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. It is time for Unearthed. This is our Unearthed installments to to close out the year. We know it's when it's actually coming out for folks who maybe are new to the show or don't remember. This is when we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last three months, so in this case it's October November December of UH. Today we are going to talk about a whole bunch of updates, so things we've talked about before on the show, either on Unearthed or otherwise, as well as a whole bunch of shipwrecks and a whole bunch of repatriations. Just the updates shipwrecks and repatriations that was enough for one whole episode. Um part two on Wednesday, we'll be talking about the Edibles and the Potables and the art and some animals and some other stuff, so we can just get started right. So first, we've had several updates about the search for victims of the Tulsa massacre, which we first covered on the show in July. Investigations continued at Oaklawn Cemetery in October and November of last year, with crews finding thirty two total burials and exhuming the remains of eight people so they could be examined. So this is an ongoing process. It's kind of a multi step thing. First, they are examining the burials themselves to try to determine whether they were likely connected to the massacre. From there, they decide which ones they should exume, and then they need to examine the remains that have been exhumed to try to identify them if possible. So while investigators have found some burial sites and conducted some exhimations, the investigations with this are still ongoing. Research published in the journal The Holocene has proposed a new explanation for how and when the person known as Utsy the Iceman died and how his body came to be preserved in the ice. The most widely accepted idea before this point has been that Utsy died in the autumn more than five thousand years ago, and that his body was quickly buried in snow, where it essentially was freeze dried and then encased under glacial ice. According to this idea, it remained undisturbed for thousands of years before being found by hikers. But this newly published research calls really all of that in the question, suggesting that instead, based on the stomach contents and analysis of plant material found around him, Utzy really died in the spring, not the fall, so his body would have been exposed to the elements all through the summer rather than immediately being buried in the snow. Radio carbon dating all to suggests that some of the material found around him is newer than his body is, so that suggests that he was not completely buried in the ice that whole time, but instead was exposed at various points that additional material than being frozen in there with him later. So that's something that they think recurred several times in the centuries between his death and his discovery. This research to even suggests that Utsey did not die in the place where his body was found, but that in all of this melting and refreezing, his body was pushed down from a higher elevation. So that initial description of what might have happened to Utsey that I talked about before this last explanation by Tracy. It's a pretty unlikely series of events. It's often described as a series of miracles, and back in a lot of researchers thought that Utsey was fairly or even entirely unique, but this new proposal suggests a process that's a lot less miraculous and more commonplace, meaning that there could be other bodies like Utsi's out there which will be found as global temperatures continue to rise and glacial ice continues to melt. There have also been other remains and artifacts exposed through the melting ice in the decades since Utzy was found, so it has already become clear that he's really not quite one of a kind. Yeah, no shade to Utsy, just saying not a totally unique in the entire world scenario. Prior hosts of the show did an episode on Nutzy in January, and then we have had a lot of Utzy updates on various installments of Unearthed since then. He also appears on an episode I have been working on in the background for a long time, and we'll see if I ever get my act fully together on it, but fingers crossed, I'll look forward to it, and I saur fossil, believed to have been collected by Mary Anning, was excavated from southern England in eighteen eighteen. We most recently ran Past Hosts episode on Mary Anning is a Saturday Classic in September of This fossil is believed to be the first complete ichths R fossil ever found, but it was placed in the collections of the Royal College of Surgeons in London and was destroyed there when the city was bombed during World War Two, so the specimen at that point was believed to have been totally lost, aside from a scientific illustration that had been made in the nineteenth century. But in and researchers found two different casts of it in two different collections, one at Yale University's Peabody Museum and the other at Berlin's Natural History Museum, and the cast in Berlin wasn't listed in the museum's records. A paper on the discovery of these casts was published in Royal Society Open Science in November, and it points out that old casts like these can have historic and scientific importance but are often overlooked. In this case, the two casts have verified the accuracy of most of the scientific illustration that still survived, while also showing a couple of spots where the illustration didn't quite capture the specimen. It also notes that there may still be other casts of this same specimen in other museums collections. Yeah, it was one of those things where people were like, that looks familiar to me. Wait, it's something we thought had been totally destroyed that we actually have this cast of Moving on, In our previous installment of Unearthed, we talked about the Summerton Man, that is a previously unidentified body who had washed up in Australia. We talked about the announcement that a pair of researchers had concluded that this person was Carl Webb, known as Charles. So Police in Australia have also been conducting their own investigation into the Summerton Man's identity. They have not we're least their results or confirmed this investigation, but one of the two researchers involved in that investigation, Derek Abbott of Adelaide University, has contacted members of the web family to try to find more information about Charles and to just confirm this identification. That conversation Unearthed to photo album containing family photos, including a Charlie Webb, as well as a group photo of the Swinburne Technical College Under sixteen football team, one of whom is listed as ce Web. One family member also underwent DNA testing to confirm a link to Charles Webb. And another update to an earlier episode of an Earth. In July, we talked about the discovery of a led sarcophagus at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The sarcophagus was found during work to rebuild the cathedral's spire following the fire that damaged it very badly in twenty nineteen. So there were actually two sarcophagu i found. There was only one that was known when we talked about this. The second was found also. There were statues, sculptures and other items discovered. Both of these sarcophagu i have now been opened. One was marked with a brass plaque saying that it belonged to Antoine de la Porte, the canon of Notre Dame Cathedral, who died in seventeen ten. The identity of the other is not known, but has been nicknamed La Cavalier. This is believed to be the body of an affluent man in his thirties who died as long ago as the fourteenth century. Based on where he was buried, he would have been someone important, but other than that, not much as known. Yeah, it's a little unclear whether anybody will be able to figure out exactly who this was. It kind of depends on exactly how old that body was, because records before a certain point no longer exist. Moving on, in we did a two part episode on Executive Order ninety six and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War Two. While researching the people who had been incarcerated, Duncan Reigan Williams, director of the University of Southern California's nso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, realized that there was no complete, sort of master list of everybody who had been imprisoned under this order, So he assembled a team of researchers and volunteers to create one, compiling and cross referencing records from all of the various camps. The result is a sacred book called cho which is a handbound, thousand page book containing one thousand, two hundred eighty four names. This is the first attempt at a comprehensive list of everyone the United States imprisoned in these camps. The names are also displayed on a website arranged by birth year. The book itself is currently on display at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California, a where visitors are invited to view the book and to use a special hanko or signature seal to stamp up to six names in the book. Although a person doesn't have to be a survivor of one of the camps or a friend or relative of somebody who was incarcerated there to stamp one of the names, this is a process that they're hoping will help verify the names in the book, so people have an opportunity to do things like correct misspellings or add people in who might have been omitted in spite of all the research that went into this. Back in we did an episode on the last Carolina parakeet and other endlings, or the last known number