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Desert Kite Blueprints, Ancient Dysentery, and Stone Receipts - Ep 220
961 Plays1 year ago
On today’s show we have 3 news stories from the Middle East. The first story is about rock art “blueprints” for desert kites in Jordan. Then we move over to Jerusalem where researchers have tested the microbes left behind in ancient toilets and a stone receipt was found on the pilgrimage road between the gates of the city and the temple. We finish up with a short update about the archaeology project in downtown Miami.
Links
- Stone Engravings of Mysterious Ancient Megastructures May Be World's Oldest 'Blueprints'
- Desert Kites, Miami Pre-History, and Illicit Antiquities - TAS 165
- Ancient toilets unearthed in Jerusalem reveal a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease
- A 2,000-Year-Old Chalkstone Receipt, Carved With Customer Names and Prices, Was Just Uncovered in Jerusalem
- Archaeologists at the ancient Tequesta site in Miami are getting sick, at risk of cancer
Contact
- Chris Webster
chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Rachel Roden
rachel@unraveleddesigns.com
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Episode 220 Overview: Kites, Poops, and Receipts
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Archaeology Show, episode 220. On today's show, we talk about kites, poops, and receipts. Let's dig a little deeper, but make sure you got that protective gear on.
00:00:35
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the show, everybody. Rachel, how's it going? Great. I'm great. I like it when I just hit record again. I had no idea you were hitting record, so I'm like talking about something else. And you're like, welcome to the show. I'm like, OK, all right, doing this.
Recording from North Carolina and Travel Experiences
00:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, so we are actually recording from North Carolina. We bounced across the country. Yes, but not with the RV. Not with the RV. We flew here to visit my family. Yes, that's right. For the Memorial Day holiday. Yep, going out to the ocean for the week. It's going to be nice. Yeah, super fun.
00:01:07
Speaker
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. There is a theology there. Well, it was there, but now it's here. And then it's going to be there. It will
What are Desert Kites?
00:01:15
Speaker
be there. Okay. So we talked and I'll link to this in the show notes because it coincidentally, I just talked about this on the rock art podcast with Dr. Alan Garfield. And you guys went way in depth on it. We did because he's a rock art expert, but desert kites, it was episode 165, 169, something like that. And we talked about this as a news article and they're back in the news.
00:01:37
Speaker
So let's talk about that. The link is again in the show notes, but desert kites are pretty prominent in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In fact, there's tons of them there. There's also some in Syria and some other places all over the middle East, but that's where they're clustered at. Right. We'll get to some densities a little bit later, but they date to anywhere from, you know, seven or so to 9,000 years old. And they're basically game drive structures used to herd gazelles and antelopes into pits in the corners.
00:02:04
Speaker
where they could then, you know, kill them and have them for food. And there's a lot of them. And so it was clearly like a pretty common method of hunting in that time period, in that place. Yeah. And some of them, some single kites, they know just because of things found around it that they've been used for over a thousand years. So they use these things pretty regularly. But we'll talk about some of their purpose later on. But anyway, how would you know how to
Ancient Knowledge Sharing through Blueprints
00:02:30
Speaker
build one? You know, they all kind of look the same.
00:02:32
Speaker
And how would you know to do it too? Where does that knowledge come from? Right. Well, an archeologist named Remy Crissard from the French National Center for Scientific Research has done a study and this wasn't like recent research. Some of these things have been known for a little while and he just kind of pulled everything together into this article. He says they found what people are calling blueprints for these complex structures actually carved on boulders nearby. Okay.
00:02:57
Speaker
So rock art basically. Well, they are rock art. Yeah, it's rock art. They're inscribed and they look to scale just like the desert kites that are on the ground near them. That's really cool. So that's one way to transition or share the knowledge of how to do these things from one person or one group to another.
00:03:16
Speaker
Yeah, some people are calling this the oldest blueprints or plans that you see for your monumental structure. There have been other plans like this kind of found, mostly from Egypt. You see drawings of pyramids and stuff like that, and some from Mesopotamia around 7,000 years old. But nothing has ever been this precise and broad to scale, and this old at the same time. So there's obviously been precise
00:03:41
Speaker
things illustrated, but not that we're this old. I mean, people just didn't realize how, I guess, the knowledge that they had of doing these kinds of things back then. And I've always said, you know, our brains aren't really all that much different than they were 15,000, 20,000 years ago right now. We may have a little bit of different cognitive development because we live in a different culture and society, obviously.
00:04:03
Speaker
But they were certainly capable of doing whatever they needed to do. This drawing or blueprint, if you want to call it that, it was found beside one of the ancient heights in Jordan. And it was an engraving of a kite that's roughly 80 centimeters long, 32 centimeters wide. And that's about 32 inches by 13 inches. And that it sounds like that basically matches the nearby kites. Like it's a plan for one of the larger ones that you can see on the landscape.
