Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of our Unearthed episode for UH, where we're covering January through March stuff that was literally and figuratively unearthed. Uh. Last time we talked about some shipwrecks and some foods and beverages and some cute animals and stuff, and we've got other things this time. Yes, So it has become kind of a tradition to start part two of our two part unearthed episodes with pot pourri. That's the stuff that's interesting, but it doesn't quite fall into a category with other fine. So. First, researchers from multiple universities have confirmed that indigenous people in what is now northern New Mexico took proactive steps to prevent wildfire at least as far back as the eleven hundreds. Members of the team interviewed tribal elders at Hamas Pueblo, as well as elders from the Hopie Tribe, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and Zoomi Pueblo about these people's cultural and land management practices. They combined this ethnographic work with archaeological study of the area, tree ring research, and modeling. They concluded that the people of the Hamas Mountains have used a variety of methods to prevent destructive wildfires for nearly a thousand years. These have included using small, low intensity fires to get rid of unnecessary flammable material, burning flammable material for cooking and heating, so you're basically gathering a lot of what might cause wildfire and then using it for a practical purpose, burning off crop land after the harvests were over, and then also just keeping a buffer around settlements that was completely clear of trees and brush. Plus, hundreds of people lived in these settlements, so just the day to day foot traffic would keep small burnable plants around the settlements to a minimum. The team drew a direct connection between this research and wildfire conditions in populated areas today. In the words of lead author Christopher Roush, quote, we shouldn't be asking how to avoid fire and smoke. We should ask ourselves what kind of fire and smoke do we want to coexist with? Another news Archaeologists in China have found what they believe to be a man's cosmetic cream. It's a small bronze jar found in a twenty year old tomb belonging to a nobleman, and it contained a substance made of animal fat and a carbonate mud known as moon milk. It's probably used to like whiten the skin. This is not remotely the oldest cosmetic product ever found in China. There are cosmetic sticks dating back to at least fourteen fifty BC, but this is the oldest fine that seems to be specifically a pro act for a man. An electrical crew trying to move some power lines stumbled onto a previously unknown tunnel under a homeowner's garden in Wales, and at this point who made this tunnel and why still a mystery. The work crew filled what they dug back into protect it, since it will probably be sometime before it can really be studied. What's happened in the village of tin Turn, which is home of Tintern Abbey, subject of a famous poem. The abbey was built between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries and it is not known if the tunnels have any connection to the abbey, but the tunnels aren't shown not any survey maps dating back to the seventeen hundreds. Either they were dug before that point or someone dug them secretly and didn't make note of its mystery tunnels. Okay, so moving on. The Pazzerick Carpet is a wool carpet that was made about four hundred BC and it was found in a burial mound in is in the collection of the Hermitage Museum. It is an astounding condition considering how old it is and the conditions it was in before being unearthed. Although one corner of this carpet is mostly missing, it is otherwise largely intact and its colors and patterns are still very vivid. That has led to a lot of questions about how exactly it has retained so much color for so long and in the conditions that it was in for so long. And according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, one reason maybe that the wool was previously fermented, with the fermentation process allowing the pigments to penetrate deeper into the fiber, and then that would make the color more vivid and more permanent. This conclusion means that the use of fermented wool in dying is about two thousand years older than was previously known. A man in New Haven, Connecticut bought a blue and white fifteen century Ming dynasty bowl at a yard sale for thirty five bucks. It was sold through auction house saw the Bees, which kept the seller's name confidential. But that turnover was that was a good flip. It's selling price was seven hundred dollars, so that was a yard sale fine that turned out to be something extremely valuable, something that it seems like the buyer suspected at that time. One of the accounts that I read was like, he did not negotiate this thirty five dollars for a bull of yard sale at all. He just went ahead and got it and then started asking questions with the praisers pretty much right away. Uh So, now we have a couple of objects that have a little bit of similarity to that, but they surprised people by turning out to be ancient artifacts, something that came as a bit of a shock. First. About twenty years ago, somebody noticed a large and conveniently shaped rock in a garden rockery, and they had it taken to their stable to use as a step when mounting their horse. It's a nice squared off right step for getting up on a horse if you need a little help with that. At least ten years later they noticed that there was a laurel wreath carved into the side of it. How many horses were mounted off of this rock before anyone realized This turned out to be nearly two thousand year old slab that probably came from Greece or Western Asia. In addition to the laurel wreath, it bears a Greek inscription that translates to the people and the young men honored Demetrios, son of Metrodorus, the son of Lucios. Auction house, Willie and Wallace asked for public help and figuring out exactly how this piece got to the UK. It's likely that a wealthy person on a grand tour of the continent brought it back into the area sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. That was very common. We talked about that sum in our episode on the Parthenon Marbles. Uh But most of the original houses in the area have since been demolished or destroyed by fire, and it is really not clear which of these households specifically might have been home to the person who originally brought it in This piece was expected to be auctioned off in February, which is why it caught my eye for this episode of Unearthed, but that auction has been postponed until June. I love this next one. Uh. Similarly, in a couple of people at a signing for the book Porphyry were leafing through the book and they were shocked to discover a picture of their friend Helen's coffee table. It turned out the table was topped with a mosaic that had originally decorated a ship of the Roman emperor Caligula, and their friend Helen was antiquities dealer Helen Fioratti, who had bought the mosaic in Italy more than forty years prior. Kad, the author of the book and interviews, talked about like hearing these women excitedly being like, that's Helen's table, and he's I'm sorry, who's Helen? Does it just look similar to Helen's table? Yeah? So, Fearati maintained that she had bought this mosaic in good faith, had been told simply that it had belonged to an aristocratic family, no knowledge that it was archaeologically significant in any way. But after this discovery that it was really something that had belonged to Caligula, it was seized