of a species to live before it becomes extinct. One of the ones we mentioned was the last Tasmanian tiger or thili sign, who died at Hobar Zoo in Australia in ninety six Although the animals skeleton and skin were preserved and given to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, they later disappeared. Eventually people concluded that they must have been thrown away, but after somebody found an unpublished taxidermists report, the museum conducted a search and they wound up finding the skin and skeleton in a cupboard in the museum's education department. Because this was in very good condition, staff had used it as part of traveling educational exhibits, sort of like we need to take an example to show people, this is the best one we have, so it's what we'll take with us, not realizing exactly what it was and that it was the last style a sign. So now this is on display at the museum. And for our last update, the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath, England has acquired a handwritten copy of Caroline Herschel's memoir which contains material that was removed when it was edited and published. This will be going on display at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy, which is housed in the Hershel's home. This was an important acquisition for the museum. Most of Caroline's own documents and personal papers are still held by the Herschel family, so they're not necessarily available for the public to see, and most of the items that are on display at the museum are on loan rather than being owned by the museum. This is only the second artifact directly connected to Caroline that the museum has been able to purchase, although acquiring more items for the museum's permanent collection is one of its priorities. Our episode on Caroline Herschel came out as a Saturday Classic in March of twenty nineteen, and now we're going to take a quick sponsor break before we get onto the shipwrecks. Today, we have about a jillion shipwrecked discoveries uh and also some research done at at shipwreck sites that were previously known about, but this research is new. First researchers in the North at Sea have been trying to figure out whether wartime shipwrecks are polluting the water there and whether that pollution means that these wrecks should be removed. In this case, they focused on the V two John Mahn German ship that was sunk by the Royal Air Force in February of two. Based on their research yes this particular wreck is leaking toxic chemicals into the water, including nickel, copper, and arsenic, as well as chemicals found in fossil fuels and explosives. The amounts of the substances are at this point fairly small, although polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or p h s, which are found in fossil fuels, are altering the ecosystem around the ship, and this is one of many wartime shipwrecks in the area. Other ships may present bigger problems next up. After being on hold due to the COVID nineteen pandemic, dives and excavations have resumed at the site of the HMS Arabis, which was one of the ships that was lost during Captain John Franklin's attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage. That attempt started in eight Researchers have recovered more than two hundred and seventy five artifacts, including an embossed leather folio with a quill tucked inside. Although it is not yet known whose folio this was or what was written inside of it. Divers discovered this as the most remarkable find of the season. Because of the conditions of the Arctic waters where these ships went down. Diving is possible only in the summer and using special equipment to help keep divers warm. Divers didn't visit the other ship, the HMS Terror, during last summer's dives, because it is in much deeper water, so archaeologists consider it to be more secure than the Arabis. You know, they're prioritizing the Arabis since it's a little bit more threatened. The team conducted fifty six dives during this very narrow diving window, and they focused a lot of their efforts on the steward's pantry on the ships that they brought up a lot of tableware. Next, in the late nineteenth century, an unusual ship design was developed almost exclusively to move freight around the Great Lakes. It's called the whale back. Although some of these vessels were later moved and used in other bodies of water, only forty four of them were ever made, and all but two of those were made for use in the Great Lakes. The name comes from its appearance, looking a little bit like the back of a whale. They're shaped almost like a cigar, with the ends curved slightly upward and ending in a blunted off shape almost like a pig snout. Barged one nine was a whale back ship that collided with another vessel during a storm on October nineteen o two. Although the crew managed to evacuate to that other ship, Barged sank. A remote operated vehicle captured the first images of the vessel on the floor of the lake into one, and its identification was announced late last year. This was the last as yet undiscovered wreck of a whale back ship, so of all the ones that had wrecked, this was the only one that until now we didn't know exactly where it was. A wreck known as the Scuff Doh was found by a diver off the coast of Sweden in two thousand three, and although investigations were conducted in the years that immediately followed, a new analysis of the ship and its cargo was just published last year, and this research has formed sort of a snapshot of maritime trade in Northern Europe during the fifteenth century. For example, the ship was made of timber that was cut down between fourteen thirty seven and fourteen thirty nine, while the trees that it was carrying as cargo date to fourteen forty to fourteen forty three. So it seems like this ship went down not long after it was built. The cargo included pieces of copper that had been mined in two regions of what's now Slovakia. There were bricks from Poland and Poland was also probably the source of the timber. Quicklime came from the island of Goodland in Sweden. Together, the various types of cargo identified and their origin points suggests that the ship was departing from the Hanseatic League port known as Goadant now Danzig, probably bound for Bruge. I just thought it was interesting has provided like one snapshot of this interconnected trade network and other news. Meisa is the largest lake in Norway and it serves as a source of drinking water for about a hundred thousand people, but it has also been used as a munitions dump. So researchers started a project to survey the floor of the lake and to map all of the dump sites using high resolution sonar, ultimate goal being to clean up the lake. In the process of this mapping, they also found what appears to be an extremely well preserved shipwreck. Very little is known about the wreck at this point. It is estimated as dating back to somewhere between thirteen hundred and eighteen fifties, so that is quite a time span. Uh. That's called hedging your bets on the gas. It is extremely well preserved, apart from a little bit of corrosion in some of the nails used in its construction. One reason all of this seems pretty vague is that there were attempts to send a remotely operated vehicle to capture images of the wreck, which might have helped learn more about it, but that had to be scrubbed due to weather. So researchers are hoping to try again next year, maybe get some pictures and clear some things up and in similar we don't know what this might be. News Nantucket residence Matthew Pelka found what appears to be the remains of a shipwreck while out on the beach in early December. The area in and around the island of Nantucket is home to a lot of shipwrecks, but at this point there's not a clear sense of which one this might be. There's some speculation that it might be the remains of a nineteenth or early twentieth century vessel used to ferry cargo to and from the island, rather than something that was meant for longer voyages. Regardless, just stumbling over the decaying timbers of a wreck ship while out on a local beach seems like it would be quite the experience. Yes, just sort of like, is that a is that a shipwreck looks kind of like part of a ship? Uh. Two more medieval cogs have been discovered in a lake in Sweden, this time during construction of a railway tunnel. They've been nicknamed Barberg skugg In one and two after their location, which was found near Barberg. Cogs have come up on several installments of Unearthed, and this is the third cog that we have talked about from But this type of ship is actually pretty rare. Only seven of them have been found in Sweden, only thirty or so have been found in all of Europe. Um. I had this moment where I was like, I keep reading about how rare these ships were, but I feel like we've been talking about them a lot, so finding two of them together is pretty unusual. Both cogs have been dated to the fourteenth century using tree ring analysis of the timbers that were used to build them. Also in Sweden, maritime archaeologists have found the Uplet, which was the sister ship to the seventeenth century warship Vassa. The Vasa sank on its first voyage in Sight and was covered by previous host of the show in the eleven episode More Shipwreck Stories Battleships. The Applet was built by the same shipbuilder as the Vassa and was launched a year later, with both ships having pretty similar dimensions and construction. The Applet was an active service during the Thirty Years War, and the active service continued until sixteen fifty eight and