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah. There's seven other nearby kites built to the same blueprints. Yeah. So they're all the same. They're star shaped. Essentially. I think I mentioned that in the beginning. It's a star shaped enclosure with pits in the corners and curved driving lines. Right. And like star shaped is very, yeah, that's subjective. I feel like, cause like when you look at it, it's like a,
00:04:53
Speaker
blobby star that might be running. I don't know. It's only star shaped in the fact that it's got, I think like five actual pits on it. Yeah. So it was like five points that each have a pit on the end of them. They're kind of cool looking like there's the points coming off of this larger area. And then at the end of each of those points, you can really see that there is like this circular thing that was probably the pit and some of them are bigger than others too. So it is clearly a very well thought out piece of architecture.
00:05:23
Speaker
Yeah, one of those big ones was actually found in 2015. It's a desert kite inscribed on a sandstone boulder, and the boulder itself is about nine feet wide by six feet tall. They didn't really mention how big the inscription was, but it's implied that it's way bigger. It's as big as that boulder. Possibly. And that boulder sits right smack in the middle of two pairs of star-shaped desert kites that correspond to the shapes on the engraving. Very cool.
00:05:50
Speaker
It also said in the article that there's actually entrances to the kites, like kind of like openings, I guess. These weren't like huge walls. They were only a couple rocks high. It was enough to, I guess, thwart the gazelle and the antelope because they're like, nope, that looks different. I'm going the other way. Yeah, it's kind of crazy they wouldn't just jump over it. But if it was too scary and weird to them, they wouldn't risk it, right? Too risky. Yeah, it was too foreign and they were being chased and they were nervous and, you know, they were they were fleeing because they don't fight. Right.
00:06:18
Speaker
But yeah, and they said that I guess near this boulder, there was actually some openings there because they would drive game into the kite. They first had to kind of get them in there. They'd probably go in just naturally because if they're just chill and looking for food, they'll probably just step over the rocks. But if they're all hurried and being chased, it looks like something different. They're stampeding basically, right? Yeah,
Ancient Toilets: Sanitation and Diseases
00:06:40
Speaker
yeah.
00:06:40
Speaker
But they did have kind of entrances that could be used to sort of drive them into the enclosure and these enclosures were Enormous not like a pen. Yeah, like they're huge. Yeah, if it was small, I imagine that the Desire to not jump over it would would go away and they just do it because it was small and they had nowhere else to go but these big ones they could sort of run around within it and Not have to jump over a wall, you know, so that I think that's how that worked. I
00:07:06
Speaker
Now these have been called world's oldest blueprints, which implies that they were made before the actual desert kites were made. But we don't actually know that, right? So what can be some other uses of it? Well, they say that they could be maps of already constructed kites. Like they made the desert kite and then etched it on the rock, inscribed it on the rock in order to use for planning. Like, okay, so, you know, John, you're going to be over here. Mike, you get over there and then we're going to do this.
00:07:34
Speaker
I'm sure those weren't the names. John and Mike, got it. Yep. Yep. They could also be used for.
00:07:41
Speaker
Can you name it? What's one other thing that could be used for? Ritual. Yay. And that's actually not too much of a joke. No, it's not. Some of these, again, there's evidence they've been used for thousands of years. And the archaeologist in the article here was, he basically said these people ate, slept, and breathed desert kites because it was their sole, not sole source, but it was a major source of their food. Their main source, yeah. It would have been a big activity pretty much every day, if not week of their lives, because one antelope would feed a family for a week. Right.
00:08:10
Speaker
you know, it would have been a constant activity and a constant probably maintenance and just thinking about these things. Yeah, like as soon as they had one successful hunt, they'd probably begin planning the next one because by the time they were done with the planning, you know, they'd finished the food they had and they used to do it again.
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah. So for those reasons, it could have been ceremonial to gather around the boulder and almost like, you know, like today, people would gather around something like that and pray, you know, and say, Oh, let's, let's do this thing. Right. Yeah. Whatever rituals they had as people. I mean, they do that before football games, right? Like it's just, it's just a thing people have done for a long time. So why wouldn't they have done it here? I could totally see that as a pre hunting sort of sort of thing or even
00:08:52
Speaker
You know, not that they met every Sunday for church, but you know, something that where they would regularly meet to like, you know, just give thanks or ask the gods whatever they believed in for, you know, favorable hunts or something. Did it mention if there are any other markings on the rock with the tights? They didn't mention them.
00:09:09
Speaker
Okay. Cause it doesn't mean the run. It would be interesting if it was some kind of like ownership type of thing too. Like if there were multiple bands of people in the area, if, if one group were like, okay, I'm going to inscribe this on this rock here, along with these other markings. And this says that this kite is mine, you know, like some kind of ownership sort of deal.