and turned over to the Italian consulate. It was repatriated to Italy and put on temporary display out a museum, and then in March it was moved to the Museo del Navy Romani, which houses other artifacts from Caligula's ships. In other news on that front, Italy's Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism plans to open an underground gallery dedicated to items from Caligula's pleasure gardens that is expected to open this spring. Yeah. I don't know the exact date or whether um that timeline issue ding. Yeah. Sadly, again, researching COVID cases has put a damper on it. We will stop though, for a quick sponsor break before we get up to some other things. Next up, we have a category that is always a favorite of mine when I work on these episodes, and that is the books and letters. Israeli archaeologists have announced the discovery of dead Sea scroll fragments that are at least nineteen hundred years old. These parchment fragments contain text from the books of Zechariah and Nahome written in Greek, and they were found in a cave where they are believed to have been hidden during the Bar Kochba revolt. These fragments were discovered during a project in Israel and the occupied West Bank, basically a sweep of hundreds of caves with the hope of protecting items of archaeological and historical significance from plundering and other damage. I'm sure there will be more analysis into these fragments later on. In other names and another thing that's just a favorite of mine that somehow we've not talked about much on the show. Research published in the English Historical Review has explored the question of why and how the Doomsday Book was made. The Doomsday Book was Britain's earliest public record and it was compiled at the request of King William the First a k a. William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, so basically, after the Norman conquest of England, William wanted a survey of the land that he was now ruling in parts so he could figure out how much to charge in taxes. So in ten eight six he sent government inspectors all over England to gather information about things like who lived there and on what property and how much livestock they had, and surveyors asked each question three times once to find out the answer for when Edward the Confessor was still King of England, wants to find out how that had changed when William became king, and wants to find out how things actually stood in ten eight six when the survey was being conducted. The resulting books that came from all this uh interrogation include The Little Doomsday, which details Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, and The Great Doomsday, which details the rest of England with the exception of London, Winchester County, Durham and Northumberland. There are other books compiled from this same data as well, including The x On Doomsday, which is one of the earlier drafts and covers Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. This research that we were talking about right now focused on the x On Doomsday. In the words of lead author Dr Stephen Baxter, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford, quote, this new research, based on the earliest surviving Doomsday manuscript, shows the survey was piled remarkably quickly and then used like a modern database where data is entered in one format and can be extracted in other formats for specific purposes. It's really an amazing achievement considering that they were keeping all of this data without the help of things like computers. Right, someone, there is a master d B, a of of pre automated calculation. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a lot of someone's. There are a lot of people that were involved in actually making books out of this data. This particular paper followed another project called The Conquerors Commissioners Unlocking the Doomsday Survey of Southwestern England. Baxter was a co investigator on this earlier project under lead investigator Julia Crick. This project created a complete digital facsimile of the ex on Doomsday, including identifying which scribe wrote which part of the manuscript, which I find incredibly cool. It also reiterates earlier research by other people, including Carol Simes at the University of Chicago. She suggested that while this data gathering step with the Doomsday Book was famously completed pretty quickly, the process of actually compiling that data into the final Doomsday books which survived today, that took a lot more time and in some cases was really chaotic. I feel like that could be said about writing an episode of stuff you missed in history class. Sure, times you can get all your information pretty quickly, but then making sense of all of it well and with the with the excellent dooms Doomsday made more complicated by the fact that there were almost two dozen scribes working on it. What if we had two dozen scribes who worked on our episode, No, we'd lose our minds. Uh. Research published in the journal Heritage Science has examined English deeds from the early modern period. Specifically, they looked at what type of animal skin the deeds were written non Using peptide mass fingerprinting, they determined that the preferred skin for this purpose was sheep. That was true for more than nine of the deeds that they looked at. Sheepskin would have been incredibly commonplace and pretty cheap thanks to the prevalence of British sheep farming, but the authors concluded that there was probably another reason for this apparent preference for sheepskin as well. Because of sheepskins physical structure and fat content, it separates into layers pretty easily, especially when you scrape it. That makes it really difficult to alter the text on something without leaving a really obvious mark. So like, if you wanted to fudge some information on your deed, trying to scrape off that old text would just leave a really obvious mark on it. So this use of sheepskin may have been as much about fraud prevention as it was about there just being a lot of sheepskin around. That's something the author's backed up with some historical references to sheepskin dating back as early as the twelfth century, people basically advising others on how to write official documents and saying, yeah, use sheepskin because you can tell if somebody's messed with it. But the preference for sheep skin for these documents lasted for centuries after the last of these written references of like mentioning that particular point. So, okay, this last entry in Books and Letters isn't exactly a book, but it is a text. In medieval and early modern Europe, pregnancy and giving birth were inherently incredibly risky, and people used a variety of objects to try to offer themselves and their loved ones some kind of protection, things like amulets, relics, staves, and birthing girdles. In England, the church even kept these items on hand to loan out to people during pregnancy and delivery. Recently published research and Royal Society Open Science looks specifically at birthing girdles. Some of these were made from animal skin or silk or some other fabric, and they were very clearly meant to be worn, But others were made from parchment that was covered in symbols and prayers that were meant to be touched or kissed or rubbed as part of like a religious veneration, and it hasn't always been clear whether these whi were just kind of stored as a parchment roll whether they were also meant to be worn on a person's body. The team examined one particular scroll from the Welcome Collection, which was covered in images and writing, much of which was very