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. Here is part two of the weird experience of working on Unearthed episodes in the middle of a pandemic, which has just been a strange thing. It's it has not been usual for me to repeatedly refer to current like the same current event multiple times doing Unearthed. Um today we have some fun stuff including edibles and potables, shipwrecks, books and letters, just some other cool stuff too. So normally when Tracy is working on Earth, she winds up finding stuff that seems cool or interesting, but it kind of doesn't really fit into any category, and so those all go into potpourri. And that's where we're starting today. First up, a five year excavation at a Pictish homes dead known as Layer of Glenchi in Scotland has unearthed lots of fines, including a padlock dating back to between five hundred and one thousand CE. Uh. There's no more really to discuss with that. I just thought it was cool to have a padlock that was that old. Moving on to something that is a little more serious. The bush fire season in Australia was really just devastating, particularly devastating, with immense losses in terms of human and animal life, as well as the general environment and ecology and property like just on and on Australia's Aboriginal and tourist Strait Islander. People's have been disproportionately affected by this, with fires completely destroying ancestral homes and cultural sites. Material losses have included things like council buildings, ceremonial items, and sacred sites. And then all of this has also been happening alongside discussions about Aboriginal land management practices that could have mitigated the fire season had anybody even following them. In a few cases, the fires have unearthed artifacts that might have gone undiscovered, something that we've talked about in previous editions of Unearthed as well, when people found artifacts between the time that a fire destroyed all the vegetation in an area and when the vegetation regrew. One example is a stone carved boomerang found in a creek bed after the adjacent property was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve. So it's not totally clear how this boomerang came to be there. They are not common in that particular part of Australia. However, this discovery did raise the point that people returning to their homes and their property after these fires should be alert to the presence of artifacts that have been uncovered by the fire. Switching Gears cruise working on Britain's HS two or high Speed to have found what maybe the oldest railroad turntable in the world while excavating the former Curzon Street station. The roundhouse that existed on this site dates back to eighteen thirty seven, so the site is part of a planned intercity terminus for high speed rail that will be located in Birmingham City Center, so more excavations of this turntable are expected, along with some efforts to figure out whether it's possible for the turntable to be preserved in some way in its current location. Researchers at REIK and Nishina Center for Accelerator Based Science in Japan have found a new way to pull tiny, tiny samples of vermilion also known as sinabar from ancient artifacts. That method is sticky tape, specifically tiny squares of special sulfur free tapes and sulfur would contaminate the process, and most sticky tapes on the market actually contain sulfur. So the need for this innovation came about from developments in the analysis techniques that were being used. The research group developed a method that only required one microgram of vermilion, and that's five hundred times smaller than the sample sizes that were needed for other methods. So that's great. It's great to need to take a smaller sample because then you don't have to do nearly as much damage to the object that you're trying to study. However, they didn't actually have a way to collect a sample that was that small. Like it was like, that's a great idea, but how do we get a sample that's that's small? Uh? And that answer was the sulfur free tape and little little three millimeter by three millimeter squares to just pull off the tiniest amounts of a million pigment from things like pottery and stone tools. I really love this sticky tape story. I do you. I was having virtual ty with a friend of mine and she was like, what are you working on right now? And I was like, Oh, I'm working on these Unearthed episodes. She's like, oh, I like this, and I was. She was like, what, what's something that's cool that's that you're finding, and like the sticky tape story was what I immediately launched into. Back in Whittaker Schroeder, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was in Mexico looking at archaeological digs and trying to find a topic for his dissertation research. And after a while he started noticing a street side carnitas vendor trying to flag him down whenever he drove by. Schroeder thought the vendor was trying to get his attention as a customer, but he was a vegetarian, so he did not stop. But on the last day of his trip he did, and it turned out that the vendor was not trying to make a sale. He had heard that Schroeder was interested in the Maya and he wanted to tell him about a friend who had found a stone tablet. It turned out that the rancher had found something significant in his yard, and five years later, after negotiations with him to do the excavation, those excavations began. They revealed the capital of the Maya Kingdom of Saxi or White Dog, which was occupied for about a thousand years starting in seven fifty BC or so. Archaeologists had been trying to find the seat of this kingdom, so discovering references to it at other sites in the team unearthed ruins, sculptures, and monuments, one of which is inscribed with descriptions of things like rituals and battles. The team was planning to return to the site in June for further excavations, although the pandemic seems likely to delay that effort. Moving on to a favorite category, and that's shipwrecks. Locals have known about a wreck about thirty five miles off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida for more than three decades. They nicknamed this wreck the Bear Wreck. I found a lot of references to that being having to do something with debris that had washed up. But I was like, it was there a bear on it? Did it look like a bear? I don't know. This January, though, this wreck was finally identified as the S. S. Cartapaxi, which disappeared in the cot Paxi was traveling from Charleston, South Carolina, to have on a Cuba carrying a load of coal when it disappeared with thirty two people on board. Since then, some people have connected the Coda Paxi to the so called Bermuda Triangle, which the ship would have passed through on that journey. Biologists and diver Michael Barnett worked on the identification using insurance records, blueprints and other documents to compare the wreckage to what was known about the Coda Paxi and then, in addition to the news coverage of this in January, the wreck was also covered on the Science Channel series Shipwreck Secrets. Crews have brought up more than three hundred fifty artifacts from the wreck of Sir John Franklin ship the Arabis, which was found in and we talked about it on on Earth that year. The items include things like a hair brush, kitchen items, wine bottles, and an accordion. These were recovered by Parks Canada underwater archaeologists. So it's been a few years since the ship was found. Uh there had been some other items brought up from it, but this was the first time that underwater archaeologists have really been able to start working at the site, and mostly that's because of the weather. The Northern location of where the wreck is located means that you can really only dive there for five or six weeks a year at best. If you have bad weather during that five or six weeks, that means it's not safe to go out. It's too bad. A team for Lost fifty two project, which has come up on previous episodes of Unearthed, has found the remains of the U. S s Stickleback, which sank after accidentally colliding with the U. S. Navy ship on May nine. The wreck wasn't far from where the collision had taken place, in about eleven thousand feet that's about three thousands of water, so this collision was accidental. It happened during an anti submarine warfare exercise. The crew were able to use compressed air to force the water out of the vessel's ballast, and they all escaped to other ships that were in the area before the reck sank. Again. For folks who might not recall, the Lost fifty two project has a goal of finding all fifty two U S sub marines that disappeared during World War Two and the four that were lost during the Cold War. As of the Stickleback announcement, it had found six of those subs. Let's have a sponsor break before we move on to one of the perpetual favorites, which is the edibles and the potables. We've got several things in the world of food and drink to talk about. First up. Researchers think they have figured out how the Coloosa Kingdom and what's now southern Florida kept large quantities of fish from going bad in the summer heat while working on large scale construction and projects. The kingdom's public works included things like really large buildings and canals, and they would have needed a large labor force to construct, and their diet was largely fish based. So the trick to keeping such a large supply of perishable food on hand and very hot weather was to build large water core to temporarily hold large numbers of living fish basically for a few days out a time, close to where the work was actually