00:09:28
Speaker
It's possible. I think if there was, it would have been mentioned. Yeah, they probably would have mentioned it. It would also surprise me that there weren't any other markings, which might also lead to the ritualistic significance of these. Could be. Like you're not going to deface the rock with other stuff. Yeah, totally. And these things, like I said, are massive. And you might be thinking, well, how many of these could there possibly be? There's over 6,000 of them found across the Middle East and Central Asia. Yeah, so many. Yeah.
00:09:53
Speaker
I imagine like, cause they're not very tall, right? So that the construction of them was probably fairly simple. You know what it's interesting though is like, we're looking at an aerial image of it, right? So we can see what the whole shape of it looks like from above, which would have been a view that they didn't have. And I'm not going the ancient aliens route. Just get that out of your head. It's not a thing. Aliens didn't build these, but it does make you wonder if they drew this on the rock after the fact,
00:10:20
Speaker
How would they know the exact shape. I don't know it's like it's the chicken and egg situation like not really though and I think people always say that though but I think that's our our modern bias towards how we think of things. Your average human today us included we don't often have to think of how something looks conceptually and then actually create that when you actually do.
00:10:43
Speaker
artists do this, right? Like you design knitting patterns and you get something in your head and you have to get that thing in your head down on a pattern. And then you have to make it in a thing. And I think it was more common for somebody living back in this environment to be able to conceive of how this is going to work. And even like pacing it out and saying, okay, so, you know, even though I can't see this from above, I know that, you know, on our drawing here, we have it going from here to here. It would have been easier to reconstruct the drawing based on the thing.
00:11:11
Speaker
That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. So maybe it did go that way. And actually your, your comparison to knitting patterns is really interesting because yeah, I get an idea in my head and I'll sketch something out on paper for what I think it is going to look like or what I want it to look like. But then when you get into the actual mechanics of doing it, stuff changes.
00:11:27
Speaker
You know, like just the, Oh, that won't work the way I wanted it to. It changes. So that would make me think that if they are truly exact images or blueprints, then it was more of an after the fact drawing rather than a before drawing, unless they already had one that was successful that they liked and they were trying to copy it. And in that case, I would think that that is, but it's still a copy of one that already happened. Anyway, that's just my speculation. Yeah.
00:11:51
Speaker
Well, and it's possible that they they had failed designs too because of the sheer number of them, right? Yeah, totally in parts of Syria Jordan and Saudi Arabia There's up to one kite for every square kilometer. It's just like you can't You can't walk through the desert over a desert. Yeah, like why do antelope and gazelle even go there? It's just a death zone
00:12:11
Speaker
Well, but like you said, when they're just like moseying around, grazing, they don't even know or care about it. It's when they get them running that they get scared and don't want to jump those walls. Well, like I said earlier, this shows that even 7,000 years ago or more, people were willing to design and construct monumental structures that utilize the landscape. And another thing you notice from this picture is there's at least two spots I can see on here. One on the left hand side is as the picture is oriented, where they use the natural boulders in the landscape.
00:12:38
Speaker
Oh, true. And then in the upper right side of it, it almost looks like there's an outcropping there that they used as well. It does. Yeah, I bet they would take advantage of the natural landscape. Why not, right? Use it to your advantage. And in the bottom right and bottom left, it almost looks like this is on a little bit of a plateau and that it falls off into the pits. So the antelope would have jumped down. There's probably people lying in wait down there. Yeah, totally.
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, because the pits wouldn't necessarily hold the Enelope. They had to get in there pretty quick and kill whatever they needed for their hunt, right? Yeah. Because I bet they would figure out they could jump the wall at some point and they would get out.
00:13:15
Speaker
Well, they were probably so excited about doing these things that, much like the people of Jerusalem 2,500 years ago, they just crapped themselves with excitement. Oh my God. Back in a minute. Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 220. And I did mention this in the beginning, but we kind of have a whole Middle Eastern theme going on here. We do. Yeah, because this article is in Jerusalem. And actually, so is the next article. So it's like Middle Eastern and specifically Jerusalem. I know.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah. So when you click on the link for this next article called ancient toilets unearthed in Jerusalem, reveal a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease.
00:13:53
Speaker
It's a rock with a hole in it. Now it's a, it's a very square rock, which I find interesting. So it was definitely carved to be that way. Yeah, it was shaped that way. There's a very good hole in it that looks like it was augured out with like a drill. I mean, it's an amazingly like symmetrical round hole. And I don't really know people, archeologists always like to put scales and stuff, but then they don't put any measurements on it. What is that scale?
