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Sharks in the Colosseum! #fakenews - TAS 288
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We get back to the news this week! We start with a cool site from Sweden where…it’s all ritual! Next we go to the Iberian Peninsula and learn about a Neanderthal glue factory, sort of. Finally, we talk about what Hollywood gets wrong, and right, about gladiators after seeing Gladiator II.
Links
- 5,000-year-old sacrificial site stuns archaeologists in Sweden. ‘Extremely unusual’
- 65,000-year-old hearth in Gibraltar may have been a Neanderthal 'glue factory,' study finds.
- What Hollywood gets wrong—and right—about Roman gladiatorsApple News Link: What Hollywood gets wrong—and right—about Roman gladiators
- The Real History Behind Ridley Scott's 'Gladiator II' and Life as a Fighter in the Ancient Roman Arena
- Man of Recaps: Gladiator Recap
Transcripts
- For a transcript of this episode, tap the Zencastr icon on in the upper left corner of the Podcast image.
Contact
- Chris Webster
[email protected] - Rachel Roden
[email protected]
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
ArchPodNet
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- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/archaeology-podcast-network?ref_id=5724
Recommended
Transcript
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 Introduction and Topics Overview
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Archaeology Show, Episode 288. On today's show, we talk about a Swedish sacrificial site, Neanderthals making glue, and what they got right and what they got wrong in Gladiator 2. Let's dig a little deeper. Don't get your hands caught in the resin.
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome to The Archaeology Show. Hello. We are
Reflecting on Live Podcasting and Future Plans
00:00:44
Speaker
coming fresh off our, I would say, fairly successful 10th anniversary event. Yeah, it was super fun. Successful from a we all pulled it off standpoint. Yeah, we all did it. Yes, it was eight hours of live podcasting.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah that was it was pretty good. I mean i definitely didn't like do all of that, and but i I was in and out and I heard bits and pieces of all the different shows, and it was really great. so Yeah, it was fun. It was ah some really good shows, a lot of good participation. i I really wish there was more, but it's tough to do with live events on a Sunday. It is, yeah. But what it told me, and I guess I probably should have known this already, is it's really not that hard to like record live when it's very similar to what we already do when we're recording. So I feel like you and I can pretty easily like work more live stuff into our like normal recording schedule. so And one of the things I think would be maybe fun to do is with the way that we record, we don't record with ah this other software that actually causes a little bit of a microphone conflict. so
00:01:48
Speaker
what we could do if we wanted to, and you know, if we're ever just prepared for it and we're in a good setting is we just turn on the Discord live stage. You can literally
Transition to Public Discord for Live Events
00:01:57
Speaker
turn on any time. yeah Yeah. It means if we're recording live, I won't yell at you about anything. Probably. Still yell. Did I yell at you yesterday? I didn't really yell at you. I did did a lot of head shaky. yeah and I mean, it might make our editing go better because maybe we're forced to make fewer mistakes.
00:02:16
Speaker
Oh, maybe. I don't know. i i The thing is with live, it's so weird, right? I could feel myself saying, um, and like filling the empty spaces, which when you and me are just sitting here we're recording, talking to each other, I don't do that. So I don't think I do when I'm editing it. I don't. So anyway, live is a is a different beast, but it it, you know, it's kind of fun too. so Yeah.
00:02:38
Speaker
Anyway, it was fun. Indeed. And that will, that content will be available. Most of it, the ones that didn't have technical difficulties will be available. Ours will for sure. Yeah. Ours will for sure. And any of the other ones that worked will be available to subscribers, not subscribers. Yeah. Members. Members. no Members. At arcpodnet.com forward slash members. So if you're a member of the show,
00:02:58
Speaker
yeah If you're a member of the network, yeah you can go to our website, and it's not all up yet. It'll be up sometime later this week. I'm hoping like by the end of the month. Isn't that a little bit more reasonable? Which is later this week. Is it? The end of the month is Sunday. Oh, it is Sunday. Okay, well the then like into the first week of December. were We have a busy couple weeks coming up. but We're not editing this stuff either. So it's it's just getting cut together into the podcast templates and then dropped into the ah members only stuff because we want you to get the live experience. So we're not going to edit the shows. Yeah, so totally. so Yeah.
