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. If you are new to the show. A few times a year, we look at things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So today we're looking at January through March. UH, stuff that crossed my radar. I had have this extensive list of hundreds of bookmarks that I go through to UH to prepare these. This time around, we have some updates. We have a whole bunch of repatriations, some mummy stuff and some Viking stuff and some animal stuff. There's lots of like little bits of loosely related things. On Wednesday's episode we'll have the edibles and potables and the books and letters and the artwork. And you were thinking, what about the exclamations. Exclamations are always such a big part of these episodes. Um, we're in kind of a weird exclamation dry spell. No exclamations for you. Yeah, that we have an exclamation we're gonna be talking about this part of an update. But a lot of the exhumations that I have. I have Google alerts that are related to exhumations, and a lot of the ones that I was hearing about were about things like relatively recent cold cases where people's families are just trying to get closure, and I'm like, that's not really what we talked about. We're usually talking about the exhumations of like notable historical people or things that have to do with some kind of like major historical event, not someone who lost a family member twenty years ago and is still trying to uh find out what happened. That's a little bit different tone than we usually have with these. Uh So, if you're waiting for the exhumations, that's that's where they are. They're nowhere in the summer. Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe somebody will be proposing that we exhume some you know, particularly flamboyant historical character. Those are more fun to talk about anyway. One of the biggest headlines this time around was definitely the discovery of the wreckage of Shackleton's ship Endurance and the Wettal Seat and Antarctica. We did a two parter on Shackleton and the Endurance just a couple of weeks ago in case you missed that one and are also listening to this episode thinking what about Shackleton. That's where he is. Already had two whole episodes. It was a Shackleton festival, so we are going to start today with updates. The one thing that got as much coverage as Shackleton's Endurance was the Smithsonian Institution's announcement that it would be returning most of the thirty nine Benin bronzes currently in its collection. Most of these objects had come to the museum as donations and were taken from Benin during the eight nine seven raid that we discussed on the show on January nineteen of this year. So there are still details that need to be worked out with this, including confirming which of the items and the Smithsonian's collections are definitely connected to the raid. This also still needs to be approved by the Smithsonian Board of Regents, and when this plan was announced in March, they were expecting a final agreement as early as April, so it's totally possible something will have happened with that between when we have recorded this and when that episode comes out. Regardless, though the Smithsonian is one of the biggest cultural institutions in the world, so they're making this commitment is a big deal. Also in earlier installments of Unearth, we talked about two different Benien bronzes that had been returned to Nigeria. One was a depiction of an Oba returned by the University of Aberdeen and the other was a Cockrell returned by the University of Cambridge Jesus College. In February of this year, the Nigerian government returned both of these objects to the Bening Royal Palace. Moving on, on March twenty nine, President Joe Haiden signed the Emmett Till Anti Lynching Act into law. This law makes lynching a federal hate crime. So we talked about Emmett Till in our August seventeen episode called The Motherhood of Mamie Till Mobile, and we talked about the fight for national anti lynching legislation in the US, which went on for more than a century in our June four, eighteen episode on Idoby Wells Barnett. At this signing ceremony, Emmett's cousin, the Reverend Wheeler Parker, was present as well as Wells Barnett's great granddaughter Michelle duster back in. According to family lore, and attendee at the Women's National Air Derby at the Cleveland Municipal Airport found a flying helmet on the ground, one that appeared to belong to third place derby winner Amelia Earhart, including having the name a air Heart written on the inside. Rather than returning it to its owner, this unnamed person gave it to his crush, Ellie Brookhart, hope that it would impress her. The helmet later wound up in a plastic bag in Brookhart's closet, and eventually it was inherited by her son, Anthony Twiggs. It apparently did not impress her enough for her to remember what his name was telling this story later, at least according to how this was passed down through the family. So her heart lost her goggles at this same event, and the goggles later wound up in the Smithsonian. But when Twigs started to find a museum that might be interested in the helmet, folks were generally pretty dismissive. The only information he had for the helmets authenticity was the story that his mother had told him. Then last year he heard about objects that had been authenticated by comparing them to photographs, so he took some pictures himself, and those pictures appeared to match photos of air Heart wearing the helmet after her flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Twigs then contacted an auction house and was told that he would need professor sational verification, so he contacted a company called Resolution Photo Match, which matched the helmets, creases, puckers, and where to photos of air Heart with Resolution Photo Match vouching for its authenticity. The helmet was auctioned off in February with an expected price of eighty thousand dollars. It sold to an anonymous buyer for eight hundred twenty five thousand dollars. Prior, hosts of the show covered air hearts disappearance. That was an episode that came out on June two thousand nine, and that was updated on July next up. Investigators have recommended that the search for victims of the race massacre and Tulsa, Oklahoma should continue. As we've discussed in previous installments of Unearthed, Exhimations for this took place in and twenty bodies were sent for more detailed examination. A report that was submitted to the committee that's been overseeing this work said that one of those bodies showed evidence of at least three gunshot wounds. The report also recommended some additional excavations at Oaklawn Cemetery and scanning of other locations where bodies may have been buried. According to reports and people's oral histories, our episode on the Tulsa massacre was most recently a Saturday Classic on MA and for our last update, according to a report from Boston News, investigators are looking at a new lead in the Gardener Museum heist. Jimmy Marks was shot outside his home in Lynn, Massachusetts, on February in what was described as a mob style hit, and recently someone sent in a tip reporting that shortly before his death, Marks had been bragging about having some of the stolen artwork. So investigators have been trying to figure out whether there's a connection between the heist and his unsolved murder. A few things have emerged, like that Marks met with Bobby Guaranty on the day of his death, and Guarante's widow told investigators that he had passed several stolen pieces of art to another man named Robert Genteel. At that point, Guarante had been dead for six years and since then, Gentile has also died. He passed away in It also seems like those two men met with two other associates not long after Marx's murder, but it's not totally clear if there's a connection there. This is kind of a complicated tangle of people, all of whom have died at this point. Uh. We put out an update of Past Hosts episode on the Gardener Museum heist on April, and it has also come up on Unearthed a number of times since then. Before we