heavily worn, and they found evidence of human proteins that suggests that it was indeed worn during pregnancy. They also found evidence of proteins that are found in honey milk and specific plants that are referenced in medieval medical books about treatments during pregnancy and childbirth, Although all of this suggests that this was worn as some kind of belt or girdle. It's not clear exactly how it was worn, Like, they don't know exactly how it might have been wrapped and tied. Yeah, there was an illustration in this paper that had like re potential configurations to have this on a person's body, you folded into a hat. Next up, we have a couple of fines that are related to music and art. First, I love this one. A large snail shell found in Marsula's Cave and the Pyrenees eighty years ago is now believed to be the oldest known wind instrument of its type based on radio carbon dating, it's eighteen thousand years old. The tip of the shell is broken off, and that's something that researchers don't believe to have been accidental, because it's like the break is at the strongest part of the shell, and then the opposite end has evidence of it being intentionally cut and perforated. There's also evidence that hematite was used as a red pigment on the shell for decorative purposes. It seems that the shell used to have a mouthpiece. There is a brownish residue around the inside of the tip which appears to have and some kind of resin that would have held the mouthpiece in place. There are also other shell horns that have been discovered that have some kind of mouthpiece still intact. And here's what I think is the best sentence from the press release on this quote. To confirm the hypothesis that this conk was used to produce sounds, scientists enlisted the help of a horn player who managed to produce three sounds close to the notes C, C sharp and D. We will we'll share a link where people can hear that on our social media. Next up. When Edvard Monk's famous work The Scream was on display in Copenhagen in people noticed that there was faint writing in the top left corner of the canvas. Translated from Norwegian, it read could only have been painted by a madman. Since then, it was generally believed that a member of the public had defaced the painting with this griffhi be but curators at the National Museum in Oslo have now studied the writing using infrared photography, which made the handwriting a lot easier to see, and they determined that Monk wrote it himself, probably after it was exhibited publicly. In some of the commentary about that exhibition, was really negative, including people speculating that Monk was mentally ill, and he was just particularly bothered by this because he had a history of mental illness in his family. I kind of love that it's him having his working through his chagrin over the reviews. Moving on, restoration on Pompei's mosaic of Alexander the Great defeating Persian King Darius at the Battle of Issus started at the end of January. This is a multi month project that's estimated to be completed in July. It's being managed by Italy's Central Restoration Institute, the University of Moli's UNIMAL and the Center for Research on Archaeometry and Conservation Science. Mosaic is known as the Alexander Mosaic and it was originally a floor mosaic at the House of the Fawn in Pompeii. It was unearthed during an excavation there in eighteen thirty one. We're going to get to some repatriations in just a sec but first we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. We have several repatriations to talk about this time around. In various previous episodes and installments of Unearthed, we have talked about the Benin Bronzes. These are thousands of items that were looted from the Kingdom of Benin and what's now Nigeria during a punitive expedition by the British and eight seven and although some institutions, including the British Museum, have insisted that they will be retaining these bronzes that are in their collections, others have started working on repatriating them. In March, the University of Aberdeen announced that it will return in a bronze depicting the King of Benin which has been in its collection since nineteen fifty seven, and authorities in Berlin have also started negotiating the return of hundreds of bronzes currently being held at the Ethnological Museum. It'll be weeks or possibly even months before these pieces are actually returned. There's a whole process going along with this, but because it involved so many pieces, this German effort in particular may put pressure on other institutions that have so far said they intended to keep the bronzes. In March, the FBI announced the repatriation of a steel that had been on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art that Stella had been looted from a temple in Nepal in the nineteen eighties and had been loaned to the museum by a private collector who bought it at auction in the nineteen nineties. Law enforcement and the museum began looking at the statues providence after tweets by Aaron L. Thompson, who is on Twitter as at art Crime prof about statue being stolen. The steel a was handed over at Nepal's embassy in Washington, d C. Next up, in our most recent year end Unearthed, we talked about a recommendation issued by the Dutch Council for Culture that called for Dutch museums to return items that were taken from their countries of origin during the Dutch colonial era if there was reasonable certainty that these items had been taken by force. In January, the Netherlands approved a centralized mechanism for repatriating such looted objects. There is also a four point five million euro project in the works, which is a joint effort among several museums and a university which will develop practical guidance for the museums that are holding these objects. Five PhD candidates, five postdoctorate researchers and to Providence. Researchers are expected to work on this effort over the span of four years. In March, officials in the US returned two hundred seventy seven pre Columbian art objects to the Mexican Consulate and no galas. Arizona Customs and Border Patrol had confiscated most of these objects in October of there were two Mexican citizens who had tried to bring them across the border. The rest had been housed at Arizona's Chandler Museum, and the museum had reported them to homeland security investigations. And it is really not clear why these repatriations just happened, in considering that those confiscations and investigations started in there's there's just no information included about what it's dragged out, just sort of skips over that part. Possibly there's a reason, but I could not find it. Lastly, for our repatriations, in January, Harvard University announced the Pebody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology had the remains of at least fifteen people of Africa and descent who may have been alive while slavery was practiced in the US. And its collections. The Pabody Museum has come up on several episodes of our show before, including in our recent episode on Julioteo and our twenty fifteen interview about the Harvard Indians School, which we replayed as a Saturday Classic in this announcement in January prompted the Association on American Indian Affairs to send a letter to the university president alleging that Harvard is in violation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. You'll see that as n A g p R a NAG pre criticisms included that the museum has failed to repatriate requested items in a timely manner, and that the museum has cataloged its collection in a way that makes the repatriation