia. The team studied the proteins in frozen paleo feces to figure out what the dogs eat, finding evidence that they consumed the muscles, bones, and intestines of various species of salmon. One of the samples also contained a canid bone fragments, suggesting that the dogs consumed the meat of other dogs after they had died, or at least not on their bones. Some of these details are tricky to puzzle out, though an Arctic communities, dogs generally rely on humans for their food throughout the winter, and that's something that requires a lot of resources, So getting a sense of the diets of working sled dogs carries over to how humans used and allocated. There's resources, especially during the colder months, but during the summer the dogs may be fed less often or not at all. That means that their diets are made up of foods that they hunt or scavenge for themselves. So when looking at this species, it's not necessarily clear that what the dogs ate was something a person intentionally fed to them or something that they hunted or scavenge. Um. We really couldn't remember if the next thing is something we have ever talked about before, because we have talked about an assortment of different pigeons and several different lost battalions on the show. But on October four, nineteen eighteen, during World War One, a group of U. S troops later nicknamed the Lost Battalion had been cut off from the rest of their unit and surrounded by Germans. Soon they were caught in crossfire and being shelled by American artillery. Because they didn't realize they were there, Major Charles W. Whittlesey tried to use pigeons to send messages about what was happening. Finally, the battalion's last bird, which was a pigeon named Cheremi, made it, but only after being seriously injured. The message got through, though, and the Lost Battalion was relieved on October seven. Cheremy survived these injuries and lived for about another eight months, becoming something of a media sensation. A tax that ermisted at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History mounted the bird's remains in nine but there were discrepancies in descriptions of whether Jeremy was male or female. The Army Signal Corps referred to the bird as SHE, while Smithsonian Records used HE. Articles written in nineteen nineteen also disagreed with The Ladies Home Journal using HE and American Legion Weekly using SHE. And of course, there's also been some debate about whether this specific bird that wound up in the Smithsonian's collection really is the same bird that carried Major Wittlesey's message about the lost battalion. So earlier this year, coinciding with the centennial of Cheremy being put on display, the Smithsonian turned to DNA testing to settle at least the question of the pigeons sex. So, sex chromosomes in birds work a little differently than in humans, and in humans, sex chromosomes are really just one part of a complex process that involves other themes and hormones and other factors. In birds, females typically have W and Z chromosomes, while males have Z chromosomes only. Researchers looked at Jeremy's chromosomes as well as those of four other birds whose bodies were preserved at about the same time and whose sex was already known, and their conclusion Jeremy had only Z type chromosomes, so share I mean was male Researchers at Iowa State University and u C Riverside have looked into why humans have never domesticated the American cotton tale rabbit. For comparison, there are all kinds of domesticated breeds of European rabbit which can have very different traits, but are all the same species. In particular, the team looked at the use of rabbits in the city of teot Wakan in what's now Mexico, where people clearly lived with rabbits for more than a thousand years, feeding them, housing them, using them as food or to feed to carnivorous animals, and use in their fur, but never truly domesticating them. So this team's conclusion is that it's all about the rabbits social behavior, not the humans treatment of them. European rabbits are social, they lived together in warrens in a way that people can reasonably replicate for rabbits in captivity, but American cotton sale rabbits are more solitary. They tend to fight with each other if they are housed together, and American cotton sales reproductive cycle also isn't as predictable as it is for European rabbits, and that makes it a lot harder for people to intentionally breed them. Researchers on the Pacific Northwest coast have studied evidence of sea otter prevalence in the area, something that connects to the way First Nations people's managed both shellfish and their predators during the Late Holocene era, and which is still relevant to indigenous peoples who live in the area today. See Honors were nearly eliminated from the area due to the fur trade, but their number rebounded after they were protected under conservation laws in both the US and Canada, but that has made it difficult for indigenous peoples to use shellfish as a food source because the increasing sea otter population eats the shellfish before they come grow big enough for humans to effectively use them as food. Indigenous communities who live in this part of North America have maintained that for centuries, they managed both the shellfish population and the population of their predators, including sea otters. This included hunting sea otters to lower their population in areas where people were living, and also keeping the otters out of areas that contained important shellfish beds. Researchers confirmed this by comparing muscle shell sizes from six archaeological sites to shell sizes in areas where sea otters do and don't live today, and they found that the ancient muscle shells were comparable to today's muscles from locations where there aren't many sea utters. Basically, if there are lots of sea otters, the muscles don't get as big because, as we said, the otters eat them before they have a chance to the shot Healsuck and Wakino First Nations provided logistical support in this research, and some indigenous leaders from those nations also shared knowledge that informed this study and in our last animal signed researchers believe people in New Guinea may have been collecting casuary eggs and raising the birds after they hatched as long as