take a quick break, we have a couple of coin hordes that were unusual enough to get past our general prohibition on coin hords. It passed the Tracy V. Wilson coin hord tests. First, a badger has earth the horde of two thousand plus year old coins in a cave in northwestern Spain. That's something that happened in April of last year, but it made headlines in January after a paper was published on the find. In December of this badger dug up more than ninety coins, and when a team investigated further, they found a total of two hundred nine of them, dating back to between two hundred and four hundred BC. This happens fairly often. The first installment of unearthed during our time as hosts included a twelve century sword and skeletal remains that were dug up by a badger. And in we shared a similar find and noted that burrowing animals are a huge threat to archaeological finds in some parts of the world. And lastly, before we take a break, a horde of forty one coins was found in Germany, and these are in a curved style whose name translates into rainbow cups. It's a very long German word, and that I not able to say myself. Um. The shape of these, though, is almost the shape of a contact lens, but made of gold and also bigger than a contact lens that wouldn't really fit into your eye. Uh. Nineteen of them are known as statters, which are about two centimeters across, and the rest of them are quarter statters, which are about one point four centimeters across. Um. These aren't stamped with any kind of design either. They're just this like smooth, slightly bull like gold coin. They don't look like what you would probably think of when the word coin comes to mind. And while you think of those, we will pause for a sponsor break. I heard about a lot of repatriations at the start of this year. First up in January, US federal agents delivered two object x to a representative at the Iraq Consulate in Los Angeles, California. One of these items was a stone tablet covered in cuneiform, and the other was a prism that was used as a teaching tool to help children learn uniform, which I think that sounds really cool. Both of these items are believed to have been about four thousand years old. Somebody had tried to buy the tablet online and that had caught the eye of investigators, and the prism had been held in a private gallery in l A. In both cases, it's not totally clear how the objects were removed from Iraq, but all the available evidence suggests that that was not done legally. In other repatriations to Iraq, three hundred thirty seven artifacts were returned from Lebanon to Iraq at a ceremony at the National Museum of Beirut. These items had been in a private institution called the Naboo Museum, which was founded by businessman Jawad Adra and his wife, former Defense Minister Zina A. Car. The museum's holdings included two thousand items from the couple's personal collection, although they have maintained they were not involved in any kind of international trafficking when they built that collection. They returned items included cuneiform tablets and other objects that were taken from the same general area as the artifacts that craft store retailer Hobby Lobby returned to Iraq. It's a region that became a frequent target for smugglers after the US invaded Iraq in two thousand three. Next, the United States has returned two pieces of artwork to Libya. These are Veiled Head of a Lady and Bust of a Bearded Man. Both of them were looted from the ancient city of Cyrene, and this area as a UNESCO World Heritage Site that faced heavy looting in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Veiled Head of a Lady dates back to the fourth century BC and had been on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since it had been loaned to the met by someone who at this point remains anonymous. Bust of a bearded Man dates back to some time between the second and fourth century BC. It had been passing from person to person on the art market before it was seized. Veiled head of a lady is really beautiful, Yes it is uh. Moving on to Dutch citizens have returned seventeen pre Columbian artifacts to Mexico. These items were between five hundred and sixteen hundred years old, and they were returned at a ceremony at the Mexican embassy in the Netherlands. Not totally clear how the two acquired the pieces that they returned. The United States returned an assortment of items to France at a ceremony at the residence of French ambassador Philippe et Yenne. This included five gold ingots from the wreck of the Prince de Conti, which had been offered up for auction in California in tween The ship sank in seventeen forty six, and it was badly looted after a teacher found archai of old documents that mentioned its location in nineteen seventy five. There was also a gold coin from a horde known as the Treasure of Lava, which was found on the island of Corsica in and was sold off without permission, and a skull taken from the ossuary in the Paris Catacombs. That one was taken from an antiquities dealer in This was just the most to me random assortment that one uh, including the skull. Here's some stuff you left at all of our houses, excepting these things that people took from your house. The Reuben Museum of Art in New York City is a museum that's largely focused on artwork from Tibets as well as from surrounding parts of Asia, and in January, the museum agreed to return a pair of wooden carvings to Nepal. The Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign had informed the museum these carvings might have been stolen, and then the museum agreed to return them after confirming that yes, that was the case. One piece was part of a gateway arch at a temple complex and it was carved in the seventeenth century, and the other was a fourteenth century window decoration from a monastery. The museum had acquired these pieces at two different private sales, and they're expected to be returned to Nepal by May of this year. Several pieces of artwork that were looted by Nazis or forcibly sold under the Nazi regime have been returned or our plan to be returned to their rightful owners or their descendants. In January and February, the French National Assembly and Senate each approved a plan to return fifteen works of art, twelve of which had been held in the collection of the Louver. One of the other pieces, Gustav Clim's rose Bushes under the Trees, has been in the collection of the muse d'Orsay and is the only one of Clim's work that has been in France's national collections. Although the French government set up a special unit it to try to track down the rightful owners of such artworks, there is still a long way to go, and estimated two hundred looted works are currently being held by the French state, and an estimated one hundred thousand were seized or forcibly sold in France under the Vichy government. In February, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels also returned a nineteen thirteen still life to the great grandchildren of Gustave and Emma Mayor, which was a German Jewish couple who had fled from Germany in nineteen thirty eight. This painting is a still life by Levis Corinth called Flowers, and it had been given to the museum in nineteen fifty one because at that point its owners could not be found. Now that they have been, it's being returned. Next, the city of Seattle is returning about two hundred seventy stone objects to the Upper Scatchet Indian tribe. These were on earth during the renovation of gorge In, which was the dining hall of a company town called New Halem. The town had been built on the site of an Upper Skaduet village to house workers during damn construction in the early twentieth century. The items being returned are mostly tools and projectile points. This process has involved a lot of research to confirm the objects origins, since multiple tribes and nations all had a presence in this same area during the period when these objects were used. Chile's National Museum of Natural History has announced that it will return a Moi and its collection to Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. The Chilean