happening. Some of these water courts were massive, as large as thirty six thousand square feet with an oyster shell foundation, and it wasn't just a matter of digging the equivalent of a big rectangular fish bowl. Keeping the fish alive would have required them to account for tides, and currents to keep the habitat going as a place where the fish could survive. Based on radiocarbon dating, these water courts were built sometime between thirteen hundred and fourteen hundred, and that would have been during the second phase of construction on a royal manner that was huge, large enough for about two thousand people. Researcher studying ancient pieces of Siberian pottery believed they figured out why pottery was first developed in that part of the world towards the end of the Ice Age. Their work involved pottery pieces that were between twelve thousand and sixteen thousand years old. Based on the lipid residues they found, this pottery was most likely used to process fish, probably salmon. So the team's suggestion is that people developed pottery at this place and time because they were looking for alternate food sources. At some point, people had already migrated away from the coldest, least hospitable parts of what's now Russia, and it would have become increasingly hard for them to find enough food by hunting and gathering. In the words of Professor Oliver Craig, quote, it is interesting that pottery emerges during these very cold periods and not during the comparatively warmer interstadials when forest resources such as game and nuts were more available. Researchers doing similar work in Japan came to the same conclusion about why pottery was developed there at about the same time, but the methods for making pottery were different in these two places, suggesting that two different populations each developed pottery for the same reasons and around the same time, but separately from each other. That separate study that Appanese Studies lead author Dr Shenya Shoda was quoted as saying, quote, we are very pleased with these latest results because they close a major gap in our understanding of why the world's oldest pottery was invented in different parts of Northeast Asia in the late Glacial period, and also the contrasting ways in which it was being used by these ancient hunter gatherers. Researchers in Israel planted thirty two Judean date palm seeds, which had been gathered from several archaeological sites. Six of them sprouted. Once that's sprouting, it happened, researchers gathered up the fragments of the germinated seeds to carbon date them. Two of the seeds went back to between the first and fourth centuries b C, two were from the mid second century b C to the first century CE, and then two of them were from the first or second century CE. The age of the seeds and the characteristics of the plants themselves may shed light on how the population of Judea shifted around two thousand years ago, as well as how people farmed date trees. Moving on, Archaeologists in Tasmania have been excavating the former Pickton road station that was home to a hundred and sixty incarcerated workers while they were building a highway in the nineteenth century. This included the solitary cells that were used for housing, along with things like ceramics, tableware, and tools. There were also a surprising number of alcohol bottles, something that would have been tightly restricted given the fact that the laborers were prisoners. Another dig at the area is scheduled for next year also, and one of the funnier moments as I was getting this episode together, I keep up with all of these links to stories throughout the year on on Pinterest, and what I had pinned for this story was not a whole article. It was apparently someone's accidental publishing error. It had the headline quote fragments found in a Tasmanian convict archaeological dig at Kempton, and then it had the subhead evidence of many types of alcohol was found at the dig, and then that was it. There was no other content. What else do you need to know? Obviously, the evidence of many types of alcohol was what prompted me to pin the story in the first place, so it was enough for me. Speaking of alcohol, archaeologists found six hundred beer bottles neatly stacked during an excavation at Scarborough Castle in in Leeds. The site had been home to Tetley Brewing, but the bottles, some of which still contain liquid, are from a variety of brewers in the area. Some of this liquid was analyzed and found that it did still contain alcohol, but it also contained lead, lots and lots of lead. It seems as though the breweries water pipes might have been contaminated, which really isn't all that surprising considering its age and the fact that it had Victorian and Georgian era plumbing. Possibly the weirdest, creepiest best headline of this season's Unearthed three thousand year old teeth solve Pacific banana mystery. Uh Fat is an island in the Pacific Ocean, across the Coral Sea from Australia. It is home to an important archaeological site known as Teoma, which is home to a large cemetery from the Neolithic Lapida culture. The cemetery itself is the oldest in the region known as Remote Oceania, and many of its burials are exceptionally well preserved. So while studying three thousand year old skeletons, researchers found microscopic particles of banana and other plants in their dental plaque. This is the first evidence that the Lapida people may have brought domesticated plants with them when they first arrived on the island, which had been uninhabited before they got there. That arrival happened about three thousand years ago, and this may help answer some ongoing questions about how the Lapida people survived as they first settled this island. Getting into more creepy things which makes me happy. Moving on from food, but continuing with that theme of stuff that was it's kind of creepy. Italian anthropologists have concluded that what appeared to be a piece of black rock, is really part of the brain of someone who died during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine. The substance was glassy, and it was found on the inside of a person's shattered skull. Another Vesuvius news, a cranium found near Pompey about a hundred years ago, has reportedly been confirmed as belonging to Plenty the Elder, at least as far as it's possible to confirm such a thing at this point. Plenty Of the Elder was admiral of the Roman Imperial Fleet and went to the area after Vesuvius erupted, both to study what was happening and to try to rescue as many people as possible, but he was killed by poisonous gas from the eruption. According to his nephew, plenty Of the Younger, a jawbone was found along with the cranium, and over the course of the work it became clear that the two bones belonged to different people. Based on isotopin analysis, the jaw bone belonged to someone of African descent who was in their late thirties, possibly someone enslaved by Plenty of the Elder. The skull, on the other hand, belonged to someone older from the general region of Italy that Plenty the Elder was from. Uh, this was really not as conclusive as headlines made it sound like, because the headlines were like, Plenty of the Elder skull identified, and they're like, maybe this is a cranium that belonging to somebody from approximately the time and place that Pliny the Elder was from, found near Pompey like that. Uh, it's creepy because it's a cranium, but it's also kind of silly. Moving on to some other stuff that I found a little creepy in archaeologists found a broken bottle full of nails at a Civil War fortification known as Redoubt nine and that today is the median of Highway I sixty four in part of Virginia. This year, the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research announced that I believe this bottle is a witch bottle. So witch bottles were meant to ward off evil spirits, something that's been practiced in various ways in different parts of the world throughout history. In this case, it involved burying a bottle full of nails near the hearth in your home, and that practice started in East Anglia in England during the Middle Ages. Archaeologists have found almost two hundred witch bottles in Britain, but only a handful in the United States, so this fine is relatively rare. Also, um, it could have just been a bottle full of nails with no supernatural significance because the top of the bottle is broken off, so it's not clear whether it contained any of the other items that were typically placed into witch bottles, like nail clippings or locks of hair. It could have just been the container someone was using to hold their nails. My brain wants to start making artisanal witch bottles to sell online. We'll just put like cat nail clippings. I increasingly really love all of the things that um, I mean not all of the things, because some of the things that have been done are horrifying, but like the concealing of objects in walls and hearts to try to ward off evil spirits through things like witch bottles and shoes, and uh think just delight me because you don't want that bell witch to come looking for her tooth, You don't. It breaks me out. That's probably why I thought the banana thing was creepy, because it was about teeth. Anyway, Um, do you want to have a little break. Yeah, I'm gonna recover from these teeth stories and we'll come back in a minute. Next up, we have just a couple of mummy fines or things related to mummies. Taka Booty was a woman who lived in ancient Egypt around twenties, six hundred years ago, whose mummy was bought in the nineteenth century and then brought to Belfast, Ireland in eighte d four. Analysis