00:03:30
Speaker
Okay, and it's all mostly audio, by the way, too. Live was video, so if you show up live, and and again, our Discord server is linked into the show notes, and it's free, and Discord is a new app. that It's free to free to download, free to have an account there. It's a new thing you have to learn, don't get me wrong, but it is where we're interacting right now, and there's a lot of good conversations happening over there. There's channels for each show. We used to have a Slack channel that was part of a members-only benefit, but we took that away. Yeah, nobody's really using it. well now and Well, people were using it, but it was only members. And now you don't have to be a member to be on the Discord. right But as a consequence, we're saying, OK, any live events we do, we also don't have to be a member for. But members do get access to all this content whenever they want. They don't have to show up live. OK, speaking of showing up live, we're going to show up live in Sweden. in
Discovery of a Swedish Sacrificial Site
00:04:20
Speaker
March, which is going to be super fun. And yeah I don't know if I like this article because of that or what, it's starting to kind of pop out for me because I'm i'm doing a little bit of Swedish on Duolingo just so I can get a little base, but yeah I'm seeing these Sweden articles and I like it. Yeah. Yeah. And we always do that when we travel, we try to like incorporate the places we go into the podcast and talk about the archeology, the history or whatever. So it just makes sense that we're getting excited about going to Sweden. And so this article about Sweden came up. Yeah. So this one is called 5,000 year old sacrificial site stuns archeologists in Sweden. Extremely unusual. Literally in quotes in the title. I hate these kinds of titles, but I mean, this is from the Miami Herald. So how stunned were they? Really? Yeah. Yeah. But, but this site is really cool. So maybe they were stunned. Who knows?
00:05:08
Speaker
Well, archaeologists working in Hammar in southern Sweden found a 5,000 year old sacrificial site with a stone walkway and a number of offerings. This is a pretty cool site. Hammar is a small village in Sweden, about 340 miles drive southwest from Stockholm. So I guess we'll probably just do that. and yeah Well, that's kind of far away from Stockholm. but In the snow. In the snow, yeah. It'll be covered. Right. So to kind of set the stage on the side a little bit, the stone walkway was 160 feet across and had a semi-circular shape. And during the Neolithic, a structure set on the edge of the, or the structure here that was part of it, sat on the edge of a marshy wetland where people left offerings.
00:05:50
Speaker
So I was kind of struggling to like mentally visualize this, but are they saying it's like a semi-circular shaped walkway with like a structure inside of that like semi-circular shape or like on one of the ends or on the edge? Just looking at the excavation, it kind of looks like it was inside of the the walkway, but it's hard to say. It is hard to tell. They don't really get into it because they don't lick the paper either. And the pictures are pretty cool because there's pictures of both the excavation and the artifacts, which you don't always get in these kind of articles. So good on them for getting those, but it's kind of hard to tell what you're seeing. Like you can definitely see the stones of something, whether it's part of the structure of the walkway. I'm not sure, but, but yeah, they, it's, it looks like a really cool site regardless of how it was arranged. And
Artifacts and Ceremonial Use of the Swedish Site
00:06:32
Speaker
those artifacts that they did find included pottery fragments, wood items, shaped flint tools, and animal bones. And while that doesn't sound completely significant, apparently there was a lot of these artifacts, which is what made it very significant.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, the project manager, Magnus Artursen, says that organic remains and artifacts with this level of preservation for this period are very unusual. And it's partial partly the the wetland environment that they were in. It's not really a wetland anymore, it looks like. It's kind of dried out a bit. Yeah. Well, maybe on it might be seasonal, too. Could be, yeah yeah. But I guess it was more marshy before. It's definitely not marshy now. yeah so But when things were chucked into there, they were preserved yes as those sorts of environments will tend to do.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, and the pictures, like we said, are really cool. There is an antler billet for flint knapping, a fishing hook, and a stylus for leather work, just ah some of the things that they found. And yeah, I mean, you don't normally get antlers. like That's the kind of organic material that, unless you're in a super dry environment, that just decomposes away. So that's the kind of preservation they're talking about, I think, is that they're getting things like that that they don't normally. Right.
00:07:45
Speaker
Apparently too, you know just in in reading this, there were pits inside the semi-circular area and the marshy area and then outside and people left offerings in both too, yeah which was kind of an interesting thing.
00:07:59
Speaker
like literally on purpose into these little pits. They would leave these offerings, which was kind of neat. My question is, why are they so sure that it's religious offerings? Is it the quality of the artifacts? Is it the arrangements? I think it's because it doesn't look like a place where somebody lived.
00:08:16
Speaker
There's no living stuff, right? There's no cooking or anything like that. It doesn't even seem to be any burials that they've talked about. It's literally just a ceremonial place where they brought stuff to put into these pits or to dump into the Martian. It's like someday in 1,000 years, somebody's going to go find one of our stupid wells or something like that where we chuck pennies into or in coins and stuff. Then we're like, what the hell is going on here? That's our virtual offering right there, isn't it? Virtual offering, yeah. People are going to think that.
00:08:46
Speaker
yeah so But their finds, what they're showing here, they say that it does suggest that it was a ceremony and complex and people gathered there at certain time at a certain time or certain times during the year to celebrate religious festivals and other things. Because apparently that's you know ethnographically correct as well. Yeah, like it's known behavior for the people who live in this area, so it just makes sense and it fits into the the story and the culture that we know. yeah I mean, we have stuff like that today. People wouldn't necessarily call it religious, but ceremonial. I mean, you go to like music festivals that take place in the same place every time every year. I wonder what the ground looks like there. mean The thing with today is they clean everything up. yeah right you know yeah And we don't generally do ritual offerings. right well and this is a ah culture of like
00:09:32
Speaker
throwaway items. It's all plastic and trash that gets taken away, right? Maybe we should bring that back. We should have some kind of a festival. But the ritual offerings will be like old cell phones. Bring your old truck at the ground. but That might be not environmentally sound. I think probably not. Let's it's not suggest that. A bunch of lithium batteries in the ground. Just let them burn.