Navy brought this statue from the island to Chile in eighteen seventy and it was placed on display in the museum eight years later. The Rapa Nui people have been asking for the return of the moi and other cultural items that are in the museum for years, as well as for similar items and other museums to be returned. The plan right now is for this moi to be displayed at the Father Sebastia, An England Anthropological Museum once it is back on the island. And on a slightly different note, before we take another break, about thirty years ago, a pre Columbian statue was removed during construction work in the Mexican city of Tacambro. It became known as the Coyote Man of Tacambaro and wound up in a private collection in Mexico, but under Mexican federal law it is an object of national cultural property and should be protected and preserved. In January, the National Institute for Anthropology and History or i n a H recovered the statue and it is currently at an iron age facility for conservation. Once it has been conserved and repaired, the plan is to place it in the Tacambaro City Council's Community Museum. We're gonna take a quick break and then come back with some astronomical stuff. To close out today's episode, we have a few finds and each of a few different categories, and we're going to start with some astronomical stuff. The island of Mottia or also called Motia, off the western coast of Sicily, is home to a year old artificial lake. It's a bit larger than an Olympic size swimming pool in terms of its length and width. It has long been believed to have served as maybe an inner harbor or a dry dock for people who are working on Phoenician ships, but according to research that was published in the journal Antiquity in March, it may have had a completely different purpose, which is that it may have been a sacred reflecting pool that was used to make astronomical observations at night. There are three temples arranged around the pool, which were aligned with specific astronomical bodies at particular times of the year, like the summer solstice. A statue of an Egyptian god associate with astronomy has been found in one corner of the pool, and an astronomical pointer was found in one of the temples. Both of those things have been cited as supporting the idea that this was a sacred reflecting pool. People could have used polls to measure and chart the positions of different celestial bodies at night and for our other astronomical tidbit. According to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, an air blast caused by debris from a comet may have contributed to the decline of the Hopewell culture that was an indigenous North American culture from the eastern part of the continent. There's evidence of a series of fires that took place between the years two fifty two and three eighty three. Those fires aligned with Chinese observations of more than sixty near earth comets that happened around the same time. Lead author Kennis tankers Lee is an enrolled member of the Piqua Tribe and Alabama and the pay Bird notes that multiple indigenous nations have oral histories that may also be references to this event. Other evidence for the comets and the air blast includes a comet shaped earthwork near what would have been the epicenter of the blast, as well as meteorite fragments and other debris, and multiple archaeological sites around the Ohio River Valley. Moving on, we have a couple of surgical finds in a skull was found in a funerary chamber in northwestern Spain. An analysis of that skull has revealed evidence of the earliest known ear surgery. The skull was dated to about five thousand, three hundred years ago and it belonged to someone who was between the ages of thirty five and fifty at the time of their death, and holes had been bored through both sides of the skull, possibly to try to treat an ear problem that involved both of the patient's ears. There's also evidence of bone regrowth around these board spots, and that suggests that the person lived for at least a few months after this surgery was conducted. And our other surgical find, a thousand year old funeral bundle in Peru has been discovered to contain a surgical kit, the oldest one ever found in northern Peru. It contained needles, alls, and about fifty different knives. The bundle also contained a ceremonial knife called it to Me, and a metal plan shet. Two frontal bones found with the kit also show evidence of having been cut using Trepi nation techniques. Now we have a couple of things related some mummies and mummification. First, researchers in Egypt have used X rays and computerized tomography or CT scanning to digitally unwrapped the mummy of amand Hotel, the First, who ruled Egypt from f to fIF oh four BC. Although many royal mummies were physically unwrapped decades ago, Egypt's director of antiquities at the time left this one as it was back in the nineteenth century. Part of the reason for that decision was the wrappings were in particularly good condition, and the mummy also featured a face mask that's described as exquisite, so at a time when there was a lot of unwrapping going on, this one remained untouched. The team used CT scans to make two D and three D images of the wrappings, the mask, and what was underneath. They confirmed that Amen Hotep the First was about thirty five when he died, but they weren't really able to determine a cause of death. They were able to get really clear images of the face, confirmation that the brain had not been removed, and images of an amulet overlaying the heart. There are also about thirty pieces of jewelry as part of the mummy. Although I'm in Hotep the first ruled during Egypt's eighteenth dynasty. This mummy was reburied during the dynasty to protect it from grave robbers. This process included unwrapping and re wrapping the body to address some damage that had previously been inflicted by looters. The team found some evidence of multiple repairs to the body that were made during this process, and, in the words of the authors, quote this study may make us gain confidence in the good will of the reburial project of the royal mummies by the twenty one dynasty priests. Archaeologists have also nared the largest cache of embalming supplies ever found in Egypt. This find is from the Abs Archaeological Site, and it contains three hundred seventy pottery jars, many of which contained residues from embalming materials or tools and utensils that were used in the process. These objects were found in fourteen separate clusters, with between seven and fifty two vessels in each of those clusters. The uppermost cluster included four limestone canopic jars which had been inscribed but not used. Next, we've got some Viking fines. One of the most gruesome pieces of Viking lore is a bloody ritual torture method called the blood eagle. The blood eagle appears in several North sagas, but there's been a lot of debate about whether this was a real practice or something that was embellished or distorted or otherwise not totally representative of something that really happened. A paper that was published in the journal Speculum in January looks at a slightly different question, which is whether the blood eagle as described in these sagas was even possible given the realities of human anatomy and the types of tools and knowledge that the people living at the time would have had access to. Some of the saga descriptions of this practice are fairly detailed, and those details are violent and horrifying. Here's the saga of Harold fair Hair, for example, quote he carved an eagle on his back in such a way that he put a sword into the chest cavity at the spine and cut down along all the ribs to the loins and pulled out the lungs through the cut. That was the death of have them. This paper is titled an Anatomy of the Blood Eagle. The Practicalities of Viking torture, and its authors argue that the blood eagle would have been difficult for the Vikings to perform, but still possible. However, there are accounts of this practice that described the victim still being alive and its final steps, and this paper argues that victims probably would