00:14:18
Speaker
It looks like it's probably five centimeters. Yeah, I had to guess it's probably not ten But if it were five that would put it at five to twenty five centimeters across which is 12 inches give or take ten inches four inches for ten centimeters Okay, so yeah about yeah, yeah about that yeah, which isn't very big which means this probably isn't five centimeters Yeah, not twenty five across yeah either way
00:14:42
Speaker
Either way, we have no idea, because the scale is not defined. I'll tell you what, I don't know if I could hit that hole no matter how big it is. It's pretty small, but... Do you think there could have been an attachment on top of it? Like something that was bowl-shaped to direct liquids? Like a pot? Yeah. Well, we're getting ahead of ourselves. We are. We do that all the time. We like to jump ahead. I just want to point out that sometimes archaeology isn't as glamorous as TV and movies make it out to be. We've definitely been in situations where we're just like,
00:15:10
Speaker
hacking through briars where, you know, we're just scrambling over pits. We're picking up somebody else's cans and trash and just like measuring them in detail. Yeah. Well, we are, as a group, we're obsessed with what gets left behind, right? And we're obsessed with waste. Yes. Waste, trash. That's what we, that's what we have. That's all we've got. So, and you know what waste includes?
00:15:32
Speaker
Poop. Poop. That might be why I wouldn't say this is true of all archaeologists. It's definitely true of us. We've gone like the other direction. Like I'm very conscious of my archaeological record I'm leaving behind and I don't want it to be big. Are you doing like leave no trace archaeological record style? I think I am. Yeah. Like I want to own very few things. But that would be a physical waste.
00:15:53
Speaker
Oh yeah. Your digital waste is my digital waste. And then my, my latrine waste is actually just the same as everybody else's anyway. So in Jerusalem, some archeologists analyzed 2,500 year old poop from ancient pit toilets.
00:16:10
Speaker
I have to say poop like that. You just have to. Okay. It's written in a CNN article. Yeah. Well poop happens. That's right. So we'll get to it, but traces of dysentery causing parasites were found below two stone toilets belonging to elite households. And these weren't toilets in the same house. No, they were just two different stone toilets. Yeah.
00:16:30
Speaker
Now Jerusalem at this time, 2,500 years ago, was at the center of the Assyrian empire. It was home to between, and this is quite the range, 8,000 and 25,000 people. We should have a better idea of that. I don't know why we don't. I think it's just hard. You probably have conflicting records and so you don't want to be wrong. So you just do the whole range, right? Well, it was also the center of the political and religious center of the Assyrian empire, you know, as it is for a lot of people today anyway. Yeah. But it was a,
00:16:59
Speaker
because of that, there were probably a lot of transients and travelers coming through. Oh, sure. And probably certain times a year, there's more people there than other times because of various religious ceremonies and other things that would bring more people. So that might account for the range. It just depended on the time of year, the season.
00:17:16
Speaker
So I'm going to read a quote here from Dr. Pierce Mitchell, who's the lead author of the study that is referenced in the article. He says that dysentery is spread by feces contaminating drinking water or food. And we suspect it could have been a big problem in early cities of the ancient Near East.
00:17:31
Speaker
due to overcrowding, heat and flies and limited water available during the summer. So makes sense. Yeah. I mean, heat and flies. I mean, honestly, what that means is not only was the latrine or the pit that they dug out for this probably seeping into the drinking water, but flies would just like land on this and then probably go land in a well that has drinking water. They would just like transmit the feces around. Well, and also like these two
00:17:55
Speaker
toilets that we're looking at specifically are really nice fancy stone toilets, right? In the fancy houses. I don't think that the lower classes would have had a similar situation and they might've been dumping waste like right into their water sources, like the river or whatever it was that they got their water from. So it probably could get pretty, pretty rank around there in the summer. People started living closer to each other and started living in cities before they figured out plumbing.
00:18:22
Speaker
Yes, for sure. And they just didn't understand how to do it. They just kept cramming more people into a small space. Yeah. And just didn't know what kind of effects the waste that they were creating was having. Well, they had no idea these microorganisms exist. They had no idea that, you know, disease was related to things like that. They still thought that it was caused by gods and just like their behavior. And yeah. So anyway, eggs.
00:18:46
Speaker
which is super gross, eggs of four types of intestinal parasites were found, including tapeworm, pinworm, roundworm, and whipworm. God, just the thought of that in my body is like so gross. But the microorganisms that actually cause dysentery are fragile and pretty hard to find. So they use this technique that is actually mentioned in the article. I didn't write it down in my notes because I didn't think it was important, but now I want to know what it is. It's called
00:19:12
Speaker
called ELISA, E-L-I-S-A, and it's all capital letters, which means it stands for something. It's like CRISPR, which is the, I can't remember what it stands for, but that's like the technique they use to basically splice DNA. But anyway, they use this technique, which essentially uses antibodies that bind onto proteins that are uniquely produced by particular species of single-celled organisms. So these single-celled organisms, they produce these proteins
00:19:38
Speaker
And these guys, they know what they are, and they have these antibodies. Antibodies link, like, link themselves to proteins. That's what they do. And so if they latch on to a particular protein, that means it exists. Okay. Which means the species exists. That means, okay, got it. Yeah. So you're basically linking onto their waste. Yeah. Wow. That's so cool and really crazy. I know. Yeah. They tested for Entomieba. I don't know how to say that. Entomieba? Yeah. Entomieba. Entomieba, Giardia, and Crypto.