process harder. The letter also alleged that the museum had failed to consult with tribes during an inventory of its collection that took place in two thousand. In response, the museum announced that it plans to adjust its repatriate a SHAM policies. And there's a lot more information about this that I think is really valuable for people to read for themselves, including the full text of the Association on American Indian Affairs, open letter to the museum, and all that can be found at www dot Indian dash Affairs dot org, slash Harvard dot html and now for everyone's favorite exhumations. On March thirty, the Spanish government approved a fund of six hundred sixty five thousand euros that's roughly seven d eighty thousand dollars to exhume graves at the Valley of the Fallen. We have talked about these graves in our previous episode on the exhumation of the remains of Francisco Franco. At least thirty thousand people are buried at the Valley of the Fallen, and in many cases their bodies were moved from other burial sites without consulting with their families. This is part of ongoing work to identify the remains of people who were killed during the Spanish Civil War and the years that followed, many whom were buried in mass graves. In other news, a plan to relocate part of the remains of the Venerable Cornelia Connolly has been abandoned after a public outcry. Connolly was a nun who was born in Philadelphia and later moved to the UK, where she established the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in eighteen forty six. She died in Mayfield, East Sussex, England, in eighteen seventy nine. Her remains had actually already been moved once from her convents to the chapel at Mayfield School. That happened in nineteen thirty five. This proposal to move some of her remains to Philadelphia was connected to an effort to have her named as a saint, but hundreds of people submitted formal objections to the plan and more than fifteen hundred signed an online petition against it. The Society of the Holy Child Jesus ultimately decided to withdraw its proposal to have her remains moved. Next the Mayo County Council in Ireland has called on the fromits to pass a legislative bill that would clear the way for the exhumation of remains at the two Mother and Baby Home. That home operated from nineteen sixty one. The Mother and Baby Home has been in the news repeatedly since, and we discussed it on our previous installment of Unearthed. In out of Wedlock pregnancies were incredibly stigmatized, so people were sent to this home, often against their will, to give birth in secret. As many as eight hundred children died while the home was in operation, and this exhumation could allow their remains to be identified and returned to families. The Sisters of Bon Secour issued an apology in January that read, in part quote, we failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children who came to the home. And another exhimation that also connects to other episodes of our show. Officials in Oklahoma hoped to start an exhimation of a mass grave connected to the Tulsa mass occur on June one of this year and that would align with the massacres hundredth anniversary. The site to be exhumed was identified at Oaklawn Cemetery in October and at the time they found evidence of twelve burials there. Funeral home records document eighteen black men being buried there, but it's possible that this mass grave contains the bodies of as many as thirty people. There are still a lot of details to work out with this. A licensed funeral director has to oversee the work, which requires a formal plan submitted to the Oklahoma State Department of Health. And although it's possible that any remains that are found may be reinterred at Oaklawn Cemetery, this would likely be temporary to give the Physical Investigation Committee time to decide on an appropriate permanent resting place for them. Yeah, there were obvious concerns about the idea that they may go through this exhumation, try to learn more about these people and then like rebury them in the same cemetery where they had been buried in a mass grave earlier. Um. So that's the idea, is that this would just be while, uh, while they're trying to find a better final resting place. In our last exclamation, this time, the International Committee of the Red Cross has announced a plan to exhume and identify the remains of Argentine soldiers who were killed during the Falkland's War and are now buried in the Falkland Islands. In eighteen, the Red Cross undertook a similar mission that resulted in the exclimations of a hundred and twenty two Argentine soldiers, a hundred and fifteen of whom were identified through DNA testing. There are still two hundred thirty six Argentine soldiers buried on East Falkland. And as a final note as we wrap up this installment of Unearthed, the vial used to administer the first fiser BioNTech COVID nineteen vaccine in the US has been entered into the collection of the Smithsonian, along with a vaccination card and scrubs belonging to Sandra Lindsay, who was the first person in the US to receive the vaccine. Lindsay immigrated to the US from Jamaica about thirty years ago, and she received the vaccine while working as an intensive care nurse and director of Critical Care Nursing at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Dr Michelle Chester administered Lindsay's first dose of the vaccine on December four, and it was live streamed during a news conference. Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has donated his personal three D model of the COVID nineteen virus to the Smithsonian as well. That model was made with a three D printer at the National Institutes of Health, and Faucci used it as a visual aid when explaining the virus and its spike proteins. It's not as much of an unearthed as a thing that's you know, now his industry. Yeah, Um, have you captured some good uh listener mail for this round? I do. It is from Kristen, and Kristen says, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I was very happy to hear your episode on the Rum Rebellion. I've always thought it was a fascinating part of Australian history, and I actually suggested as a topic to you a few years ago, So I'm glad you got to it, even if Ian got the credit, ha ha, It's totally possible. Kristen is one of the many people who sent an email that made me go didn't we do that already, when we in fact had not. This email goes on to say I thought you may be interested to know that a descendant of William Bly by the name of Anna Bli became the first female Premier of Queensland and two thousand seven and held the position until. Unlike William, she did not face a coup and was not known for a verbal abuse. I love your podcast and hope you continue to cover the odd bit of Australian history. Um. Kristen included some suggestions for topics and then said keep safe over there in the US. Yeah, I have some envy about Australia's COVID response. Uh so thanks, thanks Kristen, thanks for this. I had no idea um about this connection. I didn't I had obviously not really heard of ANIMALI before because I don't live in Australia, but did not know that William Bla I had to sendence you and then UM, in more modern times become part of the government in Australia. So thank you so much for this note. Thanks to everyone who sends us email. If you would like to send us email, We're at History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. We're all over social media at miss in History and that's where we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeart Radio app and Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of