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Snail Slime to Smallpox: Unexpected Discoveries (and Yes, There Are Cherries at Mount Vernon) - Ep 268
2.5k Plays4 months ago
This week we have three great archaeology news stories! First up, archaeologists have excavated a royal purple dye workshop in Greece. Then, excavations at an early colonial Incan cometary give insight into how small pox affected the community. And finally, perfectly preserved cherry bottles have been found in a cellar at Mount Vernon.
Links
- In This Ancient Workshop, Greeks Crushed Snail Glands to Make the Purple Dye Worn by Royalty
- More than just a color: Archaeological, analytical, and procedural aspects of Late Bronze Age purple-dye production at Cape Kolonna, Aegina
- Skeletons of Incan kids buried 500 years ago found marred with smallpox
- Two cases of smallpox from 1540 CE circum-contact (early colonial) Northern Coastal Peru
- 35 glass bottles from the 18th century filled with cherries unearthed by archeologists at George Washington’s Mount Vernon (Apple News)
Contact
- Chris Webster
[email protected] - Rachel Roden
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RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Episode 268 Introduction
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 268. On today's show, we talk about Royal Purple Dye, Smallpox in Peru, and George Washington's cherries. Let's dig a little deeper and find out what other things can be milked.
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome to the show. Hello.
00:00:41
Speaker
My name is Rachel. I don't know who I am. I am Friar Chris. Oh man. now The callback. ah It is not a good one, but pretty good actually.
Michigan Travels and RV Podcast Idea
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Well, we're still in Michigan for those following along with our travel saga. Yes, we are. We're, we're over in kind of the mitten area, the thumb mitten area kind of lake here on let's just be adults, but no geology on the lake right now. We're on the river. Okay.
00:01:15
Speaker
see Canada from our doorstep we can it's pretty cool So really but so the closest big city to where we're at right now is Port Huron I think and that's a border crossing over to Canada and then Detroit's what like an hour south of us or something like that Yeah, so that's where we're at at the moment. We're crammed into a sardine Campground I can see a minimum of seven RVs out of my window right now I can see the other seven behind you out of my windows, but it's in a forest. It is actually nice here. It's a nice campground. We had some struggles parking yesterday, but it's all good. We're good now. And I think it's going to be a good week here. So fingers crossed.
00:01:54
Speaker
Yeah. You guys should message us in and tell us if you'd be excited if we did decide to start an RVing podcast. Would you listen to it? I'm just curious. Yeah. Who wants to hear us talk about RVing instead of archeology? Because we keep talking about doing it. Not instead of this show. No, no. In addition to that. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be another show because we need more work to do. Yeah. So I mean, we're pretty free flowing with our conversation on the show. And I think an RVing podcast would be like even more that. Yes. Yeah. Probably no editing. Probably not yeah, so like when we like have to pause the recording and like fight a little bit because you annoy me getting all that you get all that yeah
00:02:31
Speaker
yeah so All right. yes Well, let's talk about Purple Die. Yeah, let's talk about it. Yeah. Purple has long been associated with the color of royalty. It has been. For a long time. And there's reasons for that. There is very good reasons for that. And this this article in particular was like music to my soul because This is the kind of thing that
Royal Purple Dye History
00:02:55
Speaker
if you want to be a person who does the ancient arts, like you could still harvest and make this purple dye yourself today and then like dye fabric or yarn or whatever. You want to milk snails. I mean, yeah, I didn't say it wouldn't be weird or gross, but like you could totally do it. So snail milking. I'm going to put that on my resume.
00:03:16
Speaker
Snail milker. OK, let's say what we're talking about here. So this is an article in Smithsonian. It's called, in this ancient workshop, Greeks crushed snail glands to make the purple dye worn by royalty, hence the milking jokes that are probably going to be made throughout this episode for this segment. Yes, I'm probably done. So this is going on in a Bronze Age town called Kelona on the Greek island of Aegina. Yep, archaeologists excavated two Mycetian buildings in this town that dated to the 16th century BCE, aka 1600 to 1501 BCE. Yeah, I had to put those dates in because I was reading the article and I was like, 16th century? Like, what does that even mean? I need numbers. Yeah. yeah So that's what that means. The research was published by Lydia Berger and others in plus one. And I believe we've linked to that in the show notes. I saw that. We have indeed. Yeah. Yeah. There's some good photos, especially like the island itself. So you can kind of see where this is in the world. So it's nice to check that out. But the Smithsonian article is really great too. So well-written. Yeah. The older the two buildings contain ceramics coated in purple pigment.