00:20:05
Speaker
Sporidium, cryptosporidium. These are the most common microorganisms responsible for diarrhea and could be behind outbreaks of dysentery. Only the test for Giardia, however, was positive. The others were not. Right. And Giardia is still a thing today. You hear about it at the hot springs in Nevada when there's cows nearby and then the Giardia just gets into the system and into the hot spring and you have to be very careful.
00:20:32
Speaker
Isn't that what they call like when you're drinking from like streams where you have to clean the water they call it beaver fever? Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they can transmit to your Giardia. Mm-hmm. Yep I mean like we said this area would have had to deal with these things first because the Middle East
00:20:48
Speaker
was the first place where humans first developed agriculture, domesticated animals, and started creating settlements and becoming more sedentary. And from that came towns, cities, just more people crammed together in a smaller place. And they're all just, you know, having a good time drinking, making art, and creating fun, new diseases for everybody to enjoy. To enjoy together. Yeah. Yep. And also die from, you know,
00:21:13
Speaker
They're just creating this Petri dish where these microorganisms that have a life cycle that is extremely short can evolve quickly because of their short lifespan. Yep. Yeah. So that's gross. Yeah, that's super gross. One of the interesting things about this article to me, though, is that the sort of class differences that you can sort of start imagining, like with this pretty beautiful really and nicely made stone toilet, which I think probably would have had some kind of
00:21:40
Speaker
Something on top of it. Yeah, maybe like a like a bowl with a hole in it or something, you know my fancy ass on hard stone rock
00:21:48
Speaker
I want a cushion and I want a ceramic bowl. Yes. Well, I don't know if you want to sit on a ceramic bowl. I do every day. Fair. I guess they could have made something sturdy enough, but. Porcelain. Porcelain back then? No, I don't think so. Porcelain that old. Porcelain probably is in the eat. In the farries. In the farries. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:11
Speaker
But anyway, so that just is really interesting to me because it does make me wonder if the people in the upper classes that had a toilet like this would be more protected from the microorganisms in their waste. Whereas you imagine that the lower classes probably had more close contact with it and maybe they were then getting it more.
00:22:30
Speaker
Maybe, but it's clear that the people who were using this toilet had these, yeah, they had the microorganisms. It's in their waste. I guess my question would be like, is the rate the same between the different classes? I don't know if there's a way to know that, but it would be interesting to see.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah, man. Super gross. Yep, totally. Anyway, what I'm wondering too is with these, I guess latrines they were calling them were privies, they're basically a hole that's dug out underneath where you're using the toilet. But that has to also be excavated periodically as well. You're not just going to move your toilet in your house. So I think if somebody did excavate that for me and
00:23:11
Speaker
It was not done very well. I would want my money back. And for that, I'd probably have to keep my receipts.
Uncovering a 2000-Year-Old Stone Receipt
00:23:18
Speaker
We'll talk about Jerusalem receipts in a minute. Welcome back to the archaeology show episode 220. And we're going to talk about a 2000 year old stone receipt discovered in Jerusalem.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah. So we're moving forward in time a little bit here. This is newer than our, our last segment, but it is still Jerusalem. So they're making some good discoveries there these days. And it's not a receipt for cleaning out your latrine. Well, I mean, we don't know. Maybe it's got writing on it. We don't know what it's a receipt for. Yeah. So this article is called a 2000 year old chalkstone receipt carved with customer names and prices was just uncovered in Jerusalem.
00:24:02
Speaker
And this is pretty breaking news. It just came out a couple days ago, basically. And what it is, it's a fragment of a heavy stone lid of an ossuary with seven lines of text on it. Yeah. And those lines are partially legible because it is just a fragment, but they do appear to be people's names and sums of money, which is where the receipt piece of this comes from.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, they are likely what they think is a record of financial transactions, like a payment for workers or people who owed money. Yeah. Oh, it's like a ledger. Oh, is this like the guy who like has guys that go around and like pummel people for money? And this is his list of who owes him and like who needs to be pummeled. I mean, maybe, but it was a stone lid of an ossuary.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, yeah, I don't, they did not explain why it's an ossuary. I had some, maybe it's reused, you know, just a reused piece of stone. I don't know. Or did somebody just like want everybody to know that, listen, I might be dead, but you owe me and here's your names and here's the sum of money. Oh my God. That would be the most like vindictive thing that you could possibly do to publicly shame the people that owe you money when you die.
