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Roman Wine, Microplastics, and a Lynx Burial - Ep 259
2.9k Plays9 months ago
This week we have three fascinating Archaeology news stories! First up, Archaeologists have determined what Roman wine tastes like. Then, a new study looks at the impact of micro plastic contamination on archaeological sites. And finally a unique lynx burial puzzles, well, everyone!
Links
Segment 1
- Archaeologists Have Determined What Ancient Roman Wine Tasted Like
- Making wine in earthenware vessels: a comparative approach to Roman vinification
Segment 2
- Microplastics Are Contaminating Ancient Archaeological Sites
- The contamination of in situ archaeological remains: A pilot analysis of microplastics in sediment samples using μFTIR
Segment 3
- 1,500-year-old burial of lynx with 4 dogs stacked on it puzzles archaeologists
- A fifth- to sixth-century CE lynx (Lynx lynx L., 1758) skeleton from Hungary 2: Stature and archaeological interpretations
Contact
- Chris Webster
chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Rachel Roden
rachel@unraveleddesigns.com
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction & Episode Preview
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. Hello, and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 259. On today's show, we talk about Roman wine, microplastics, and a link burial. Let's dig a little deeper. Dog pile on the artifacts.
00:00:33
Speaker
Okay. Welcome to the show,
Location & Banter
00:00:35
Speaker
everyone. We have a news episode. Yes, we do. Okay. We got like wine, dogs, and plastics. But first, where are we? Oh yeah. Hi, how you doing? You just like rolled right into it. No chat, no nothing. Just we're talking about archeology. It's too awkward. You're making it awkward. We're in California.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, we crossed over to California just this past weekend, yesterday actually, and yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah. Gonna be cold this weekend though for your birthday. I mean, not in the twenties like it was in Reno. That is true, but it will be colder. But right now we're enjoying some lovely sunshine in the San Luis Obispo area.
00:01:19
Speaker
Got to drive out and see the ocean last night for the first time in at least months, last fall at least, maybe even before that. I can't remember. Yeah, I don't remember. Yeah. All right.
Exploring Ancient Roman Wine
00:01:32
Speaker
Well, maybe we'll drink some wine just like the Romans did. Let's talk about that.
00:01:37
Speaker
So I think you all know by now that we like wine and we like to drink wine and go to wineries. So when this article popped up, I was like, of course we have to talk about it. It's called, archaeologists have determined what ancient Roman wine tasted like. And this was published in My Modern Met and the link is an Apple news link, but we also linked to the original paper, which is open source.
00:02:02
Speaker
And it was published in Antiquity and it's actually a really good resource just about like wine history in general in Europe and how they made it and who made it and when and where and stuff like that. I don't normally read those papers and think, oh, this is like really interesting and like keep on reading, but I definitely started doing that with this one. So it's kind of a good read actually.
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, there was quite a bit of alcoholic beverage drinking back in the day for different reasons than we do now. Yeah. Back then it was essentially the alcohol would kill a lot of stuff in the water and be much safer to drink than actual water is. Yeah. The fermentation process would make it safer. And if they did other things to it, like boiling it or whatever, that would make it safer. So like people just kind of gravitated towards stuff like alcoholic beverages. Yeah. Yeah. If you're going to do that, you may as well make it fun.
00:02:55
Speaker
And we know that Romans drink wine and they probably drink a lot of it. It was clearly very important to their culture. It's portrayed in images and we have vessels that are left behind in lots of different places so we know that they were drinking wine.
00:03:10
Speaker
And you would think we know what it tastes like, but wine can be made out of just about any type of fruit, anything you can ferment. Yeah. Anything you can ferment. And if you put some other stuff in it, I mean, anybody that drinks wine knows that there is no like one wine flavor. Yeah. You know, it's got a lot of complexity to it. Broad range of flavors. And like, I don't even know if we knew really like white or red even, you know, cause it just all depends on the grapes. So yeah. Yeah.
00:03:35
Speaker
But this group of researchers that published the paper on antiquity, they wanted to find out what this Roman wine tasted like. And according to them, we're just going to jump to the punchline here, you know, skip all the research for a minute. We'll come back to it. But according to them, Roman wine tasted somewhat spicy and smelled like toasted bread, apples, roasted walnuts and curry.
00:03:58
Speaker
at least one of those things is not something that Romans would have had probably. So it is kind of a surprising description, but yeah, it sounds like it would have been very interesting.