00:04:23
Speaker
grinding tools and piles of broken mollusk shells. And I'll tell you what, the fact that they were still covered in purple pigment just says to how much they were losing in this entire process. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Well, you got to store a purple dye in something, right? And what is it going to do? It's going to coat the sides of the vessel, right? They didn't really have glass in any high quantities at that time. No. And it would have been too precious to use for this when they could... I don't know. This is pretty precious. Well, it is pretty precious. Yeah. This is the one thing you would store in glass. Yeah. but Well, anyway, all those artifacts indicate that this was probably a purple dye factory of some sort. This pigment was actually known as Mycenaean purple in this time period. And then later on, it became known as Tyrian purple. That was the name given to it by the Romans. And then Lannister purple. And then I knew that joke was going to happen. Lannister purple, the best Lannister. I'm purple and I know things.
00:05:19
Speaker
That's the best. Game of Thrones for those who somehow missed that cultural phenomenon in the last 15 years. I watched season two of House of the Dragon on HBO premiering Sunday. Oh, wow. No, we're not going to do that. way We're not sponsored. Nobody's given us any money for that one. Anyone who's listening to this that works at h HBO, I'll give you an address to send the check. Just send me a message. Anyway. now Okay, so this purple dye, it is created by extracting the mucus gland. Extracting? Is that the word we use? Milking. Milking. We're gonna go with extracting. Sounds more scientific. Extracting the mucus glands of mollusks or Mediterranean sea snails. Yes. They're cute little twisty shells. When you look at the pictures, you can't feel bad about the fact that they're smooshing their little bodies to death. Well, I want to know who was sitting there crushing or just like playing with some snails and then like,
00:06:13
Speaker
accidentally squeezed one too hard and be like, how the hell is that? And then they wiped it on their shirt and that stain never went away probably. That's definitely how that happened. Like how do I make that happen again? That was cool. I want a shirt that's this entire color right or tunic probably, right? I don't know. It's Greek. Yeah. yeah So it was first manufactured by the Phoenicians in present day Lebanon and then the the practice sort of spread from there. And it's a very complicated and very painstaking, well actually it's not really complicated. I might've used the wrong word there in my note. It's not terribly complicated. You just sort of squeeze their little guts out and add it to some salt water, shut it out in the sun and let it go. Yeah, it's just tedious and painstaking. So because of that, it, you
Snail Milking for Dye Production
00:06:56
Speaker
know, only the very rich owned anything died with the Mycenaean purple color. Yeah, Pliny the Elder wrote that thousands of little snails were required to make a single ounce of dye. Yeah. Yeah, so it is painstaking. It is. He was kind of known for his dramatics a little bit though, so I like wonder. Even if he's only half right. Yeah, true. Yeah, so like I was just saying, they would have had to first crush the shells, extract their tiny glands, mix them with salt water, and then let that mixture steep in the sun, which is probably where the ceramic coated vases come in, because they have to sit in something in the sunlight, right? Yeah.
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah, the result was a deep purple lilac or dark red color, I suppose, depending on concentrations. Plus they're like biological animals. It probably wasn't all consistent. Yeah. And if you had a ah lot of one species, maybe from one area, I wonder if they could have started like pinpointing the different colors from the different shell types and different places or whatever. I i bet they got that good at at knowing what they were doing. Right. Yeah. yeah The pigment is used on textiles, paintings, and whatever they could get it to stick on, probably. yeah i would guess yeah Interestingly, the ceramics found, like we mentioned earlier, were coated in this pigment and were likely storage vessels because they probably didn't paint the inside of these vessels with purple dye that was precious. No, probably not. It was yeah just leftover and then it you know dried on there and there it stayed until they were uncovered by archaeologists.
