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A Flooded Tomb Reveals Its Secrets - TAS 285
482 Plays14 days ago
This week we check back in with recent archaeology in the news! First, we look at new research on the oldest known battlefield in Europe. Then, we take a look a home renovation in France that turned into an early medieval cemetery excavation! And finally, a flooded Kushite tomb in Sudan is finally revealing it’s secrets thanks to the work of underwater archaeologists.
Links
- Thousands of bones and hundreds of weapons reveal grisly insights into a 3,250-year-old battle
- Warriors from the south? Arrowheads from the Tollense Valley and Central Europe - From the Journal of Antiquity
- Accidental basement find reveals dozens of centuries-old skeletons
- Two Archaeologists Discover Something Extraordinary After Diving Into A Flooded Tomb (Apple)
- Sudan tomb diver reveals pharaoh's secrets (BBC)
Contact
- Chris Webster
[email protected] - Rachel Roden
[email protected]
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction and 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.
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 285. On today's show, we talk about a Bronze Age battlefield, a cemetery found in a basement, and a submerged tomb at the pyramids of Nuri.
Tolens Valley Battlefield: Discovery and Analysis
00:00:28
Speaker
Let's dig a little deeper into why I can't say Bronze Age. but Stop making fun of me.
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Hello. We're doing a news articles. I know. I feel like it's been so long. Yeah, it's a new thing we're doing. In fact, the date on this first article is from the end of September, because it's been that long since we've recorded a news episode. Yes. Anyway. Well, yeah. All that means is that we probably will have a couple weeks of news episodes, because I don't know about you, but I've just been saving up the stories as I come across interesting things. so Indeed. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, this first article is titleed titled, Look at the Bones.
00:01:17
Speaker
We're starting with the Monty Python quote. I literally don't remember what that's from, but okay. I think we literally just saw that that clip, or maybe I did because I had it playing in the background. It's from Holy Grail. That sounds right. yeah Thousands of bones and hundreds of weapons reveal grisly insights into a-year-old battle.
00:01:44
Speaker
Yes. yeah This is from the Tolens Valley in Northeastern Germany. The site was founded in 1996 by an amateur archaeologist, AKA somebody just roaming around and finding stuff, called themselves an amateur archaeologist. I know. like Are they just like a walker, like somebody out for a walk? and If I put a band-aid on somebody, am I an amateur doctor? Ooh, maybe. Right? Sure. I'm a little irritated. Well, maybe like an amateur Nurse? Yeah. Yeah. Like I went to CVS and I tooled around the first aid aisle and I got some stuff and I and i opened a kit and then I you know cleaned up a wound. Amateur paramedic. Am I an amateur paramedic? Amateur paramedic. Nobody calls them that. Right. Why? Because you dig around outside or you have a metal detector. Are you an amateur archeologist? It's like one of those things that news stories will never not do. They just can't help themselves.
00:02:33
Speaker
I don't know why. You read a history book, you saw ancient aliens, and now you're an arch amateur archaeologist. Amateur historian right here. Wow. All right. Well, I'm an amateur senior citizen. Does it even make any sense? Are you amateur podcaster? Get on with this. Oh, I'm definitely not that. All right, anyway, they saw bones sticking out of the bank of the Tollens River. See, just saw bones, anyway. yep Excavations have since found 300 metal objects and 12,500 bones, that's a lot, that belong to 150 people that fell in battle around 1250 BCE. yeah all right Now, why don't you tell us how 12,500 bones equals only 150 people.
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah, so I love talking about this because it was something I studied in college, but what they would have done to figure out how many people is identify a bone, a particular bone, and that became their like ID bone, right? And they counted how many of those bones they had across the entire collection.
00:03:40
Speaker
And they want to strategically pick that bone probably. Like if they had like a lot of skulls, then maybe they would have picked a skull bone or if they had, you know, like they're not, you're not going to pick a long bone where you might not have, you know, all of those pieces because they degrade away or whatever. You're going to pick something that is strategically well preserved and present in your collection. in your collection. yeah So whatever they picked here, they counted up 150 of them. And so that's how they went from 12,500 bones or probably fragments of bones yeah being realistic to just 150 people. Yes, indeed. Called minimum number of individuals. Yes, yeah that's what that's called. Yeah, in technical terms.
00:04:21
Speaker
There could have been more. That's why they say minimum. There could have been more, but minimum.
Weapons and Warfare: Bronze Age Battles
00:04:26
Speaker
Weapons found included swords, wooden clubs, arrowheads, or they call them. They might not be from actual arrows, but arrowheads. That's just what people call them. Some found still embedded in bones, and there's a really cool picture. Oh, the picture is so cool. Yeah, the article. From the inside of a skull of literally implement coming through the skull. Yeah, it looks like a metal implement, actually. metal yeah metal it doesn't like just like hit you in your heart when you see that because you're like that right there is like the moment of that person's death like we are seeing that in the archaeological record I've died from that I'm Are you kidding me? That arrow is straight into like two inches of brain. Like you're not surviving that. I got a headache just looking at that. I know. I know. It's just so, oh, it just like hurts to know that that is how that, that, that is that person's last moment on this in this world. Yeah.