00:04:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's really crazy. Yeah. And that's just like, I mean, one kind of wine, right? Yeah. The one that they tried to create. Would have been all wine. Right. Yeah. And this wine that they are trying to determine the flavor of, it typically would have had a unique orange tint, which I did think that was kind of weird. I can't really think of too many orange tinted wines, except maybe like when a rose gets
00:04:33
Speaker
almost a little orangy rather than red, but that would be the only kind. And there could actually be quite a bit of variability, like you've been saying. They had white wines, they had golden wines all the way to like super, super dark, almost black wines. So there definitely was a lot of variability in color.
00:04:51
Speaker
Lead author Dimitri van Limbergen says that the research team used techniques that the Romans would have used, and the results were much better, much more tasty, and much more stable than the people had previously assumed about wines from this time period. So they just made more wine.
00:05:09
Speaker
Well, what they did is they made it the way that Romans made it and they used ingredients that the Romans would have had access to. So they are doing a lot of guessing here, but they did the best they could based on what they know the Romans had. And one of those things that they know for sure the Romans had is these sort of traditional large clay vessels called dolia that would have been partially buried.
00:05:38
Speaker
And dolium is the plural, and they had sort of a rounded body with a flat base and a wide mouth. And you might be thinking, where have I heard of buried large vessels for making wine before? Yeah, we talked about this months ago. Georgia, the country of Georgia.
00:05:57
Speaker
some of the earliest wines in the world made in these caveveres they call them. And I remember we read about that before we went to Croatia. Yeah, we did. And I think that this research team was really inspired by those traditional techniques that are still in use in Georgia.
Microplastics in Archaeology
00:06:15
Speaker
because it sounds like they followed along with a lot of what they saw in the traditional wine making process that you can still find today in that country. So that was part of where they got their techniques and procedures and methods from.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, they said that the typical vessels they use led to the spicy flavor because the temperature and pH were all controlled as it aged within this vessel. But I'm wondering, because a lot of wine will take on the flavor of the casks that it is aged in. And there are obviously wooden barrel casks these days. But they do ferment wine in steel containers as well, just because you're looking for a certain thing. But I wonder what kind of extra flavor, if anything, like a clay pot would have
00:06:58
Speaker
would have given. Yeah. And like, does it matter? Well, I'm sure it did matter what was in that pot potentially before it was used for wine. I think that whatever was in the vessel before could have influenced the flavor of the wine. I mean, it definitely would have, right? If they'd had.
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah. Well, even if they cleaned it as well as they could, it still is going to leave behind some residue. And when a liquid sits in a vessel for that long, it's just going to absorb whatever flavor. So yeah, I think that the clay itself and then anything that might've been in the pot before it was used for wine, if anything, would definitely have an influence on the wine. Even other wines that might've been like fermented in there. And then if they reuse them, I don't know if they were single use or reuse vessels. They didn't really go into that, but yeah.
00:07:42
Speaker
I imagine they'd have figured out pretty quick that if they put a very different wine in the same container, you can never clean it out. So you're probably going to use the same type of wine in one. I mean, that would have been something I think they would have come to pretty quickly. Yeah, for sure. Can't imagine though, in clay pots, how much sediment there would have been in this wine. Oh, in the... Yeah, they definitely would have had to strain it, I'm sure. So dolio were common in everyday life and they were present in most Roman homes. So we've known about these for a long time.
00:08:09
Speaker
And like we said, they were typically buried up to their necks. And that is where the Latin term dolia de fossa comes from. Yeah. You can see a picture of just like the bottle openings. Yeah. On a floor. And then it's partially excavated too. So you can see the complete, the like full vessels in the background. Yeah. That's really like, they're still in place. I wonder if that's, oh, that's Calvary. That's Calvary in Georgia using the current practices. Yeah. But yeah, same idea for sure.
00:08:38
Speaker
And we do, in the archaeological record, have some examples of Roman wine cellars, the most famous of which would be at the Villa Regina and Pisanella farmhouses near Pompeii, and also the Villa of Augustus at Samvesuviana. So we have seen this, the picture that you're seeing there, which is a modern Georgian
00:09:01
Speaker
wine making cellar. We have seen examples of basically the same thing in Roman archaeological sites. That's cool. And as we see often in archaeological assemblages, dolia are so common that they're often classified as coarse pottery. And this is the often part is they're somewhat overlooked by researchers and they're just like, ah, man, found one of those.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, it takes, take somebody who's really interested in it and maybe looks at it with a, with a different eye and a different analytical technique to figure out what they could have been used for aside from maybe something they were assumed to be used for. Well, yeah. And like, even, even just assume like knowing that they were made for that. Okay, great. But like, are there differences between the different
00:09:43
Speaker
Dolia, I mean, did the rich people have finer versions than the poor people? Like you would assume so, but maybe not. Maybe it was just like an, everybody kind of had the same quality situation. I don't know, but I mean, this study and others looking at all of those exact kind of things are sort of aiming to change that perception of Dolia as just being, you know, boring, boring pottery to be discarded or not discarded, but just sort of ignored, I guess.