have died much earlier in this process. Our other Viking news is one of the more frustratingly reported finds of this unearthed cycle. Scientists have used radio carbon dating to analyze some birch tar that was stuck to a helmet found in Visca, Denmark. This helmet was one of a pair of nearly identical helmets, both with dramatically curving horns, which were most likely originally decorated with feathers and horse hair as well. But although horned helmets have been used to represent Vikings in popular culture, these helmets are much older. They date back to about nine BC, roughly two thousand years before the Viking era. The helmet style also probably didn't originate in Denmark. It's very similar to rock art and figurines from Sardinia and western Siberia, suggesting a trading relationship between Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. So here's the annoying part. So many articles reported this as new research shows Vikings did not wear horned helmets. It is clear from Twitter replies and whatnot that this was new information to a lot of people. Please do not feel bad if this was new information to you, but Vikings didn't wear horned helmets is not new information within the field of history at all all. The idea that vikings war horned helmets probably traces back to nineteenth century costumes for Wagner's opera The Ring, in a general mythologizing of Vikings that was happening around that time. It's really not even new information that these specific helmets were from the Nordic Bronze age that was generally agreed upon not long after they were first found in nineteen forty two. So I've found myself very annoyed by the breathless reporting of new research proves Vikings didn't wear horn helmets when it was first reported, And then I got to be annoyed again when I reviewed it all again to do on Earth. And now I get to be annoyed a third time. Right now. I don't know why this doesn't annoy me, but it might be because I was raised on bugs bunny who always had a horned helmet as a Viking. It's fine, you know, and there's plenty of depictions of Vikings that have horn helmets. Now, if, like, if you, as a lay person not a historian, was not aware of all this, totally don't feel bad about it. But the just persistent reporting that it was somehow a breakthrough historical discovery. I was like, come on now. I think probably that is more indicative of the knowledge base of the reporter, which probably reflects lay people, right like, oh, look, this isn't the thing. They may not have done the historical research to know that had been found already. It was also the people who kind of cover the history beat for various and that was I was like, come on now, someone in this editorial process raise the red flag. Uh, We're gonna move on to animals, so Tracy will stop being quite so irritated about the Viking situation. Researchers have studied horse remains from one d seventy one different archaeological sites and concluded that medieval war horses actually tended to be quite small. This is a little bit tricky since it's often not possible to tell whether a horse was specifically a war horse, but the tallest Norman horse they found would have been about fifteen hands high, which is about as big as a light riding horse today. It wasn't until after the medieval period had ended that horses started to get a lot bigger, closer in size to today's draft horses. This is a note thing where like the popular imagination of a war horse as this like mammoth animal like necessarily line up. It's also clear that people bred horses specifically for different purposes during the medieval period, and the words of Professor Allen Outram from the University of Exeter quote selection and breeding practices, and the royal studs may have focused as much on temperament and the correct physical characteristics for warfare as they did on cross size. Researchers in China have found evidence that geese were domesticated there at least seven thousand years ago, which may mean that geese, not chickens, were the first birds to be domesticated. They used radio carbon dating to confirm the age of the bones, and they also looked at the bones themselves. Four of the bones were from goslings, but the rest suggested that the adults were locally bred and about the same size, suggesting intentional breeding in captivity. And lastly, repairs to the city water system in Rome have unsurprisingly unearthed all kinds of stuff, including multiple tombs, an urn, and a terra cotta statue of a dog's head. This dog is very cute. It has just the very upright, very alert ears and wavy for this little sort of statuette is similar in shape to decorative elements that were used on drainage systems, but it doesn't have any holes that water would have passed through, so it might have just been a cute dog figure for its own sake, which I love. So we're to have more unearthed next time. But in the meantime, Tracy, do you have some listener mail for us? Do I have a short listener mail from Margaret? And I answered Margaret, but wanted to answer uh everyone, since it's a kind of a frequently asked question. Margaret wrote and said, Hi, Holly and Tracy, have you ever done an episode about the Armenian Jennocide? Normally I wouldn't suggest such an I'm assuming absolute down of an episode, but the new Marvel show Moon Night is getting review bombed by people angry that they dared him to imply that it really happened. I think most people's knowledge of the event only extends to knowing that Turkey won't acknowledge it. Thanks for all you do. Just left a job that had long stretches of a loane time in my office, and you helped me stay awake, Margaret. Thanks Margaret for this question, I answered Margaret, and now everyone, Uh, we have not done an episode on the Armenian genocide. We did, however, pretty recently back in March re air our episode on Raphael Limpken in the Genocide Convention, and there is an overview of the Armenian genocide in that episode because it really informed how he thought about genocide and the need for UH in his mind and international law to try to prevent genocide and bring the perpetrators to some kind of justice. Um. Also, holy moly, the idea of people spending their time review bombing mood night because of literally two words in one line of dialogue. UM, here's what I have learned, being very much in various fandoms. People will spend their time review bombing anything if they get their nickers. In a tweet well, and this is why I am not actively participating in any fandom anymore, because that behavior, I oh, it's it's not cool. Yeah. I got to the limit of my ability to deal with that, and I was like, you know what, I'm just never not not going to be in fandoms anymore, or I will love the thing and enjoy the thing, But in terms of participating in some kind of like community where people are gonna shriek about everything they're furious about, not really going to do it. I just saw myself always going when do these people make their clothes? Which I know is a very weird Holly esque thing, But then I'm like, when do they mow their lawns? Are there dishes done? Like? Yeah, there's so much time and effort that goes into just this pointless expression of weird ire that I'm like, how are you having a functioning life? Are you? I'm worried? Please eat and hydrate. I guess I know, maybe that will make you feel better, unless like you need to grouse at folks for nothing. Yeah, we have had the Armenian genocide on the list for an episode for a really long time. I'm sure at some point it will happen. I cannot say it would happen soon, in part just because at this moment we're working a few weeks ahead on our episodes, which is nice because that means if we take any time off, we already have episodes there they're ready to cover it. But like, that is the topic that I've been kind of circling around for for ages and ages. Um So, anyway, thank you so much for that email. Please don't review bomb things. Uh if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast that I heart radio dot com and we're all over social media. Missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed. If