then a year after that, during the Second Northern War, it was intentionally sunk along with seven other ships. This is an attempt to block off a strait that could be used to attack Stockholm by sea. Just in case you're thinking, wait, the Uplet sounds familiar somehow. In Unearthed in July, we talked about the discovery of a wreck that was at first believed to be the Opplet, but that turned out to be two other rex the Apollo and Maria, and other news. A nearly intact seventeenth century dress, which was probably a wedding dress, was pulled from a shipwreck off the Widden Islands in the Netherlands. Back and it was put on public display for the first time this past November at the Museum cop Skill. This dress was one of a lot of garments and other textiles that were part of this rex cargo, but it really took a while for conservators to figure out what exactly it was. Some of this was because of the time that it had been in the water, like the damage that it had faced on being submerged, but it also had to do with the nature of the garment itself. The various parts of this dress would have been pieced together by a maid while the wearer was being dressed, so it wasn't like one dress that you would just pick up and it's a whole thing. There were lots of different pieces to be put together. Yeah, if you've ever looked at like particularly you know Rococo era addresses, you see that some pieces literally get pinned together while you're getting dressed. This is not a pull on situation, no. Uh So in this case, conservatives believe that this was a wedding dress in part because the fabric is woven with a pattern of silver pieces known as a love not This would have made it very expensive, so it probably belonged to a very wealthy person or a member of the nobility, and in our last fine, which is more shipwreck adjacent than really about shipwrecks. Documentary film crew looking for the submerged remains of World War two era aircraft found a piece of the Space Shuttle Challenger off the eastern host of Florida. Divers pretty immediately realized what it was because of the recognizable pattern of tiles that acted as a heat shield during a shuttle's re entry into the atmosphere. If you are younger than Holly and I. The Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff on January, on what was supposed to be its tenth flight and the first flight of an American civilian in space. NASA confirmed this find, which is one of the largest single pieces of the Challenger that has been found, in a statement in November. So let's take a break and then we will dive into repatriations next. We have quite a number of repatriations to talk about, some of them in a fair amount of detail. In November, members of the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes traveled to Bury, mass the two sits to take custody of more than a hundred and fifty items, including weapons, clothing, pipes, and other belongings. These had been in the collection of the Founders Museum in Barry for more than a hundred years. A lot of these items are from the collection of Frank Route, who was the nineteenth century traveling shoe salesman who lived in Berry. He was a collector of Indigenous artwork and cultural items, and he kind of made a showcase out of his collection and then donated it to the town library in Eo. Route purchased some of these items while traveling from people who were selling things that they had made or owned to tourists, but some are also directly connected to the eighteen ninety Wounded Knee massacre. Route bought them from someone who had been contracted to clear the massacre site after it was over. According to tribal members who were present at the ceremony where these items were returned, they will be stored at the Ogala Lakota College as these communities decide what to do with everything. Everything has been authenticated, but there are still some questions to be resolved, like if anything needs to be returned to a specific family and how to most respectfully treat anything that was connected to the massacre. Members of multiple Lakota tribes, including descendants of Woundedknee survivors, have been trying to have these items returned for decades. This is one of many collections that became more widely known after the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was passed in nine Efforts to have these items returned have been going on at least since the early nineteen nineties, with one early proposal being for the museum to return the original items while indigenous communities made replicas to serve as replacements. A group of Woundednee descendants traveled to Bury this past April to visit the museum and again asked for the item's return. So NAGRA doesn't directly apply to this particular museum. This law is focused on federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funds, and the Founders Museum and Barry is a small collection that's housed within the Woods Memorial Library and it doesn't receive federal funds. The Very Museum Association and Barry Library Association did, however, consult with a NAGPRA specialist on how to return these items. Those consultations started earlier in After all this, there were still more than one items in the museum's collection that likely belonged to an indigenous nation, so the process is still ongoing to determine how those items should be returned. Next. Colgate University returned about fifteen hundred items to the Oneida Nation in November. These items are from a collection that the university acquired in nineteen fifty nine and had been housed at the Long Year Museum of Cultural Anthropology. These had been collected by Herbert Bigford, Senor between n and nineteen fifty seven. These were belongings that had been buried with people in sights around up state New York. News reports describe Bigford as an amateur archaeologist and as secretary for an organization whose members went on so called digging tours in the summertime. This is part of an ongoing process involving the university and the Onita Nation to return objects that started in the nineteen nineties. And just as a side note here, I really do not know anything about Herbert Bigford Senior. I don't know what relationship he had with the Oneita people, if any, or what kind of archaeological training he had, if any, or what kind of standards this organization he was part of had for their so called digging tours, if any again. But there is a long, long history of non indigenous people in North America just feeling entitled to go dig up the graves of Indigenous people and keep whatever they want. This has been going on for centuries. There are written accounts from like literally some of the earliest colonists in North America. It is still going on. So we have talked a lot on the show about the fields of archaeology and anthropology and museums and other institutions sort of examining their acquisition practices and their collections and making formal efforts to repatriate culturally important items and belongings. But there is also this whole other aspect of just ordinary random people who have no institutional connection, who are private citizens acting on their own, who like the things they have taken, haven't necessarily made their way into an institution that might be going through this kind of process. And speaking of institutions revisiting their practices, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University has announced its intent to return a collection of hair sample taken from seven hundred Indigenous children, which has been in the museum's collection for more than eighty years. Anthropologist George Edward Woodbury collected this hair from Indigenous children who were attending government run boarding schools between nineteen thirty and ninety three. So the reaction from Indigenous communities to this announcement was largely one of just heartbroken, horror and outrage. These schools, the boarding schools, they have a painful and deeply traumatic legacy. We've talked about them on the show a number of times. They were an act of cultural genocide and hundreds of children died while attending them. So and many Indigenous nations. Hair also has a very special cultural and religious significance, and that means the idea that vulnerable children's hair was being taken from them at these schools and then kept in a museum that was just particularly violating. In November twenty five, items returned to the Organized Village of Cake from George Fox University in Oregon. These items had been identified in when Frank Hughes, a member of the Cake Village Council, was working at the university as NAG pre coordinator. The items include a mask, woven baskets, and head dresses, some of which may have been given to visitors as gifts, but some of which were probably taken by missionaries in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. One piece, in particular is a wooden mask that was used to identify territory and it could only have been removed if someone cut it off the tree that it was on the organized village of cake Is in Alaska, which I neglected to put in that paragraph. And this was a sort of surprising thing because Um Hughes obviously knew that he was going to be looking at items that needed to be returned to various nations, did not expect that there was going to be something from his tribe where he lives to be part of that. Um moveing on to repatriations to nations that are located outside of the United States, six artifacts have been returned to turkeya from the United States that happened on October. These included items