00:10:11
Speaker
not worthy of further study. Yeah. I mean, I can remember when I worked in Peru, like we would, we would discard pottery because there were so much of it on the site that we had a size that if it was smaller than a certain size, like usually about a penny ish, it would just be discarded. And then
00:10:30
Speaker
There's always a part of me that was like, well, right now we don't want to do anything with those tiny little nubbins of pottery. But what if sometime in the future we would want to do something with them, but we can't. We didn't collect them. They're gone now, you know? So yeah, it's just when your perception changes over time, you want to make sure that you're ready to conform to those new perceptions based on your excavation techniques. So yeah.
00:10:54
Speaker
It says that these were so common. Did you see any numbers? Like how many there might've been? No, just... Was it around eight billion, close to eight billion? Maybe. That actually sounds like kind of a lot, but I don't know. Well, if it wasn't, we've got something that was eight billion in the next article. So we'll see you on the other side of the break.
00:11:14
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 259. And this time we are talking about microplastics. And you might wonder wondering why we're talking about microplastics on an archeology podcast, but this article called microplastics are contaminating ancient archeological sites will tell us just what we're talking about here. It's from Smithsonian magazine. The actual article, the report I should say that this is from is linked also in the show notes.
00:11:40
Speaker
But microplastics, we'll talk about what they are in a second here, but they're found nearly everywhere on this planet. Oceans, food, they find it in fish a lot. That's crazy. Yeah, the atmosphere and even human lungs, blood and placenta.
00:11:53
Speaker
I'm so concerned about that. And I know we're about to talk about how they are contaminating archaeological sites, but I almost can't move past that first sentence. It's so concerning. But yeah. Well, some soil excavated 24 feet below the ground dating to the first or early second century CE was found to contain microplastics.
00:12:13
Speaker
And in this study, some of those were contemporary soil samples, so excavated not that long ago. And others were in the 1980s and just sitting in a lab and waiting for somebody to analyze. And that happens a lot. Where somebody takes soil samples, they're like, I don't know what we're going to do with this, but we need to sample the soil. There are a lot of unanalyzed soil samples in labs across the country, if not the world. There definitely is. OK.
00:12:36
Speaker
Many questions. This specific example is from a site that is the first or early second century CE. There was no plastic there at that time.
00:12:48
Speaker
Not in first or second century England, no. Right, okay. Yes. So how in the world are microplastics showing up in the soil? Well, microplastics are considered micro when they are smaller than five millimeters long. And five millimeters is not that long. It's not that long. Right, it's really small. And often they're not like balls or something, they're just little filaments. They're just like little, you know, cylinders. Yeah, they can be.
00:13:11
Speaker
Typically, they're a lot smaller than five millimeters, but five millimeters is pretty small. That's about the diameter of a standard pencil eraser, they say. So again, that is pretty big for a microplastic. Most of it is much smaller, but soil is not solid.
00:13:26
Speaker
You know, it's pretty easy for microplastics to just be in the, if it's in the atmosphere and it's raining down, because when rain is created in clouds, it needs something to condense on. It's called a condensation nuclei. And if there's microplastics in the air, you're going to have more rain and more clouds because there's more things in the air for clouds to condense upon, right? That's how cloud seeding works. They put, what is it? Sodium nitrate or something or something? No, silver nitrate, sodium nitrate.
00:13:56
Speaker
some sort of explosive, I think. Silver nitrate or something like that, it's like this metal particle that planes will disperse into the atmosphere in heavy, clouded area when they know the moisture's there. But there's just not a lot of dust and stuff in the air to make rain. And they want to make rain, so they put that in the air and hopefully it'll condense and then it will rain out. That's all it needs.
00:14:18
Speaker
So that's, that's one way this can get just distributed around is it gets up into the atmosphere and then, cause they're really light, you know, so why not? It can't get in the atmosphere. I guess that makes sense. I just was like trying to figure out how they get in the soil, but really it's just the handling of whatever the soil is stored in from field to lab to wherever it's stored that it just infiltrates.