00:25:15
Speaker
Like I'm taking this to the grave. Like I know that I can't do anything about getting this money back right now, but I'm going to shame you. Exactly. It's just, it's like so deeply like mean and human that I kind of love it. Okay. Well that's, I'm going to say that's what that was. All right. The authors are saying though, that it's like an ancient receipt.
00:25:36
Speaker
Now, receipts are not something that usually survive the archaeological record because they're too mundane and nobody really purposely preserves them. You more find them by chance or maybe in a situation where a larger institution might preserve its receipts. But an individual, it just doesn't really happen that often.
00:25:58
Speaker
So the stone was dated to between 100 BCE and 100 CE. So it's straddling that millennia change there right at the time of Jesus, if that is your cup of tea, like all that was going on in Jerusalem at that time.
00:26:15
Speaker
And based on the script, as well as similarities to other inscriptions, that's where the date comes from. Yeah, sure. Yeah, because language is changing, I wouldn't say quickly, but enough that we can track that, you know, and say, well, if it's written like this, then it must date to around this timeframe. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And there's always trends too, like trends and how they write things and the way it looks. So you can follow that kind of stuff.
00:26:41
Speaker
One of the inscriptions is for somebody called Shimon. And that is followed by the Hebrew letter Mem. And Mem is apparently an abbreviation of Ma'at, which is the Hebrew word for money. So that's where they're getting this whole money thing from.
00:27:01
Speaker
And Shimon was like John in early Roman times. Yeah, it was like a popular biblical name. Although, while I haven't exactly read all of the Bible, I've literally never heard the word Shimon mentioned in any sort of biblical reference.
00:27:16
Speaker
Not that I'm a scholar on it, but if it's so common, why would I have heard it? I think it was common for them, but not necessarily common now, if that makes sense. Is this a popular biblical name? Yeah, that's what they said in the article. Yeah, that's crazy. Anyway, the stone fragment was found in a debris pile during a salvage excavation, more CRM, on pilgrimage road, so kind of a popular place.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah, the road extends about 600 meters and it connected Jerusalem city gate with the gates of Temple Mount and Temple Mount is where the second temple was located. So basically like the city was over here and it was 600 meters away was where their temple where they would go for all their religious purposes, ceremonies and things like that. So there's basically a lot of traffic on this road at that time. People going back and forth for various religious reasons to the temple.
00:28:08
Speaker
Just let note for the listeners, Rachel's wildly gesticulating with her hands. I don't know if you could see that. I always wildly just articulate when I'm talking about this kind of stuff. So do you. It's over here. It's over there. I hope you guys can visualize. It's over in the living room and then the temple is over in the bedroom. Okay. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. In the early Roman period. So from about 37 BC to 70 C this road that we're talking about was heavily trafficked and was probably a commercial hub.
00:28:36
Speaker
Lending credence to what I was saying 500 years earlier about the amount of traffic coming through there, it's even more now. It is, yeah. And this was the road that connected these two places, but also they found stone weights and measuring tables in some of the excavations that they've done on this road. And that's the kind of thing that you see for commerce. So it's like, I am imagining this road that was just like lined with vendors selling things. Yeah. And they had to have a beach in Mexico.
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure, but those guys are on the move, right? It sounds like it must have been somewhat established if they're finding remains of weights and tables and things, you know? It all depends on what the customers are doing, right? The customers were sitting on the beach, and the vendors had to be on the move to get new customers. But here, people are walking down the road. The people are on the move. Yeah, the vendors just wait. Yeah, it's a drive-by situation. Yeah, exactly. So, Jerusalem has a really interesting history with the Romans.
00:29:34
Speaker
Basically, 37 BCE is when Herod the Great captured Jerusalem after a 40-day siege. And he was there kind of like sanctioned by the Romans, basically. He wasn't Roman, but he was from Judea, but they sanctioned him to be there, basically. And so he took over the city and he actually built the Second Temple, too.
00:29:55
Speaker
And he led Jerusalem into a time of prosperity, basically. And it was a really great time until he died and he had heirs and things didn't go well. And then they brought in the Pontius pilot guys whose name I can't remember what they are right now, but the, you know, the guy that executed Jesus, those guys, the protectorate people came in, they ran Jerusalem for awhile.
00:30:18
Speaker
There was a lot of strife by the time we get to the 70 CE time period. The Jewish people rose up in revolt and Rome squashed them and burnt down their temple. That is a really quick and dirty history. But I just thought it was interesting to know the backdrop of what is going on at this time with this temple and the heavily trafficked road in between the city and the temple.
A Quick History of Jerusalem
00:30:41
Speaker
So there you go. There's your five minute history of Jerusalem.
00:30:45
Speaker
So apart from the roads, sanitation, and the aqueduct, what did the Romans ever give us? Gotta bring out a Monty Python quarter. We're talking about Jerusalem in two different articles. Yeah, every time. So it's time to watch Life of Brian again.