of her mummy has revealed that her cause of death was being stabbed in the back. Also, researchers confirmed that the mummy's heart is actually still intact and present in the chest cavity. Taka Booty is an example of what other cultures treatment of Egyptian mummies was like in the nineteenth century. After Taca Booty was brought to Belfast, she was publicly unwrapped on January five. That was really just kind of a public spectacle of like, let's goc at these human remains that we're going to remove from their burial wrappings to find a little horrifying uh in totally different, almost opposite mummy news from a different part of the world. Researchers from the University of Western Ontario have been working on a portable digital X ray system that could allow more thorough but also non invasive study of mummies. Actually in the field, using X ray imaging to study mummies is not new. Mosaic x rays that use multiple images to turn two dimensional X rays into a three D view of a mummy's interior or not new either. However, before this point this work has usually been done with film, with the team taking that film back home with them and then developing the images and studying them there. And it was time consuming and it also meant that you were no longer physically able to compare your imaging to like the mummies in front of you. This team, on the other hand, is working on an all digital setup using an X ray machine the size of a suitcase that was originally made for veterinary use. The images produced are sent directly to a laptop and they can be viewed immediately. The X ray machine being used in this work was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and last summer the team used it in Peru to take more than eight d X rays in the field over the course of just six days. Moving on away from mummies and into books and letters, Charlotte Bronte, most well known for her novel Jane Eyre, also made tiny, tiny nature books and magazines when she was a team I love this. Her siblings made tiny books like this too. And when we say we're talking about something tiny, what we mean is something the size of like a box of matches. In the case of the one we're about to talk about, it's thirty five by sixty one millimeters tiny, so small. UM. I saw some of these at a special exhibition at the Morgan one time a couple of years ago when we were in New York for something podcast related. UM, and they had the books and these little magnifying glasses that you could get it closer. I loved them so much. I love the whole exhibit so much. Was great anyway. One of Charlotte Bronte's creations along these lines was a six book series called The Young Men's Magazine, and this included original stories, mock advertisements, and other materials. They really were like tiny, tiny, little mock up men's magazines full of original work. Four of the six installments in this series were already part of the collection of the Bronte Parsonage Museum. A fifth has been lost since the nineteen thirties. We're not quite sure where it is, and the sixth came up for auction in the fall of nineteen That led to a fundraising campaign to help the museum buy it. And that campaign was promoted by such notable people as Dame Judy Dench, who's the Bronte Society's honorary president. And this campaign we are happy to say was successful. It was announced in February that the newly acquired Little Book has gone on display at the Parsonage Museum. I really love the fact that Dame Judy Dench is the honorary president of the Bronte Society. Is moving on. Researchers are studying a two thousand year old artifact in Japan to try to figure out whether it contains Japan's oldest known example of writing. Gastuo Yanagita and his colleagues have maintained that this is an inkstone showing Chinese characters that are written on the stone in India inc. India INC Is a form of inc made from carbon black, typically in a stick or a cake which is moistened to produce inc, but it can also describe a liquid inc made from carbon black and suspended in a fluid. India Inc or Indian ink, as it is called in the UK, is a little bit of a misnomer. This was first made in China and Japan, and in some places it is actually called Chinese inc. As I was working on it, I was like, I'm sure there are people who know what india inc is, but I'm not clear on the details, even though I've been hearing the term used my entire life. Other researchers studying this piece, though, have tried to confirm the presence of india inc on the stone through infrared imaging, and they just couldn't confirm that it was there. So there's some dispute going on about this. If it is ultimately confirmed that this really is an example of writing, it would move the first use of writing in Japan to between two hundred and three hundred years earlier than what's currently known. When Chile occupied Peru during the eighteen seventy nine to eighteen eighty four Pacific War, chileanforces removed, among other things, thousands of books and manuscripts from Peru's National Library. Chile returned more than four thousand, five hundred books, but some of the ones that were taken were sold to private collectors, and this is also something that is a repatriation, which we're going to talk about more of them in a bit. One such manuscript is Memories of the Peruvian Monarchy or Outline of the Inca's History by Justo Apu Salharrawa Inca. Very sorry if I've pronounced that badly. Uh. He was a descendant of Juanna Kapak, who was the sixteenth century Inca emperor who we talked about in our previous episode on the Battle of Caja Marca. This is a beautiful, illustrated manuscript detailing the history of the Inca Empire and Spanish conquest in the region. A lot of it is sourced from documents that have not survived until the present day. After more than a decade of negotiation, a private collector agreed to return the manuscript to Peru in November of twenty nineteen, and it was publicly shown for the first time earlier this year. It has also been digitized, although Tracy was not able to find the digitization online. Yeah, I found various references to it being available digitally, but um, possibly because I am searching in English and don't know how it might be described, um in Spanish in a searchable way, I was not able to find it. As our last, our last entry into books and letters. We're gonna count blueprints as books. Back in nine, senior draftsman Ken Barnes was working on a fighter jet project in Canada, helping to design the Avro Arrow Mark two. When the first avrow Errow made its debut, it was one of the fastest jets in its class. It had been designed to intercept Soviet aircraft if they were to attack targets in North America, as was a Cold War era aircraft. At the same time, other developments like the intercontinental ballistic missile and satellite technology meant that the era was simultaneously at the top of its class and out of date. So the government canceled the Mark two project and ordered everyone working on it to destroy all their documents to keep them from falling into Cold War era enemy hands. Barnes, however, did not do this, and in a story that at this point could have gone very differently. I'm imagining like some heists or something that did not happen, But what if they had. Uh. He kept them safely in his home, where they stayed tucked away in a workbench in his basement until they were inherited by his son, Gourd. The younger Barnes ultimately donated them and they became part of an exhibit called Touch the Sky, The Story of Arow Canada at the University of Saskatchewan's Deefen Baker Canada Center. We have a couple of repatriations to talk about. The Ellen lad Thompson Revocable Trust has donated more than one items to Hawaii's Iolani Palace. This is something that a lot of news coverage has framed as being related to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy at the hands of US business interests aided by the military. Ine That's something that we've talked about on the show. In the words of CNN's headline, for example, quote thousands of artifacts were taken when Hawaiian's monarchy was overthrown. Now some have returned home to Iolani Palace. It is absolutely true that thousands of artifacts pieces of artwork and other items were seized and auctioned off after the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown, and that many of these pieces have never been recovered or return But this particular donation has a little bit different backstory. These items had originally belonged to Anton and Emily Rosa. Anton was the son of a Hawaiian mother and a father of Portuguese descent. He was a judge and King Kalakau appointed him as Attorney General. After that, Rosa served as Kalaka who was vice chamberlain, and he was part of Queen Lilio Kawani's privy council. Rosa died in eight at the age of forty three, and in obituaries his politics were described as nationalist and in opposition to the republic that was established after US interests overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. These items, which were probably given to the Rosa family as gifts, were then passed down to their descendants. Then Helen Land Thompson, Rosa's granddaughter, died in Honolulu on June, which ultimately led to those items being donated to the Iolani Palace. The headlines sort of made it sound like these were things that nefarious people had looted from the palace and decided to return. But like this is a family who had connections with the monarchy's personal items that they have donated now uh. In other news, scot Outland has returned the remains of both the couple a hundred and ninety one years after