00:08:15
Speaker
Yeah. And according to the researchers, it was such a high quality dye that they found that it could still be extracted from these vessels vessels today and be used to dye clothing. Yeah. In the article, there's like a pile of like a powdery purple substance. That's a lot though. I feel like that's a stock shot. and It might be, but I, I don't know. I kind of thought it might be like from, from pulling it off the vessels, you know? There'd be a lot of vessels, but it could be, could be. It just seems like too much. Yeah. I also see little bits like sediment or something mixed in with it. Maybe they found, they might've found actual little piles of it because it was a production center. So they might've found anyway. Yeah. But I was like, Oh my God, how do I get some of that? I want to like dye some yarn, that color and something with it and be like, I'm wearing the actual color of the Royal. The 1500 year old, well more like 3,500 year old, 3,500 year old color of the Royals. Yeah, they also found stones used for grinding, a waste pit with piles of crushed snail shells and probably a whole bunch of other stuff too. But yeah, stuff's gotta go somewhere. Yeah.
00:09:21
Speaker
But like we said, Mycenaean purple eventually became the color of royalty when Julius Caesar named Tyrion purple his official color and successive emperors followed his lead. Mm hmm. Because they're all like, me too. Thanks, Julius Caesar. But that that would have all happened in, you know, the first century eighty or whatever, whenever Julius Caesar was doing his thing. Right. And so this site dates to fifteen hundred years earlier than that, making it one of the earliest production sites for this kind of pigment. Well, he's not going to use no startup process. Like he wants something well established. Oh, it was well established by the time I got to him. That is for sure. Yeah. Yeah. At this time, Kelono was a dense, small, fortified town that produced and traded lots of handcrafted products, including Mycenaean dye. So it's the only thing. Yeah. Yeah. they Well, I mean, it's an island town, right? You got to do what you got to do to survive.
00:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, the factory itself was in an urban area near the coast, which is ideal, of course, for production of the pigment. The snails had to be caught and kept alive until their glands could be harvested. Yeah. Because, you know, I'm sure they would just dry up and be useless. Yeah. If they were dead, that wouldn't work so much. So they had to have like a, I don't know what they would have stored them in, maybe in vessels also, sort of in vessels, store them. Yeah, I don't know. I wonder how long that turnover process was. Like, did they go harvest like one day a week? or not harvest, but go catch them one day a week and then harvest for the rest of it. I wonder, I wonder what the exact process like that would have been. I wonder if there was a whole industry set up for this and you had people going out to harvest, is harvest the snails and bring them back. Oh yeah. Maybe they bring them in shipping containers, maybe S S cargo containers.
00:11:00
Speaker
or snails hurts me it hurts that I had to live through that joke and so did all of you guys I'm sorry well I saw your face I was like oh he's gearing up for something but I didn't know what it was Anyway, there was only one snail species used in this particular workshop and the banded dye Murex. Yeah. Whatever species that is. That's what it was. I was stumbling over that because it's a weird name of a snail. Yeah. It's a weird name for sure. But yeah, that's what it said in the article. I mean, why is that? Is that because that's the only one that had the purple dye. They could only get it out of that one. It seems like regional the way evolution works. There would be other snails with similar glands, but they couldn't get it from colors. Wonder if it was, yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe they liked the color of these in particular. So they targeted them when they were collecting or maybe it was just availability and there was a lot of them. Who knows? You know what you also have to do when you're burning snail or when you're crushing snails. Gotta burn a few pigs and lambs. Yeah, apparently you might have to sacrifice some baby pigs and lambs, because they found burnt bones. And I'm like, does that really mean ritual? Or maybe they were just hungry? Or does it mean dinner? Do we have to jump to ritual when you see the burnt bones of piglets and lambs? I don't know. Like you're selling the color of the royals, you're making pretty good money, you're gonna have some ribs for lunch. I'm just saying. And maybe a lamb chop for dinner.
00:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. i I would like to know more about the the context of that comment. yeah like Was it common for people in this area, in this time, to sacrifice piglets and lambs specifically, and this fits in with that cultural context? Or is it just that because it's different, that's why they're saying ritual. I don't know. I just, I would like more about that because it just feels a little bit, well, you know, everybody loves to jump to ritual. So yeah. Yeah. We don't love to jump to ritual though. So you can count on us to poke holes. That's true. Yeah. All right. Well with that, around the same time over in Egypt, they were starting to get smallpox and 3000 years later,
00:13:12
Speaker
That was gonna have a real huge impact on Peru. We'll talk about that so when we get back. I don't know where you're going with that. All right, welcome back to The Archaeology Show, episode 268. And now we're talking about... My favorite place. Peru. Peru. I cannot, cannot resist the story from Peru. Sorry. You and everybody else. Right. But it's such a great country with a rich ancient history. So anyway,
Smallpox in 16th-Century Peru
00:13:40
Speaker
here we go. All right. Well, this one is about this story was published in live science, or at least the news story was titled skeletons of Incan kids buried 500 years ago, found marred with smallpox.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah. And it was written by Christina Kilgrove and her name probably sounds familiar to you guys. And also ah in particular to me, because I looked her up and it turns out she went to Chapel Hill at the same time that I did, although she was doing her master's degree and then her PhD while I was in my undergrad. And I don't really think we crossed paths at all, but yeah, she was there. She was doing her classical archeology, bio archeology thing at the same time. So, yeah so, hey friend,
00:14:22
Speaker
I was, you know, scraping through college at that time. yeah So yeah, she was being productive and yeah I hadn't reached my productive years yet. So all right. and now
00:14:38
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, so she writes a great article We see her stuff all the time and she publishes often and because she was a bioarchaeologist or is a bioarchaeologist I think she does a lot of stuff that's focused on on that and that always piques my interest in yours too I think because there's just so many interesting things you can learn by studying the skeleton. So that's what this article is about All right. So let's get into it Yeah, so in a again once again, I'm going to go talk about personal stuff again. but So this is this article is based on the recent excavations at a 16th century cemetery in Wanchaco, Peru. And it shows the impact of smallpox in the early colonial period. And the study was initially published in Science Direct, which we have a link to in the show notes, by Christine Tsishinko.
00:15:24
Speaker
I'm probably not saying that right. Sorry. John Verano and Gabriel Pareto. And okay, of course, again, this Peru, but even closer connection to me, Wanchaco is the name of the town that I stayed in when I did my field school there. So I had have intimate familiarity with this town. I stayed there three separate times, you know, ah five to six weeks each time. And the church they're talking about doing the excavations at, I've been to like, we literally like, you know, you walk around the town because it's very small and where was your show?
00:15:55
Speaker
I'm like, why didn't they ask me to join? I literally lived in that town 20 years ago. and Obviously I should have been invited. So anyway, I did not work in Juan Chaco at all. My field school was well outside of town. It was just a town that we chose to stay in. And yeah, but so I have great memories, great experiences there and actual on the ground experience with going to see this church. It's a cool place. Nice. So Wanchaco is a small fishing town on the northwest coast of Peru. It's sort of near Trujillo, which is like the closest big city. And then also the ancient city of Chan Chan is right there as well. So that kind of places you in the map, both ancient and modern. Yes. I know where all those places are. Thank you for that. Well, we have talked about all of them before, but also you can just look them up and see where they are. They're all very close together. and
00:16:43
Speaker
The colonial church in Oanchaco was built by the Spanish between 1535 and 1540. So they'll come into large focus here shortly. yes The population buried there, which includes indigenous people, shows how colonialism was already changing the culture of the people because there are reed crosses buried with them, including European glass beads found in some of the graves of the indigenous people. So a lot of mixture of yeah trade going on, really. trade for sure, but like already you're seeing signs of Christianity yeah in these burials and like this is early, early colonial period, right? So like the Spanish have just barely gotten there. It makes you wonder if the indigenous people like really were like into the religious
00:17:25
Speaker
stuff at that point or if it was just sort of being imposed on them yeah by the Spanish after death or if they were actively participating because they were like, this is pretty and cool. You know, like I wonder about the motivations behind the indigenous people in this time period, but it's really hard to know that obviously. Yeah. There were 120 early colonial burials excavated and 90 of them, 75% were children. yeah that's That's a big number of children, right? And yeah and and of those 90 children, 60 to 67% of those were five and under. 60 of them 60 individuals. Oh, I see 60 Equating to 67 percent. Yeah, we're five and under got it. Yeah yeah i rather that kind of weird sorry I know that strongly suggests a novel disease because of their developing immune systems They were most vulnerable to a new illness like smallpox like smallpox the Egyptians damn Egyptians
00:18:16
Speaker
What did they do to bring smallpox into the world?