that were seized from two different auction houses and one private collector, and they included life sized statues, including a bronze statue of Roman emperor Lucius Verus, and there was also a Roman era sarcophagus that was returned as part of this The Netherlands has repatriated two hundred twenty three pre Hispanic artifacts to Mexico, part of an ongoing effort by the Mexican government to reclaim its cultural heritage from other nations. The oldest of these pieces date back to the thirteenth century b c. And they are from cultures from around most of what's now Mexico. These items are now with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History for analysis and conservation. The University of Cork has now plans to return artifacts, including a wooden sarcophagus and mummified remains, to Egypt. That return is supposed to happen in The sarcophagus and the remains were both donated to the university, and other items, including a set of four knopic jars, are also among these items that are being returned, but it is less clear how they became part of the university's collections. A set of ancient seals is being returned to Iraq from the United States after they were listed in an online auction site. In These items had been looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in two thousand three, following the US invasion of Iraq. Four of them are cylinder seals, which made an impression when rolled across the surface. Three of them are stamps. They are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of items that were stolen from Iraq in the wake of that invasion. Next up, Pope Francis has announced a plan to return three pieces of the parthen On to Greece. These items have been held in the Vatican City Museums, and in response to this announcement, the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports called for the return of the many similar items that are currently being held by the British Museum. Those are known as the Parthenon Marbles or the Elgin Marbles. We covered them as a two part episode back in and we have a few updates that are all related to the Beni bronzes and other items taken from the Kingdom of Benin. We've previously talked about Germany's announcement of a plan to return more than one thousand items to Nigerian authorities. That process is underway now, with ninety two sculptures being delivered to Nigeria by the city of Cologne. Cambridge University has also announced a plan to return one hundred sixteen artifacts to Nigeria from its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. As we talked about in more detail in our episode on the Benin Bronzes. One of the complex cities of all of this is that the Kingdom of Benin still exists, but not as an internationally recognized political entities. So most of the time are items that are being returned are going to Nigeria, which is the nation that exists to day in the same general area that the Kingdom of Benin occupied. We have also talked about the Smithsonian's announcement of a plan to return to Benien bronzes that are in its collection. An organization called the Restitution Study Group has filed suit against the Smithsonian to try to stop that effort. The organization's argument is that returning these items to Nigeria prevents the descendants of enslaved people now living in the US from being able to access parts of their heritage. However, at this point, twenty nine items that we're in the Smithsonian's collections have already been transferred to Nigeria with nine others remaining on long term loan. So that is where we will end Unearthed in two part one. We will have more stuff on Wednesday before listener mail. I have a quick correction. When we were doing our episode on Irving Berlin, we talked about the Marx Brothers movie The Coconuts um and made a random side comment. We were talking about how this movie, as many Marx Brothers movies were, was like more a vehicle for their comedic chaos than like something driven by a plot, right, um, And there was a side comment about who poked who in the eye. And we have gotten a number of emails from people who have pointed out that the Marx Brothers comedy did not generally involve poking one another in the eye. That was something more associated with the Three Stooges. Um. So, the Marx Brothers did have like some physical comedy and some slapstick, but they also had a lot of wordplay and a lot of like physical humor. Sometimes when you're watching a Marx Brothers movie, it's like there's a verbal joke that goes around around in circles until it becomes really absurd. Um. So yeah, we made an example that had more to do with a different comedy group simultaneously. Though there has been a very dismissive tone in some of these emails, making it sound like the Three Stooges were just slapstick with nothing else involved, when the Three Stooges comedy could also be very subversive and also be like very pointed in terms of social commentary. I found this not just in the emails that we got, but also more broadly on the Internet. There are a lot of people who seem very angry that people sometimes confuse the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges um and make it sound like the Three Stooges were just slapping each other with no rhyme or reason, when really it was like part of something that wove in a lot of often social commentary and satire, and not just like poking each other in the eye with nothing else happening on screen. Right one, I will say, when I realized this when someone sent us the first correction, I was morbidly embarrassed because, dude, I wore Gratio Marx glasses to my wedding. But that is the product of us trying to get a lot of episodes ready at the end of the year. But the other thing related to what you were just saying is that it is a little bit I don't know if dismaying is the right word. I grow chagrin when people um act as though that comparison and that confusion I think happens a lot, which is why people will get frustrated by it. But my other thing is like, it's not an insult to confuse someone with the Three Stooges. They are I pokey at times, but like as you said, there's a lot of very smart They're using the construct of them being buffoons to really lampoon a lot of people without them realizing it at the time because they thought, oh, there three dufices, right, right, So I'm sorry we I don't know if confused one for the other is right, Like, I'm sorry we we, in an unscripted moment, gave a wrong example of what we were trying to say. I don't really think we besmirched the name of the Marx Brothers by invoking the Three Stooges, because I don't think the Three Stooges need to be dismissed out of hand as purposeless violence, which is sort of how some of these things have characterized them. So I also have an actual email. Uh and this email it's from all the way back in November because it's related to our previous installment of on Earth, and I meant to read it before now and I forgot. This is from Hannah, and Hannah said Dear Tracy and Holly. As always, I enjoyed the seasonal Unearthed episodes. Coincidentally, Part two aired a few days after I participated in a three day conference about the Jews of medieval England. It was a rich and diverse workshop, bringing together researchers to discuss topics from tax and court records to manuscript glasses, from material culture and architecture, to curating museum exhibitions and methodology. Over dinner, I asked Dr Dean Irwin for his opinion on the recently published article about the possible identification of the skeletons found in the well in Norwich as Jews who fell victim to violence in the twelfth century. Dr Irwin shared with me his skepticism of this conclusion, and that from his familiarity with the historical records, it is more likely that the remains are those of people who were recent immigrants to the area from the continent, and not of members of the well established local Jewish community. The disappearance of local people whose presence was documented by the crown for taxation purposes would not have gone unnoticed in the legal records of the time, Yet no fine or other recourse is recorded. Hannah included UH linked to Dr Irwin's remarks and went on to say, I found this discussion of fascinating example of how our reading of history is ongoing and how many factors contribute to trying to achieve a more insightful understanding of the past, incorporating cutting edge DNA technology or medieval archival documents. Thank you again for continue to create one of my favorite podcasts. UH. And that again was from Hannah Um, So thank you so much for this email. I am sorry that I neglected it to read it back when it when it originally came to us. UM. I found this really interesting, not just because of it adding another dimension to that discovery that we talked about, but also because this comes up a lot. I think when there's new DNA research sometimes historians will say, hey, but we actually already had some written documentation about this that either confirms what the DNA research said or totally raises questions about whether that's actually the case or not. So I found this to be an interesting example of how DNA research and written historical records are both part of understanding all of this. UM so thank you again to Hannah for sending this email. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcasts that I heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media I miss in History, where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or 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 B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is time for Unearthed. This is our Unearthed installments to to close out the year. We know it's when it's actually coming out for folks who maybe are new to the show or don't remember. This is when we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed over the last three months, so in this case it's October November December of UH. Today we are going to talk about a whole bunch of updates, so things we've talked about before on the show, either on Unearthed or otherwise, as well as a whole bunch of shipwrecks and a whole bunch of repatriations. Just the updates shipwrecks and repatriations that was enough for one whole episode. Um part two on Wednesday, we'll be talking about the Edibles and the Potables and the art and some animals and some other stuff, so we can just get started right. So first, we've had several updates about the search for victims of the Tulsa massacre, which we first covered on the show in July. Investigations continued at Oaklawn Cemetery in October and November of last year, with crews finding thirty two total burials and exhuming the remains of eight people so they could be examined. So this is an ongoing process. It's kind of a multi step thing. First, they are examining the burials themselves to try to determine whether they were likely connected to the massacre. From there, they decide which ones they should exume, and then they need to examine the remains that have been exhumed to try to identify them if possible. So while investigators have found some burial sites and conducted some exhimations, the investigations with this are still ongoing. Research published in the journal The Holocene has proposed a new explanation for how and when the person known as Utsy the Iceman died and how his body came to be preserved in the ice. The most widely accepted idea before this point has been that Utsy died in the autumn more than five thousand years ago, and that his body was quickly buried in snow, where it essentially was freeze dried and then encased under glacial ice. According to this idea, it remained undisturbed for thousands of years before being found by hikers. But this newly published research calls really all of that in the question, suggesting that instead, based on the stomach contents and analysis of plant material found around him, Utzy really died in the spring, not the fall, so his body would have been exposed to the elements all through the summer rather than immediately being buried in the snow. Radio carbon dating all to suggests that some of the material found around him is newer than his body is, so that suggests that he was not completely buried in the ice that whole time, but instead was exposed at various points that additional material than being frozen in there with him later. So that's something that they think recurred several times in the centuries between his death and his discovery. This research to even suggests that Utsey did not die in the place where his body was found, but that in all of this melting and refreezing, his body was pushed down from a higher elevation. So that initial description of what might have happened to Utsey that I talked about before this last explanation by Tracy. It's a pretty unlikely series of events. It's often described as a series of miracles, and back in a lot of researchers thought that Utsey was fairly or even entirely unique, but this new proposal suggests a process that's a lot less miraculous and more commonplace, meaning that there could be other bodies like Utsi's out there which will be found as global temperatures continue to rise and glacial ice continues to melt. There have also been other remains and artifacts exposed through the melting ice in the decades since Utzy was found, so it has already become clear that he's really not quite one of a kind. Yeah, no shade to Utsy, just saying not a totally unique in the entire world scenario. Prior hosts of the show did an episode on Nutzy in January, and then we have had a lot of Utzy updates on various installments of Unearthed since then. He also appears on an episode I have been working on in the background for a long time, and we'll see if I ever get my act fully together on it, but fingers crossed, I'll look forward to it, and I saur fossil, believed to have been collected by Mary Anning, was excavated from southern England in eighteen eighteen. We most recently ran Past Hosts episode on Mary Anning is a Saturday Classic in September of This fossil is believed to be the first complete ichths R fossil ever found, but it was placed in the collections of the Royal College of Surgeons in London and was destroyed there when the city was bombed during World War Two, so the specimen at that point was believed to have been totally lost, aside from a scientific illustration that had been made in the nineteenth century. But in and researchers found two different casts of it in two different collections, one at Yale University's Peabody Museum and the other at Berlin's Natural History Museum, and the cast in Berlin wasn't listed in the museum's records. A paper on the discovery of these casts was published in Royal Society Open Science in November, and it points out that old casts like these can have historic and scientific importance but are often overlooked. In this case, the two casts have verified the accuracy of most of the scientific illustration that still survived, while also showing a couple of spots where the illustration didn't quite capture the specimen. It also notes that there may still be other casts of this same specimen in other museums collections. Yeah, it was one of those things where people were like, that looks familiar to me. Wait, it's something we thought had been totally destroyed that we actually have this cast of Moving on, In our previous installment of Unearthed, we talked about the Summerton Man, that is a previously unidentified body who had washed up in Australia. We talked about the announcement that a pair of researchers had concluded that this person was Carl Webb, known as Charles. So Police in Australia have also been conducting their own investigation into the Summerton Man's identity. They have not we're least their results or confirmed this investigation, but one of the two researchers involved in that investigation, Derek Abbott of Adelaide University, has contacted members of the web family to try to find more information about Charles and to just confirm this identification. That conversation Unearthed to photo album containing family photos, including a Charlie Webb, as well as a group photo of the Swinburne Technical College Under sixteen football team, one of whom is listed as ce Web. One family member also underwent DNA testing to confirm a link to Charles Webb. And another update to an earlier episode of an Earth. In July, we talked about the discovery of a led sarcophagus at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The sarcophagus was found during work to rebuild the cathedral's spire following the fire that damaged it very badly in twenty nineteen. So there were actually two sarcophagu i found. There was only one that was known when we talked about this. The second was found also. There were statues, sculptures and other items discovered. Both of these sarcophagu i have now been opened. One was marked with a brass plaque saying that it belonged to Antoine de la Porte, the canon of Notre Dame Cathedral, who died in seventeen ten. The identity of the other is not known, but has been nicknamed La Cavalier. This is believed to be the body of an affluent man in his thirties who died as long ago as the fourteenth century. Based on where he was buried, he would have been someone important, but other than that, not much as known. Yeah, it's a little unclear whether anybody will be able to figure out exactly who this was. It kind of depends on exactly how old that body was, because records before a certain point no longer exist. Moving on, in we did a two part episode on Executive Order ninety six and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War Two. While researching the people who had been incarcerated, Duncan Reigan Williams, director of the University of Southern California's nso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, realized that there was no complete, sort of master list of everybody who had been imprisoned under this order, So he assembled a team of researchers and volunteers to create one, compiling and cross referencing records from all of the various camps. The result is a sacred book called cho which is a handbound, thousand page book containing one thousand, two hundred eighty four names. This is the first attempt at a comprehensive list of everyone the United States imprisoned in these camps. The names are also displayed on a website arranged by birth year. The book itself is currently on display at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California, a where visitors are invited to view the book and to use a special hanko or signature seal to stamp up to six names in the book. Although a person doesn't have to be a survivor of one of the camps or a friend or relative of somebody who was incarcerated there to stamp one of the names, this is a process that they're hoping will help verify the names in the book, so people have an opportunity to do things like correct misspellings or add people in who might have been omitted in spite of all the research that went into this. Back in we did an episode on the last Carolina parakeet and other endlings, or the last known