00:14:42
Speaker
Well, no, they're not saying this happened after excavation. They excavated it this way. Well, how is it getting into soil that is so far below the ground? Again, it's permeating through the water. Oh, it's getting like dragged down. England is a very wet country. Yeah. So all the rain that's coming down, if there's microplastics on the ground or just just below the surface or, or even just coming down with the rain, it's just through time. Okay. It's, it's going down and down and down. I just couldn't even fathom of that happening like that. That's crazy. Okay. Yeah.
00:15:10
Speaker
Go ahead. Sorry, I derailed you because I just don't understand how or why. The imaging technique they used is called reflectance FTIR or reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. And Fourier transform is just a mathematical process. It's a formula basically. And infrared spectroscopy, again, just
00:15:30
Speaker
the way they can see these things. And they can determine the abundance and relative size of particles in a particular sample. In this sample, now they didn't really say what the volume of the soil was. I'm sure they do in the paper, but I couldn't find it just on a quick look. But in this particular sample, they found 66 particles. So not that many really, just 66 particles of 16 different polymer types. So different types of plastic.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah. That's 66 more particles than you should have in a 2000 year old soil sample. Right. 24 feet below the surface. Right. Yeah. Okay. Now these plastics can come from many sources, including laundry, uh, landfills, beauty products, and sewage sludge. All of that. Oh, that's pretty gross. Yeah. Sewage is probably cause it's, you know, it's coming out.
00:16:23
Speaker
Well, I mean, yeah, depending on what kind of container it's stored in, there's always a little bit of leakage, I guess. Gross. Right. So a little bit about the history of microplastics here. In the last 100 years, most of the microplastics have been deposited because that's about the longest we've had plastic, to be honest with you. Most of this has been since the 1950s because by the 1950s, the baby boomers after the war there, they were
00:16:47
Speaker
I mean, plastics just shot up on the marketplace. Yeah, they were everywhere. And people didn't really know how to recycle them and weren't really concerned with it. But humans have produced a total of about 8 billion tons of plastics since the 1950s. Well, really over the last hundred years. That is crazy. And it's estimated that over that amount of time, only about 10% has been recycled. So now 8 billion tons of plastic. That's about, I did the math.
00:17:12
Speaker
457,142,857 copies of our RV. That's how much plastic. That's a lot of RVs and also a lot of plastic. I was going to take the length of RV and tell you how much plastic that was in football fields. That was too complicated. I just didn't want to do the math.
00:17:31
Speaker
You know what? I'm not sad about that. Maybe we can let go of the football field thing and move on from that,
Impact on Soil and Preservation
00:17:36
Speaker
maybe? I guess almost one third of all plastic waste ends up in soil or freshwater. Oh, well, yeah. Obviously, we've all seen the floating garbage islands in the middle of the ocean, right? I think it's the Pacific Ocean that has the super gigantic one just swirling in its mostly plastic bags, right? Yeah.
00:17:53
Speaker
Now, according to the researchers here, this represents the very first time that they're aware of that evidence has been presented for the presence of microplastics in archaeological soil samples. So what does that really mean? Why do we care? This just sucks that there's plastic in there. But what's the big deal here, right? I mean, if that's going to happen, it's going to happen. Can we change it? Yeah. Only if we get rid of plastics. But even if we get rid of plastics today, there's a lot of plastic in the world. Whatever's there is there. Yeah. It's not going to go away. Yeah. So I guess the question is,
00:18:21
Speaker
what kind of impact is it gonna have? What problems could it create? Yeah, yeah. So it's been long understood by archeologists that leaving archeological remains, and in this case, we're really talking about organic remains, right? Not necessarily, obviously stone tools and things like that, but organic remains, which could include wood, fabric, bones, obviously. It could include anything, long as it's organic and it can decay into nothing.
00:18:47
Speaker
But it's long been understood that if you just leave it in place, if we could have this non-destructive archaeological technique where we could like Star Trek or something, just scan the ground and know exactly what's under there and exactly what it is without digging it up, that would be the best preservation method because it's in place.
00:19:03
Speaker
The descendant communities are happy. Everybody's happy. You don't have to store these collections somewhere. But that may not now be the case because with these plastics in the ground, they're not really sure what effect certain polymers are having in certain soils, in certain conditions on the chemistry of that soil, which would then possibly cause further decay or more rapid decay of organic remains.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah. It's a question to really think about because I just, yeah, I have so many questions because like, first of all, yes, leaving things in C2 is the best way to preserve it, but it's, I don't know if preserve is the right word. It's the best way to protect it. Yeah.