Impact of Smallpox on Indigenous Populations
00:18:19
Speaker
The end of this article actually says it is that it was first detected in Egyptian mummies from 3000 years before this. Yeah, on their skin. Yeah. Cause they have actual skin remains on Egypt. Yeah. But most of the time you just have skeletal remains at a cemetery and that is true of this one. And most of the time you can't tell what killed a person if it was a disease, yeah a fast acting disease like smallpox, right? so It doesn't have time to make a skeletal impression. Exactly. Yeah. It makes it really hard to tell how people died, how an epidemic started, you know, that kind of thing. But this one is different because two of the children who were around 18 months old when they died, they actually did show clear evidence of smallpox in their bones. And there's a very specific way that you can tell that.
00:19:02
Speaker
It's so sad, too. You can see it in the picture. So in the life science article, there's a picture at the top. And if you look really closely, like at the little bottoms of the long bones, you'll see what I'm talking about. But there their skeletons basically show numerous destructive lesions, they called them, which are almost like little moth holes. And those were found in the joints of their shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees and ankles. And if you look at that picture, you can see like the little holes that are sort of at those joint points for the bones. And that's so sad because that would have been just the worst thing to go through and experience. Oh, just awful.
00:19:38
Speaker
Yeah, those are consistent with an infection called osteomyelitis verulosa, which is triggered by smallpox. Yeah. The researchers guess they lived with smallpox for a few weeks before succumbing. And that is why their bones, of course, such show this infection. If they died within a few days, like you said, they wouldn't have showed anything. Yeah. yeah so But not everyone who gets smallpox gets this specific infection. You know, it's like COVID and coronavirus. Yeah. You know, coronavirus causes COVID-19. Yeah. So, but it, but one doesn't, you know, and coronavirus actually causes a lot of other stuff too. Like it just like weakened your immune system, does those kinds of things. Well, smallpox was doing a similar thing, making them susceptible to these different types of infections. But like they said, not everyone gets this specific one. And it says here, the rate is between five and 20% in children younger than five. So this is kind of a, kind of a big deal. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting for sure because I didn't realize that there would be so much variability in what the, I guess, symptoms of smallpox would look like and that this was just one of the things that yeah could occur. So just what a devastating, like nasty, nasty thing to have to live through or die from. So yeah.
00:20:50
Speaker
Yeah. This indicates that there are probably many more smallpox victims in the area and they don't show any effects in their skeletons. Yeah. I think what they're getting at is because there were so many children in this, in this cemetery and unusually high percentage of children, probably a lot more of them died from smallpox than we can tell just by looking at their bones because they didn't have any effects. So yeah, that's crazy. And now let's get it to like the significance of this, because a lot of what we said is kind of obvious, right? like We know smallpox was a thing brought to the Americas by the explorers, in particular the Spanish explorers really did a number in South America. So like why do we care about this? But the the thing that is interesting is that
00:21:38
Speaker
We know that they that some smallpox killed many indigenous people in the Americas, like up to like 70% of them, you know, in that first century that Spanish were there, but we don't have a lot of proof of this, basically. We just have written words from the Spanish conquistadors, you know? And it's hard to say definitively who was responsible, where the epidemics began, how it struck the populations, all of those very specific details of how it happened and who it happened to, right? So a cemetery like this with this specific example of the children of the community being devastated likely by
00:22:20
Speaker
smallpox, then it starts to help build a story of what happened to this community and what might have happened to other communities that were experiencing the same thing. And then as you build that picture in and get more communities throughout South America who experienced the same thing, you can say, well, like this happened in 1535 on the coast of Peru, but it didn't happen until 1580 over here and 1600 over here. And yeah I think you can start building this like epidemic map. That'll be really interesting to see throughout the Americas and just watch the devastation of the indigenous people, which is awful, but a reality, right? Yep, indeed. Yeah. I love this stuff. I love like demography studies and looking at a population and using the ages of the people when they died, how they died to like draw conclusions about the larger population. It's very statistics based, but I just, I love that. I think it's so interesting. Population statistics is really cool. Yeah, and it's just one piece to the puzzle, too, and you start adding that to everything else that we know about different things. It does paint a pretty, pretty broad picture. Yeah, it does. And really start to dive in on some stuff. Yeah, for sure. Cool. Yeah. OK, well, with that, let's go to our last article and find out why George Washington lied about how many cherries he had back in a minute.