00:05:22
Speaker
there has been no direct evidence of this scale of battle ever found earlier than this. Yeah. Cause this was huge. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why they consider this Europe's oldest battle that we know of to date. I always feel like you have to quantify those kinds of statements with that. yeah You never know what you're going to find in the future, but up to now, this is the oldest one. Yeah. That should just be like implied. Yeah, it really should. But I don't know that news stories always imply it super well. They just, they they don't, but that's okay. We're here to do that for them.
00:05:52
Speaker
Now also the bones revealed they were mostly men that were young and strong, many with healed wounds from previous skirmishes. So this is like a fighting force that was probably trained and they were... Or people just fought a lot back then. Well, yeah, but I mean, I think what they're getting at here is it's these were people that were that were trained. Yeah. No one knows who the people were that fought in the battle. However, with all the stuff that was found, apparently none of it is identifiable enough yet through analysis that they can tell, oh, this was the blah, blah, blah army or this was the, you know, these people, which is interesting because a lot of times you can look at stuff and say, you know, the style here, the the markings here indicate these people.
00:06:36
Speaker
But they haven't really found that there's no written accounts. No artifacts have revealed anything There's just nothing so far that they found that really leads to any clues in that way Well, it's like yeah they they don't lead to specific people or specific groups. they you They've got the broad the broad regions based on the arrowhead types and stuff that they've found. Well, but yeah that's the new part of the story, though, yeah is the ah is the arrowheads. Yeah, exactly. Because up until now, other analysis hasn't revealed that but that part of the story. But now that they're looking at the arrowheads and projectile points,
00:07:08
Speaker
their finding that the battle may have included local groups as well as an army from the south, right and that this may be one of the earliest examples of intra-regional conflict in Europe. Isn't that interesting that it took this long to analyze the differences in shape and style of the arrowheads? Wouldn't you think that would be one of the first things they would do? I don't know. It sounds like it's just the amount of stuff that they pulled out of here you know people go methodically they have a certain amount of funding in time and yeah it's just you know i box by box yeah i suppose you might focus on like the bones first because you just think you're gonna get the most information from from the people that are buried there and yeah the weapons sort of come after that maybe but well and a lot of times as we know when a collection like this is is excavated i mean you're sure you're kind of looking at stuff as you're pulling it out, but the first job is to basically catalog it all and put it all into something, into a database, or and then into, I mean, to be honest, clean it up and put it into boxes. Yeah.
00:08:09
Speaker
and then And then what? People come along, they end up getting PhDs and dissertations out of this material, and somebody says, well, I want to study this, and I want to study this, and I want to study this. I mean, it's a lot of money and time to go through these collections. Yeah, for sure. So it just takes years.
00:08:27
Speaker
There have been previous discoveries of foreign artifacts like a Bohemian bronze axe and a sword from southeastern central Europe, indicating that there was interactions with other groups, not from this area, of course.
00:08:42
Speaker
Yeah, the airheads, though, were interesting because it seems that no two were identical, yeah which is odd. yeah And they could tell that these were not made by the local population. right So there's you know groups of people all over the place. There's stylistic differences when you make these things because it's really hard to make two identical to begin with. So that's not unique for for these types of things. But when you look at the the overall shape, the morphology archaeologists call it,
00:09:09
Speaker
you can tell generally from that that people in one area kind of make it the same way. yeah you know You're never gonna make too identical to each other, but they kind of make it the same way. yeah Then you look at these people that are 50 miles away or on the other side of a range or in another valley, they kind of make it the same way too, but slightly different. you know This base looks a little bit different. This angle is a little bit different, you know something like that. and That's what they started looking at. and They started realizing that hey the local population made them slightly different than what we're finding here. and We're seeing that there are some correlations with some populations
00:09:43
Speaker
elsewhere away right yeah yeah The lead author in the current paper in the journal Antiquity, Leif Einselman, said they collected literature and data from more than 4,700 Bronze Age arrowheads from Central Europe and mapped out where they came from to compare them with the Tolanese Valley arrowheads.
00:10:02
Speaker
Another study I was surprised hadn't been already done before. It's so surprising, right? But like you said, it's just so much work and it takes somebody with an interest to like do that work. yeah Now it's available in the world. So nobody has to do it going forward yeah and they can use it, but somebody had to do it first, right?
Archaeological Interpretations of Conflict
00:10:20
Speaker
yeah Many matched the style of airheads from other sites in the region, suggesting they were made locally and carried by men who called that region home. so yeah But others were very differently shaped and matched those from the southern region in what's now modern Bavaria and Moravia. Einselman thinks that it's unlikely they were imported or traded for, and more likely they were carried by the men who fought with them.
00:10:43
Speaker
There's a causeway that crosses the Tollens River, and it was constructed about 500 years before the battle, and that's thought to be the starting point of the conflict. Essentially, this causeway was an important trade route, and control of it would have been powerful. So they're making a lot of conjecture here a little bit. um There's no evidence of this. So researchers are still looking for other options as what to what could have been the other cause of the battle. But I think what they're trying to kind of say here is that you've got this huge fighting force, you've got evidence that people from another region, ah several other regions came by from the south, came up and helped fight, or or were part of the fight, didn't help, but they were part of the fight. So it's like, okay, are a whole bunch of different areas fighting for maybe control of this this crossing? Because this is basically where it took place? yeah Is that the assumption that's being made here? I don't know, maybe, maybe that's what they're saying.