00:09:50
Speaker
They can tell too here that there were feasts with, and they said, ritual butchering. And I'm like, are they just saying it was ritual because it's a ceremonial site, or are they saying it was ritual because...
00:10:03
Speaker
of the way they were cut the way they were cut or something. I mean, people have to eat. If they're going to be here for a festival, they're going to eat. yeah You're going to have food trucks, food carts, food oxen, right you know food reindeer. This is Sweden. Or just like fires that food is cooked on. You know, whatever. People might be selling stuff. Who knows? so Yeah.
00:10:22
Speaker
But anyway. It is interesting because I've never heard butchering referred to as ritual. Oh, we definitely have. I think you just forgot. Oh, really? Yeah, because people sacrifice animals all the time. Oh, yes. Sorry. Yeah. I definitely have heard of that. I think that's what they're talking about. Ritual sacrifice, but like to cut an animal in a certain way.
00:10:41
Speaker
to fulfill some sort of ritual or spiritual thing, that I feel like is not something I've heard enough very often. Yeah. That is an interesting way to put it. So yeah, but I don't know if they're indicating that specifically or if it's like you said, it's just, it could be ethnographic too. It could just be a thing that cultures here have done for a long time. So yeah. Anyway, the Arctic fact does deposition in both the wetland and in the open pits that I mentioned before are suggesting this. So they're, they're chucking these things into both pits. Yep.
00:11:07
Speaker
According to the evidence, people likely began gathering at the wetlands site and leaving authoring offerings here between 3500 and 3000 BCE. I mean, that is 5,000 years ago. That's crazy.
00:11:19
Speaker
Yep. That's a long time ago. Yeah. They don't, they, they talk about how the, the oldest part of this, which is always the part that grabs the headline, but they don't really talk about whether or not the evidence tells them or suggests how long this site was used for. Was it just like 5,000 years ago for a short period of time and then kind of lost, but the construction that went into the semicircular walkway and then probably any structures that around there rather would suggest otherwise. I mean, it had to be a few generations at least. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So anyway, take a look at the pictures, some of the pottery fragments, so some striped and pecked styles. What? I could not remember the name that we give to like that read impressed sort of style or fingernail impressed almost. yeah i What is that called? Those are the words, I think. Are those really the words? finger ellen impressed Like there's one like really specific
00:12:08
Speaker
circular impressions on it too that look like maybe the end of a branch or something like that. Or the end of a bone or stick. Yeah, yeah something very flat, something that they flattened off and purposely used like that, which is also really neat. yeah Really cool looking pottery. I would love to see more information on this pottery actually because it's just very detailed, very pretty.
00:12:26
Speaker
Well, interestingly enough, the site began as a head of a home construction project. I don't know if it was a particular home or like a housing development. It looks like it's in a field, so maybe hard to say, but basically definitely a ah CRM project for Sweden. And excavation will continue when more funding comes in because they had probably just enough to say, oh, crap, we found a bunch of stuff.
00:12:46
Speaker
And now they've got to make their case. Yeah. And then, oh, crap, this stuff is really significant. So yeah now we've got to make some decisions and do some things. Yeah. Yeah.
Neanderthal Glue-Making Site in Gibraltar
00:12:57
Speaker
Well, while Sweden is dealing with their relatively young 5,000-year-old site, over in Gibraltar, we've got a 65,000-year-old hearth where Neanderthals are just having factories. Yeah. Sweden's like cooking up reindeer and butchering them ritually. And the Neanderthals are like, we've got a factory over here. We've got glue, guys. We've got glue. We're literally sticking this whole thing together. Oh my God. Welcome back to episode 288 of the RKLG show. And yeah, now we're going to Gibraltar, the big rock. Yeah. Really just the area. Just, yeah. There's more than just a rock there. Yes. So this article is called 65,000 year old hearth in Gibraltar may have been a Neanderthal glue factory study finds. Factory?
00:13:44
Speaker
I know. It's an interesting word to use. We'll talk about that. But this was published in Live Science and we do have to give a quick little shout out to Max B, one of our kind of super fans. He sends us stuff all the time. Oh yeah. Thanks Max. But he sent us a link to an article about this as well, a different article. But this has kind of been all over the news, or at least it was maybe a week or two ago when it first was published, because this is kind of cool and pretty big news in the yeah Neanderthal world. So yeah, we definitely wanted to cover it. And, you know, when Max sent us the article, we're like, yeah, definitely our listeners want to hear about this.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah. So this is on the Iberian Peninsula and so like Spain, Portugal area, downward Gibraltar is, and this is, ah I mean, literally a little, they're calling it a factory. We'll get into that, yeah but it's an interesting word choice, but yeah, tar and like resin making factory. yeah So, all right. So this is,
00:14:38
Speaker
Just to put it in context here, that's 65,000 years. This is 20,000 years before modern humans even set foot in this region. Right. So homo sapiens. This isn't Neanderthals like mixing with homo sapiens time. This is way pre humans, modern humans. Right.