those remains were taken from their grave and what's now Newfoundland by explorer William Cormack. This return followed years of discussion with the Canadian government and with indigenous leaders. These remains belonged to non No Saboset and demas do it really sorry? If I have done that badly. I tried to get pronunciations and failed to mast do it was captured by a European fur trader in eighteen nineteen, and her husband was killed trying to rescue her. She died of tuberculosis the following year. As of March, the remains were being held at the Rooms Archive in Museum in St. John's as indigenous leaders from Newfoundland and Labrador discussed how and where to rebury them to ensure that they would not be disturbed again. Initially, Scottish authorities had refused to return these remains because the request had not been made by a act descendant. This is one of those situations where the Bothic nation as a nation was destroyed back in the nineteenth century, so the efforts to have the remains repatriated has been a collaborative effort among multiple indigenous people's In Canada, a pipe tomahawk that George Washington gave to Seneca leader Cornplanter in seventeen two has been returned to the Seneca nation. A Seneca diplomat had donated the tomahawk to the New York State Museum in eighteen fifty one, but it had been lost or stolen from the museum. About one hundred years later, it was returned to the museum by an anonymous person in The formal return of the pipe took place in Salamanca, New York in January. And now we are going to move on and finish off this installment of Unearthed with something that a lot of people's social media shares blamed for the state of the world right now, um which, as we've said earlier, this episode is coming out in two weeks. Who knows what the state of the world will be at that point. Thirty lead curse tablets were found in the main cemetery of ancient Athens, down at the bottom of a well. This well is known as B thirty four. It's one of more than forty known wells in the cemetery, and it dates back to the fourth century b c. It was common to bury these types of tablets in a person's tomb under the idea that the person could carry the message with them to the underworld, and wells were seen as another connection to underworld deities. This use of wells as kind of a curse tablet mailbox increased after Athenian law banned the burial of curses in tombs as part of laws governing the tomb's overall management. So these cursed tablets would have been considered the black arts, and the black arts were not looked upon very favorably in Athens, so this well, which was the water source for a public bath, was probably just a convenient place for people to try throw their curses in surreptitiously. This kind of reminds me of people trying to scatter ashes on disney rides. Uh. Some of the other items found in the well, which had to be pumped free of water before the excavation could begin where bronze coins, cooking pots, drinking vessels, peach pits, and talus bones used for dice games. This wasn't all just littering. Some of these items would have been thrown in as an offering to the water nymph believed to be tied to the well. So this story came out a little bit earlier in the year, but it circulated a lot. I saw it around numerous times in the early days, just after the World Health Organization had declared a pandemic, and that led to people making various quips about how we needed to throw the curses back in. Uh. Just to be clear, though, they were removed when the well was excavated for the first time back in so and also probably they had already done their cursework if you believe in such a thing, since the whole point was for them their messages to be retrieved by underworld deities down at the bottom of the the well. It's a return to sender situation. We don't do so. Yeah, that is our unearthed for the springtime. I'm wildly curious how this goes in summer. Yeah, me too, me too. Um, Like a lot of universities are are only doing online instruction UM or like have like told students not to return to campus. So like, Uh, the world of university based work is very different. Simultaneously, though, my spouse works for a university as a librarian, and he has been incredibly busy working at home. UM as faculty have wanted a lot of research help for stuff that is related to COVID nineteen in some way. Oh um, there's that could go so many different ways. Like I imagine a lot of UM field work is probably canceled or postponed. A lot of conferences where these kinds of things make their first public appearance, like those, a lot of them have either been canceled or postponed or moved to an all online format. It's remains to be seen. Uh, what will have to report in July. Yeah, I imagine there could be like analysis and um, you know, putting together of papers during this time. But we'll see, we'll see well, And based on our own experience, it's a little hard to concentrate that it is. I mean, we we have a lot to be thankful for Ali and I and our work, but also it's been kind of like just an emotional and been mental struggle. Yeah, I find myself like in the middle of research and being like none of this makes sense together? How do I make a narrative structure? And then I realized, like two hours have past and I've just been essentially staring at a cat say like, I'm just like, I don't know what happened here, but I gotta make up for a long time. Do you have a little listener mail to take us out? I do have listener mail. It is from someone who asked us to please leave their name off if we read it, so I'm doing that. They write, I would just like to thank you, ladies for your special coronavirus episodes. Podcasters may not be doctors or laboratory technicians, or truck drivers and supermarket shelf sackers, but you're still doing an important job of keeping the spirits up of people stuck at home. My wife and I are in Australia and are both working from home. I work for the railways, and most other railroaders still have to go to work to keep the trains moving. We're running more inner modal general freight trains than ever there as long as they can be to fit into passing loops also known as sidings, but are not as heavy as they could be. Things like dried pasta and toilet paper take up a lot of space but are not very heavy. The people who load trains are used to seeing a peak period in the lead up to Christmas, but right now they're seeing a peak which doesn't end. One of the biggest problems I have is having to keep picking the cats off the laptop. We have three cats and a dog. I sent out this photo to my workmates that said my cat Trim takes after his namesake. The original Trim is how Australia got its name. Matthew Flinders had just finished the first complete map of Australia and Trim went to sleep in the middle of it. He wanted to write Tara Australia on it, which is Latin for Southern Land, but he abbreviated it to Australia so as not to wake Trim. I then had to explain to one of my my workmates that it wasn't true. British Naval Office Matthew Flinders was the first person to circumnavigate Australia into properly map it. He did bring his cat, a ship's cap called Trim with him. Trim was known for mischief like sprawling out on the chart table when an officer had to do the navigation. But the name Australia had already been coined, Flinders chose to use it and made it popular. On a lighter note, after your Train Wrex episode, you might like to here about the Tea and Sugar. This was a shopping mall on a train. There used to be a whole series of settlements next to the railway across the Mill Harbor Desert, where the track mountaineers lived with their family more or less every week from when the line opened in nineteen seventeen until n this train ran across the line bringing them supplies. Tea and sugar were the most famous supplies it carried, hence the name. One carriage had a grocery store, another carriage had a butcher's shop, and another carriage had a bank branch. Nurses would often ride the train to check on people's health, and movie projectors were often carried. That Christmas Father Christmas, also known as Santa Claus, would ride the train, and the train finally stopped running when modern technology meant people no longer needed to live in such remote settlements. Things like concrete sleepers on ties, which are not eaten by termites, did not need to be replaced as often. Modern four wheel drive cars meant track workers and their families could live in towns and then drive out to where they're needed to work, spending a few nights in bunk houses on the line. Thank us again, Thank you so much anonymous listener for uh these two charming stories about trim and about the Tea and Sugar. I love both of them. Um. As soon as I heard about the Tea and Sugar, I was like, can we do an episode about that? I did a similar thing, um, and then I was like, can I do an episode about this and other cool trains? As like a six impossible episodes. And I haven't quite pulled together something that might be a thing to that can happen in the future, but I did not immediately figure out what to do with it. But anyway, it's such a great story. Thank you so much for sending us this email. Again. We hope people are weathering things as best as possible, uh, and thanks for listening to our show. If you would like to write to us, we're at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. And then we're all over social media at Missing History, which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast the I heart radio app, and anywhere else you 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 