our Unearthed episode for UH, where we're covering January through March stuff that was literally and figuratively unearthed. Uh. Last time we talked about some shipwrecks and some foods and beverages and some cute animals and stuff, and we've got other things this time. Yes, So it has become kind of a tradition to start part two of our two part unearthed episodes with pot pourri. That's the stuff that's interesting, but it doesn't quite fall into a category with other fine. So. First, researchers from multiple universities have confirmed that indigenous people in what is now northern New Mexico took proactive steps to prevent wildfire at least as far back as the eleven hundreds. Members of the team interviewed tribal elders at Hamas Pueblo, as well as elders from the Hopie Tribe, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and Zoomi Pueblo about these people's cultural and land management practices. They combined this ethnographic work with archaeological study of the area, tree ring research, and modeling. They concluded that the people of the Hamas Mountains have used a variety of methods to prevent destructive wildfires for nearly a thousand years. These have included using small, low intensity fires to get rid of unnecessary flammable material, burning flammable material for cooking and heating, so you're basically gathering a lot of what might cause wildfire and then using it for a practical purpose, burning off crop land after the harvests were over, and then also just keeping a buffer around settlements that was completely clear of trees and brush. Plus, hundreds of people lived in these settlements, so just the day to day foot traffic would keep small burnable plants around the settlements to a minimum. The team drew a direct connection between this research and wildfire conditions in populated areas today. In the words of lead author Christopher Roush, quote, we shouldn't be asking how to avoid fire and smoke. We should ask ourselves what kind of fire and smoke do we want to coexist with? Another news Archaeologists in China have found what they believe to be a man's cosmetic cream. It's a small bronze jar found in a twenty year old tomb belonging to a nobleman, and it contained a substance made of animal fat and a carbonate mud known as moon milk. It's probably used to like whiten the skin. This is not remotely the oldest cosmetic product ever found in China. There are cosmetic sticks dating back to at least fourteen fifty BC, but this is the oldest fine that seems to be specifically a pro act for a man. An electrical crew trying to move some power lines stumbled onto a previously unknown tunnel under a homeowner's garden in Wales, and at this point who made this tunnel and why still a mystery. The work crew filled what they dug back into protect it, since it will probably be sometime before it can really be studied. What's happened in the village of tin Turn, which is home of Tintern Abbey, subject of a famous poem. The abbey was built between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries and it is not known if the tunnels have any connection to the abbey, but the tunnels aren't shown not any survey maps dating back to the seventeen hundreds. Either they were dug before that point or someone dug them secretly and didn't make note of its mystery tunnels. Okay, so moving on. The Pazzerick Carpet is a wool carpet that was made about four hundred BC and it was found in a burial mound in is in the collection of the Hermitage Museum. It is an astounding condition considering how old it is and the conditions it was in before being unearthed. Although one corner of this carpet is mostly missing, it is otherwise largely intact and its colors and patterns are still very vivid. That has led to a lot of questions about how exactly it has retained so much color for so long and in the conditions that it was in for so long. And according to research published in the journal Scientific Reports, one reason maybe that the wool was previously fermented, with the fermentation process allowing the pigments to penetrate deeper into the fiber, and then that would make the color more vivid and more permanent. This conclusion means that the use of fermented wool in dying is about two thousand years older than was previously known. A man in New Haven, Connecticut bought a blue and white fifteen century Ming dynasty bowl at a yard sale for thirty five bucks. It was sold through auction house saw the Bees, which kept the seller's name confidential. But that turnover was that was a good flip. It's selling price was seven hundred dollars, so that was a yard sale fine that turned out to be something extremely valuable, something that it seems like the buyer suspected at that time. One of the accounts that I read was like, he did not negotiate this thirty five dollars for a bull of yard sale at all. He just went ahead and got it and then started asking questions with the praisers pretty much right away. Uh So, now we have a couple of objects that have a little bit of similarity to that, but they surprised people by turning out to be ancient artifacts, something that came as a bit of a shock. First. About twenty years ago, somebody noticed a large and conveniently shaped rock in a garden rockery, and they had it taken to their stable to use as a step when mounting their horse. It's a nice squared off right step for getting up on a horse if you need a little help with that. At least ten years later they noticed that there was a laurel wreath carved into the side of it. How many horses were mounted off of this rock before anyone realized This turned out to be nearly two thousand year old slab that probably came from Greece or Western Asia. In addition to the laurel wreath, it bears a Greek inscription that translates to the people and the young men honored Demetrios, son of Metrodorus, the son of Lucios. Auction house, Willie and Wallace asked for public help and figuring out exactly how this piece got to the UK. It's likely that a wealthy person on a grand tour of the continent brought it back into the area sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. That was very common. We talked about that sum in our episode on the Parthenon Marbles. Uh But most of the original houses in the area have since been demolished or destroyed by fire, and it is really not clear which of these households specifically might have been home to the person who originally brought it in This piece was expected to be auctioned off in February, which is why it caught my eye for this episode of Unearthed, but that auction has been postponed until June. I love this next one. Uh. Similarly, in a couple of people at a signing for the book Porphyry were leafing through the book and they were shocked to discover a picture of their friend Helen's coffee table. It turned out the table was topped with a mosaic that had originally decorated a ship of the Roman emperor Caligula, and their friend Helen was antiquities dealer Helen Fioratti, who had bought the mosaic in Italy more than forty years prior. Kad, the author of the book and interviews, talked about like hearing these women excitedly being like, that's Helen's table, and he's I'm sorry, who's Helen? Does it just look similar to Helen's table? Yeah? So, Fearati maintained that she had bought this mosaic in good faith, had been told simply that it had belonged to an aristocratic family, no knowledge that it was archaeologically significant in any way. But after this discovery that it was really something that had belonged to Caligula, it was seized and turned over to the