you are new to the show. A few times a year, we look at things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So today we're looking at January through March. UH, stuff that crossed my radar. I had have this extensive list of hundreds of bookmarks that I go through to UH to prepare these. This time around, we have some updates. We have a whole bunch of repatriations, some mummy stuff and some Viking stuff and some animal stuff. There's lots of like little bits of loosely related things. On Wednesday's episode we'll have the edibles and potables and the books and letters and the artwork. And you were thinking, what about the exclamations. Exclamations are always such a big part of these episodes. Um, we're in kind of a weird exclamation dry spell. No exclamations for you. Yeah, that we have an exclamation we're gonna be talking about this part of an update. But a lot of the exhumations that I have. I have Google alerts that are related to exhumations, and a lot of the ones that I was hearing about were about things like relatively recent cold cases where people's families are just trying to get closure, and I'm like, that's not really what we talked about. We're usually talking about the exhumations of like notable historical people or things that have to do with some kind of like major historical event, not someone who lost a family member twenty years ago and is still trying to uh find out what happened. That's a little bit different tone than we usually have with these. Uh So, if you're waiting for the exhumations, that's that's where they are. They're nowhere in the summer. Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe somebody will be proposing that we exhume some you know, particularly flamboyant historical character. Those are more fun to talk about anyway. One of the biggest headlines this time around was definitely the discovery of the wreckage of Shackleton's ship Endurance and the Wettal Seat and Antarctica. We did a two parter on Shackleton and the Endurance just a couple of weeks ago in case you missed that one and are also listening to this episode thinking what about Shackleton. That's where he is. Already had two whole episodes. It was a Shackleton festival, so we are going to start today with updates. The one thing that got as much coverage as Shackleton's Endurance was the Smithsonian Institution's announcement that it would be returning most of the thirty nine Benin bronzes currently in its collection. Most of these objects had come to the museum as donations and were taken from Benin during the eight nine seven raid that we discussed on the show on January nineteen of this year. So there are still details that need to be worked out with this, including confirming which of the items and the Smithsonian's collections are definitely connected to the raid. This also still needs to be approved by the Smithsonian Board of Regents, and when this plan was announced in March, they were expecting a final agreement as early as April, so it's totally possible something will have happened with that between when we have recorded this and when that episode comes out. Regardless, though the Smithsonian is one of the biggest cultural institutions in the world, so they're making this commitment is a big deal. Also in earlier installments of Unearth, we talked about two different Benien bronzes that had been returned to Nigeria. One was a depiction of an Oba returned by the University of Aberdeen and the other was a Cockrell returned by the University of Cambridge Jesus College. In February of this year, the Nigerian government returned both of these objects to the Bening Royal Palace. Moving on, on March twenty nine, President Joe Haiden signed the Emmett Till Anti Lynching Act into law. This law makes lynching a federal hate crime. So we talked about Emmett Till in our August seventeen episode called The Motherhood of Mamie Till Mobile, and we talked about the fight for national anti lynching legislation in the US, which went on for more than a century in our June four, eighteen episode on Idoby Wells Barnett. At this signing ceremony, Emmett's cousin, the Reverend Wheeler Parker, was present as well as Wells Barnett's great granddaughter Michelle duster back in. According to family lore, and attendee at the Women's National Air Derby at the Cleveland Municipal Airport found a flying helmet on the ground, one that appeared to belong to third place derby winner Amelia Earhart, including having the name a air Heart written on the inside. Rather than returning it to its owner, this unnamed person gave it to his crush, Ellie Brookhart, hope that it would impress her. The helmet later wound up in a plastic bag in Brookhart's closet, and eventually it was inherited by her son, Anthony Twiggs. It apparently did not impress her enough for her to remember what his name was telling this story later, at least according to how this was passed down through the family. So her heart lost her goggles at this same event, and the goggles later wound up in the Smithsonian. But when Twigs started to find a museum that might be interested in the helmet, folks were generally pretty dismissive. The only information he had for the helmets authenticity was the story that his mother had told him. Then last year he heard about objects that had been authenticated by comparing them to photographs, so he took some pictures himself, and those pictures appeared to match photos of air Heart wearing the helmet after her flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Twigs then contacted an auction house and was told that he would need professor sational verification, so he contacted a company called Resolution Photo Match, which matched the helmets, creases, puckers, and where to photos of air Heart with Resolution Photo Match vouching for its authenticity. The helmet was auctioned off in February with an expected price of eighty thousand dollars. It sold to an anonymous buyer for eight hundred twenty five thousand dollars. Prior, hosts of the show covered air hearts disappearance. That was an episode that came out on June two thousand nine, and that was updated on July next up. Investigators have recommended that the search for victims of the race massacre and Tulsa, Oklahoma should continue. As we've discussed in previous installments of Unearthed, Exhimations for this took place in and twenty bodies were sent for more detailed examination. A report that was submitted to the committee that's been overseeing this work said that one of those bodies showed evidence of at least three gunshot wounds. The report also recommended some additional excavations at Oaklawn Cemetery and scanning of other locations where bodies may have been buried. According to reports and people's oral histories, our episode on the Tulsa massacre was most recently a Saturday Classic on MA and for our last update, according to a report from Boston News, investigators are looking at a new lead in the Gardener Museum heist. Jimmy Marks was shot outside his home in Lynn, Massachusetts, on February in what was described as a mob style hit, and recently someone sent in a tip reporting that shortly before his death, Marks had been bragging about having some of the stolen artwork. So investigators have been trying to figure out whether there's a connection between the heist and his unsolved murder. A few things have emerged, like that Marks met with Bobby Guaranty on the day of his death, and Guarante's widow told investigators that he had passed several stolen pieces of art to another man named Robert Genteel. At that point, Guarante had been dead for six years and since then, Gentile has also died. He passed away in It also seems like those two men met with two other associates not long after Marx's murder, but it's not totally clear if there's a connection there. This is kind of a complicated tangle of people, all of whom have died at this point. Uh. We put out an update of Past Hosts episode on the Gardener Museum heist on April, and it has also come up on Unearthed a number of times since then. Before we take a quick break, we have a couple