00:11:40
Speaker
Yeah, I guess the one thing that I kind of like trip over is how do we know for sure that the arrowheads involved weren't traded for? Like if if there's a conflict brewing between two local populations in this area, they already lived there. How do we know that they didn't start trading in and stocking up on arrowheads in anticipation of this conflict? Like why are we why are they so sure that it was groups of like fighting men that came in from other places?
00:12:09
Speaker
I mean, I think my guess would be that if you've got a population of people that are fighting, I mean, they probably had their own weapons. Why would they have just traded for weapons on them? you know Why wouldn't they have their own their own weapons and their own things in addition to maybe things they traded for? Yeah, there's probably a mix of things, but yeah why wouldn't they also just have their own stuff? you know They bring their own things. yeah you know Trade is obviously a deal, but I don't know. I feel like they would have shown up with their own stuff too.
00:12:38
Speaker
you know yeah You know, this wasn't a village. right We can tell that. right there's no There's no evidence that there was a village here. okay So this was a battleground. So you show up with weapons ready to fight. I think it's really hard to make draw conclusions. It is an assumption. Yeah, it's like a battleground in general just seems like a really, really difficult place to draw conclusions because you don't have any of the like habitation evidence that goes along with most states. You don't you know have how people are living. You don't have any of that other context that helps fill in the blanks. So you're just kind of left drawing these assumptions. I don't really think that they're wrong necessarily. I'm just trying to understand how they got to where they got.
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah, the remains of the weaponry found suggest more than 2,000 people were involved, yeah which, again, that is a little bit um suspect, too. it's like the It's like the bone analysis, you know, over 12,000 bones found, and and that represents 150 people, but then they say,
00:13:35
Speaker
that there were over 2,000 people involved judging by the weapons. i mean I know a lot of people probably got away, and and then maybe the MNI's wrong as far as the people go, because they got differing numbers here. But anyway, they say this was the this shows the Bronze Age. I like these quotes here, or these comments. The Bronze Age wasn't as peaceful as was believed.
00:13:56
Speaker
I'm not sure anybody thought the Bronze Age was super peaceful, but the Bronze Age wasn't as peaceful as believed. And I'm going to jump down to one of our last notes here because there's also in another comment says Bronze Age societies also built fortified settlements and smiths to forge weapons.
00:14:12
Speaker
and that these weren't just displays of power, it turns out. Whoever thought those were just displays of power are not actually used. Right. Other people actually just wrote that. Yeah. And I'm like, that seems weird to say that. Yeah, it does. I mean, I don't know why anybody thought the Bronze Age was peaceful, but... I mean, this is a giant battle. Obviously it wasn't super peaceful. So yeah. And as far as the 2000 people involved thing, actually that does kind of make sense to me because if you have the remains from 150 individuals, I mean, even in the worst battles, most of the people don't die. It's not a hundred percent casualty rate. So if 150 out of 2000 or so people were the casualties, I think that kind of does make sense from a proportion sense, you know? Yeah, but so we're saying like 1800 people just left their weapons there. Are they broken weapons? Well, I think it's broken. Yeah, broken. Because arrows, arrows, right? One person could have a quiver of 20 arrows. Yeah, but one person's not going to be able to kill 20 people though. Suspect. Don't trust their numbers. Anyway, injuries do suggest that archery was involved, obviously, unless they were stabbing people with arrows. Yeah, there's a really cool graph that shows all the different types of wounds that they found on the bodies and arrow shots were very high up on that list. You can see a lot of them all over the body. That was cool. Which also suggests the shields were used, which apparently is a big deal because this also suggests
00:15:41
Speaker
ah Another one thing that suggests a large-scale of battle because apparently those all those factors suggest a large-scale battle Yeah, right. You don't use arrows in a small battle Apparently, you know you use you use arrows when you have a you know a field of archers shooting across the field Right, because you've got to be really good stuff to hit a person. So if you have a whole pile of people in front of you, then I guess the chances are better of hitting one. Gosh, it's so dark when you think about it, really like crazy, crazy that they had to resort to war and instead of just, you know, working it out. But, you know, that's humans for you.
00:16:18
Speaker
All right, so well, let's take a break from that. And on the other side, we'll talk about a place in France where apparently it couldn't work out. A bunch of big humans, and they buried them under a basement in France. Back in a minute.
French Basement Cemetery Discovery
00:16:30
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 285 of The Archaeology Show. And we are now talking about France and skeletons and rhinos. More skeletons. Skeletons have been been in the news lately. just Apparently. yeah Well, I mean, it's The Archaeology Show. Yeah. There's a lot of skeletons in these closets. Right.
00:16:52
Speaker
I have to admit to like my bias for skeletons too. I love them. Yeah. I kind of also just like really want to buy an old house in Europe somewhere. But then also I kind of really don't because ah I have a desires to do that because I want to do a renovation and find something really old and cool either in the walls or in the basement. But also I don't want to live over a cemetery.