Italian consulate. It was repatriated to Italy and put on temporary display out a museum, and then in March it was moved to the Museo del Navy Romani, which houses other artifacts from Caligula's ships. In other news on that front, Italy's Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism plans to open an underground gallery dedicated to items from Caligula's pleasure gardens that is expected to open this spring. Yeah. I don't know the exact date or whether um that timeline issue ding. Yeah. Sadly, again, researching COVID cases has put a damper on it. We will stop though, for a quick sponsor break before we get up to some other things. Next up, we have a category that is always a favorite of mine when I work on these episodes, and that is the books and letters. Israeli archaeologists have announced the discovery of dead Sea scroll fragments that are at least nineteen hundred years old. These parchment fragments contain text from the books of Zechariah and Nahome written in Greek, and they were found in a cave where they are believed to have been hidden during the Bar Kochba revolt. These fragments were discovered during a project in Israel and the occupied West Bank, basically a sweep of hundreds of caves with the hope of protecting items of archaeological and historical significance from plundering and other damage. I'm sure there will be more analysis into these fragments later on. In other names and another thing that's just a favorite of mine that somehow we've not talked about much on the show. Research published in the English Historical Review has explored the question of why and how the Doomsday Book was made. The Doomsday Book was Britain's earliest public record and it was compiled at the request of King William the First a k a. William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, so basically, after the Norman conquest of England, William wanted a survey of the land that he was now ruling in parts so he could figure out how much to charge in taxes. So in ten eight six he sent government inspectors all over England to gather information about things like who lived there and on what property and how much livestock they had, and surveyors asked each question three times once to find out the answer for when Edward the Confessor was still King of England, wants to find out how that had changed when William became king, and wants to find out how things actually stood in ten eight six when the survey was being conducted. The resulting books that came from all this uh interrogation include The Little Doomsday, which details Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, and The Great Doomsday, which details the rest of England with the exception of London, Winchester County, Durham and Northumberland. There are other books compiled from this same data as well, including The x On Doomsday, which is one of the earlier drafts and covers Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. This research that we were talking about right now focused on the x On Doomsday. In the words of lead author Dr Stephen Baxter, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford, quote, this new research, based on the earliest surviving Doomsday manuscript, shows the survey was piled remarkably quickly and then used like a modern database where data is entered in one format and can be extracted in other formats for specific purposes. It's really an amazing achievement considering that they were keeping all of this data without the help of things like computers. Right, someone, there is a master d B, a of of pre automated calculation. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a lot of someone's. There are a lot of people that were involved in actually making books out of this data. This particular paper followed another project called The Conquerors Commissioners Unlocking the Doomsday Survey of Southwestern England. Baxter was a co investigator on this earlier project under lead investigator Julia Crick. This project created a complete digital facsimile of the ex on Doomsday, including identifying which scribe wrote which part of the manuscript, which I find incredibly cool. It also reiterates earlier research by other people, including Carol Simes at the University of Chicago. She suggested that while this data gathering step with the Doomsday Book was famously completed pretty quickly, the process of actually compiling that data into the final Doomsday books which survived today, that took a lot more time and in some cases was really chaotic. I feel like that could be said about writing an episode of stuff you missed in history class. Sure, times you can get all your information pretty quickly, but then making sense of all of it well and with the with the excellent dooms Doomsday made more complicated by the fact that there were almost two dozen scribes working on it. What if we had two dozen scribes who worked on our episode, No, we'd lose our minds. Uh. Research published in the journal Heritage Science has examined English deeds from the early modern period. Specifically, they looked at what type of animal skin the deeds were written non Using peptide mass fingerprinting, they determined that the preferred skin for this purpose was sheep. That was true for more than nine of the deeds that they looked at. Sheepskin would have been incredibly commonplace and pretty cheap thanks to the prevalence of British sheep farming, but the authors concluded that there was probably another reason for this apparent preference for sheepskin as well. Because of sheepskins physical structure and fat content, it separates into layers pretty easily, especially when you scrape it. That makes it really difficult to alter the text on something without leaving a really obvious mark. So like, if you wanted to fudge some information on your deed, trying to scrape off that old text would just leave a really obvious mark on it. So this use of sheepskin may have been as much about fraud prevention as it was about there just being a lot of sheepskin around. That's something the author's backed up with some historical references to sheepskin dating back as early as the twelfth century, people basically advising others on how to write official documents and saying, yeah, use sheepskin because you can tell if somebody's messed with it. But the preference for sheep skin for these documents lasted for centuries after the last of these written references of like mentioning that particular point. So, okay, this last entry in Books and Letters isn't exactly a book, but it is a text. In medieval and early modern Europe, pregnancy and giving birth were inherently incredibly risky, and people used a variety of objects to try to offer themselves and their loved ones some kind of protection, things like amulets, relics, staves, and birthing girdles. In England, the church even kept these items on hand to loan out to people during pregnancy and delivery. Recently published research and Royal Society Open Science looks specifically at birthing girdles. Some of these were made from animal skin or silk or some other fabric, and they were very clearly meant to be worn, But others were made from parchment that was covered in symbols and prayers that were meant to be touched or kissed or rubbed as part of like a religious veneration, and it hasn't always been clear whether these whi were just kind of stored as a parchment roll whether they were also meant to be worn on a person's body. The team examined one particular scroll from the Welcome Collection, which was covered in images and writing, much of which was very heavily worn, and they found