00:31:00
Speaker
No, I haven't seen that one in a really long time. You want a good history of that area? That's just how you watch it. Oh, do you think? It's from a secondhand source. So you have to, it's not Jesus, it's Brian. So, you know. Oh man. Yep. All right. Well, there's lots of cool things coming out there. And as we head into the field season for a lot of places in the Northern hemisphere,
00:31:22
Speaker
It's kind of interesting because news articles continue to come out because journals continue to publish. But I feel like there should really be like a drop off in this kind of stuff because people are doing a lot of field work over the summer. Just because a lot of people that do this field work are also academic professors and they teach and do their analysis and write up during the school year.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, they get that stuff done by the end of the year, and then they're heading out into another field season. Right. Yeah. That means that we might see a lot more press releases like this because they haven't had time to write it up, but they still want to get it out there. And in some places, it's really important for them to do that. You don't often see that with US CRM projects unless it's a high profile project. If it's somewhere that everybody can see and you can't hide it and it's not in the middle of the desert in Nevada for a mine somewhere that's run out of Canada, then
00:32:09
Speaker
you're probably gonna hear about it in a press release, but otherwise, yeah. So speaking of press releases, I thought it might be kind of fun to just do like a quick update on Miami. Oh my God. We have a little bit of extra time in this segment and there was an article that came out recently about it and we weren't gonna talk about it cause it's not really archeology related, but we do talk about Miami on here kind of a lot since we both worked on the project there 20 years ago, but the new project is ongoing. 20 years ago.
00:32:39
Speaker
Uh, 17, 18 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. 2005. That was 18 years ago, my friend. Yeah, that's upsetting. So anyway, there's a recent article that came out called archeologists at the ancient to Kesta site in Miami are getting sick at risk of cancer. And it does seem a little bit alarmist, but there's probably some truth there. And it is really interesting that the way the
00:33:09
Speaker
archaeology companies. I'm not going to name anybody. We don't need to go down that road. It's all an article if you want to go read it, which we'll link to in the show notes. But some of the archaeologists have reported getting sick and various different symptoms, rashes, vomiting, diarrhea, upset stomach, that kind of thing, nausea. And they're saying that they're being exposed to chemicals on this excavation that they're working on, which is an old oil tank storage area from a while ago. And they say that that's causing illness. So
00:33:38
Speaker
I didn't know that. Other articles we read didn't say we used to be there. No, they didn't. And this was not true of the area that we worked in. I don't, not that we know. But we, and we, they're smelling things. Like they say that they, things like smell really bad as they're digging through. So anyway, it's just really interesting to see how
00:33:58
Speaker
that is progressing and hopefully they're going to mediate any unsafe circumstances or, you know, this is just a complaint and the investigation
The Impact of Field Seasons on Discoveries
00:34:08
Speaker
is still ongoing. So we don't know how valid the complaints are yet. Not that I want to take away anybody's, you know, thunder, but there's still an investigation to be done. So yeah. And this is why doing historical background research on places is really important, not just to
00:34:25
Speaker
understand what you might find, but for the safety of the archaeologists as well, I'm shocked that they didn't plan for this a little better and just prepare for it and have them wearing protective gear just in case they found something. Do you remember when we worked in North Carolina near the Cape Fear River? There was one spot where it just smelled terrible. I don't know what it was or what was going on there. It was kind of like a chemical smell.
00:34:50
Speaker
What did we do for that? Didn't we like, we had to wear gloves for sure. We wore gloves. I think we ended up not digging there. Yeah, maybe like they were maybe going to do more testing, but they decided not to for safety reasons or something like that. I never felt unsafe though. Like when we started smelling something weird, they backed away. Yeah, we backed out immediately, but we weren't forced to dig in it.
00:35:09
Speaker
No, well, and everybody does have a choice. So you do wonder like how upfront they were with potential safety concerns. But you know, if it's an actual like hazmat issue, you need to have full gear for that. And they're clearly not doing that. I have seen projects like old hospitals and things like that where people do have to wear like full hazmat gear. So if they were worried about safety, then that should have been the route that they went. But I don't know. One other time I could think that we were,
00:35:37
Speaker
in a potentially unsafe situation but again we're able to get out of it is I remember this one this one mine and I want to say it was it's south of I-80 between like Battle Mountain and and wherever but anyway it was this mine I remember exactly where it was way there like out that way but down south okay yeah I remember working out there and we saw these barrels that had like this white substance in it and cyanide was used a lot yeah was it silver I think it was for silver it helps
00:36:07
Speaker
Essentially, this isn't the right term, but it helps like dissolve or melt away the rock and leaves the silver behind. So it helps get rid of the matrix. That's not the right way to say it exactly, but it helps to extract the silver. I think it was either silver or gold. That's one of the two things they were using that for. But yeah, you could smell this. Like, I don't know if it was cyanide. They say it smells like almonds, I think, but it didn't old cyanide didn't smell like almonds.