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. Here is part two of the weird experience of working on Unearthed episodes in the middle of a pandemic, which has just been a strange thing. It's it has not been usual for me to repeatedly refer to current like the same current event multiple times doing Unearthed. Um today we have some fun stuff including edibles and potables, shipwrecks, books and letters, just some other cool stuff too. So normally when Tracy is working on Earth, she winds up finding stuff that seems cool or interesting, but it kind of doesn't really fit into any category, and so those all go into potpourri. And that's where we're starting today. First up, a five year excavation at a Pictish homes dead known as Layer of Glenchi in Scotland has unearthed lots of fines, including a padlock dating back to between five hundred and one thousand CE. Uh. There's no more really to discuss with that. I just thought it was cool to have a padlock that was that old. Moving on to something that is a little more serious. The bush fire season in Australia was really just devastating, particularly devastating, with immense losses in terms of human and animal life, as well as the general environment and ecology and property like just on and on Australia's Aboriginal and tourist Strait Islander. People's have been disproportionately affected by this, with fires completely destroying ancestral homes and cultural sites. Material losses have included things like council buildings, ceremonial items, and sacred sites. And then all of this has also been happening alongside discussions about Aboriginal land management practices that could have mitigated the fire season had anybody even following them. In a few cases, the fires have unearthed artifacts that might have gone undiscovered, something that we've talked about in previous editions of Unearthed as well, when people found artifacts between the time that a fire destroyed all the vegetation in an area and when the vegetation regrew. One example is a stone carved boomerang found in a creek bed after the adjacent property was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve. So it's not totally clear how this boomerang came to be there. They are not common in that particular part of Australia. However, this discovery did raise the point that people returning to their homes and their property after these fires should be alert to the presence of artifacts that have been uncovered by the fire. Switching Gears cruise working on Britain's HS two or high Speed to have found what maybe the oldest railroad turntable in the world while excavating the former Curzon Street station. The roundhouse that existed on this site dates back to eighteen thirty seven, so the site is part of a planned intercity terminus for high speed rail that will be located in Birmingham City Center, so more excavations of this turntable are expected, along with some efforts to figure out whether it's possible for the turntable to be preserved in some way in its current location. Researchers at REIK and Nishina Center for Accelerator Based Science in Japan have found a new way to pull tiny, tiny samples of vermilion also known as sinabar from ancient artifacts. That method is sticky tape, specifically tiny squares of special sulfur free tapes and sulfur would contaminate the process, and most sticky tapes on the market actually contain sulfur. So the need for this innovation came about from developments in the analysis techniques that were being used. The research group developed a method that only required one microgram of vermilion, and that's five hundred times smaller than the sample sizes that were needed for other methods. So that's great. It's great to need to take a smaller sample because then you don't have to do nearly as much damage to the object that you're trying to study. However, they didn't actually have a way to collect a sample that was that small. Like it was like, that's a great idea, but how do we get a sample that's that's small? Uh? And that answer was the sulfur free tape and little little three millimeter by three millimeter squares to just pull off the tiniest amounts of a million pigment from things like pottery and stone tools. I really love this sticky tape story. I do you. I was having virtual ty with a friend of mine and she was like, what are you working on right now? And I was like, Oh, I'm working on these Unearthed episodes. She's like, oh, I like this, and I was. She was like, what, what's something that's cool that's that you're finding, and like the sticky tape story was what I immediately launched into. Back in Whittaker Schroeder, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was in Mexico looking at archaeological digs and trying to find a topic for his dissertation research. And after a while he started noticing a street side carnitas vendor trying to flag him down whenever he drove by. Schroeder thought the vendor was trying to get his attention as a customer, but he was a vegetarian, so he did not stop. But on the last day of his trip he did, and it turned out that the vendor was not trying to make a sale. He had heard that Schroeder was interested in the Maya and he wanted to tell him about a friend who had found a stone tablet. It turned out that the rancher had found something significant in his yard, and five years later, after negotiations with him to do the excavation, those excavations began. They revealed the capital of the Maya Kingdom of Saxi or White Dog, which was occupied for about a thousand years starting in seven fifty BC or so. Archaeologists had been trying to find the seat of this kingdom, so discovering references to it at other sites in the team unearthed ruins, sculptures, and monuments, one of which is inscribed with descriptions of things like rituals and battles. The team was planning to return to the site in June for further excavations, although the pandemic seems likely to delay that effort. Moving on to a favorite category, and that's shipwrecks. Locals have known about a wreck about thirty five miles off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida for more than three decades. They nicknamed this wreck the Bear Wreck. I found a lot of references to that being having to do something with debris that had washed up. But I was like, it was there a bear on it? Did it look like a bear? I don't know. This January, though, this wreck was finally identified as the S. S. Cartapaxi, which disappeared in the cot Paxi was traveling from Charleston, South Carolina, to have on a Cuba carrying a load of coal when it disappeared with thirty two people on board. Since then, some people have connected the Coda Paxi to the so called Bermuda Triangle, which the ship would have passed through on that journey. Biologists and diver Michael Barnett worked on the identification using insurance records, blueprints and other documents to compare the wreckage to what was known about the Coda Paxi and then, in addition to the news coverage of this in January, the wreck was also covered on the Science Channel series Shipwreck Secrets. Crews have brought up more than three hundred fifty artifacts from the wreck of Sir John Franklin ship the Arabis, which was found in and we talked about it on on Earth that year. The items include things like a hair brush, kitchen items, wine bottles, and an accordion. These were recovered by Parks Canada underwater archaeologists. So it's been a few years since the ship was found. Uh there had been some other items brought up from it, but this was the first time that underwater archaeologists have really been able to start working at the site, and mostly that's because of the weather. The Northern location of where the wreck is located means that you can really only dive there for five or six weeks a year at best. If you have bad weather during that five or six weeks, that means it's not safe to go out. It's too bad. A team for Lost fifty two project, which has come up on previous episodes of Unearthed, has found the remains of the U. S s Stickleback, which sank after accidentally colliding with the U. S. Navy ship on May nine. The wreck wasn't far from where the collision had taken place, in about eleven thousand feet that's about three thousands of water, so this collision was accidental. It happened during an anti submarine warfare exercise. The crew were able to use compressed air to force the water out of the vessel's ballast, and they all escaped to other ships that were in the area before the reck sank. Again. For folks who might not recall, the Lost fifty two project has a goal of finding all fifty two U S sub marines that disappeared during World War Two and the four that were lost during the Cold War. As of the Stickleback announcement, it had found six of those subs. Let's have a sponsor break before we move on to one of the perpetual favorites, which is the edibles and the potables. We've got several things in the world of food and drink to talk about. First up. Researchers think they have figured out how the Coloosa Kingdom and what's now southern Florida kept large quantities of fish from going bad in the summer heat while working on large scale construction and projects. The kingdom's public works included things like really large buildings and canals, and they would have needed a large labor force to construct, and their diet was largely fish based. So the trick to keeping such a large supply of perishable food on hand and very hot weather was to build large water core to temporarily hold large numbers of living fish basically for a few days out a time, close to where the work was actually happening. Some