eighteen thousand years ago, thousands of years before people domesticated chickens or geese, and in the words of lead author Christina Douglas, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Penn State, quote, this is not some small foul. It is a huge ornary, flightless bird that cannavissarate you. So doing this would have required people to find the castawary nests and remove the eggs just before it was time for them to hatch, and then intense only cracked the eggs open so that the chicks would imprint on human beings rather than on a mother bird. Although people would also boil eggs that were close to hatching and then eat the embryo inside, most of the eggshells in this study did not have any signs of burning or being cooked, meaning that most likely they were indeed cracked open to retrieve the living chickenside not to be used as food. Thinking about food and eggs, do you want to take a quick sponsor break before we come back for this last segment, let's do next up. We have several fines that are related to graves and grave sites. First, some children playing in a sandbox in Poland found a burial site dating back to some time between eleven hundred and seven hundred BC. This site included human remains as well as pottery. A lot of the pottery had been broken, probably during the construction of this play area that the sandbox was in, according to locals. A nearby archaeological site was discovered years ago during construction of a pond and a fence for a farm, but the map used to market its location was not particularly precise. It is possible, although not yet confirmed, that these two sites are related. The news coverage that I found of this didn't say what the children's reaction was when they found human remains in their sandbox. I mean, it depends on the kid, right, I really think it does. Some kids are ghoulish Halloween children from day one, and others grew into it. Back in nine, a crew digging for a water pipe in Finland found a very old sword, and that discovery led archaeologists to a grave site. The gray site was nearly a thousand and years old, but it was not entirely typical of similar graves in the area. It appeared to contain one set of remains dressed in clothing that was typical of women at the time, but the person had also been buried with a sword, something that was more associated with men's graves. Interpretations varied on whether that first sword that was found was also part of this same grave. This also seemed to be someone who was buried with a lot of care, maybe someone wealthy. They were buried in furs and feather bedding, and the sword, which had no hilt was inlaid with silver. You know, they're not sure if it was intentionally without a hilt, or if the hilt had maybe been wooden and had rotted away. Early interpretations of this grave site included that it had really been the grave of two people, one a man and one a woman, but that the man's remains hadn't been found yet, or that that one person was a woman and was buried in the grave with the sword as an indication that she had been a leader or maybe even a warrior. But new research in the European Journal of Archaeology comes to a different conclusion. DNA analysis revealed that the person's sex chromosomes were x x Y, also known as klein Felter syndrome. We don't really know what this person's body looked like. Klein Felter syndrome doesn't necessarily look the same from one person to another, and the remains in that grave were skeletal, but the researchers concluded that the person's gender identity might not have fit into a binary model, something we don't really have a way to confirm at this point. But the items that were placed in the grave and the care with which the person was buried do suggest that they were very highly respected in their community. Next up, back in, a crew working at a golf course and Lincolnshire, England found a Bronze age coffin. A team of archaeologists and archaeology students happened to be doing field work in the area and they came to assist. Historic England announced the results of re ceercha into this find in September. The coffin had been made from a hollowed out oak tree and an axe was placed in it along with the person being buried. The acts in particular is a rare find, since both the wooden halft and the stone heads survived. The coffin is about four thousand years old, and it's one of only about sixty five similar coffins found in Britain. Preservation work is ongoing for both the coffin and the axe, something that is time consuming because both of those items were water logged. We have talked about people buried together on the show before this time. A burial found this year in Shanshi Province seems to be that of a couple who were buried together and intentionally posed in a loving embrace. This fine dates back to some time between the fourth and sixth centuries, and it's believed to be the first burial of its kind discovered in China. There are at least two other joint burials from the same period that have been discovered in China, but not with this apparently intentional positioning. This fine was written up in a paper titled Eternal Love Locked in an Embrace and sealed with a ring a Sindbay couple's joint burial in north Way era, China that was in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. Back researchers found a Byzantine warrior skull in the grave of a five year old child who was buried at a fort. It's not known whether the warrior and the child were connected to each other in some way, or if the child's grave was just a convenient place to bury the head. The warrior had likely been killed and decapitated when the Ottoman army took the fort roughly six d fifty years ago, and their friends or family probably didn't have access to the rest of the body and had to bury that head in secret. Paper about this burial site was published back in but a paper in the Journal Mediterranean archaeology and archaeometry in set Timber looked at this skull, specifically that the warrior had successfully recovered from having a badly broken jaw. The jawbone had been broken into, but somebody had stabilized the bone as it healed by threading wire around this person's teeth. Based on the lack of discoloration around the teeth from the wire, it was probably made of gold. This basic