evidence of human proteins that suggests that it was indeed worn during pregnancy. They also found evidence of proteins that are found in honey milk and specific plants that are referenced in medieval medical books about treatments during pregnancy and childbirth, Although all of this suggests that this was worn as some kind of belt or girdle. It's not clear exactly how it was worn, Like, they don't know exactly how it might have been wrapped and tied. Yeah, there was an illustration in this paper that had like re potential configurations to have this on a person's body, you folded into a hat. Next up, we have a couple of fines that are related to music and art. First, I love this one. A large snail shell found in Marsula's Cave and the Pyrenees eighty years ago is now believed to be the oldest known wind instrument of its type based on radio carbon dating, it's eighteen thousand years old. The tip of the shell is broken off, and that's something that researchers don't believe to have been accidental, because it's like the break is at the strongest part of the shell, and then the opposite end has evidence of it being intentionally cut and perforated. There's also evidence that hematite was used as a red pigment on the shell for decorative purposes. It seems that the shell used to have a mouthpiece. There is a brownish residue around the inside of the tip which appears to have and some kind of resin that would have held the mouthpiece in place. There are also other shell horns that have been discovered that have some kind of mouthpiece still intact. And here's what I think is the best sentence from the press release on this quote. To confirm the hypothesis that this conk was used to produce sounds, scientists enlisted the help of a horn player who managed to produce three sounds close to the notes C, C sharp and D. We will we'll share a link where people can hear that on our social media. Next up. When Edvard Monk's famous work The Scream was on display in Copenhagen in people noticed that there was faint writing in the top left corner of the canvas. Translated from Norwegian, it read could only have been painted by a madman. Since then, it was generally believed that a member of the public had defaced the painting with this griffhi be but curators at the National Museum in Oslo have now studied the writing using infrared photography, which made the handwriting a lot easier to see, and they determined that Monk wrote it himself, probably after it was exhibited publicly. In some of the commentary about that exhibition, was really negative, including people speculating that Monk was mentally ill, and he was just particularly bothered by this because he had a history of mental illness in his family. I kind of love that it's him having his working through his chagrin over the reviews. Moving on, restoration on Pompei's mosaic of Alexander the Great defeating Persian King Darius at the Battle of Issus started at the end of January. This is a multi month project that's estimated to be completed in July. It's being managed by Italy's Central Restoration Institute, the University of Moli's UNIMAL and the Center for Research on Archaeometry and Conservation Science. Mosaic is known as the Alexander Mosaic and it was originally a floor mosaic at the House of the Fawn in Pompeii. It was unearthed during an excavation there in eighteen thirty one. We're going to get to some repatriations in just a sec but first we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. We have several repatriations to talk about this time around. In various previous episodes and installments of Unearthed, we have talked about the Benin Bronzes. These are thousands of items that were looted from the Kingdom of Benin and what's now Nigeria during a punitive expedition by the British and eight seven and although some institutions, including the British Museum, have insisted that they will be retaining these bronzes that are in their collections, others have started working on repatriating them. In March, the University of Aberdeen announced that it will return in a bronze depicting the King of Benin which has been in its collection since nineteen fifty seven, and authorities in Berlin have also started negotiating the return of hundreds of bronzes currently being held at the Ethnological Museum. It'll be weeks or possibly even months before these pieces are actually returned. There's a whole process going along with this, but because it involved so many pieces, this German effort in particular may put pressure on other institutions that have so far said they intended to keep the bronzes. In March, the FBI announced the repatriation of a steel that had been on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art that Stella had been looted from a temple in Nepal in the nineteen eighties and had been loaned to the museum by a private collector who bought it at auction in the nineteen nineties. Law enforcement and the museum began looking at the statues providence after tweets by Aaron L. Thompson, who is on Twitter as at art Crime prof about statue being stolen. The steel a was handed over at Nepal's embassy in Washington, d C. Next up, in our most recent year end Unearthed, we talked about a recommendation issued by the Dutch Council for Culture that called for Dutch museums to return items that were taken from their countries of origin during the Dutch colonial era if there was reasonable certainty that these items had been taken by force. In January, the Netherlands approved a centralized mechanism for repatriating such looted objects. There is also a four point five million euro project in the works, which is a joint effort among several museums and a university which will develop practical guidance for the museums that are holding these objects. Five PhD candidates, five postdoctorate researchers and to Providence. Researchers are expected to work on this effort over the span of four years. In March, officials in the US returned two hundred seventy seven pre Columbian art objects to the Mexican Consulate and no galas. Arizona Customs and Border Patrol had confiscated most of these objects in October of there were two Mexican citizens who had tried to bring them across the border. The rest had been housed at Arizona's Chandler Museum, and the museum had reported them to homeland security investigations. And it is really not clear why these repatriations just happened, in considering that those confiscations and investigations started in there's there's just no information included about what it's dragged out, just sort of skips over that part. Possibly there's a reason, but I could not find it. Lastly, for our repatriations, in January, Harvard University announced the Pebody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology had the remains of at least fifteen people of Africa and descent who may have been alive while slavery was practiced in the US. And its collections. The Pabody Museum has come up on several episodes of our show before, including in our recent episode on Julioteo and our twenty fifteen interview about the Harvard Indians School, which we replayed as a Saturday Classic in this announcement in January prompted the Association on American Indian Affairs to send a letter to the university president alleging that Harvard is in violation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. You'll see that as n A g p R a NAG pre criticisms included that the museum has failed to repatriate requested items in a timely manner, and that the museum has cataloged its collection in a way that makes the repatriation process harder. The letter