00:19:43
Speaker
and allow it to continue decomposing naturally in the way that it is already decomposing. As soon as you pull it out of the ground, you basically stop the decomposition in most cases, and then you're preserving it outside of a soil context. I mean, you stop decomposition if you extract it, right?
00:20:03
Speaker
If you extract it right, yeah, like woods and other organic things, bones, those are very difficult. So you have to do it the right way. But then from there, it often goes into a box and it has to be stored somewhere, which is a whole other big question of storage of this kind of stuff. And is it worth it? And how much space is it taking up? And how much is it costing? And all those kind of questions. But that is a totally different podcast subject. So if the microplastics are changing the chemistry of the soil,
00:20:29
Speaker
I'm kind of wondering, are we that concerned about that? Like if we're trying to just let things decay naturally in the ground, I understand this is not natural. It is introducing a different component to it, but are we that worried about that? Well, and what effect have we put on the soil by putting bodies in it?
00:20:50
Speaker
Well, there is that. That's not something that can be helped or changed. Especially our bodies filled with microplastics. Yeah, right. But no, I mean, it is an interesting question, because unless something fossilizes, it is going to decay into nothing eventually. That's just how it works. Given enough time, it doesn't matter what kind of soil it is, even if it's a desert environment where it takes a long time. I mean, at some point, that desert's not going to be a desert anymore. That's just how the cycle works.
00:21:19
Speaker
And it's going to go away. And even deserts, I should say, are bad examples because things just turn to dust out there. They do. They just become part of the soil, essentially. But like a bog or something like that, where things can sit for thousands of years, things change and things do decay eventually.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, kind of what is the big deal? It's just happening quicker, maybe, but we don't even know that. In fact, that's one of the next things they're going to study, these particular researchers. They're going to start looking at how does the chemistry of soil change. They're just postulating that maybe the chemistry of soil changes. And for all we know, it could change for the better and preserve them and retard decay and make it not happen. So I mean, who knows? These are plastics, after all. Yeah.
00:22:02
Speaker
intriguing question because one, are we that concerned about it? But two, maybe we are. Maybe we should be. We should at least have all the information before we decide whether we're concerned about it or not because it sounds like right now this is so preliminary. We just know they're there, but we don't really know what the extent of the effects of them are. So more research there would definitely be important. But yeah, that's crazy. And I guess to think about
00:22:30
Speaker
sites that have not been uncovered yet. Those sites are being affected right now as we speak and we don't know that that is happening. Sites we don't even know exist yet. Sites we don't know exist yet. That is a big effect that honestly I still don't know how we can change it or stop it because the plastic exists and we can't dig up the whole world so like that's another thing that we don't really have control over but yeah that it could ruin potentially future information.
00:22:56
Speaker
Well, if a certain microplastic soil combination did accelerate decay of, let's say, human remains, we might end up finding sites a hundred years from now that may have contained human remains, but now only contain other grave goods that do not decay. And that might be one sign that, hey, you know,
00:23:15
Speaker
damn microplastics or something. But there's also certain types of soil that will also just cause things to decay quicker or slower. There's so many factors that I don't even know how these guys are going to do it. They could test the soil composition one place and then test it with and without microplastics and see what is this going to do, how has this changed. But man, the number of variables there across the world are just so high. Different types of plastic, different types of soil, different environments.
00:23:44
Speaker
different artifacts. Yeah. You know, how does it affect wood versus bone? You know, it's just, it's crazy.
Future of Archaeology?
00:23:50
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. But I totally like zeroed in on one thing that you just said right there. And now I can't stop thinking about it because you're talking about archeologists as a future, right? Archeologists in a hundred years, but, and this is like a total tangent and might not even be the appropriate place to have this conversation, but like, will there be archeology in a hundred years?
00:24:08
Speaker
Like, yes, for the ancient worlds, still that will be happening. But like, anything right now going into the soil, like, why would anybody excavate that? We have all the records. Everything is recorded. There's no reason to do any excavation on something right now that goes into the ground 100 years from now, right? I've thought about that. And we do have, you know, using our criteria here in the United States of important person
00:24:35
Speaker
event yeah object yeah, you know style that kind of stuff if it's unique and in a representative example or an extraordinary example of something then we typically want to preserve it and You know stuff like that. We probably do have very good records of
00:24:53
Speaker
But we don't necessarily have good records of everything in the world, right? That's true. We're sitting on a friend's property right now, and who would know if they built the most fascinating thing out here that anyone's ever seen, and no one ever sees it, and then it falls over, gets buried, or something like that. Somebody could find it later on, and somebody's going to have to systematically excavate that if they want to know what it is and what it looks like. Yeah, I guess there's always holes in records.