of these water courts were massive, as large as thirty six thousand square feet with an oyster shell foundation, and it wasn't just a matter of digging the equivalent of a big rectangular fish bowl. Keeping the fish alive would have required them to account for tides, and currents to keep the habitat going as a place where the fish could survive. Based on radiocarbon dating, these water courts were built sometime between thirteen hundred and fourteen hundred, and that would have been during the second phase of construction on a royal manner that was huge, large enough for about two thousand people. Researcher studying ancient pieces of Siberian pottery believed they figured out why pottery was first developed in that part of the world towards the end of the Ice Age. Their work involved pottery pieces that were between twelve thousand and sixteen thousand years old. Based on the lipid residues they found, this pottery was most likely used to process fish, probably salmon. So the team's suggestion is that people developed pottery at this place and time because they were looking for alternate food sources. At some point, people had already migrated away from the coldest, least hospitable parts of what's now Russia, and it would have become increasingly hard for them to find enough food by hunting and gathering. In the words of Professor Oliver Craig, quote, it is interesting that pottery emerges during these very cold periods and not during the comparatively warmer interstadials when forest resources such as game and nuts were more available. Researchers doing similar work in Japan came to the same conclusion about why pottery was developed there at about the same time, but the methods for making pottery were different in these two places, suggesting that two different populations each developed pottery for the same reasons and around the same time, but separately from each other. That separate study that Appanese Studies lead author Dr Shenya Shoda was quoted as saying, quote, we are very pleased with these latest results because they close a major gap in our understanding of why the world's oldest pottery was invented in different parts of Northeast Asia in the late Glacial period, and also the contrasting ways in which it was being used by these ancient hunter gatherers. Researchers in Israel planted thirty two Judean date palm seeds, which had been gathered from several archaeological sites. Six of them sprouted. Once that's sprouting, it happened, researchers gathered up the fragments of the germinated seeds to carbon date them. Two of the seeds went back to between the first and fourth centuries b C, two were from the mid second century b C to the first century CE, and then two of them were from the first or second century CE. The age of the seeds and the characteristics of the plants themselves may shed light on how the population of Judea shifted around two thousand years ago, as well as how people farmed date trees. Moving on, Archaeologists in Tasmania have been excavating the former Pickton road station that was home to a hundred and sixty incarcerated workers while they were building a highway in the nineteenth century. This included the solitary cells that were used for housing, along with things like ceramics, tableware, and tools. There were also a surprising number of alcohol bottles, something that would have been tightly restricted given the fact that the laborers were prisoners. Another dig at the area is scheduled for next year also, and one of the funnier moments as I was getting this episode together, I keep up with all of these links to stories throughout the year on on Pinterest, and what I had pinned for this story was not a whole article. It was apparently someone's accidental publishing error. It had the headline quote fragments found in a Tasmanian convict archaeological dig at Kempton, and then it had the subhead evidence of many types of alcohol was found at the dig, and then that was it. There was no other content. What else do you need to know? Obviously, the evidence of many types of alcohol was what prompted me to pin the story in the first place, so it was enough for me. Speaking of alcohol, archaeologists found six hundred beer bottles neatly stacked during an excavation at Scarborough Castle in in Leeds. The site had been home to Tetley Brewing, but the bottles, some of which still contain liquid, are from a variety of brewers in the area. Some of this liquid was analyzed and found that it did still contain alcohol, but it also contained lead, lots and lots of lead. It seems as though the breweries water pipes might have been contaminated, which really isn't all that surprising considering its age and the fact that it had Victorian and Georgian era plumbing. Possibly the weirdest, creepiest best headline of this season's Unearthed three thousand year old teeth solve Pacific banana mystery. Uh Fat is an island in the Pacific Ocean, across the Coral Sea from Australia. It is home to an important archaeological site known as Teoma, which is home to a large cemetery from the Neolithic Lapida culture. The cemetery itself is the oldest in the region known as Remote Oceania, and many of its burials are exceptionally well preserved. So while studying three thousand year old skeletons, researchers found microscopic particles of banana and other plants in their dental plaque. This is the first evidence that the Lapida people may have brought domesticated plants with them when they first arrived on the island, which had been uninhabited before they got there. That arrival happened about three thousand years ago, and this may help answer some ongoing questions about how the Lapida people survived as they first settled this island. Getting into more creepy things which makes me happy. Moving on from food, but continuing with that theme of stuff that was it's kind of creepy. Italian anthropologists have concluded that what appeared to be a piece of black rock, is really part of the brain of someone who died during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year seventy nine. The substance was glassy, and it was found on the inside of a person's shattered skull. Another Vesuvius news, a cranium found near Pompey about a hundred years ago, has reportedly been confirmed as belonging to Plenty the Elder, at least as far as it's possible to confirm such a thing at this point. Plenty Of the Elder was admiral of the Roman Imperial Fleet and went to the area after Vesuvius erupted, both to study what was happening and to try to rescue as many people as possible, but he was killed by poisonous gas from the eruption. According to his nephew, plenty Of the Younger, a jawbone was found along with the cranium, and over the course of the work it became clear that the two bones belonged to different people. Based on isotopin analysis, the jaw bone belonged to someone of African descent who was in their late thirties, possibly someone enslaved by Plenty of the Elder. The skull, on the other hand, belonged to someone older from the general region of Italy that Plenty the Elder was from. Uh, this was really not as conclusive as headlines made it sound like, because the headlines were like, Plenty of the Elder skull identified, and they're like, maybe this is a cranium that belonging to somebody from approximately the time and place that Pliny the Elder was from, found near Pompey like that. Uh, it's creepy because it's a cranium, but it's also kind of silly. Moving on to some other stuff that I found a little creepy in archaeologists found a broken bottle full of nails at a Civil War fortification known as Redoubt nine and that today is the median of Highway I sixty four in part of Virginia. This year, the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research announced that I believe this bottle is a witch bottle. So witch bottles were meant to ward off evil spirits, something that's been practiced in various ways in different parts of the world throughout history. In this case, it involved burying a bottle full of nails near the hearth in your home, and that practice started in East Anglia in England during the Middle Ages. Archaeologists have found almost two hundred witch bottles in Britain, but only a handful in the United States, so this fine is relatively rare. Also, um, it could have just been a bottle full of nails with no supernatural significance because the top of the bottle is broken off, so it's not clear whether it contained any of the other items that were typically placed into witch bottles, like nail clippings or locks of hair. It could have just been the container someone was using to hold their nails. My brain wants to start making artisanal witch bottles to sell online. We'll just put like cat nail clippings. I increasingly really love all of the things that um, I mean not all of the things, because some of the things that have been done are horrifying, but like the concealing of objects in walls and hearts to try to ward off evil spirits through things like witch bottles and shoes, and uh think just delight me because you don't want that bell witch to come looking for her tooth, You don't. It breaks me out. That's probably why I thought the banana thing was creepy, because it was about teeth. Anyway, Um, do you want to have a little break. Yeah, I'm gonna recover from these teeth stories and we'll come back in a minute. Next up, we have just a couple of mummy fines or things related to mummies. Taka Booty was a woman who lived in ancient Egypt around twenties, six hundred years ago, whose mummy was bought in the nineteenth century and then brought to Belfast, Ireland in eighte d