00:17:16
Speaker
Oh, I totally want to live over a cemetery. Yes, I kind of do as well. But also, I have US laws and regulations in place in my head because I'm afraid that you know if you bought a house in the United States, like an old house, and you found, I don't know, a cemetery of pretty much any kind in your basement, I'm pretty sure that would be bad for your property. I think it would be, yeah. Yeah, really bad. yeah yeah But anyway, this article, accidental basement find reveals dozens of centuries old skeletons. I mean, I think like in a place like France that has been occupied for so long by so many people throughout so much time that they kind of just have to like deal with it when, yeah when skeletons are found in basements. Indeed. Yeah. Which is what they did here. So the preventative archeology firm, which
00:18:04
Speaker
I don't understand that name. I think it's a translation issue. Yeah, I think so. Because you're not preventing anything. That's what they called it. They call it preventative archaeology. And I was like, that's an interesting term. It's got to be like CRM or something like that, but in France. It must be. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:18
Speaker
so Anyway, the firm is called Archaeodunum. They excavated a site over the winter of 2023 and 2024 in the basement of a home in France, like we said. And the homeowner was doing a renovation and they accidentally found a skeleton and then here we go.
00:18:36
Speaker
I know. Could you imagine? They're like, ah, Christ, a skeleton. I wonder if this is like an old murder or something like that. Well, you don't know. You have to call in experts because like it could be from somebody who died 20 years ago or in the case of this one, right like 2000 years ago. I feel like they're cutting a bunch out here because what was that article in, I can't remember where it was, but that one where the The right Roman table or something that was being used as a bar. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it was like archaeology team unite Yeah, know like they called in the archaeologists because now they say this jumps straight from and this is a suburb in southern Paris Yeah, they they jump straight to a whole bunch of graves were found but yeah, that wasn't the order of operations No, the guy finds a skeleton and I'm sure called the police probably and the police come in and we're like, yeah, dude This is like a thousand years old like super old Yeah, and so they call probably whoever, a university, yeah they call somebody, and they're like, we don't do this, call these guys, and they come in, and then you know three months later. Okay, this is like such a tangent, but like who has to pay for that? Is the person building the house, do they have to like pay for the archeology firm to come in and like excavate all of that so they can go ahead with their renovation? Again, not the United States. I'm willing to bet the government of France paid for it, because under the ground, they probably own it.
00:19:47
Speaker
Yeah. It's history. Yeah, true. But anyway, a total of, like this I don't know how these long these people have been living in this house, but 38 graves, not one, 38 graves spread out across four rooms of this cellar. okay Well, a cellar with four rooms means that this is probably a pretty large house, sort right? Pretty large house. Yeah, whatever house in France is a mansion. No, it's not.
00:20:09
Speaker
ah So they were arranged in parallel rows and seemed to be part of a cemetery that was in use from the third century to the 10th century. Yeah. 700 years is a long time. That is a very long time. Yeah. lee And kind of knew that there was a cemetery here in this area. So like the fact that they're finding graves, I guess is not like a huge surprise. It's more about what the grace told them that is surprising.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, since the 1800s, several plasters of sarcophagi had been discovered in that area. yeah And scholars in the 19th century thought those burials were linked to the Notre Dame de Champs Chapel built in the 7th century on the site of a pagan temple in that area. yeah So they were like, oh yeah, it must be part of this. Yeah, I mean, why not, right? I mean, it would make sense.
00:20:58
Speaker
There's been no trace of these constructions found to date, however, and those graves were never fully really studied by modern science. That was, you know, several hundred years ago. yeah This new evidence suggests the cemetery is older than those scholars assumed anyway and long before the construction of the chapel.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, and they have some reasons for thinking that now. So during the late Roman Empire, the deceased in the region were often buried laying down on their backs in a wooden casing in a very deep grave. yeah Not too different from like, you know, how we do it today, really. pretty much but But the change though, it did change and and that's in the early medieval period starting around 500 CE, the practice evolved to being buried instead in a plaster sarcophagi. So you kind of can see that break in time through the burial practices.
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, and this excavation uncovered 10 sarcophagi arranged side-by-side in a fan shape, which would just be crazy. And you don't see that evolve ah excavate out under your house. Yeah, so crazy. Like, what were they fanned out in front of? They must have been fanned in front of something. That's why you do a fan shape. Some kind of statue, probably, or something. Yeah. Maybe like a family, right a family whatever you call those big things, mausoleum A big family marker, yeah. yeah One of those probably had a map with a shield on its surface, I'm sure of it, that led to a treasure. Why didn't they know this? Why are you always hunting for treasure? I'm serious. why mean There had to be something. i mean this The time period, I'm sure it led to the you the Crusades and some math in the United States. Come on. Seriously. like Anyway, the boring part is, all the remains we analyzed and allowed to determine sex, age of death, and possibly other conditions.
00:22:43
Speaker
Okay, so again, these confusing news stories sometimes, they said that in the 19th century, they thought that the other burials found in the area were related to the chapel that was built in the seventh century, right? Which would be the 600s, right? Well, this article is saying that these burials in this basement, the recent ones are all buried in plaster sarcophagi that start, they start using around 500 C.