00:25:18
Speaker
Yeah. Always going to be like that. But you're right though. I don't know if, I think more likely we'll, we'll end up coming up with one of two things, either a, you know, robotic, you know, excavation. So archeologists aren't actually doing it. They're driving it. So it's more computer scientists and anthropologists working together because archeology is this, is the science of, of really digging, right? It's not really history. I mean, archeologists like to draw conclusions and make reports and things like that. But really an archeologist job is to pull stuff out of the ground.
00:25:48
Speaker
The historians and the anthropologists are the ones that take that information and run with it, right? So when the science of archeology goes away because we've got non-destructive subsurface techniques that can tell us everything without digging a single thing down to the micro level, and we've got, you know, if we do have to excavate, we've got other things to do that for us, AI to just do it, AI-controlled robots, you know? I mean, that sounds,
00:26:15
Speaker
fantastic in science fiction, but 100 years from now, seriously? Yeah. We will actually have flying cars 100 years from now. I mean, I'm just saying. Maybe. Well, we won't need flying cars because we'll have Hyperloop. Yeah, I could see archaeology going away completely, and it'll be because of the muons. The muons? Yeah. Yeah, the muons. Yeah.
00:26:36
Speaker
I don't know why you said that. I don't know. You can cut that out. No, I mean, Muans have we talked about Muans in, uh, in archaeotech, actually Muans being used to find different spaces and things like that. Yeah. It's a way to see under the ground without, kind of, because the earth is being, the earth is being bombarded by Muans. So if you can put a detector on the other side of something, it'll basically draw a map for you and show you where spaces are.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah, just thinking about the way technology is going to advance and that is one place where it will and it takes away the need to excavate. Imagine if we could use neutrinos for that because neutrinos pass right through the earth and hardly ever touch it. And in fact, it takes, they've got these like a mild deep detectors in ice in Antarctica or wherever that they can, and they're so deep just to get away from the atmosphere and all the other stuff to make sure that nothing else is doing it, is affecting it. And then they've got these
00:27:27
Speaker
these neutrino detectors that just like they're looking for this little flash with a neutrino intersects with something in our world. It produces this flash because it basically it's a reaction. Okay. Yeah. And it happens almost never, but we have billions of neutrinos going through us right now, but they're so small and so fast. They do not interact with the atoms in our body in most cases.
00:27:47
Speaker
Yeah. And then there's people that have said that they could be causing cancer. They could cause cell deformation when they hit a certain cell or something like that. But anyway, the point is if you could put a detector on the other side of the earth and just monitor the neutrinos that are going all the way through it, could you just map everything inside the earth?
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah, that would be interesting. Yeah. I mean, I feel like technologies like that are going to happen. So yeah. Yeah. Well, this conversation took a dark turn to the end of archaeology as a field. Yeah. Cool. Let's talk about how, you know, ancient pets like to do things like dog pile on the links back in a minute.
Lynx Burial Discovery
00:28:24
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, episode 259. And we're going to talk about dog pile. I can't stop saying dog pile.
00:28:33
Speaker
I don't know why. It's not a dog pile. It's a pile of dogs. So this article was published in Live Science. It's called 1500 year old barrel of links with four dogs stacked on it. Puzzles are geologists for puzzles this time. I know. And I am kind of puzzled actually. So I feel like that's a valid statement. Yeah.
00:28:53
Speaker
I mean, the whole science of archaeology is puzzling. It is puzzling. But you know what? As we discussed before, the discipline's going away. So, you know, bye. You don't have to worry about it. This is our last show, by the way, since we've talked about everything. What a downer of an episode. OK. It should have been our April Fool's episode. We didn't do one, but we released on that day. I know, we did.
00:29:15
Speaker
The last archaeological site possible has been excavated. Why didn't we do that? It's because we never think about what day it's coming out when we're recording, you know? Because we record ahead. So next year we'll use that. So if you're an OG, you'll know what's happening. Yes, exactly. OK. So this burial was found in Hungary. And it is an early medieval settlement. Dates to about the fifth to sixth centuries. And the pit itself is about 4.6 feet deep. So that's what we're dealing with.
00:29:44
Speaker
And at the bottom of this burial pit, there was the complete articulated skeleton of a lynx.
00:29:50
Speaker
Yeah, and a Lynx is more known as a bobcat here in North America. Yeah, but they were found all over and are found all over the Northern hemisphere. And above the Lynx and in layers, there was four dog burials and they were probably pointers or German shepherds, some kind of breed like that. Wouldn't those be Hungarian shepherds? Yes, sure. So this is really interesting and really different for a lot of reasons.