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah, and they used this sticky glue because Neanderthals also had ah projectile points. Yes. They had tools. Weapons. They had other things. Yep, they were hunting and living and doing those things. Yeah, and they used this sticky substance to basically help haft it to the spear shaft. Yeah, exactly. Or whatever they're doing. Yeah, so let's get into this word factory. The reason they're using this is because it's really just a carefully designed hearth that they found. yeah A hearth with a very specific purpose that was carefully controlled in both heat and flame and all of those things will get more into the specifics of it later. But I think they're calling it factory basically because they carefully designed it so that it it could be used in this way over and over and over again. Is that yeah kind of the impression you were getting for that word? um Not maybe over and over and over again, but for sure or they didn't just use it once. Yeah, but also in just the construction of it This just wasn't a fire pit. This was well thought out and this had different elements to it It had engineering design it had you know all the elements that well you would put on ah a common factory I mean in a factory
00:16:02
Speaker
yeah The strict term factory is for pumping things out regularly. yeah Yeah, exactly. For doing the same process multiple times and having the same results come out of it. And you can only get that if you have a very specialized process that you go through. you know so Yeah. And in this case, it was the precisely controlling the fire and maintaining and managing the temperature of the fire, basically. Yes. So as we mentioned, they made glue out of this, which was like tar and resin. And the fact that they did that is not the new bit here. It's not new. Yeah, we didn't know that. We've known that they did that for a long time. I think probably from residue on past weapons and points that were found or whatever. Well, and we've seen evidence of the fact that they must have done this just by looking at weapons and things in rock art that dates up to 75,000 years old. Okay, yeah. Which, you know, you're like 75, 65, eh, M-E-D, that's 10,000 years. Yeah, yeah. That's a long time. That is a long, long time. Yeah. So a lot of time to perfect the process, so to speak, and to just keep on going with it. And that's what this new hearth is showing, is that they were skilled engineers and that they had fine-tuned the glue making process to really be able to, probably be able to create a hearth like this anytime they wanted to create this glue. So this
Replicating Neanderthal Engineering Skills
00:17:19
Speaker
hearth is pretty simple. It measures about nine inches across by about three and a half inches deep, and it has sharply cut vertical walls. And my first thought was, okay, did the archeologist do that?
00:17:28
Speaker
and they were digging it? No, they probably had a profile and they had the lines, you know. Maybe. Haven't you ever dug a hearth before? Come on. I don't know how good an archaeologist they were. Come on. There are also two short trenches about an inch long. I mean, don't even know how they could really see that in the record. That's kind of cool, but very short that extend north and south out of the pit. So really just two little indentations, so to speak, keyholes almost, on the north and south side of the pit. I don't think the fact that they were north and south was probably significant. It's just happened to be where they were. Yeah, but that is the precise engineering bit there, is having those two trenches is what is giving them more- The vertical sides. Yeah, and the vertical sides is what's giving them this control over heat and temperature and whatnot. So an analysis of the remains and residue in the hearth shows that it contained charcoal, partially burned rock rows, which is a flowering shrub in the area, and some other things. There's also chemicals and traces of urea, so basically
00:18:25
Speaker
pee and zinc from guano or, uh, and guano was bird or bat poop. Basically they' using all kinds of things to help control this process. So crazy how useful guano was to prehistoric populations. yeah Can you just imagine like being the first one to figure out that like you could use it to make glue and other things like that? It's just crazy, right? yeah Who even came up with that idea?
00:18:49
Speaker
So here's the process. They likely filled the pit with leaves from the plants and that produced, the plants actually are what produced the sticky brown resin um when heated, right? yeah Kind of just like oozes out of them. yeah Then they would have covered the pit with a layer of, and this is the like the burning leaves, they would have covered them with a layer of wet sand and soil, likely mixed with the guano to help seal the inside of the pit and keep oxygen out. so You can see the iterative process here, right? They're like, Oh, well we need to cover this because we need the heat in there. But then it's just escaping through the sand because sand is relatively porous, yeah but you need to make it a little bit of wet. It wasn't quite working. So then they mixed it with some other stuff and yeah.