00:23:09
Speaker
That's only a hundred years difference. Yeah. So why are we like, why are they saying, Oh no, it's much earlier. It's like, no, that's a hunt. Like at the earliest it's a hundred years earlier. And, or it's like the same time period actually. So either I'm missing something in this article and it wasn't communicated well, or it kind of sounds like this really jives with what the earlier archeal just said as well. And it's just adding more evidence to the same thing that we already knew.
00:23:36
Speaker
ah yes yeah mean it my misunderstanding I I I mean, no, I guess. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's some of the, maybe there are some of the older style graves mixed in with it. And so we have a transition cemetery. Who knows?
00:23:51
Speaker
I don't know if the guy's done with this. Did he make some like Roman baths down there out of all this? like did they you know what's like What's going on down there? What did his Renault turn into? Mancave. Mancave, my God. I don't think anybody does Mancaves anymore. It's not a thing. Especially not in the suburbs of Paris. yeah Yeah, they're cooler than that. Yeah. I mean, what does he do when What was he going to do down there? Like bedrooms? Like what was he going to do? And is he like, all right, well, you know, you've got a bedroom down here. You've got your own bathroom. So we're going to leave you to sort out yourself. Oh, by the way, 38 people live down here. Kind of. They were buried. They were dead for a thousand years. But don't worry about that. I'm sure they're gone now. I think they need to set a season of ghosts here.
00:24:36
Speaker
That shows not real. They never find anything. Oh, that show. The show in the house. Yeah. I was thinking the, like a ghost hunter thing. No, no, no, no. Like the, the fictional show ghosts where they can see ghosts. That would be great. Wouldn't it be? Yeah. But they're all be like the, they would be like the people in the basement. Yeah. yeah the base people The basement people that all died from what? That smallpox or something? Yeah. yeah ridiculous anyway All right. Okay. Well, we're going to now end this and find out what happens when you go diving.
Exploring a Flooded Tomb in Sudan
00:25:10
Speaker
Oh, are you going to get your treasure hunt finally? We're going finally going to find some treasure. Yeah. Flooded tombs. Come on. Yeah. Back in a minute. We'll go back to the archaeology show, episode 285. And we were talking about flooded tombs. Go.
00:25:29
Speaker
It's quite the lead up. Yeah. Well, I did pick out this article. And I'm going to give two disclaimers about this article before we start. It's the first one that it came from Idolator.
00:25:40
Speaker
Yes, that is the first one. And the hell is that I don't know, but I found the tone of the article to be very like conversational and there's like exclamation points and stuff. So like, you know, it was an an enjoyable light read and I enjoyed that. And I cross checked some of their like history facts that they were dropping in there. And generally speaking, most of it, it checked out. So like, I felt pretty good about it from a,
00:26:08
Speaker
information standpoint, right? yeah However, what I was just doing right in the very second before we started podcasting was scrolling through and looking at the pictures just one more time, just to get it back in my head. And I'm like, wait a minute, all these photos say Getty images on them. Oh yeah. These aren't images from.
00:26:26
Speaker
Yeah. And then I started looking closer and I'm like, we're going to get to this because this is about underwater archeology. But they say specifically that they can't use any scuba tanks because the area is too tight. For scuba tanks, they have to use the long tubes that run the air down to you from the surface.
00:26:43
Speaker
all of these pictures have scuba tanks in them. So like every single image in this article is just pulled from random public place. And while I think the pyramids are correct, cause that's what they do look like when you look them up, and it's certainly not pictures that were given to them by the people involved in this article. And the scuba pictures are very misleading cause none of those pictures represent the actual scuba diving that they did for this article. So,
00:27:10
Speaker
There's your disclaimer, take this with a grain of salt from a photo perspective. Otherwise, I kind of enjoyed the article. It was great. Yeah. These are articles though, these kind of click-baity websites, I don't know who sets them up and why, but they make money because of advertising and these people just search for other articles on the internet and then they repurpose the same article. They maybe rewrite a few words to get around copyright and then drop in images and we click on them and read them.
00:27:36
Speaker
Yeah, it does make me wonder if we should like research a little harder where this article came from, if we can find even an origin point for it, because... Well, it might change just enough of the words to where you can. Yeah. But like I said, I enjoyed the tone of this article. It's not very journalistic. It has a point of view more so than you know the kind of boring, like toe the middle of the line, journalist journalistic articles do. So I appreciated that. It sounded like somebody with excitement about archeology wrote this article, which is what I appreciate about it. So yeah anyway, just keep an eye out for that kind of stuff when you're reading articles. This one definitely sucked me in because it was fun. yeah Anyway, let's talk about the fun part of it. indeed
00:28:22
Speaker
So underwater archeologists, Kristin Rami and a Pierce Paul Kriezmann went on an underwater exploration of a submerged ancient tomb in Sudan. And the article title is to archeologists discover something extraordinary after diving into a flooded tomb. Spoiler alert, it was nothing extraordinary other than exactly what you would expect to find in a tomb. And that is extraordinary because it's a tomb, but it wasn't like special, right? Okay. Yeah. So a body?