of coin hordes that were unusual enough to get past our general prohibition on coin hords. It passed the Tracy V. Wilson coin hord tests. First, a badger has earth the horde of two thousand plus year old coins in a cave in northwestern Spain. That's something that happened in April of last year, but it made headlines in January after a paper was published on the find. In December of this badger dug up more than ninety coins, and when a team investigated further, they found a total of two hundred nine of them, dating back to between two hundred and four hundred BC. This happens fairly often. The first installment of unearthed during our time as hosts included a twelve century sword and skeletal remains that were dug up by a badger. And in we shared a similar find and noted that burrowing animals are a huge threat to archaeological finds in some parts of the world. And lastly, before we take a break, a horde of forty one coins was found in Germany, and these are in a curved style whose name translates into rainbow cups. It's a very long German word, and that I not able to say myself. Um. The shape of these, though, is almost the shape of a contact lens, but made of gold and also bigger than a contact lens that wouldn't really fit into your eye. Uh. Nineteen of them are known as statters, which are about two centimeters across, and the rest of them are quarter statters, which are about one point four centimeters across. Um. These aren't stamped with any kind of design either. They're just this like smooth, slightly bull like gold coin. They don't look like what you would probably think of when the word coin comes to mind. And while you think of those, we will pause for a sponsor break. I heard about a lot of repatriations at the start of this year. First up in January, US federal agents delivered two object x to a representative at the Iraq Consulate in Los Angeles, California. One of these items was a stone tablet covered in cuneiform, and the other was a prism that was used as a teaching tool to help children learn uniform, which I think that sounds really cool. Both of these items are believed to have been about four thousand years old. Somebody had tried to buy the tablet online and that had caught the eye of investigators, and the prism had been held in a private gallery in l A. In both cases, it's not totally clear how the objects were removed from Iraq, but all the available evidence suggests that that was not done legally. In other repatriations to Iraq, three hundred thirty seven artifacts were returned from Lebanon to Iraq at a ceremony at the National Museum of Beirut. These items had been in a private institution called the Naboo Museum, which was founded by businessman Jawad Adra and his wife, former Defense Minister Zina A. Car. The museum's holdings included two thousand items from the couple's personal collection, although they have maintained they were not involved in any kind of international trafficking when they built that collection. They returned items included cuneiform tablets and other objects that were taken from the same general area as the artifacts that craft store retailer Hobby Lobby returned to Iraq. It's a region that became a frequent target for smugglers after the US invaded Iraq in two thousand three. Next, the United States has returned two pieces of artwork to Libya. These are Veiled Head of a Lady and Bust of a Bearded Man. Both of them were looted from the ancient city of Cyrene, and this area as a UNESCO World Heritage Site that faced heavy looting in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Veiled Head of a Lady dates back to the fourth century BC and had been on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since it had been loaned to the met by someone who at this point remains anonymous. Bust of a bearded Man dates back to some time between the second and fourth century BC. It had been passing from person to person on the art market before it was seized. Veiled head of a lady is really beautiful, Yes it is uh. Moving on to Dutch citizens have returned seventeen pre Columbian artifacts to Mexico. These items were between five hundred and sixteen hundred years old, and they were returned at a ceremony at the Mexican embassy in the Netherlands. Not totally clear how the two acquired the pieces that they returned. The United States returned an assortment of items to France at a ceremony at the residence of French ambassador Philippe et Yenne. This included five gold ingots from the wreck of the Prince de Conti, which had been offered up for auction in California in tween The ship sank in seventeen forty six, and it was badly looted after a teacher found archai of old documents that mentioned its location in nineteen seventy five. There was also a gold coin from a horde known as the Treasure of Lava, which was found on the island of Corsica in and was sold off without permission, and a skull taken from the ossuary in the Paris Catacombs. That one was taken from an antiquities dealer in This was just the most to me random assortment that one uh, including the skull. Here's some stuff you left at all of our houses, excepting these things that people took from your house. The Reuben Museum of Art in New York City is a museum that's largely focused on artwork from Tibets as well as from surrounding parts of Asia, and in January, the museum agreed to return a pair of wooden carvings to Nepal. The Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign had informed the museum these carvings might have been stolen, and then the museum agreed to return them after confirming that yes, that was the case. One piece was part of a gateway arch at a temple complex and it was carved in the seventeenth century, and the other was a fourteenth century window decoration from a monastery. The museum had acquired these pieces at two different private sales, and they're expected to be returned to Nepal by May of this year. Several pieces of artwork that were looted by Nazis or forcibly sold under the Nazi regime have been returned or our plan to be returned to their rightful owners or their descendants. In January and February, the French National Assembly and Senate each approved a plan to return fifteen works of art, twelve of which had been held in the collection of the Louver. One of the other pieces, Gustav Clim's rose Bushes under the Trees, has been in the collection of the muse d'Orsay and is the only one of Clim's work that has been in France's national collections. Although the French government set up a special unit it to try to track down the rightful owners of such artworks, there is still a long way to go, and estimated two hundred looted works are currently being held by the French state, and an estimated one hundred thousand were seized or forcibly sold in France under the Vichy government. In February, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels also returned a nineteen thirteen still life to the great grandchildren of Gustave and Emma Mayor, which was a German Jewish couple who had fled from Germany in nineteen thirty eight. This painting is a still life by Levis Corinth called Flowers, and it had been given to the museum in nineteen fifty one because at that point its owners could not be found. Now that they have been, it's being returned. Next, the city of Seattle is returning about two hundred seventy stone objects to the Upper Scatchet Indian tribe. These were on earth during the renovation of gorge In, which was the dining hall of a company town called New Halem. The town had been built on the site of an Upper Skaduet village to house workers during damn construction in the early twentieth century. The items being returned are mostly tools and projectile points. This process has involved a lot of research to confirm the objects origins, since multiple tribes and nations all had a presence in this same area during the period when these objects were used. Chile's National Museum of Natural History has announced that it will return a Moi and its collection to Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. The Chilean Navy brought this statue from the