00:19:32
Speaker
Anyway, this prevents the flames from burning the actual contents. What they're trying to do is they're putting the stuff down there to basically create this heat. right And then they're covering it with the sand to basically heat it up. They're yeah they're kind of making an oven. They're kind of making a cooking surface. They're making a hot plate. yeah yeah yeah so Yeah, because what they would do after that and is they would build a fire on top of it with thin twigs, which would have heated those leaves that were in that chamber below. And so that layer of sand iguana was protecting the leaves down below it from the fire up above it and giving them that control over what they were doing. Yeah, because it really is, I guess, an oven. They're just really trying to heat it up down there. Just gave them more precise control over what was happening to the material that they were actually trying to get, which was that resin out of the leaves.
00:20:24
Speaker
Right. So in order to see whether or not all this was logical, experimental archaeology. Yay! Our favorite. I know the the researchers decided to just kind of do this themselves and see what's going on using the exact same plants yeah in the area. So they built a replica and produced ultimately enough resin to have to two spear points together. That's super amazing. um Yeah, it took about four hours from the time they started collecting leaves to hafting the finished spear points. So that's a long time, but and you know it's probably worth the effort if you've got a much more sturdy spear point at the end of it that you can use for hunting or um you know whatever you need to do. Yeah, and they even sat there while they were doing all this and flint knapped the spear points. Yeah, because with fire and with heat, you know there's a lot of waiting time. It's a slow process. Yeah, you've got to just wait for it to get to temperature, wait for it to burn, whatever you're doing. so yeah
00:21:14
Speaker
Another interesting thing, so not only do we have the sort of what what had to have been the passing down of knowledge and how to create this whole thing and do it, but they realized there's also teamwork involved yeah because this was probably a two person job. I'm a little skeptical on that because when somebody gets really skilled at something, you just don't realize how skilled they are.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, they probably just figure out how to do it themselves. so They could have. yeah They could have. It would have been nice to have probably two people that are doing it, yeah but who knows? You can speculate that in a community, there would have been two people. In fact, can't you see a family situation, like a a father and son or, hey, mother and son, mother and daughter, whatever, who are doing this process and working together? And that's how you pass that knowledge down by generation, is is through the family connection like that. right I could also see Solo Hunter out doing this too. Oh, oh sure. but They got to chill in the evening. They don't have Netflix. Right. But as far as passing down the knowledge, wouldn't it make sense for you to have basically a family that just passes it through the generations? you know
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, the two people ah for these guys was because you have to manage the fire covering the covering the kiln area and plus you also have to open the crust covering the kiln to kind of just do all this all at once, right? So you got fire management and you also have like digging underneath that crust to get to where the resin was and yeah. And the two channels they say that were likely dug on the sides were were likely dug to help remove the heated leaves before they cooled because the leaves were just kind of like I guess ultimately oozing this resin and they wanted to be able to reach in there, pull those leaves out while it was still hot because there's partial leaf pie parts left and they don't really want that in the resin. yeah And then just have the tar or resin leftover. So they just put themselves in a little channel, which also means they had some sort of a stick or something they would reach in there to drag the leaves out. grab Yeah, got it with something because they wouldn't want to burn themselves obviously. So it would have been very hot in there for sure. though yeah
00:23:10
Speaker
Yeah. Really very cool process though. And so cool that Neanderthal 65,000 years ago are doing this. Like once again, give them more credit because they deserve it. Yeah, for sure. All right.
Historical Accuracy in Gladiator 2
00:23:23
Speaker
Well, we're going to end this episode with a little bit of a fun one. And we're going to talk about kind of the new gladiator movie that came out, gladiator two. So if you haven't seen it, there might be a couple of spoilers, but really what we're going to talk about is what Hollywood gets right and what they get wrong about gladiator, some of the big myths. yeah We'll do that on the other side back in a minute.
00:23:41
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, episode 288. And as mentioned in this segment, we're going to talk about gladiators and what Hollywood gets right, well how get what gets wrong. In fact, this article is from National Geographic, and it's called What Hollywood Gets Wrong and Right About Roman Gladiators. Because for those of you not in the news or in the aware right now in November 2024, in the aware is how you say that. In the aware. In the aware. okay is In the aware. Is that aside from Aqueducts, Rhodes, I'm gonna just do it right away. Yeah, okay. Romans also gave us gladiators. so That's good. But no, the Gladiator 2 movie is out and it is a sequel of sorts to Gladiator 1. We did find out that
00:24:27
Speaker
You can kind of get away with just like a recap of Gladiator 1 if you really don't want to see the whole entire thing. Yeah, we are definitely going to link to that recap because it's our go-to guy who does the best recaps on the internet because he's also a little bit like satirical too. Yeah, he's a little crazy. He's so funny. yeah Anyway, I have to admit, and I had admitted this on the live show yesterday too,
00:24:48
Speaker
I never saw Gladiator, the first one. It's crazy. I know, right? You got taken a task for it too. I know I did. Everybody's like, what am I even? I know, it's crazy. I have seen it now. I watched it, but I'm not going to lie. I watched it after we went to see Gladiator 2. And the only reason I was able to do that is because I watched a really good recap. yeah Because you do need to know some of the details of the characters in the storyline from the first one before you go see the second one. But you can do it from a recap. You don't need to see the movie. Honestly, though, if you didn't know any of that, I thought it was still a pretty good movie. Oh, it was good. I liked it a lot. The costumes are beautiful. yeah i You know, I love a good bit of like a draping fabric, like love, you know, lovely, luscious fabrics draped over a person very Roman. I know. I just, I love all that stuff. You probably weren't looking at the costumes at all and that's fine. That's not who you are. Fine. Just assign stuff to me, whatever.