four. Analysis of her mummy has revealed that her cause of death was being stabbed in the back. Also, researchers confirmed that the mummy's heart is actually still intact and present in the chest cavity. Taka Booty is an example of what other cultures treatment of Egyptian mummies was like in the nineteenth century. After Taca Booty was brought to Belfast, she was publicly unwrapped on January five. That was really just kind of a public spectacle of like, let's goc at these human remains that we're going to remove from their burial wrappings to find a little horrifying uh in totally different, almost opposite mummy news from a different part of the world. Researchers from the University of Western Ontario have been working on a portable digital X ray system that could allow more thorough but also non invasive study of mummies. Actually in the field, using X ray imaging to study mummies is not new. Mosaic x rays that use multiple images to turn two dimensional X rays into a three D view of a mummy's interior or not new either. However, before this point this work has usually been done with film, with the team taking that film back home with them and then developing the images and studying them there. And it was time consuming and it also meant that you were no longer physically able to compare your imaging to like the mummies in front of you. This team, on the other hand, is working on an all digital setup using an X ray machine the size of a suitcase that was originally made for veterinary use. The images produced are sent directly to a laptop and they can be viewed immediately. The X ray machine being used in this work was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and last summer the team used it in Peru to take more than eight d X rays in the field over the course of just six days. Moving on away from mummies and into books and letters, Charlotte Bronte, most well known for her novel Jane Eyre, also made tiny, tiny nature books and magazines when she was a team I love this. Her siblings made tiny books like this too. And when we say we're talking about something tiny, what we mean is something the size of like a box of matches. In the case of the one we're about to talk about, it's thirty five by sixty one millimeters tiny, so small. UM. I saw some of these at a special exhibition at the Morgan one time a couple of years ago when we were in New York for something podcast related. UM, and they had the books and these little magnifying glasses that you could get it closer. I loved them so much. I love the whole exhibit so much. Was great anyway. One of Charlotte Bronte's creations along these lines was a six book series called The Young Men's Magazine, and this included original stories, mock advertisements, and other materials. They really were like tiny, tiny, little mock up men's magazines full of original work. Four of the six installments in this series were already part of the collection of the Bronte Parsonage Museum. A fifth has been lost since the nineteen thirties. We're not quite sure where it is, and the sixth came up for auction in the fall of nineteen That led to a fundraising campaign to help the museum buy it. And that campaign was promoted by such notable people as Dame Judy Dench, who's the Bronte Society's honorary president. And this campaign we are happy to say was successful. It was announced in February that the newly acquired Little Book has gone on display at the Parsonage Museum. I really love the fact that Dame Judy Dench is the honorary president of the Bronte Society. Is moving on. Researchers are studying a two thousand year old artifact in Japan to try to figure out whether it contains Japan's oldest known example of writing. Gastuo Yanagita and his colleagues have maintained that this is an inkstone showing Chinese characters that are written on the stone in India inc. India INC Is a form of inc made from carbon black, typically in a stick or a cake which is moistened to produce inc, but it can also describe a liquid inc made from carbon black and suspended in a fluid. India Inc or Indian ink, as it is called in the UK, is a little bit of a misnomer. This was first made in China and Japan, and in some places it is actually called Chinese inc. As I was working on it, I was like, I'm sure there are people who know what india inc is, but I'm not clear on the details, even though I've been hearing the term used my entire life. Other researchers studying this piece, though, have tried to confirm the presence of india inc on the stone through infrared imaging, and they just couldn't confirm that it was there. So there's some dispute going on about this. If it is ultimately confirmed that this really is an example of writing, it would move the first use of writing in Japan to between two hundred and three hundred years earlier than what's currently known. When Chile occupied Peru during the eighteen seventy nine to eighteen eighty four Pacific War, chileanforces removed, among other things, thousands of books and manuscripts from Peru's National Library. Chile returned more than four thousand, five hundred books, but some of the ones that were taken were sold to private collectors, and this is also something that is a repatriation, which we're going to talk about more of them in a bit. One such manuscript is Memories of the Peruvian Monarchy or Outline of the Inca's History by Justo Apu Salharrawa Inca. Very sorry if I've pronounced that badly. Uh. He was a descendant of Juanna Kapak, who was the sixteenth century Inca emperor who we talked about in our previous episode on the Battle of Caja Marca. This is a beautiful, illustrated manuscript detailing the history of the Inca Empire and Spanish conquest in the region. A lot of it is sourced from documents that have not survived until the present day. After more than a decade of negotiation, a private collector agreed to return the manuscript to Peru in November of twenty nineteen, and it was publicly shown for the first time earlier this year. It has also been digitized, although Tracy was not able to find the digitization online. Yeah, I found various references to it being available digitally, but um, possibly because I am searching in English and don't know how it might be described, um in Spanish in a searchable way, I was not able to find it. As our last, our last entry into books and letters. We're gonna count blueprints as books. Back in nine, senior draftsman Ken Barnes was working on a fighter jet project in Canada, helping to design the Avro Arrow Mark two. When the first avrow Errow made its debut, it was one of the fastest jets in its class. It had been designed to intercept Soviet aircraft if they were to attack targets in North America, as was a Cold War era aircraft. At the same time, other developments like the intercontinental ballistic missile and satellite technology meant that the era was simultaneously at the top of its class and out of date. So the government canceled the Mark two project and ordered everyone working on it to destroy all their documents to keep them from falling into Cold War era enemy hands. Barnes, however, did not do this, and in a story that at this point could have gone very differently. I'm imagining like some heists or something that did not happen, But what if they had. Uh. He kept them safely in his home, where they stayed tucked away in a workbench in his basement until they were inherited by his son, Gourd. The younger Barnes ultimately donated them and they became part of an exhibit called Touch the Sky, The Story of Arow Canada at the University of Saskatchewan's Deefen Baker Canada Center. We have a couple of repatriations to talk about. The Ellen lad Thompson Revocable Trust has donated more than one items to Hawaii's Iolani Palace. This is something that a lot of news coverage has framed as being related to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy at the hands of US business interests aided by the military. Ine That's something that we've talked about on the show. In the words of CNN's headline, for example, quote thousands of artifacts were taken when Hawaiian's monarchy was overthrown. Now some have returned home to Iolani Palace. It is absolutely true that thousands of artifacts pieces of artwork and other items were seized and auctioned off after the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown, and that many of these pieces have never been recovered or return But this particular donation has a little bit different backstory. These items had originally belonged to Anton and Emily Rosa. Anton was the son of a Hawaiian mother and a father of Portuguese descent. He was a judge and King Kalakau appointed him as Attorney General. After that, Rosa served as Kalaka who was vice chamberlain, and he was part of Queen Lilio Kawani's privy council. Rosa died in eight at the age of forty three, and in obituaries his politics were described as nationalist and in opposition to the republic that was established after US interests overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. These items, which were probably given to the Rosa family as gifts, were then passed down to their descendants. Then Helen Land Thompson, Rosa's granddaughter, died in Honolulu on June, which ultimately led to those items being donated to the Iolani Palace. The headlines sort of made it sound like these were things that nefarious people had looted from the palace and decided to return. But like this is a family who had connections with the monarchy's personal items that they have donated now uh. In other news, scot Outland has returned the remains of both the couple a hundred and ninety one years