number of a species to live before it becomes extinct. One of the ones we mentioned was the last Tasmanian tiger or thili sign, who died at Hobar Zoo in Australia in ninety six Although the animals skeleton and skin were preserved and given to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, they later disappeared. Eventually people concluded that they must have been thrown away, but after somebody found an unpublished taxidermists report, the museum conducted a search and they wound up finding the skin and skeleton in a cupboard in the museum's education department. Because this was in very good condition, staff had used it as part of traveling educational exhibits, sort of like we need to take an example to show people, this is the best one we have, so it's what we'll take with us, not realizing exactly what it was and that it was the last style a sign. So now this is on display at the museum. And for our last update, the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath, England has acquired a handwritten copy of Caroline Herschel's memoir which contains material that was removed when it was edited and published. This will be going on display at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy, which is housed in the Hershel's home. This was an important acquisition for the museum. Most of Caroline's own documents and personal papers are still held by the Herschel family, so they're not necessarily available for the public to see, and most of the items that are on display at the museum are on loan rather than being owned by the museum. This is only the second artifact directly connected to Caroline that the museum has been able to purchase, although acquiring more items for the museum's permanent collection is one of its priorities. Our episode on Caroline Herschel came out as a Saturday Classic in March of twenty nineteen, and now we're going to take a quick sponsor break before we get onto the shipwrecks. Today, we have about a jillion shipwrecked discoveries uh and also some research done at at shipwreck sites that were previously known about, but this research is new. First researchers in the North at Sea have been trying to figure out whether wartime shipwrecks are polluting the water there and whether that pollution means that these wrecks should be removed. In this case, they focused on the V two John Mahn German ship that was sunk by the Royal Air Force in February of two. Based on their research yes this particular wreck is leaking toxic chemicals into the water, including nickel, copper, and arsenic, as well as chemicals found in fossil fuels and explosives. The amounts of the substances are at this point fairly small, although polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or p h s, which are found in fossil fuels, are altering the ecosystem around the ship, and this is one of many wartime shipwrecks in the area. Other ships may present bigger problems next up. After being on hold due to the COVID nineteen pandemic, dives and excavations have resumed at the site of the HMS Arabis, which was one of the ships that was lost during Captain John Franklin's attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage. That attempt started in eight Researchers have recovered more than two hundred and seventy five artifacts, including an embossed leather folio with a quill tucked inside. Although it is not yet known whose folio this was or what was written inside of it. Divers discovered this as the most remarkable find of the season. Because of the conditions of the Arctic waters where these ships went down. Diving is possible only in the summer and using special equipment to help keep divers warm. Divers didn't visit the other ship, the HMS Terror, during last summer's dives, because it is in much deeper water, so archaeologists consider it to be more secure than the Arabis. You know, they're prioritizing the Arabis since it's a little bit more threatened. The team conducted fifty six dives during this very narrow diving window, and they focused a lot of their efforts on the steward's pantry on the ships that they brought up a lot of tableware. Next, in the late nineteenth century, an unusual ship design was developed almost exclusively to move freight around the Great Lakes. It's called the whale back. Although some of these vessels were later moved and used in other bodies of water, only forty four of them were ever made, and all but two of those were made for use in the Great Lakes. The name comes from its appearance, looking a little bit like the back of a whale. They're shaped almost like a cigar, with the ends curved slightly upward and ending in a blunted off shape almost like a pig snout. Barged one nine was a whale back ship that collided with another vessel during a storm on October nineteen o two. Although the crew managed to evacuate to that other ship, Barged sank. A remote operated vehicle captured the first images of the vessel on the floor of the lake into one, and its identification was announced late last year. This was the last as yet undiscovered wreck of a whale back ship, so of all the ones that had wrecked, this was the only one that until now we didn't know exactly where it was. A wreck known as the Scuff Doh was found by a diver off the coast of Sweden in two thousand three, and although investigations were conducted in the years that immediately followed, a new analysis of the ship and its cargo was just published last year, and this research has formed sort of a snapshot of maritime trade in Northern Europe during the fifteenth century. For example, the ship was made of timber that was cut down between fourteen thirty seven and fourteen thirty nine, while the trees that it was carrying as cargo date to fourteen forty to fourteen forty three. So it seems like this ship went down not long after it was built. The cargo included pieces of copper that had been mined in two regions of what's now Slovakia. There were bricks from Poland and Poland was also probably the source of the timber. Quicklime came from the island of Goodland in Sweden. Together, the various types of cargo identified and their origin points suggests that the ship was departing from the Hanseatic League port known as Goadant now Danzig, probably bound for Bruge. I just thought it was interesting has provided like one snapshot of this interconnected trade network and other news. Meisa is the largest lake in Norway and it serves as a source of drinking water for about a hundred thousand people, but it has also been used as a munitions dump. So researchers started a project to survey the floor of the lake and to map all of the dump sites using high resolution sonar, ultimate goal being to clean up the lake. In the process of this mapping, they also found what appears to be an extremely well preserved shipwreck. Very little is known about the wreck at this point. It is estimated as dating back to somewhere between thirteen hundred and eighteen fifties, so that is quite a time span. Uh. That's called hedging your bets on the gas. It is extremely well preserved, apart from a little bit of corrosion in some of the nails used in its construction. One reason all of this seems pretty vague is that there were attempts to send a remotely operated vehicle to capture images of the wreck, which might have helped learn more about it, but that had to be scrubbed due to weather. So researchers are hoping to try again next year, maybe get some pictures and clear some things up and in similar we don't know what this might be. News Nantucket residence Matthew Pelka found what appears to be the remains of a shipwreck while out on the beach in early December. The area in and around the island of Nantucket is home to a lot of shipwrecks, but at this point there's not a clear sense of which one this might be. There's some speculation that it might be the remains of a nineteenth or early twentieth century vessel used to ferry cargo to and from the island, rather than something that was meant for longer voyages. Regardless, just stumbling over the decaying timbers of a wreck ship while out on a local beach seems like it would be quite the experience. Yes, just sort of like, is that a is that a shipwreck looks kind of like part of a ship? Uh. Two more medieval cogs have been discovered in a lake in Sweden, this time during construction of a railway tunnel. They've been nicknamed Barberg skugg In one and two after their location, which was found near Barberg. Cogs have come up on several installments of Unearthed, and this is the third cog that we have talked about from But this type of ship is actually pretty rare. Only seven of them have been found in Sweden, only thirty or so have been found in all of Europe. Um. I had this moment where I was like, I keep reading about how rare these ships were, but I feel like we've been talking about them a lot, so finding two of them together is pretty unusual. Both cogs have been dated to the fourteenth century using tree ring analysis of the timbers that were used to build them. Also in Sweden, maritime archaeologists have found the Uplet, which was the sister ship to the seventeenth century warship Vassa. The Vasa sank on its first voyage in Sight and was covered by previous host of the show in the eleven episode More Shipwreck Stories Battleships. The Applet was built by the same shipbuilder as the Vassa and was launched a year later, with both ships having pretty similar dimensions and construction. The Applet was an active service during the Thirty Years War, and the active service continued until sixteen fifty eight