00:25:37
Speaker
That's my thing. We know this. Okay. Yeah. So anyway, it's beautiful. It's the acting was fabulous. The, the movie itself was great. There's some points that we'll go over here in a minute that were maybe not necessarily true, but you know, you just got to give them some artistic freedom and yeah I'm fine with everything they did for the most part. It's much like vampires. There's like been a lore put on vampires, yeah you know, as as as each new vampire fiction is created, kind of adds to what a vampire is. And then sometimes people take their own spin on it. Sometimes they're sparkly for no reason. You know, it's just like whatever. They're not going to burn into flame, but they'll be sparkly.
00:26:14
Speaker
Okay, but this is a little bit different because the Romans were real people. The gladiators were real people and all the characters in the movie or a lot of the characters in the movies were real people. And they're taking some pretty major artistic license with those people in those but each places. But there's been lots of gladiator movies through the years that focused on gladiators. I mean, one of the bigger early ones was like Ben Hur, right? Yeah. A lot of big, you know,
00:26:39
Speaker
g Gladiator stuff in that with the Roman Colosseum. I mean that was pretty pretty famous scenes, right? But every time Hollywood attacks it They don't always get it right. No, that's just what we're talking about. And so again, like we're mostly okay with it the only thing that gets me a little bit is like The real histories of these people are so fascinating. Like you almost don't need to mess with it, but when they're making these really pretty stories that get tied up in a nice neat bow at the end, they just kind of have to like mess with things. And that's where you get the the fake stuff. But anyway, that's all right.
00:27:15
Speaker
Okay, so and just a little bit about gladiators before we start here. Gladiators so were seen as strong warriors, right? and They were often armed with exotic weapons while fighting in this one-on-one combat. And there would be various settings.
00:27:30
Speaker
in any story involving Imperial Rome and highlighting and contrast the brute strength of the fighters and the pampered decadence of the elite. And that's who they were. That's what they were doing. All right. So this article that we found goes over a few myths about gladiators. Yeah.
00:27:46
Speaker
The first one is, did they have nicknames? I know. Yeah. I love this one. In the first Gladiator movie, Maximus, who was the main character, was nicknamed The Spaniard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had i didn't know about that either because I didn't see the first one as we discussed. But yeah. Yeah. ah But yes, this is true, and it goes way back. They were known by their personas, and they had fans and followings. It was crazy. There were actual fangirls of these gladiator warriors that are similar to like fangirls of pop idols today. It's more girls than boys, wow depending on your... you know yeah
00:28:24
Speaker
particular persuasion as far as that goes. The Romans had all the persuasions. They did, they did for sure. So yeah. I mean, there's even a name, I can't remember it right now, but there's actually an actual name for like fangirls that they use for these, these young women who were just obsessed with gladiators back then. These are Italians. It wasn't the Tafosi. No. That's what they call her.
00:28:43
Speaker
That's what they call the crazy fans for Ferrari. Oh my gosh. And it's not just Ferrari formula one though. It's, it's, the Tofosi actually means it's like a, it's, it's something like, like extreme fan or something like that. It's actually a term that they use for other sports as well. Yeah. So actually it wouldn't surprise me if it was something related to that. No, it begins with an L it was like ludia ludia ludia, something like that. Yeah.
00:29:06
Speaker
Anyway, but that's, that's the point is these gladiators had these nicknames and there was people that just really like love to follow them and yeah go to all their fights and stuff like that. Yeah. They even had signature moves and equipment sometimes, yeah which I thought was really cool because, you know, lots of modern fighting video games, everybody has signature moves and equipment, right? And I'm like, well, the Romans did it first. So there you go. They always did it first. They did everything first. Yeah.
00:29:33
Speaker
But it's pretty cool that they would have done that. yeah They had ah an actual superstar who apparently was pretty well known named Celadus the Thracian. And apparently there's graffiti in Pompeii that celebrates his victories and his popularity with his fangirls. Yeah, see? Fangirls, right? Yeah.
00:29:50
Speaker
Another common myth that Hollywood likes to play on because it makes for for good movies. And this movie definitely did that. This movie definitely did that, yeah. Was did they always fight to the death? Yeah. yeah And the short answer is no, they did not. yeah It was very infrequent for gladiators to die in battle. And that's because these gladiators, they were often criminals or prisoners of war, slaves, whatever.