00:28:53
Speaker
there's a sarcophagus in there and there's some other like potential things, but we'll get there. So. This tomb is associated with one of the 20 remaining Nuri pyramids that were constructed by the Kushite royals. And I had never heard of these pyramids, and I had never really seen them either. They're they're like these taller, skinnier, triangular pyramids. And there they seem to have like a smaller footprint than the big ones that you think of from Giza, of course. But there's many more of them packed into a ah small space, and they are pretty highly degraded. And there is evidence that, like,
00:29:29
Speaker
there are some medieval churches and stuff or maybe mosques or whatever that they repurpose stones from to build other buildings. So they've kind of been degraded by both human and erosion activity over the years. So they're not in super great shape.
00:29:42
Speaker
Yeah, the Nuri served as the royal necropolis for the ancient city of Napata, which was the first capital of the Nubian kingdom of Kush. Yeah, the Kushite pharaohs ruled Egypt from 650 BCE to 300 BCE after the fall of the new kingdom. And during that time, they revived some of their religious practices of the older Egyptian kingdoms, like pyramids, like this. This is why we are finding pyramids here.
00:30:10
Speaker
And these pyramids, just like the ones in Giza, are located close to the Nile. But one kind of more interesting difference is the actual tombs, where the kings were buried, are underground. So because of that, they are all flooded, or partially flooded, in some way flooded.
00:30:29
Speaker
yeah In the early 20th century, Egyptologist George Reisner attempted to explore the pyramids of Nuri. He found them to be flooded, and though some artifacts were recovered, the work was not very extensive. yeah It was really hard to explore that kind of stuff during that time. yeah They didn't have any like scuba gear or anything. They weren't they weren't doing underwater archaeology back then, basically.
00:30:50
Speaker
Now there's a sentence in this article that goes, Reisner never published the results of his findings in Nuri. And for almost a century, the place was forgotten. Mm-hmm. Forgotten by who? I know. I just hate those kind of sentences. Nobody forgot this place existed. I mean, I kind of forgot about it.
00:31:06
Speaker
It's a whole cultural heritage monument. I think it's it's UNESCO World Heritage site. like This is a very significant, important place. But because of the difficulty of excavation, more excavation work was not done. But that is the only way it was in any way forgotten, if you can even call it that. I had completely forgotten about it. Well, you never knew about it. So I don't know if that counts as forgetting.
00:31:29
Speaker
Anyway, okay, off my soapbox, I hate those words. The only people that forget things are the the ones that never knew about it to begin with, but going on. So it is true, however, that pretty much no other excavations happened.
00:31:43
Speaker
on these tombs that are underground and flooded. Until 2018, when Pierce Paul Kreisman started working here, he got, you know, he was an experienced underwater archaeologist and he got grants from the National Geographic Society and, you know, narrowed in on which tomb to focus on. And that was the tomb associated with the Pyramid of Nastasen. Nastasen? Nastasen. Nastasen. I don't know what the emphasis is on that one. Nastasen. Nastasen. I don't know. I don't know either. Yep. Well, good thing the National Geographic Society was down with PPC because he went in. Oh my God. Wow. You are so lame. I just wanted to say that. I know. I have nothing leading past that. No, you don't. Full stop on that sentence. Perfect.
00:32:34
Speaker
Anyway, Nastasen, I'm going to go with Nastasen, was the last getting buried in this area. So his was closest to the Nile and most prone to flooding. Yeah. Nastasen was one of the minor royals who ruled Kush from 335 to 315 BCE. I mean, that's 20 years. 20 years, right? I mean, if if I knew but through a 20-year rule of you know this area that I was going to be known as a minor royal.
00:33:02
Speaker
You know, I hesitated over that word too. That word is in this article and I didn't find corroboration in other sources for minor. I'm not really sure. 20 years. yeah so That's a lot of time. i mean they didn't do much I know I think it's because he came from one of the minor He was elevated from a minor like a royal family like not necessarily from the like top line He did but I'm just like it's like it's so funny because there are there are names in like like US presidents like if you told me the name of a US president from like
00:33:39
Speaker
you know, the mid 1800s, I'd be like, Oh yeah, I kind of remember that guy was a president. Like some of those people that just served like one term and didn't really do anything. yeah Really we call them a minor president. yeah You know what I mean? But we don't just, we just don't use that. yeah You know, but they just like didn't do much. They were kind of in the middle. They just didn't All right, settle down. I'm just like very upset by the word minor. Settle down. I don't think that's how that word is meant in this case. It just meant he came from one of the minor noble houses that wasn't the main bloodline. I'm just saying. and It's very insulting. OK, all right. Well, pretend I didn't use that word, because now I really regret not taking it out.
00:34:15
Speaker
I don't like it. All right. OK, so very little is known about him. And of course, these researchers are hopeful that they can find out more things, fill in this picture of this this last of the Nury Kings by exploring his tomb. Maybe the bandits will go visit him. The time bandits. Oh, one could help, because that show is great.
00:34:37
Speaker
Reisner's crew in the early 1900s, they found the staircase that leads down into the tomb,
Archaeological Ethics: Past and Present
00:34:43
Speaker
right? yeah And they dug it out because there wasn't too much water yet. And they were able to get into the first room of the tomb and they definitely removed a bunch of what are called shop tea. And those are little statues that are meant to look after the deceased in the afterlife.