18th-Century Cherry Preservation at Mount Vernon
00:23:41
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeology show episode 268. And yeah, we're talking about George Washington. And it is somewhat of a myth that he chopped down a cherry tree, but it's not a myth that they had cherry trees. So yeah. Yeah. I liked, so this article is from CNN and I do like the little, I don't know, subtitle thing that they have here. It's the story of a, Six year old George Washington topping down a cherry tree may be a myth, but archeologists excavating Mount Vernon, the home of the United States first president, made the very real discovery of 35 glass bottles filled with cherries and berries. So I mean, obviously it's a myth about the tree, but it is kind of funny that they are cherry bottles that they found. I mean, they definitely had cherry trees. I think they're still there. Oh yeah, for sure. They still are cherry trees, right? Yes. Anyway, so the bottles were found in five storage pits at Mount Vernon. 29 were intact and contained perfectly preserved cherries as well as berries like gooseberries or currants. In fact, the top picture is kind of funny. It's just like a perfectly placed little bottle soldiers.
00:24:44
Speaker
Yeah. sitting in a hole Yeah. I wonder if they were actually found like that or if they sort of placed back in there. Yeah. Because to have them all like standing upright like that would be crazy, but I guess it's totally possible yeah if they were, you know, arranged that way in a cellar when they were put there. And they do think that that's basically where they were when they were after they finished, you know, bottling the terries, they just sent them here and walked away. So yeah. Yeah. They carefully extracted the contents of each bottle and refrigerated them and will eventually undergo analysis. And yeah, my question was like, why? Why did they have to separate the contents from the bottle? The bottles are probably fragile. Oh, you think so? I think they mentioned that in an article here about how fragile the bottles are. Oh, OK. All right. The bottles are like falling apart. and Yeah. I mean, my first instinct is always to like leave stuff together. Yeah. Because what if there is some significance to which ones were in which bottle? which they will know. They will certainly keep the contents separated. But yeah, I thought that was interesting, but it looks like in the pictures, like there's no kind of cork or anything left in those bottles. So maybe it was to protect them from air exposure. They had to get the contents out to stop, you know, any kind of decomposition process that might happen yeah now that they're uncovered and not protected by the soil layer that they were under. So yeah.
00:26:00
Speaker
But anyway, that's what they did. Yeah. Yeah. They say the bottles were being sent off to an offsite lab for conservation, but they were they were likely forgotten here when Washington left Mount Vernon to join the Continental Army. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. That's pretty. That was OK. Specific timing on that one. It's very specific. The guy who said that is like the director of the like site. And so he seems very enthusiastic. like Like he wants to apply a story yeah to everything at the site. So that's the story being applied to these bottles that appear to be like abandoned. But yeah, I mean, did people live at Mount Vernon after the Revolutionary War? Did Washington go back here?
00:26:43
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know the story of the property. I've been there in the seventh grade. Well, come on seventh grade, Rachel. I don't know. Or maybe sixth grade. Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I don't remember. Did you get your National Park stamp back then? I don't know. I don't think so. A little Junior Ranger badge? Nope. I wasn't so fanatic about it yet, but yeah.