and then a year after that, during the Second Northern War, it was intentionally sunk along with seven other ships. This is an attempt to block off a strait that could be used to attack Stockholm by sea. Just in case you're thinking, wait, the Uplet sounds familiar somehow. In Unearthed in July, we talked about the discovery of a wreck that was at first believed to be the Opplet, but that turned out to be two other rex the Apollo and Maria, and other news. A nearly intact seventeenth century dress, which was probably a wedding dress, was pulled from a shipwreck off the Widden Islands in the Netherlands. Back and it was put on public display for the first time this past November at the Museum cop Skill. This dress was one of a lot of garments and other textiles that were part of this rex cargo, but it really took a while for conservators to figure out what exactly it was. Some of this was because of the time that it had been in the water, like the damage that it had faced on being submerged, but it also had to do with the nature of the garment itself. The various parts of this dress would have been pieced together by a maid while the wearer was being dressed, so it wasn't like one dress that you would just pick up and it's a whole thing. There were lots of different pieces to be put together. Yeah, if you've ever looked at like particularly you know Rococo era addresses, you see that some pieces literally get pinned together while you're getting dressed. This is not a pull on situation, no. Uh So in this case, conservatives believe that this was a wedding dress in part because the fabric is woven with a pattern of silver pieces known as a love not This would have made it very expensive, so it probably belonged to a very wealthy person or a member of the nobility, and in our last fine, which is more shipwreck adjacent than really about shipwrecks. Documentary film crew looking for the submerged remains of World War two era aircraft found a piece of the Space Shuttle Challenger off the eastern host of Florida. Divers pretty immediately realized what it was because of the recognizable pattern of tiles that acted as a heat shield during a shuttle's re entry into the atmosphere. If you are younger than Holly and I. The Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff on January, on what was supposed to be its tenth flight and the first flight of an American civilian in space. NASA confirmed this find, which is one of the largest single pieces of the Challenger that has been found, in a statement in November. So let's take a break and then we will dive into repatriations next. We have quite a number of repatriations to talk about, some of them in a fair amount of detail. In November, members of the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes traveled to Bury, mass the two sits to take custody of more than a hundred and fifty items, including weapons, clothing, pipes, and other belongings. These had been in the collection of the Founders Museum in Barry for more than a hundred years. A lot of these items are from the collection of Frank Route, who was the nineteenth century traveling shoe salesman who lived in Berry. He was a collector of Indigenous artwork and cultural items, and he kind of made a showcase out of his collection and then donated it to the town library in Eo. Route purchased some of these items while traveling from people who were selling things that they had made or owned to tourists, but some are also directly connected to the eighteen ninety Wounded Knee massacre. Route bought them from someone who had been contracted to clear the massacre site after it was over. According to tribal members who were present at the ceremony where these items were returned, they will be stored at the Ogala Lakota College as these communities decide what to do with everything. Everything has been authenticated, but there are still some questions to be resolved, like if anything needs to be returned to a specific family and how to most respectfully treat anything that was connected to the massacre. Members of multiple Lakota tribes, including descendants of Woundedknee survivors, have been trying to have these items returned for decades. This is one of many collections that became more widely known after the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was passed in nine Efforts to have these items returned have been going on at least since the early nineteen nineties, with one early proposal being for the museum to return the original items while indigenous communities made replicas to serve as replacements. A group of Woundednee descendants traveled to Bury this past April to visit the museum and again asked for the item's return. So NAGRA doesn't directly apply to this particular museum. This law is focused on federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funds, and the Founders Museum and Barry is a small collection that's housed within the Woods Memorial Library and it doesn't receive federal funds. The Very Museum Association and Barry Library Association did, however, consult with a NAGPRA specialist on how to return these items. Those consultations started earlier in After all this, there were still more than one items in the museum's collection that likely belonged to an indigenous nation, so the process is still ongoing to determine how those items should be returned. Next. Colgate University returned about fifteen hundred items to the Oneida Nation in November. These items are from a collection that the university acquired in nineteen fifty nine and had been housed at the Long Year Museum of Cultural Anthropology. These had been collected by Herbert Bigford, Senor between n and nineteen fifty seven. These were belongings that had been buried with people in sights around up state New York. News reports describe Bigford as an amateur archaeologist and as secretary for an organization whose members went on so called digging tours in the summertime. This is part of an ongoing process involving the university and the Onita Nation to return objects that started in the nineteen nineties. And just as a side note here, I really do not know anything about Herbert Bigford Senior. I don't know what relationship he had with the Oneita people, if any, or what kind of archaeological training he had, if any, or what kind of standards this organization he was part of had for their so called digging tours, if any again. But there is a long, long history of non indigenous people in North America just feeling entitled to go dig up the graves of Indigenous people and keep whatever they want. This has been going on for centuries. There are written accounts from like literally some of the earliest colonists in North America. It is still going on. So we have talked a lot on the show about the fields of archaeology and anthropology and museums and other institutions sort of examining their acquisition practices and their collections and making formal efforts to repatriate culturally important items and belongings. But there is also this whole other aspect of just ordinary random people who have no institutional connection, who are private citizens acting on their own, who like the things they have taken, haven't necessarily made their way into an institution that might be going through this kind of process. And speaking of institutions revisiting their practices, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University has announced its intent to return a collection of hair sample taken from seven hundred Indigenous children, which has been in the museum's collection for more than eighty years. Anthropologist George Edward Woodbury collected this hair from Indigenous children who were attending government run boarding schools between nineteen thirty and ninety three. So the reaction from Indigenous communities to this announcement was largely one of just heartbroken, horror and outrage. These schools, the boarding schools, they have a painful and deeply traumatic legacy. We've talked about them on the show a number of times. They were an act of cultural genocide and hundreds of children died while attending them. So and many Indigenous nations. Hair also has a very special cultural and religious significance, and that means the idea that vulnerable children's hair was being taken from them at these schools and then kept in a museum that was just particularly violating. In November twenty five, items returned to the Organized Village of Cake from George Fox University in Oregon. These items had been identified in when Frank Hughes, a member of the Cake Village Council, was working at the university as NAG pre coordinator. The items include a mask, woven baskets, and head dresses, some of which may have been given to visitors as gifts, but some of which were probably taken by missionaries in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. One piece, in particular is a wooden mask that was used to identify territory and it could only have been removed if someone cut it off the tree that it was on the organized village of cake Is in Alaska, which I neglected to put in that paragraph. And this was a sort of surprising thing because Um Hughes obviously knew that he was going to be looking at items that needed to be returned to various nations, did not expect that there was going to be something from his tribe where he lives to be part of that. Um moveing on to repatriations to nations that are located outside of the United States, six artifacts have been returned to turkeya from the United States that happened on October. These included