00:34:59
Speaker
And then they left from there and just never returned. sure I don't know if it's because there was water in the way and they just really couldn't go any further or if they just had bigger fish to fry, other tombs were easier to excavate, who knows, but they didn't return after that. And I'm also kind of like, okay, so cool. They went down the staircase, they opened the tomb for the first time, because it seems like it was untouched before that. and They entered, they took a bunch of artifacts and then they left. So what did they do exactly?
00:35:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah did it well that they That's looting. Did they document it and put it in the British Museum? Maybe. I don't know where those artifacts are now, actually. If they did, it's not looting. Still somebody asked for it. He didn't even publish his research on these pyramids. So I don't even know. Is there anything in the British Museum published? Well, there are. Yes, a lot of it is. And George Reisner is famous. He did the Giza pyramid. So like he's- Oh, see, it's not looting. No. Well, if you don't publish it, if you take the artifacts, I'm sure he gave the artifacts to the government. I'm going to hope he did. I don't know. So it's not actual looting. But boy, does it not like feel a little bit like that. Anyway.
00:36:07
Speaker
i think I think honestly, you're I think the the definition of looting is going to end up being what happens to the artifacts. If you yeah keep them for yourself and put them on your mantle and don't tell anybody, that's looting. If you sell them to somebody else and profit off them, that's looting.
00:36:25
Speaker
I think those are the two big definitions. But what if you're one of these old school archaeology guys and you care more about making a name for yourself really than anything else and so you take these artifacts and you donate them to somewhere really important and your name gets attached to that donation and all of a sudden you're in the history books forever. So your form of compensation has come in notoriety and historical like remember history remembering you for doing this. so All you did was donate, and you didn't write anything? Well, in this case, you didn't. I don't know. i just I feel like what some of these archaeologists were doing in the early 1900s was just a half step over looting, and they were really doing it to game fame and fortune in other ways. I think you're using the word incorrectly, because I think some of these people that were calling archaeologists, these gentleman adventurers. Yeah, they weren't really doing archaeology. They were looters. Yeah, the the field of archaeology in the late 1800s, early 1900s was
00:37:22
Speaker
was again, little more than just gentleman, gentleman adventuring these people who had money or had sponsors that were like, you know, Hey, I'm going to go down and do this and you're going to pay me to do that. And I'm going to bring back these fantastic things and show the Victorian era or show these, you know, ah show these fancy people, these things. yeah That wasn't archeology, no it wasn but it was being called archeology.
00:37:46
Speaker
But at the same time, there were some people in that time period doing real good archeology. It exists, it was there, and they could have done it. and They were. but yeah And I don't really know a lot about George Reisner, so I don't want to slander him right now. But you know it doesn't seem like in this particular instance, he was trying to do good or good archeology. He was just trying to get in there, find some stuff, and take it to wherever he was taking it to. right So anyway, moving on from that. Again, another soap box.
00:38:15
Speaker
Since then, the curse took over, and the scar staircase was reburied, and the entire tomb is now flooded. Is the curse global warming? and Yes. OK. Yes, actually. OK, cool. The curse of technology and global warming. Yeah. Anyway, the first year of work in 2019 was just excavating the stairs, because yeah that was a job. yeah Once they reached the tomb, the rest was underwater. And they used tubes to breathe, because stuba tanks, stuba Bronze Age,
00:38:44
Speaker
Once they'd reached the tomb entry, the rest is underwater, and they used tubes to breathe because scuba tanks were too bulky. They just couldn't make it through the area. Yeah, that's what we were talking about in the beginning, how like that's how you can tell that the photos are yeah kind of BS, because yeah they did not use tanks. They couldn't. Which is shocking. The early Egyptians probably used tanks. I don't know how they didn't. ah They knew it was going to be underwater. OK, do we need to talk about global warming and how that works? Anyway. There was no water back then. Well, no. I mean, the Egyptian, that's just why they had pyramids in those areas near the Nile. It was known for flooding. Well, yeah. But they didn't necessarily want their tombs to flood. And I don't think at that time they were filling up with water. Actually, a little bit shocking, to be honest with you. The Nile is known for also its movement in that area, because it it it did move. It's called anastomosis, one of the people that was moved like that. But yeah anyway, the river moved a lot. So presumably, when they built a pyramid there, although they did take 10, 20, 30 years to build a pyramid sometimes, depending on how big it was. I don't know how long this one took to build, but and this tomb in particular.
00:39:45
Speaker
but It's kind of funny, did they know that that tomb was going to flood? Did the tomb start flooding before they even finished it? I doubt it. Probably it was in an area that was perfect in that short timeframe, which, geologically speaking, 20 years is only a tiny little blip, right? It doesn't take long for that river to move, though. It was probably perfect in that timeframe, and then now it's not. Yeah, indeed.
00:40:10
Speaker
So after they got into the tomb and now it's all underwater, they began excavating in what they are calling Reisner's pit, which is basically where the crew from with Reisner first excavated in the 1900s.