island to Chile in eighteen seventy and it was placed on display in the museum eight years later. The Rapa Nui people have been asking for the return of the moi and other cultural items that are in the museum for years, as well as for similar items and other museums to be returned. The plan right now is for this moi to be displayed at the Father Sebastia, An England Anthropological Museum once it is back on the island. And on a slightly different note, before we take another break, about thirty years ago, a pre Columbian statue was removed during construction work in the Mexican city of Tacambro. It became known as the Coyote Man of Tacambaro and wound up in a private collection in Mexico, but under Mexican federal law it is an object of national cultural property and should be protected and preserved. In January, the National Institute for Anthropology and History or i n a H recovered the statue and it is currently at an iron age facility for conservation. Once it has been conserved and repaired, the plan is to place it in the Tacambaro City Council's Community Museum. We're gonna take a quick break and then come back with some astronomical stuff. To close out today's episode, we have a few finds and each of a few different categories, and we're going to start with some astronomical stuff. The island of Mottia or also called Motia, off the western coast of Sicily, is home to a year old artificial lake. It's a bit larger than an Olympic size swimming pool in terms of its length and width. It has long been believed to have served as maybe an inner harbor or a dry dock for people who are working on Phoenician ships, but according to research that was published in the journal Antiquity in March, it may have had a completely different purpose, which is that it may have been a sacred reflecting pool that was used to make astronomical observations at night. There are three temples arranged around the pool, which were aligned with specific astronomical bodies at particular times of the year, like the summer solstice. A statue of an Egyptian god associate with astronomy has been found in one corner of the pool, and an astronomical pointer was found in one of the temples. Both of those things have been cited as supporting the idea that this was a sacred reflecting pool. People could have used polls to measure and chart the positions of different celestial bodies at night and for our other astronomical tidbit. According to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, an air blast caused by debris from a comet may have contributed to the decline of the Hopewell culture that was an indigenous North American culture from the eastern part of the continent. There's evidence of a series of fires that took place between the years two fifty two and three eighty three. Those fires aligned with Chinese observations of more than sixty near earth comets that happened around the same time. Lead author Kennis tankers Lee is an enrolled member of the Piqua Tribe and Alabama and the pay Bird notes that multiple indigenous nations have oral histories that may also be references to this event. Other evidence for the comets and the air blast includes a comet shaped earthwork near what would have been the epicenter of the blast, as well as meteorite fragments and other debris, and multiple archaeological sites around the Ohio River Valley. Moving on, we have a couple of surgical finds in a skull was found in a funerary chamber in northwestern Spain. An analysis of that skull has revealed evidence of the earliest known ear surgery. The skull was dated to about five thousand, three hundred years ago and it belonged to someone who was between the ages of thirty five and fifty at the time of their death, and holes had been bored through both sides of the skull, possibly to try to treat an ear problem that involved both of the patient's ears. There's also evidence of bone regrowth around these board spots, and that suggests that the person lived for at least a few months after this surgery was conducted. And our other surgical find, a thousand year old funeral bundle in Peru has been discovered to contain a surgical kit, the oldest one ever found in northern Peru. It contained needles, alls, and about fifty different knives. The bundle also contained a ceremonial knife called it to Me, and a metal plan shet. Two frontal bones found with the kit also show evidence of having been cut using Trepi nation techniques. Now we have a couple of things related some mummies and mummification. First, researchers in Egypt have used X rays and computerized tomography or CT scanning to digitally unwrapped the mummy of amand Hotel, the First, who ruled Egypt from f to fIF oh four BC. Although many royal mummies were physically unwrapped decades ago, Egypt's director of antiquities at the time left this one as it was back in the nineteenth century. Part of the reason for that decision was the wrappings were in particularly good condition, and the mummy also featured a face mask that's described as exquisite, so at a time when there was a lot of unwrapping going on, this one remained untouched. The team used CT scans to make two D and three D images of the wrappings, the mask, and what was underneath. They confirmed that Amen Hotep the First was about thirty five when he died, but they weren't really able to determine a cause of death. They were able to get really clear images of the face, confirmation that the brain had not been removed, and images of an amulet overlaying the heart. There are also about thirty pieces of jewelry as part of the mummy. Although I'm in Hotep the first ruled during Egypt's eighteenth dynasty. This mummy was reburied during the dynasty to protect it from grave robbers. This process included unwrapping and re wrapping the body to address some damage that had previously been inflicted by looters. The team found some evidence of multiple repairs to the body that were made during this process, and, in the words of the authors, quote this study may make us gain confidence in the good will of the reburial project of the royal mummies by the twenty one dynasty priests. Archaeologists have also nared the largest cache of embalming supplies ever found in Egypt. This find is from the Abs Archaeological Site, and it contains three hundred seventy pottery jars, many of which contained residues from embalming materials or tools and utensils that were used in the process. These objects were found in fourteen separate clusters, with between seven and fifty two vessels in each of those clusters. The uppermost cluster included four limestone canopic jars which had been inscribed but not used. Next, we've got some Viking fines. One of the most gruesome pieces of Viking lore is a bloody ritual torture method called the blood eagle. The blood eagle appears in several North sagas, but there's been a lot of debate about whether this was a real practice or something that was embellished or distorted or otherwise not totally representative of something that really happened. A paper that was published in the journal Speculum in January looks at a slightly different question, which is whether the blood eagle as described in these sagas was even possible given the realities of human anatomy and the types of tools and knowledge that the people living at the time would have had access to. Some of the saga descriptions of this practice are fairly detailed, and those details are violent and horrifying. Here's the saga of Harold fair Hair, for example, quote he carved an eagle on his back in such a way that he put a sword into the chest cavity at the spine and cut down along all the ribs to the loins and pulled out the lungs through the cut. That was the death of have them. This paper is titled an Anatomy of the Blood Eagle. The Practicalities of Viking torture, and its authors argue that the blood eagle would have been difficult for the Vikings to perform, but still possible. However, there are accounts of this practice that described the victim still being alive and its final steps, and this paper argues that victims probably would have died much earlier in this