00:30:14
Speaker
and And some were were like professionals that that volunteered to become gladiators. But no matter what background they came from, whether they were forced into it or they chose it, they became professional athletes who studied at gladiator schools. They spent so much time and effort preparing to be gladiators and training for it. And so much money was funneled into them from their patron, their owner, their master, whoever it was.
00:30:39
Speaker
that these people were not interested in losing their investment by having a gladiator potentially die at the end of each fight. So they mostly ended in draws. It
Myths of the Roman Colosseum
00:30:48
Speaker
would it was just the the fight itself that what people came to see, not the actual death of one of the gladiators.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah. And it was a lot of, um, which we'll get into the next point. I mean, not only were they gladiators, but it was a lot of theater involved yeah with this like violent combat and things like that as well. I guess the only real difference between all of this and like, I don't know, some of the things we have today, like some of the extreme sports and like combat fighting and stuff yeah is, uh, we don't want people to fight to the death anymore yeah because it's not that people fought to the death all the time, which is the myth that we're kind of busting right now. But people did die. They did die. People lost yeah you know limbs and and got seriously injured. yeah They were using fake weapons. Yeah, totally. yeah so And it does say here that they survived their bouts nine out of 10 times. Yeah.
00:31:36
Speaker
Like a 10% death rate though is still pretty high. And like none of that would happen in modern day sports, you know, wrestling or anything like that. Like that's not common obviously, but you know, so they did die sometimes, but it just wasn't nearly as often as you know, Hollywood and theater would make it out to see. Yeah.
00:31:55
Speaker
All right, so another myth is possibly involving some of the things that they would have put in the Colosseum, because in the second movie here, they really outdid themselves. They did. i don't I didn't see the first movie in a long time, and I only watched the recap. Did they flood the Colosseum for the first movie? They didn't. No. Well, they used to flood the Colosseum. That is actually a true thing. That is true facts, and they did do that in one of the scenes in the movie. Right. And it was so cool. That was one of my favorite parts of the whole movie. They flooded it and they had like a naval battle scene. And that's all real. They did do that. well We'll say we'll get into specifics of that in a minute. But they did do that. yeah Yeah. Yeah. But one of the things that they kind of went over the line on. Yeah. this We got to debunk this one. This is the only thing that I was like, guys, come on. Yeah.
00:32:39
Speaker
ah If you fell out of your boat, you were eaten by a shark ideally. Like not just a little shark, like a massive great white shark. Yes. So there's a couple things wrong with that. First off, the Romans did not bring sharks into the Colosseum. At least there's no historical record of it. And I immediately saw that and was like, okay, that's a bit much because I had at least one problem with it. and i just I didn't even think about this until later. I thought I didn't think about the catching of the sharks in keeping them alive. I mean, sure. The Romans could do a lot of stuff. They had big nets. They could do all kinds of things. yeah Catching a shark and bringing it on board your ship yeah and then keeping it alive. The sharks usually have to be like kept moving. And I mean, they're fish, yeah right? So you can't just like.
00:33:23
Speaker
You can't just like put them in a tank of water, but then they would have had to either run real fast or put them into a tank of water or into some kind of a... Or like a wagon filled with water or something? Yeah, something. The logistics of it just didn't make any sense to me. It's easy to get lions and tigers in there. Sure. But getting a shark in there seemed much more logistically difficult. And I was like, that's not even going to happen. And then during our live show yesterday, we happened to have somebody on.
00:33:45
Speaker
one of our other hosts actually, Stephanie from, Stephanie Rice from Passe Macabre, her study area is Egypt of the Roman period. And she knows a lot about all this stuff. And she's like, she saw this movie and she's like, it wasn't even the right kind of shark. Like they don't even have those kinds of sharks so in the Mediterranean. Right. They can't. Yeah. It was just so over the top. And yeah I saw like a a interview maybe with Ridley Scott, who's a director saying, well, there's no proof that they didn't do this. And I'm like, Well, there's not a reason to do it. Hollywood lives historically, like with historical movies, on no proof that it did that it didn't happen. That it didn't happen, yeah. which I can kind of respect in some ways. I i kind of love it because like you do have to take some artistic license. We keep talking about that and we're totally okay with that. This might have gone a little bit too far, but man, it did make for like a really fun battle scene because it wasn't just like a battle between ships. yeah There was the added like terror of being you know devoured by a shark if you fell off the ship. yeah So anyway, it was the coolest scene in the movie in my opinion.
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah, apparently they did mock naval battles as early as Julius Caesar's reign, yeah which was well before the Colosseum was even completed around ADCE. And again, our expert on the live show yesterday, she said that that was actually Julius Caesar started that because he wanted to celebrate his victory of the Romans over the Egyptians. yeah and There was a big battle yeah that they were celebrating. Yeah, they they didn't need the Colosseum, basically, to have a battle theme. right that The Colosseum just became a really great place to do it later on once it was built.