00:40:25
Speaker
And they just basically started collecting all the dirt and sediment from this area, and then pulling it out to do screening on it. Because they figured this tomb hasn't been it hasn't been touched. It can't have been touched because of all the water, unless you have gear. And nobody had gear until the last 40 or 50 years. It wouldn't have even been possible. So so if you're following along, archaeology over 100 years ago was finding cool shit and raiding tombs. And now it's collecting dirt.
00:40:52
Speaker
and literally taking it back to the lab and sifting through it. Okay, well, it should have been collecting dirt back then, too. They just weren't doing that, so... It's actually true, though. Our geology now is, hey, look at that cool bag of dirt. Let's take it back to the lab. Yeah, okay, but this bag of dirt is really cool because you know what they found in it.
Uncovering Burial Practices in Sediment
00:41:10
Speaker
All kinds of little, very thin pieces of gold foil that were likely used as decoration on figurines or boxes or... Plates maybe like whatever was in the tomb as offerings and gifts to go with the deceased so They have all the gold still all the other things that it was attached to would have been dissolved away because of the water It's kind of a catch-22 right like if it had been looted Maybe we would have some of those artifacts and we do have the ones from a hundred years ago Only because they were taken out because otherwise they would have dissolved in the water ever since then But you know, yeah
00:41:48
Speaker
Blooting's not good either, so I don't know. Anyway, but what they're planning to do is continue to work through that sediment and find out what they can. And then in the third chamber, which is the deepest chamber, or the furthest chamber, Nasus and sarcophagus still sits.
00:42:06
Speaker
um like they think undisturbed in the water, right? and There's no reason to think that it had ever been looted or opened or whatever. So yeah, I mean, from there, they haven't tried to open it yet. They haven't done anything to it yet, but I think the next step sort of, you know, figure out how to get it out of the underwater tomb so that they can open it and see what's left. That will definitely open the curse.
00:42:27
Speaker
100%. Is that the mummy's curse? 100%. Okay, well, yeah yep, that's... That will either do something to Brendan Fraser, or I'm not really sure what's gonna happen, but it'll be bad. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah no, we don't believe in curses here. We just believe in knowledge, so... The curse of knowledge. Yeah, or sometimes.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, I just thought that article was really cool because it's a little bit more of an adventure moment in archaeology rather than just plain old, you know, scraping dirt away. Although it is scraping dirt away, but it's underwater, so that makes it cooler, right? It does. Yeah. I actually really like reading about those early adventures. I'll have to see if I can remember eventually. I probably won't get into time for these show notes. but If I can ever remember, I'll try to post something about some of the other books I've read, because i' I've probably given away. We gave away a lot of books or to our local bookstore in Reno when we moved into an RV, had a whole library of stuff. But I had some really cool books about some early, early adventures of people that were doing actually some, what they would have called good science back in the day, you know, in the late 1800s, early 1900s. But this still is adventures where
00:43:40
Speaker
you know You get out and you you hire the locals. yeah and I mean, it's really unethical these days, but you would have you you would have hired a whole bunch of locals and natives to help carry all of your stuff, your big Victorian furniture out into wherever and then set up a tent while they go do all the digging and artifact finding, bring it back to you for cataloging yeah while you sit and have a fancy meal and they do all the work. But either way,
00:44:07
Speaker
Well, they don't get their hands dirty. no they you know they They oversee. They're the guy with the clipboard. It's not any different today. They're just the guy, like back in the day, they sat on their yeah fancy blanket and drank wine, and today they're the guy with clipboard so the One of the ones, if you're interested in paleoanthropology, that is just sticks in my mind all the time. is I can't remember the name of the book, but it was about Eugene Dubois who discovered Java Man. And he was real famous for paying the locals to bring him fossil finds. Because there was a very specific site they were excavating and he found that they just worked faster if he'd pay them for the stuff that they found. Well, they found that if they broke them into pieces, they got paid more. So he had to stop that practice real fast. Yeah. yeah yeah so I think he ended up starting paying by weight yeah instead. yeah yeah Then they stopped breaking them. so But you learn real quick. Oh my gosh, so crazy. Anyway, all right so that was fun. when We've got a lot of new stories to catch up on. There's actually quite a bit. Fall is a good time for this because you know people work a lot party over the summer, they start reporting, and these things start coming out. There's a lot of good stuff out there. and i'm like
00:45:16
Speaker
Super excited for the next episode because some of my favorite news stories are the ones where they like claim to have solved some like centuries-old history So that's we're gonna look at some stories that are Supposedly doing that next week. All right. Well with that we'll see you next week i e
00:45:37
Speaker
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.
00:46:00
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech 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.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Say bronze age a couple times.
00:46:30
Speaker
Because you kept saying bronze age. I do that every time I say it. I know, just and I can try to sub it in if there's some that are really bad. Bronze age. Bronze age. Bronze age. Bronze age. Bronze age. Bronze age. Will you let me say it? You're just waiting to say it. Sorry, go ahead. Bronze age.
00:46:55
Speaker
I'm cutting all this together givingron bra bron but and Bronze age. Bronze age. Bronze age. I can't wait to cut this together and give it to Tilly. Bronze age. Bronze. Bronze age. Bronze. Bronze age. Bronze age. Thanks, Tilly.