items that were seized from two different auction houses and one private collector, and they included life sized statues, including a bronze statue of Roman emperor Lucius Verus, and there was also a Roman era sarcophagus that was returned as part of this The Netherlands has repatriated two hundred twenty three pre Hispanic artifacts to Mexico, part of an ongoing effort by the Mexican government to reclaim its cultural heritage from other nations. The oldest of these pieces date back to the thirteenth century b c. And they are from cultures from around most of what's now Mexico. These items are now with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History for analysis and conservation. The University of Cork has now plans to return artifacts, including a wooden sarcophagus and mummified remains, to Egypt. That return is supposed to happen in The sarcophagus and the remains were both donated to the university, and other items, including a set of four knopic jars, are also among these items that are being returned, but it is less clear how they became part of the university's collections. A set of ancient seals is being returned to Iraq from the United States after they were listed in an online auction site. In These items had been looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in two thousand three, following the US invasion of Iraq. Four of them are cylinder seals, which made an impression when rolled across the surface. Three of them are stamps. They are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of items that were stolen from Iraq in the wake of that invasion. Next up, Pope Francis has announced a plan to return three pieces of the parthen On to Greece. These items have been held in the Vatican City Museums, and in response to this announcement, the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports called for the return of the many similar items that are currently being held by the British Museum. Those are known as the Parthenon Marbles or the Elgin Marbles. We covered them as a two part episode back in and we have a few updates that are all related to the Beni bronzes and other items taken from the Kingdom of Benin. We've previously talked about Germany's announcement of a plan to return more than one thousand items to Nigerian authorities. That process is underway now, with ninety two sculptures being delivered to Nigeria by the city of Cologne. Cambridge University has also announced a plan to return one hundred sixteen artifacts to Nigeria from its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. As we talked about in more detail in our episode on the Benin Bronzes. One of the complex cities of all of this is that the Kingdom of Benin still exists, but not as an internationally recognized political entities. So most of the time are items that are being returned are going to Nigeria, which is the nation that exists to day in the same general area that the Kingdom of Benin occupied. We have also talked about the Smithsonian's announcement of a plan to return to Benien bronzes that are in its collection. An organization called the Restitution Study Group has filed suit against the Smithsonian to try to stop that effort. The organization's argument is that returning these items to Nigeria prevents the descendants of enslaved people now living in the US from being able to access parts of their heritage. However, at this point, twenty nine items that we're in the Smithsonian's collections have already been transferred to Nigeria with nine others remaining on long term loan. So that is where we will end Unearthed in two part one. We will have more stuff on Wednesday before listener mail. I have a quick correction. When we were doing our episode on Irving Berlin, we talked about the Marx Brothers movie The Coconuts um and made a random side comment. We were talking about how this movie, as many Marx Brothers movies were, was like more a vehicle for their comedic chaos than like something driven by a plot, right, um, And there was a side comment about who poked who in the eye. And we have gotten a number of emails from people who have pointed out that the Marx Brothers comedy did not generally involve poking one another in the eye. That was something more associated with the Three Stooges. Um. So, the Marx Brothers did have like some physical comedy and some slapstick, but they also had a lot of wordplay and a lot of like physical humor. Sometimes when you're watching a Marx Brothers movie, it's like there's a verbal joke that goes around around in circles until it becomes really absurd. Um. So yeah, we made an example that had more to do with a different comedy group simultaneously. Though there has been a very dismissive tone in some of these emails, making it sound like the Three Stooges were just slapstick with nothing else involved, when the Three Stooges comedy could also be very subversive and also be like very pointed in terms of social commentary. I found this not just in the emails that we got, but also more broadly on the Internet. There are a lot of people who seem very angry that people sometimes confuse the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges um and make it sound like the Three Stooges were just slapping each other with no rhyme or reason, when really it was like part of something that wove in a lot of often social commentary and satire, and not just like poking each other in the eye with nothing else happening on screen. Right one, I will say, when I realized this when someone sent us the first correction, I was morbidly embarrassed because, dude, I wore Gratio Marx glasses to my wedding. But that is the product of us trying to get a lot of episodes ready at the end of the year. But the other thing related to what you were just saying is that it is a little bit I don't know if dismaying is the right word. I grow chagrin when people um act as though that comparison and that confusion I think happens a lot, which is why people will get frustrated by it. But my other thing is like, it's not an insult to confuse someone with the Three Stooges. They are I pokey at times, but like as you said, there's a lot of very smart They're using the construct of them being buffoons to really lampoon a lot of people without them realizing it at the time because they thought, oh, there three dufices, right, right, So I'm sorry we I don't know if confused one for the other is right, Like, I'm sorry we we, in an unscripted moment, gave a wrong example of what we were trying to say. I don't really think we besmirched the name of the Marx Brothers by invoking the Three Stooges, because I don't think the Three Stooges need to be dismissed out of hand as purposeless violence, which is sort of how some of these things have characterized them. So I also have an actual email. Uh and this email it's from all the way back in November because it's related to our previous installment of on Earth, and I meant to read it before now and I forgot. This is from Hannah, and Hannah said Dear Tracy and Holly. As always, I enjoyed the seasonal Unearthed episodes. Coincidentally, Part two aired a few days after I participated in a three day conference about the Jews of medieval England. It was a rich and diverse workshop, bringing together researchers to discuss topics from tax and court records to manuscript glasses, from material culture and architecture, to curating museum exhibitions and methodology. Over dinner, I asked Dr Dean Irwin for his opinion on the recently published article about the possible identification of the skeletons found in the well in Norwich as Jews who fell victim to violence in the twelfth century. Dr Irwin shared with me his skepticism of this conclusion, and that from his familiarity with the historical records, it is more likely that the remains are those of people who were recent immigrants to the area from the continent, and not of members of the well established local Jewish community. The disappearance of local people whose presence was documented by the crown for taxation purposes would not have gone unnoticed in the legal records of the time, Yet no fine or other recourse is recorded. Hannah included UH linked to Dr Irwin's remarks and went on to say, I found this discussion of fascinating example of how our reading of history is ongoing and how many factors contribute to trying to achieve a more insightful understanding of the past, incorporating cutting edge DNA technology or medieval archival documents. Thank you again for continue to create one of my favorite podcasts. UH. And that again was from Hannah Um, So thank you so much for this email. I am sorry that I neglected it to read it back when it when it originally came to us. UM. I found this really interesting, not just because of it adding another dimension to that discovery that we talked about, but also because this comes up a lot. I think when there's new DNA research sometimes historians will say, hey, but we actually already had some written documentation about this that either confirms what the DNA research said or totally raises questions about whether that's actually the case or not. So I found this to be an interesting example of how DNA research and written historical records are both part of understanding all of this. UM so thank you again to Hannah for sending this email. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcasts that I heart radio dot com. We're also all over social media I miss in History, where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app or 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.