00:35:12
Speaker
And so in one of the articles we found, we found out about this guy Cassius Dio, who is a Roman historian. He was writing these stories maybe 100 years after the fact, so pretty close to this time period. And he wrote that Titus staged a sea fight impersonating the Corcyrean and Corinthians in a naval battle from 434 BCE. And that was the first naval battle in the Colosseum when it was flooded in ADCE when it opened. so I wonder what it looked like before it was finished. It must have been really short, just basically a circle with maybe some... More of an oval. I mean an oval with some mock grandstands or something.
00:35:49
Speaker
Another cool thing that we found when doing the research is there has been a hydraulic study of the Colosseum just to figure out what the logistics of flooding it would have been like since we know they did do that. And they concluded that it could have been flooded by the Aqua Claudio, which would have been the aqueduct that provided water to the Colosseum, in 34 to 76 minutes, depending on how much water they wanted in there and like how quickly they were trying to do it because they could control the flow rate.
00:36:16
Speaker
Is that not crazy? That is crazy fast, right? It's crazy how specific those numbers were because we were watching comments fly by during our live show yesterday and one of our people put in, it's hilarious that they didn't write 35 to 75 minutes. like Why 34 to 76? That's oddly specific. That's what they said in the paper. yeah I think because they're scientists, that's why. And they were calculating flow rates and the minimum was 34 and the maximum was 76.
00:36:42
Speaker
All right,
Diversity in Ancient Rome
00:36:43
Speaker
so the final myth here was the diversity of ancient Rome. Was it actually as diverse as like ethnically diverse as the movies would make it out to be? Because in the second one, we won't give it away too much, but Denzel Washington is a black man that plays a prominent character that ends up coming into some power and has a lot of influence. And there's a number of other characters too that are definitely not white. Not that all Romans were necessarily white, but from most of that work. Well, they certainly weren't. That's the thing, right? And that's what we're talking about here. Was it actually that diverse? And it turns out, yeah, it was. Yeah, it definitely would have been. I mean, Rome was an empire that was conquering, right? They were always conquering people and they didn't just stick to the European side. They crossed over into the Middle East. They went to Africa and North Africa. Like they were conquering people from all over. And part of the reason that they were successful is that they did tend to incorporate those populations into the Roman Empire. They didn't just make them slaves and wipe them out. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that did happen. They did. They did do that. That definitely did happen. Don't get us wrong. It did happen. But they also incorporated these people. And sometimes they were able to rise to power, as the character played by Denzel Washington did, his name, Macrinus. He actually was a real guy who was born in what is modern-day Algeria. And he was part of the upper class in Algeria. And he moved into Rome. And he probably wasn't white. I don't know if he was black.
00:38:01
Speaker
But he would have been something not white, right? And that's just so that's just one example of a person in Rome that we know would have had African heritage. And there's plenty more people in that time period that would have been that white. So all the whitewashing that happens, like, think do you remember that show we watched on like HBO, I think it was, Rome? yeah From like 20, 25 years ago? Yeah, it was a while ago. I don't really remember there being many people of color in that show. They really went very... And they're all usually British too. Okay, I'm fine with that. you know that That's fine, i'm I'm okay with that. They probably should have Italian accents, but whatever, it's it's all good. But yeah, so like just it's just something to keep in mind, especially in this day and age when race is such and a thing that is brought up over and over and over, and we need to remember that these past empires were not always full of white people. yeah They were much more diverse than then they've been portrayed in the past. right
00:38:57
Speaker
All right. Well, we actually covered quite a bit more yes and we did that on the live show yesterday. So if you're a member of the Archeology Podcast Network, you can go check out your bonus content probably sometime by the end of this week. I think this episode that we recorded yesterday for the bonus will probably be up in the next day or two because we're not going to cut it too much. We're just going to slap it together and throw it up in the bonus content. yeah so because we get out yeah live yeah Go check it out. we did We did spend most of the episode actually talking about this, plus the um new property in Scotland that the APN is going to buy. If you're interested in that and you want to help us out on our GoFundMe that I hope somebody sets up, that's a joke then check that out. You can watch us drink fancy champagne, and that's pretty much the show. yeah yeah But back to the the gladiator thing really quick, what we covered more closely on the live show was the characters that are in the two movies, both the first one and the second one, how close their representation was to the real life characters. that Because many of the characters in the movies are actual real people too. so yeah
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah, we we went more in-depth on that. And it is very interesting. We'll put some more links in the show notes, and you can do some reading about it, too. But we really encourage you to just go become members and listen to us talk about it, because it was really fun. and And we had some great comments coming in the whole time while we were talking about it, too. That's right. All right, arcpodnet dot.com forward slash members. What is the phrase? You can do it for less than a pumpkin spice grande latte with modification per month. So yeah, consider where you're spending your money. Yeah, I mean, we appreciate it. It takes a lot of work to keep this thing going. That's right. Yeah. All right. Thanks a lot, everybody. We'll see you next week. Bye.
00:40:35
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet dot.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.
00:40:58
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural 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 w www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.