also alleged that the museum had failed to consult with tribes during an inventory of its collection that took place in two thousand. In response, the museum announced that it plans to adjust its repatriate a SHAM policies. And there's a lot more information about this that I think is really valuable for people to read for themselves, including the full text of the Association on American Indian Affairs, open letter to the museum, and all that can be found at www dot Indian dash Affairs dot org, slash Harvard dot html and now for everyone's favorite exhumations. On March thirty, the Spanish government approved a fund of six hundred sixty five thousand euros that's roughly seven d eighty thousand dollars to exhume graves at the Valley of the Fallen. We have talked about these graves in our previous episode on the exhumation of the remains of Francisco Franco. At least thirty thousand people are buried at the Valley of the Fallen, and in many cases their bodies were moved from other burial sites without consulting with their families. This is part of ongoing work to identify the remains of people who were killed during the Spanish Civil War and the years that followed, many whom were buried in mass graves. In other news, a plan to relocate part of the remains of the Venerable Cornelia Connolly has been abandoned after a public outcry. Connolly was a nun who was born in Philadelphia and later moved to the UK, where she established the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in eighteen forty six. She died in Mayfield, East Sussex, England, in eighteen seventy nine. Her remains had actually already been moved once from her convents to the chapel at Mayfield School. That happened in nineteen thirty five. This proposal to move some of her remains to Philadelphia was connected to an effort to have her named as a saint, but hundreds of people submitted formal objections to the plan and more than fifteen hundred signed an online petition against it. The Society of the Holy Child Jesus ultimately decided to withdraw its proposal to have her remains moved. Next the Mayo County Council in Ireland has called on the fromits to pass a legislative bill that would clear the way for the exhumation of remains at the two Mother and Baby Home. That home operated from nineteen sixty one. The Mother and Baby Home has been in the news repeatedly since, and we discussed it on our previous installment of Unearthed. In out of Wedlock pregnancies were incredibly stigmatized, so people were sent to this home, often against their will, to give birth in secret. As many as eight hundred children died while the home was in operation, and this exhumation could allow their remains to be identified and returned to families. The Sisters of Bon Secour issued an apology in January that read, in part quote, we failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children who came to the home. And another exhimation that also connects to other episodes of our show. Officials in Oklahoma hoped to start an exhimation of a mass grave connected to the Tulsa mass occur on June one of this year and that would align with the massacres hundredth anniversary. The site to be exhumed was identified at Oaklawn Cemetery in October and at the time they found evidence of twelve burials there. Funeral home records document eighteen black men being buried there, but it's possible that this mass grave contains the bodies of as many as thirty people. There are still a lot of details to work out with this. A licensed funeral director has to oversee the work, which requires a formal plan submitted to the Oklahoma State Department of Health. And although it's possible that any remains that are found may be reinterred at Oaklawn Cemetery, this would likely be temporary to give the Physical Investigation Committee time to decide on an appropriate permanent resting place for them. Yeah, there were obvious concerns about the idea that they may go through this exhumation, try to learn more about these people and then like rebury them in the same cemetery where they had been buried in a mass grave earlier. Um. So that's the idea, is that this would just be while, uh, while they're trying to find a better final resting place. In our last exclamation, this time, the International Committee of the Red Cross has announced a plan to exhume and identify the remains of Argentine soldiers who were killed during the Falkland's War and are now buried in the Falkland Islands. In eighteen, the Red Cross undertook a similar mission that resulted in the exclimations of a hundred and twenty two Argentine soldiers, a hundred and fifteen of whom were identified through DNA testing. There are still two hundred thirty six Argentine soldiers buried on East Falkland. And as a final note as we wrap up this installment of Unearthed, the vial used to administer the first fiser BioNTech COVID nineteen vaccine in the US has been entered into the collection of the Smithsonian, along with a vaccination card and scrubs belonging to Sandra Lindsay, who was the first person in the US to receive the vaccine. Lindsay immigrated to the US from Jamaica about thirty years ago, and she received the vaccine while working as an intensive care nurse and director of Critical Care Nursing at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Dr Michelle Chester administered Lindsay's first dose of the vaccine on December four, and it was live streamed during a news conference. Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has donated his personal three D model of the COVID nineteen virus to the Smithsonian as well. That model was made with a three D printer at the National Institutes of Health, and Faucci used it as a visual aid when explaining the virus and its spike proteins. It's not as much of an unearthed as a thing that's you know, now his industry. Yeah, Um, have you captured some good uh listener mail for this round? I do. It is from Kristen, and Kristen says, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I was very happy to hear your episode on the Rum Rebellion. I've always thought it was a fascinating part of Australian history, and I actually suggested as a topic to you a few years ago, So I'm glad you got to it, even if Ian got the credit, ha ha, It's totally possible. Kristen is one of the many people who sent an email that made me go didn't we do that already, when we in fact had not. This email goes on to say I thought you may be interested to know that a descendant of William Bly by the name of Anna Bli became the first female Premier of Queensland and two thousand seven and held the position until. Unlike William, she did not face a coup and was not known for a verbal abuse. I love your podcast and hope you continue to cover the odd bit of Australian history. Um. Kristen included some suggestions for topics and then said keep safe over there in the US. Yeah, I have some envy about Australia's COVID response. Uh so thanks, thanks Kristen, thanks for this. I had no idea um about this connection. I didn't I had obviously not really heard of ANIMALI before because I don't live in Australia, but did not know that William Bla I had to sendence you and then UM, in more modern times become part of the government in Australia. So thank you so much for this note. Thanks to everyone who sends us email. If you would like to send us email, We're at History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. We're all over social media at miss in History and that's where we'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeart Radio app and Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.