technique was described in writings that were attributed to Hippocrates that were written centuries before this warrior's injury was treated based on the condition of the jaw. This warrior lived for another ten years after the jaw bone break, moving from graves to gravestones. In August, an auctioneer planning in a state auction discovered that a marble slab that had been used to make fudge it was actually a gravestone. I feel like that's a business model right there. It's really not clear exactly how the gravestone came into the family's possession. The woman who was using it was still living but had Alzheimer's and her family was going through her belongings after she had been moved into long term care. The gravestone belonged to Peter J. Weller, who had died in Lansing, Michigan, in eighteen forty nine. A little less than thirty years later, his grave had been moved from Oak Park Cemetery to Mount Hope Cemetery, and for some reason, the gravestone did not make the move along with the body. When the family and the auctioneer realized that they had his gravestone, they contacted Friends of Lansing's Historic Cemeteries for help. Although the organization was not able to find any living relatives of Peter Weller, they did discover that he had two daughters and a daughter in law buried at Mount Hope Cemetery. They have now restored his gravestone and returned it to the cemetery and restored his daughter's headstones as well. The daughter in law stone had already been restored, and our last thing to discuss us in this first part of our Autumn Unearthed. The Colombian Harmony Cemetery was a black cemetery established in Washington, d C. In eighteen fifty nine. Some pretty prominent people were buried there, including past podcast subject Maryanne shad Carry, who was a writer a lawyer and an activist, and Elizabeth Keckley, who had been enslaved from birth but purchased her own freedom in eighteen fifty five and later became Mary Todd, Lincoln's dressmaker. More than thirty five thousand people were ultimately buried at Columbian Harmony Cemetery. In the nineteen sixties, the cemetery was closed and all of the bodies buried there were moved to Maryland, in part to make way for a metro station, But the gravestones were not moved with the bodies. They were sold or given away, and most of them were lost. Then in twenty sixteen, Virginia Senator Richard Stewart discovered some of them on property that he had purchased. They had been used to control erosion a along the Potomac River. This is obviously an appalling situation, and in August fifty five of those gravestones were moved to National Harmony Memorial Park in Prince George's County, Virginia, where they will be part of a memorial garden. Restorative justice nonprofit called the History, Arts and Science Action Network has also been looking for the living descendants of the people whose gravestones. These are to research their histories. Virginia has approved a four million dollar expenditure to recover and restore the headstones and to create a memorial to the people who were originally buried at the Columbian Harmony Cemetery. More work on this project is expected this fall, and that is where we are going to leave off for this installment of On Earth, and we will pick up with lots more stuff on Wednesday. Do you have a listener mail in the meantime? I do. This is from Laura and it's about our Alistair Crowley episode, and Laura wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy, it was very exciting to hear your recent episode on Alistair Crowley. I will confess that I knew very little about him before this episode, other than that he was an owner of the Boleskin House, which I happened to visit a few years ago on a trip to Scotland. I thought you might find it interesting to know that the house has a nearby cemetery where the Fraser clan of Outlander fame has their family burial plots. Right near the Fraser gravestones is a small shed which is rumored to have been used for black magic rituals. Of course, we stuck our heads in and took some pictures. There were some symbols on the walls of the shed, but I truly couldn't tell if they had been there for decades, where if a recent visitor had made them. I found it to be a delightful mashup of magic lore, outlander history, and a bonus of loch Ness as the backdrop. My friend and I only happened to discover this place because of our Airbnb host, who wanted to make sure we took the most interesting drive to our next station. I truly appreciate the insight of locals on road trips. Later that day, we also happened to see our first white, Harry cou the only white when we saw during the trip a photo of this cow is attached. We had been looking to see Harry COO's the whole trip, and I happened to spot this one on a hill while we were driving past. I made sure to do a quickie turn and go back for a photo. Thank you for you your work on stuff you miss in history class. I love learning from you both, and it's clear to me as a listener how much effort and attention you put into your work, Laura. So thank you Laura for this email number one. This picture of the Harry cou Uh. If you have not seen Harry Coo, it is a very a cow with very long hair, which you know it doesn't resemble most of the cows that I have seen, uh in my life. Um. It reminded me a bit of when I was in i Sland back some years ago. Um. There are feral sheep in Iceland and we saw one, I think only one the whole time we were there. That looked like something out of a Miyazaki movie. And like the look of its face and the like the sheer. Uh Like it wasn't a like a densely packed well, it looked more hairy like this like this cow does. Anyway, it reminded me a bit of that. Also, Moleskan House a word that I could swear I either looked up or heard someone say. But if I did that, they were wrong because we said it wrong on the show. Uh. So again, thank you Laura for sending all of these pictures. I could just look at this Harry coop all day. Uh. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast. We're at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're also all over social media at miss and Street. 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 or wherever else you'd like to get your podcast. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.