after those remains were taken from their grave and what's now Newfoundland by explorer William Cormack. This return followed years of discussion with the Canadian government and with indigenous leaders. These remains belonged to non No Saboset and demas do it really sorry? If I have done that badly. I tried to get pronunciations and failed to mast do it was captured by a European fur trader in eighteen nineteen, and her husband was killed trying to rescue her. She died of tuberculosis the following year. As of March, the remains were being held at the Rooms Archive in Museum in St. John's as indigenous leaders from Newfoundland and Labrador discussed how and where to rebury them to ensure that they would not be disturbed again. Initially, Scottish authorities had refused to return these remains because the request had not been made by a act descendant. This is one of those situations where the Bothic nation as a nation was destroyed back in the nineteenth century, so the efforts to have the remains repatriated has been a collaborative effort among multiple indigenous people's In Canada, a pipe tomahawk that George Washington gave to Seneca leader Cornplanter in seventeen two has been returned to the Seneca nation. A Seneca diplomat had donated the tomahawk to the New York State Museum in eighteen fifty one, but it had been lost or stolen from the museum. About one hundred years later, it was returned to the museum by an anonymous person in The formal return of the pipe took place in Salamanca, New York in January. And now we are going to move on and finish off this installment of Unearthed with something that a lot of people's social media shares blamed for the state of the world right now, um which, as we've said earlier, this episode is coming out in two weeks. Who knows what the state of the world will be at that point. Thirty lead curse tablets were found in the main cemetery of ancient Athens, down at the bottom of a well. This well is known as B thirty four. It's one of more than forty known wells in the cemetery, and it dates back to the fourth century b c. It was common to bury these types of tablets in a person's tomb under the idea that the person could carry the message with them to the underworld, and wells were seen as another connection to underworld deities. This use of wells as kind of a curse tablet mailbox increased after Athenian law banned the burial of curses in tombs as part of laws governing the tomb's overall management. So these cursed tablets would have been considered the black arts, and the black arts were not looked upon very favorably in Athens, so this well, which was the water source for a public bath, was probably just a convenient place for people to try throw their curses in surreptitiously. This kind of reminds me of people trying to scatter ashes on disney rides. Uh. Some of the other items found in the well, which had to be pumped free of water before the excavation could begin where bronze coins, cooking pots, drinking vessels, peach pits, and talus bones used for dice games. This wasn't all just littering. Some of these items would have been thrown in as an offering to the water nymph believed to be tied to the well. So this story came out a little bit earlier in the year, but it circulated a lot. I saw it around numerous times in the early days, just after the World Health Organization had declared a pandemic, and that led to people making various quips about how we needed to throw the curses back in. Uh. Just to be clear, though, they were removed when the well was excavated for the first time back in so and also probably they had already done their cursework if you believe in such a thing, since the whole point was for them their messages to be retrieved by underworld deities down at the bottom of the the well. It's a return to sender situation. We don't do so. Yeah, that is our unearthed for the springtime. I'm wildly curious how this goes in summer. Yeah, me too, me too. Um, Like a lot of universities are are only doing online instruction UM or like have like told students not to return to campus. So like, Uh, the world of university based work is very different. Simultaneously, though, my spouse works for a university as a librarian, and he has been incredibly busy working at home. UM as faculty have wanted a lot of research help for stuff that is related to COVID nineteen in some way. Oh um, there's that could go so many different ways. Like I imagine a lot of UM field work is probably canceled or postponed. A lot of conferences where these kinds of things make their first public appearance, like those, a lot of them have either been canceled or postponed or moved to an all online format. It's remains to be seen. Uh, what will have to report in July. Yeah, I imagine there could be like analysis and um, you know, putting together of papers during this time. But we'll see, we'll see well, And based on our own experience, it's a little hard to concentrate that it is. I mean, we we have a lot to be thankful for Ali and I and our work, but also it's been kind of like just an emotional and been mental struggle. Yeah, I find myself like in the middle of research and being like none of this makes sense together? How do I make a narrative structure? And then I realized, like two hours have past and I've just been essentially staring at a cat say like, I'm just like, I don't know what happened here, but I gotta make up for a long time. Do you have a little listener mail to take us out? I do have listener mail. It is from someone who asked us to please leave their name off if we read it, so I'm doing that. They write, I would just like to thank you, ladies for your special coronavirus episodes. Podcasters may not be doctors or laboratory technicians, or truck drivers and supermarket shelf sackers, but you're still doing an important job of keeping the spirits up of people stuck at home. My wife and I are in Australia and are both working from home. I work for the railways, and most other railroaders still have to go to work to keep the trains moving. We're running more inner modal general freight trains than ever there as long as they can be to fit into passing loops also known as sidings, but are not as heavy as they could be. Things like dried pasta and toilet paper take up a lot of space but are not very heavy. The people who load trains are used to seeing a peak period in the lead up to Christmas, but right now they're seeing a peak which doesn't end. One of the biggest problems I have is having to keep picking the cats off the laptop. We have three cats and a dog. I sent out this photo to my workmates that said my cat Trim takes after his namesake. The original Trim is how Australia got its name. Matthew Flinders had just finished the first complete map of Australia and Trim went to sleep in the middle of it. He wanted to write Tara Australia on it, which is Latin for Southern Land, but he abbreviated it to Australia so as not to wake Trim. I then had to explain to one of my my workmates that it wasn't true. British Naval Office Matthew Flinders was the first person to circumnavigate Australia into properly map it. He did bring his cat, a ship's cap called Trim with him. Trim was known for mischief like sprawling out on the chart table when an officer had to do the navigation. But the name Australia had already been coined, Flinders chose to use it and made it popular. On a lighter note, after your Train Wrex episode, you might like to here about the Tea and Sugar. This was a shopping mall on a train. There used to be a whole series of settlements next to the railway across the Mill Harbor Desert, where the track mountaineers lived with their family more or less every week from when the line opened in nineteen seventeen until n this train ran across the line bringing them supplies. Tea and sugar were the most famous supplies it carried, hence the name. One carriage had a grocery store, another carriage had a butcher's shop, and another carriage had a bank branch. Nurses would often ride the train to check on people's health, and movie projectors were often carried. That Christmas Father Christmas, also known as Santa Claus, would ride the train, and the train finally stopped running when modern technology meant people no longer needed to live in such remote settlements. Things like concrete sleepers on ties, which are not eaten by termites, did not need to be replaced as often. Modern four wheel drive cars meant track workers and their families could live in towns and then drive out to where they're needed to work, spending a few nights in bunk houses on the line. Thank us again, Thank you so much anonymous listener for uh these two charming stories about trim and about the Tea and Sugar. I love both of them. Um. As soon as I heard about the Tea and Sugar, I was like, can we do an episode about that? I did a similar thing, um, and then I was like, can I do an episode about this and other cool trains? As like a six impossible episodes. And I haven't quite pulled together something that might be a thing to that can happen in the future, but I did not immediately figure out what to do with it. But anyway, it's such a great story. Thank you so much for sending us this email. Again. We hope people are weathering things as best as possible, uh, and thanks for listening to our show. If you would like to write to us, we're at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. And then we're all over social media at Missing History, which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast the I heart radio app, and anywhere else you 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.