00:36:27
Speaker
Well, it's something that's been sitting out in the desert for, you know, a hundred years, maybe. Like, how could you know? Whoever it was, it was a funky white substance that didn't smell great. Just stay away. Just stay away. Yeah. You just don't want to get it. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it does bring up those questions of like,
00:36:44
Speaker
Sometimes that relationship between a developer and a CRM company and the other parties, sometimes they want to move so fast that maybe safety concerns aren't addressed properly or fully ahead of time. And I'm wondering if as the story continues, if we're going to find out more that maybe safety was less of a priority when they were planning this project, which is unfortunate. Yeah.
00:37:06
Speaker
Well, and I can think of one more circumstance that I was just thinking of, because I didn't think of it from a chemical standpoint, but still a dangerous situation an archaeologist can be in. When we worked on my company that I have, I worked on the China Lake Naval Weapons Center. Obviously, I mean, anything metal, we weren't allowed to even touch.
00:37:24
Speaker
You had rules from the Navy that you had to follow. Because they knew. And we had explosive ordnance technicians with us at all times. Each crew had an EOD person with them. Explosive ordnance disposal. And we were supposed to stop for anything metal. We weren't supposed to poke at it, kick it, or touch it because it could be an unexploded piece of ordnance. And not only that, so that's hazardous to your health if that goes off.
00:37:46
Speaker
But also the Navy and the military in general likes to use in some weapons. And I think it's, I think it's for like armor piercing bullets and stuff like that, but also other things they use depleted uranium, which is highly radioactive. Oh, okay. So it's not just the explosion that was the potential problem, but the could actually be radioactive. Yeah, yeah, totally. So you don't want to pick it up. What about like a can dump? Could you get in there and record that safely? Or did you have to let your guy go through it first?
00:38:12
Speaker
Well, I don't think we found a single one of those. Oh, you didn't. Okay. Okay. Yeah, because people weren't there. So they weren't, they were there in some settlements. So we did find some settlements that would have had stuff like that, but that was clearly like a house area. Yeah. So that was okay. But just walking out on the landscape, that's what was really dangerous because it was ranching before the 1940s when the Navy took over.
00:38:33
Speaker
there wasn't any like real mining or anything out there where they would have had established mines and stuff where you would find a canned up. And when people are ranching out there, they don't have can dubs generally. They might have a couple of cans where they stopped and had lunch and just chucked them on the ground, but no like big things like that. So for those random one-off things, yeah, we were still supposed to call EOD over and say, Hey, you know, you know, archeologists use pin flags to like, like you see the, you know, the phone company or something using.
00:38:59
Speaker
Yeah, like a metal, the metal shaft and then the plasticy bit on the top. In this project, we weren't allowed to use metal pin flags. We had to use fiberglass pin flags because anything metal that you poke into the ground could just poke into something that could explode. Yeah. And fiberglass is less likely to make it do that. Right. The scarier pieces of, um, well, so they had these different kinds of
00:39:21
Speaker
cluster bombs that they would test out there. And only one in every 10 or 20 or something like that had a shotgun shell-like cartridge in it that would let off a smoke bomb. So the rest were inert. They were dummy bombs. But you never know which one of those has the shotgun shell in it that didn't go off. And even though it's a small charge for one of these things, it could still take your hand off or shoot through your chest or something like that.
00:39:44
Speaker
So the scariest ones of those, because some of them are like baseball sized, like softball sized, were the ones that you're just walking along and you happen to be standing there and you see just a little bit of it peeking out of the sand. They're not like sitting on the surface a long time. That's so scary because like you could see just a little bit of it.
00:39:59
Speaker
How many did you not see is the question. Oh my gosh, that's crazy. Well, this doesn't really have anything to do with Jerusalem. It has nothing to do with Jerusalem or archeology. Well, a little bit of archeology, but safety and archeology. And I just thought it would be fun to give a quick update on Miami since we have talked about that site so much on this show. So go read the article. We'll link to it. Make your own judgments on how they did or did not break safety rules. And yeah, it's just an ongoing drama down there. It sounds like,
00:40:28
Speaker
And I wouldn't be surprised if even the 2,500-year-old privies they were digging out from the first article had material in it that wasn't completely hardened and solid.
Ensuring Safety in Archaeology
00:40:39
Speaker
Oh, probably. I mean, these things. Probably super gross. It was probably super gross. And they probably had detective gear on. They probably had, yeah. That's why you have to wear the safety gear on old hospital sites, too, is because you don't know what kind of microbes might be there that could be bad. So be safe, everybody. Just be safe out there.
00:40:56
Speaker
Well, on that note, I think we'll leave it. So we'll see you next week with something else. All right, bye. Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening, and have an awesome day.
00:41:31
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.