00:30:18
Speaker
Now, first of all, you might be like Lynx, like what in the world? Like we said, they were found all over the northern hemisphere, but they have mostly disappeared from Europe now because of loss of habitat. Basically, people have taken over the wooded habitat that they would normally live in. Yeah.
00:30:35
Speaker
But even in this time, when there was more of them around, you don't often find their remains at an archaeological site because people don't eat these kind of animals. Yeah. It's really crazy because every time you hear about a lynx on some nature show or something like that, like they're really hard to even film or photograph. Yeah. They're just very elusive. They there's not very many of them.
00:30:55
Speaker
Their cats, they don't want anything to do with people, right? They're like really jerk cats with big claws and teeth. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I can imagine they would have been any more approachable back in the day in medieval times, as opposed to now, but probably even less so.
00:31:11
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. So the whole thing is super unique for all of those reasons. Now, you would find them in an archaeological context sometimes remains of links, but that would be like claws or pelts that might be found as grave goods, essentially. So you could see claws as jewelry or in some other like decorative way. And then pelts, of course, would have been used in clothing or maybe other like fabric situations, blanket or something like that.
00:31:39
Speaker
but you almost never find any parts of the skeleton and certainly never complete articulated skeletons. Yeah. Yeah. The pit of animals here was founded a site called Zumardi Kutvo Gedulo in West Hungary, West Central Hungary. That's not how you pronounce that. I'm really glad that you got that bullet point. You're the one who had to try to say that. There's a lot of little characters and stuff that I just don't understand. Yeah, it's Hungarian. Anyway, it's an area known as Pannonia and was under Roman rule.
00:32:07
Speaker
Yeah. This last phase of occupation at Zemardi was a small settlement and it would have been from not too long after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. So that's the type of people in place that we're talking about here. Yeah. These people likely obtain their food from domesticated animals and crops rather than from hunting wild game. So another reason why the Lynx is like, what's going on here? It's just like super weird, right? Yeah. Yeah.
00:32:31
Speaker
So a little bit more about the burial itself. And this study was published in the international journal of osteoarcheology and it is another open source article. So we will make sure and have that link in the show notes. I did start reading through it, but it gets very like jargony and complicated pretty quickly. And this life science article does a really good job of summing everything up. So if that's all you get a chance to read, then you'll, you're getting the gist of it. Yeah.
00:32:57
Speaker
But basically at the bottom of the beehive shaped pit, a male link skeleton was found fully stretched out.
00:33:06
Speaker
And then above the links, there were four adult dogs, two females and two males. They were buried on their right sides above the links. And each animal was separated by eight to 16 inches of soil. That's weird. Yeah. So like very specific, very purposeful. They were put there by a human with a reason. That is the only way they got into that configuration, right?
00:33:31
Speaker
Yeah, there's two really good drawings too. There's one sort of top down view of the skeletons and how they're related to each other. And they really are, at least three of them are on top of the links. The other one's kind of off to the side. And then when you look at it in plan view off to the side, like a cross section, you can really see the separation and distance between them.
00:33:52
Speaker
Yeah, the cross section one was so striking to me because you just, you have to put so much thought into burying like this. It's not, it's not an afterthought. It's not tossing things into a pit because you just needed to get rid of the carcasses of these animals. You know, like this is thoughtful and that is what makes it so crazy to me.
00:34:12
Speaker
The fact that they're all buried on the right sides is not a mistake. No, not at all, right? Well, like we're talking here, there is a lot of struggles on how to interpret this. Nobody's really sure. Really? It's clearly ritual.
00:34:24
Speaker
And they do say that. Where's Tilly with her ritual? Tilly wants to make a ritual sound for podcasts so that we can insert it in every time one of us says it. That's Tilly from the Tea Break, Time Travel, and My Trial podcast. She's very funny. You guys should go listen to all of their podcasts. You would love them.
00:34:44
Speaker
One of the paper co-authors is Laszlo Bartowski. That's not how you say that, but I'm going to go with him. And he says it's very difficult to interpret this, obviously, because nothing has ever been found like this before. And a couple of the options that he and other authors of the paper throw out there are it's possible that this burial is the end result of a deadly confrontation in which the dogs may have been killed by a cornered lynx, but then they also killed the lynx.