process. Our other Viking news is one of the more frustratingly reported finds of this unearthed cycle. Scientists have used radio carbon dating to analyze some birch tar that was stuck to a helmet found in Visca, Denmark. This helmet was one of a pair of nearly identical helmets, both with dramatically curving horns, which were most likely originally decorated with feathers and horse hair as well. But although horned helmets have been used to represent Vikings in popular culture, these helmets are much older. They date back to about nine BC, roughly two thousand years before the Viking era. The helmet style also probably didn't originate in Denmark. It's very similar to rock art and figurines from Sardinia and western Siberia, suggesting a trading relationship between Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. So here's the annoying part. So many articles reported this as new research shows Vikings did not wear horned helmets. It is clear from Twitter replies and whatnot that this was new information to a lot of people. Please do not feel bad if this was new information to you, but Vikings didn't wear horned helmets is not new information within the field of history at all all. The idea that vikings war horned helmets probably traces back to nineteenth century costumes for Wagner's opera The Ring, in a general mythologizing of Vikings that was happening around that time. It's really not even new information that these specific helmets were from the Nordic Bronze age that was generally agreed upon not long after they were first found in nineteen forty two. So I've found myself very annoyed by the breathless reporting of new research proves Vikings didn't wear horn helmets when it was first reported, And then I got to be annoyed again when I reviewed it all again to do on Earth. And now I get to be annoyed a third time. Right now. I don't know why this doesn't annoy me, but it might be because I was raised on bugs bunny who always had a horned helmet as a Viking. It's fine, you know, and there's plenty of depictions of Vikings that have horn helmets. Now, if, like, if you, as a lay person not a historian, was not aware of all this, totally don't feel bad about it. But the just persistent reporting that it was somehow a breakthrough historical discovery. I was like, come on now. I think probably that is more indicative of the knowledge base of the reporter, which probably reflects lay people, right like, oh, look, this isn't the thing. They may not have done the historical research to know that had been found already. It was also the people who kind of cover the history beat for various and that was I was like, come on now, someone in this editorial process raise the red flag. Uh, We're gonna move on to animals, so Tracy will stop being quite so irritated about the Viking situation. Researchers have studied horse remains from one d seventy one different archaeological sites and concluded that medieval war horses actually tended to be quite small. This is a little bit tricky since it's often not possible to tell whether a horse was specifically a war horse, but the tallest Norman horse they found would have been about fifteen hands high, which is about as big as a light riding horse today. It wasn't until after the medieval period had ended that horses started to get a lot bigger, closer in size to today's draft horses. This is a note thing where like the popular imagination of a war horse as this like mammoth animal like necessarily line up. It's also clear that people bred horses specifically for different purposes during the medieval period, and the words of Professor Allen Outram from the University of Exeter quote selection and breeding practices, and the royal studs may have focused as much on temperament and the correct physical characteristics for warfare as they did on cross size. Researchers in China have found evidence that geese were domesticated there at least seven thousand years ago, which may mean that geese, not chickens, were the first birds to be domesticated. They used radio carbon dating to confirm the age of the bones, and they also looked at the bones themselves. Four of the bones were from goslings, but the rest suggested that the adults were locally bred and about the same size, suggesting intentional breeding in captivity. And lastly, repairs to the city water system in Rome have unsurprisingly unearthed all kinds of stuff, including multiple tombs, an urn, and a terra cotta statue of a dog's head. This dog is very cute. It has just the very upright, very alert ears and wavy for this little sort of statuette is similar in shape to decorative elements that were used on drainage systems, but it doesn't have any holes that water would have passed through, so it might have just been a cute dog figure for its own sake, which I love. So we're to have more unearthed next time. But in the meantime, Tracy, do you have some listener mail for us? Do I have a short listener mail from Margaret? And I answered Margaret, but wanted to answer uh everyone, since it's a kind of a frequently asked question. Margaret wrote and said, Hi, Holly and Tracy, have you ever done an episode about the Armenian Jennocide? Normally I wouldn't suggest such an I'm assuming absolute down of an episode, but the new Marvel show Moon Night is getting review bombed by people angry that they dared him to imply that it really happened. I think most people's knowledge of the event only extends to knowing that Turkey won't acknowledge it. Thanks for all you do. Just left a job that had long stretches of a loane time in my office, and you helped me stay awake, Margaret. Thanks Margaret for this question, I answered Margaret, and now everyone, Uh, we have not done an episode on the Armenian genocide. We did, however, pretty recently back in March re air our episode on Raphael Limpken in the Genocide Convention, and there is an overview of the Armenian genocide in that episode because it really informed how he thought about genocide and the need for UH in his mind and international law to try to prevent genocide and bring the perpetrators to some kind of justice. Um. Also, holy moly, the idea of people spending their time review bombing mood night because of literally two words in one line of dialogue. UM, here's what I have learned, being very much in various fandoms. People will spend their time review bombing anything if they get their nickers. In a tweet well, and this is why I am not actively participating in any fandom anymore, because that behavior, I oh, it's it's not cool. Yeah. I got to the limit of my ability to deal with that, and I was like, you know what, I'm just never not not going to be in fandoms anymore, or I will love the thing and enjoy the thing, But in terms of participating in some kind of like community where people are gonna shriek about everything they're furious about, not really going to do it. I just saw myself always going when do these people make their clothes? Which I know is a very weird Holly esque thing, But then I'm like, when do they mow their lawns? Are there dishes done? Like? Yeah, there's so much time and effort that goes into just this pointless expression of weird ire that I'm like, how are you having a functioning life? Are you? I'm worried? Please eat and hydrate. I guess I know, maybe that will make you feel better, unless like you need to grouse at folks for nothing. Yeah, we have had the Armenian genocide on the list for an episode for a really long time. I'm sure at some point it will happen. I cannot say it would happen soon, in part just because at this moment we're working a few weeks ahead on our episodes, which is nice because that means if we take any time off, we already have episodes there they're ready to cover it. But like, that is the topic that I've been kind of circling around for for ages and ages. Um So, anyway, thank you so much for that email. Please don't review bomb things. Uh if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or history podcast that I heart radio dot com and we're all over social media. Missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.