Mount Vernon's Historical Significance and Slavery
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah. Fanatic is the word I would use. Anyway, the fact that they were so well preserved is a testament to the skills of the slaves who would have been processing and preserving these cherries and basically oversaw all food preparation of Mount Vernon. yeah Also, it's mentioned a little bit later on in the article, the acidic nature of the cherries, the tart variety, which also probably would have helped in preservation. Yeah, for sure. yeah i I wonder again, i again, I want more details, but this is all from a press release, right? So like we're still waiting for results on analysis and all that stuff. But I'm like, were they, were these cherries like like, were they put into a bottle with like sugar and stuff, kind of like maraschino cherry style for preservation and then use in, in that way? Or was it like a,
00:27:46
Speaker
Like, what were they preserved in? What kind of liquid was put in to preserve them? They don't talk about that in the article, and I am just curious about that. They probably don't know yet, if any. Yeah. But it's been cherry shoved into a bottle. Yeah, I suppose it could have been. Yeah. Hmm. So anyway, they've begun, begun analysis on the bottle contents and hoping they can identify the exact species that helped and then perhaps use them for future germination. I mean, they do have the cherry pits. Yeah. So that's what they're hoping they can like plant the same cherry trees that Washington would have used still there. Like there's still varieties or they just changed too much in 250 years. I think they probably we changed too much. Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:23
Speaker
Well, they've got 54 cherry pits and 23 stems, so suggesting the bottles were full of complete cherries at one point. um There's also cherry pulp. So yeah yeah, they're just kind of degraded. Yeah, I think I feel like the article title is a bit of a misnomer or at least the beginning maybe the beginning of the article where they're perfectly preserved. They weren't exactly perfectly preserved. It sounds like they were sort of a pile of cherry pulp and pits and stems that they extracted from these bottles. And then they're pulling the pits and the stems out of the goo. Essentially that's in there. now I'm wondering what the purpose of these bottles were. It didn't sound like a cherry fit very well into the bottle. Yeah. Like jamming them in. And then like, if that's the case, they knew they weren't going to get them out very easily. So what was the point to put them in there? And I don't know. Did they maybe like ferment?
00:29:10
Speaker
Yeah, did they maybe let them ferment a little bit and like these were forgotten Maybe they were intending to pour something in there later to help with that process and make a little bit of a cherry liqueur or something out Yeah, maybe that that's what I'm wondering. i I would love to know more like what the point of bottling these cherries were like what was what were they hoping it would turn into that they could then use as a food of whatever type Well, some analysis they've done already suggests through my scroscopy that the cherries were harvested by snipping them from trees with shears. The stems were purposely left on the fruit before bottling. Again, i just more questions, right? like yeah why What did you want to do with those cherries? Was it simply preservation? Just 100% preservation so that maybe you would have cherries that were still good enough to eat or cook with at a later date if you left the stems on and put them in a bottle. It might have just been as simple as that. and
00:30:04
Speaker
Who knows? They will know, hopefully, after more analysis in the lab. Well, they're going to do more work too, because this is all part of a $40 million dollars project to repair and conserve the Mount Vernon property, because as a public monument, it receives much more traffic than you would think a 1700s private residence would expect to have, yeah even of a former president. Yeah, so I think the wear and tear on the property has been, has been real yeah ever since it became such a popular public, public place to visit, you know? So they're, they're doing a lot of work. They have done a lot of work in the past, but it's like, eat you know, some of it's a hundred years old, some of the preservation that they've done and they've just got to redo it a hundred years is still too old yeah to to manage all the people today that want to go there. Yeah, it was preserved 100 years ago and now the preservation needs preserving. Yes, exactly. Yeah, but it's great that they have the funds and the desire, you know, from people to yeah make it happen because it is a really cool place. I remember really, really loving the visit that we had here because it's just a really beautiful property.
00:31:07
Speaker
And it's really cool. So yeah, you know minus the whole like slave bit if you don't want to Acknowledge that that was a thing that happened. You know, you do have to acknowledge it. You do have to acknowledge it. You do happen. It did happen. Yeah. All right. Yep. Our founding fathers were not perfect. So what else happened? The end of this episode. Bye. See ya.
Closing and Credits
00:31:35
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment in 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.
00:31:58
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 Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.