00:35:14
Speaker
I guess I could see that. Now here's where we need David from the Life in Ruins podcast that isn't making new episodes anymore, but there's a great back catalog. But he is the ethnocynology guy and he knows all about dogs in the prehistoric record. But people love their dogs back then the same way people love their dogs today. And if something crazy went down with the Lynx,
00:35:40
Speaker
And the end result was, you know, the dogs, four dogs died and the Lynx died. I could see this being some kind of like burial, ceremonial burial thing to honor the dogs that killed the Lynx. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, it's possible. Yeah. Or they could have just been Lynx worshippers. And this was their Lynx to the Afterworld.
00:36:00
Speaker
So that's the reason that I like a little bit less and then the people just love their dogs and wanted to give them a proper burial right option, but But yeah, they did put forward that like maybe was a ritual significance some kind of links cults where they I don't know But why would you bury four dogs on top of a links if you were worshiping it to give it companions in the afterlife? Yeah
00:36:28
Speaker
You know, everybody knows a cat rules all the dogs. So give it some dogs as slaves and send it to the afterlife. And the dead dogs are above it because they're protecting it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, there's some stuff to think about there. Or maybe they thought the Lynx was a vampire or something, some sort of demon that could come back because then they put the dogs over it. So the Lynx would have to go through layers of dogs to get out. Oh yeah. So the dogs were protecting the humans. Yes.
00:36:56
Speaker
I actually like that better than worshiping the Lynx and giving them dog companions. You might actually think we're joking too, but I mean people thought and some still kind of do think this way. Yeah, that's true. I mean it's just you never know when you don't have explanations for things that happen in your world, you come up with explanations until you're proven wrong.
00:37:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's very true. And like we said earlier, this is right after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was a super chaotic time period in this area because they had just lost this like huge presence that, you know, everybody had to live underneath, right? So who knows what they were thinking at that time? You know, the Romans were gone, enter links, right? Yeah.
00:37:39
Speaker
There you go. You know, like I guess it's possible. I don't know. For me personally, I like the whole one time confrontation situation. And this is how they chose to honor the dogs that, that died protecting the people, their human companions from the Lynx. That seems like the most likely option, but like the author say, like we've said, who even knows? It could be anything. It is weird to me that they buried the Lynx though.
00:38:07
Speaker
Well, you don't want it lying around. I mean, you have to do something with it, right? There's dead animals all over the forest. Yeah. They'll get taken care of. They know that. Yeah. Why would you bury it? Yeah. Well, I mean, and why, why bury it with the dogs? Cause if your object is just to bury it so that it's not decomposing near your home or whatever.
00:38:27
Speaker
then why bury it with the dogs? Put it in its own burial pit. Of course, that's a lot more energy to dig multiple burial pits. So there's that component. So it could be as pragmatic as that, right? Like they just had to get rid of these bodies and they didn't want to dig more than one pit. I don't know. Who knows? Yeah. I guess we'll never know. It's hard to say how we would figure out it's going to be a mystery. We will be puzzled forever. And I think I'm okay with that.
00:38:52
Speaker
Did you happen to see in the paper if they are really certain that this was a single event burial and not just over time? I don't remember reading that.
Evaluating Article Credibility
00:39:02
Speaker
Yeah. Sometimes that's really hard to tell. Yeah.
00:39:05
Speaker
But the way this article is written is it was a single event, but yeah, it's being treated that way It looks like yeah, and I don't remember seeing anything. Yeah to disagree with that Okay, yeah, I just wonder if you saw that yeah All right. Well, this was written by Christina Kilgrove who is a life science contributor and she has been on several Podcasts of the archaeology podcast. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she was on the women in archaeology podcast times and she's a big big tweeter, you know her exer
00:39:35
Speaker
Exes are called there is a name. I can't remember somebody said it. They're calling him something But anyway, she's a osteologist and specialist and stuff like that. So well, I super love this article So I appreciate the way it was written and yeah, cuz like not all
00:39:51
Speaker
Not all journalists put together a really good article about the source material, which in this case was from the Osteology Journal, you know, so she did a really good job with that. Well, she probably could have done better, but she did get her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If she's gone to Duke, she probably understands. No wonder she's so awesome, because Carolina is the best. Maybe not so much the basketball team this year,
00:40:16
Speaker
Wow, you don't even know, actually. I know a little bit. I mean, I follow it out of the side of my eye. I graduated 20 years ago. It's fine, though. Right. Well, just like your college career, this podcast is over. All right. We'll see you guys next week. Wait, my college times are over? Yes, that's true. Your college memories, even. My career after college is still ongoing, though, right?
00:40:44
Speaker
I don't know if that's true either. All right. See you guys next week. I feel burned. 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.
00:41:19
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.