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PROMO - Sutton Hoo "Ghost Ship" and The Dig - The Archaeology Show 111
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The Archaeology Podcast Network is taking a bit of a break for October, 2022. In the mean time, we’re introducing you to some of the other fantastic shows that we produce. Here’s an episode from The Archaeology Show about Sutton Hoo and the Netflix film, “The Dig”.
With the recent release of The Dig, a Netflix film focused on the excavation of the incredible Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo, we decided it was the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at this site! Sutton Hoo is extremely important and interesting for many reasons and we dive into those as well as review the movie. Did we like it? Join us and find out!
We had so much to talk about that we couldn’t fit it all into the episode. Become an APN member to get access to the rest of the conversation!
Links
- UK National Trust - Sutton Hoo
- The British Museum
- Edith Pretty
- Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff
- The Dig Trailer
- Sutton Hoo burials: reconstructing the sequence of events
- Current Archaeology
- Sutton Hoo
- Roadster Adventures
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Transcript
Introduction and Upcoming Episodes
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hey listeners of A Life in Ruins Podcast. This is Chris Webster, founder of the Archaeology Podcast Network. And I just wanted to pop in to let you guys know that we're taking a little bit of a break in October of releasing new episodes across the network.
00:00:16
Speaker
Instead, we are releasing other episodes from podcasts on the APN in your favorite podcast, so hopefully you can find a new favorite podcast. This episode is from The Archaeology Show, one of our highest downloaded podcasts on the network, and this episode is specifically about Sudden Who and the Netflix show The Dig. So check that out, and hopefully you can go over and subscribe and find one of your new favorite podcasts alongside A Life in Ruins onto the show.
00:00:43
Speaker
You're
Focus on Sutton Hoo and 'The Dig'
00:00:44
Speaker
listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast. Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 111. On today's show, we talk about the movie The Dig and the real archaeological site it's based on, Sutton Hoo. Let's dig a little deeper.
00:01:11
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everybody. And as usual, I've got my new regular co-host, I guess, my wife, Rachel. How's
Co-host Introduction and Podcast Logo Discussion
00:01:20
Speaker
it going? Hello. And I don't know if anybody's really paying attention to this, because I never noticed what happens to podcasts. But the logo actually says her name on it now. Oh, it does? Oh, how exciting. I'm real. I'm a real girl. That's right.
00:01:33
Speaker
Your name is now on two logos on the Archeology Podcast Network. Historical Yarns, which we've been talking about resurrecting at some point here in 2021. Yes. Yeah, I do want to bring that back. Working on it. Working on it. Yeah. So in the meantime, we are going to have a discussion, as we mentioned in the intro, about Sutton Hoo. And Rachel did most of the research on this, so I'm going to let her kick it off. But I will just say, we're going to talk about the movie The Dig at the end. This is mostly going to be a discussion about the real site that the movie is based on.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah. I think for both of us, after we watched the movie, we were excited to talk about it, but it definitely sent us both on a bit of a rabbit hole. Me in particular,
The Origin of Sutton Hoo
00:02:10
Speaker
since I was doing the research for this episode, just finding out about the area and the time period and everything that was going on in that place and time, because I didn't know anything about it. It was, it was completely new information for me. So I don't know about you.
00:02:24
Speaker
I'd heard about it before, we've talked about it. I may even have done an Arc 365 episode on it when I was around because I was looking at world famous archaeological sites and stuff like that and Sutton Hoo is probably one of them. If you live in the UK, you know about Sutton Hoo, more than likely. It's been talked about, it's been written about, there's been documentaries about it. I mean, it's been in the popular culture and scientific culture for, well, almost a century now. So, yeah, it's been a long time.
00:02:52
Speaker
All right, well to jump right into it, the first question I had when I was looking at this, I'm like, sudden who? Like what in the world does that even, it's a weird English name. There's lots of weird English names. And this one, I couldn't quite wrap my head around what it was until I saw it written out. So just for people who haven't seen it before, it's S-U-T-T-O-N H-O-O.
00:03:13
Speaker
And wait, is this a character on Dr. Seuss? Is this like a French character? I know. There's so many crazy British names. Sorry, British people, but like your names are just wacky sometimes. But the origin of it is that it's named after the nearby parish of Sutton and it comes from a combination of the old English Sutt
00:03:35
Speaker
plus ton, which means south farm center village, and then ho, which is a hill shaped like a heel spur. So, you know, farm said village and then hill. So on a hill, basically, I guess is what they're saying.
00:03:49
Speaker
So one thing I didn't really realize, I read this, but is the hill that's shaped like a heel spur, and I don't know what a heel spur is, like what does that mean? Like a heel of a boot, or like your ankle bone, or like your, I don't know, whatever, it's foot related. Do they mean the actual mound that was excavated, or the actual hill that all this is on? I think it's the actual hill, because I don't think it's named after the burial mound, I don't think that. Although, unclear.
00:04:17
Speaker
Early people may not have known that was a burial mound. Nobody did until they excavated it. Right, but there's a bunch of them there. So like it's not like it's just one mound. So I would guess it's just the overall geology of the area is what they... This is like Sutton Hoo mound and then there were Sutton here and Sutton there. Oh, here come the jokes. All right, let's continue with our Sutton Hooverville. Okay.
00:04:40
Speaker
This is gonna be great. Okay, so
Historical Context of Sutton Hoo
00:04:44
Speaker
this is located in Suffolk in England or in the UK and it's on the southeast coast near a town called Woodbridge. That's about the biggest like modern town that's there and it is close to the North Sea approximately seven miles up a river and that's important because that was like a path inland. Various different groups of people were taking this path inland over many years because this area was occupied by lots of different groups of people over a lot of years.
00:05:10
Speaker
So the first ones, well, not the first ones, but for our purposes, we're just going to talk about what was going on in the early part of this millennia, like 400s, we'll start there. The Romans occupied this area and they basically completely withdrew from there by around 410 CE. And just for our purposes, I'm going to say all these dates are CE going forward. I'm going to drop the CE, but just know that we're talking common era.
00:05:36
Speaker
So Romans were gone by about 410 and that left sort of a void in the area. And that's when the Germanic tribes started moving in and taking that river that I was talking about inland from the North Sea and coming in and populating this area. And those Germanic tribes were Angles and Saxons and eventually they become the Anglo-Saxons. That's where we get that name from.
00:05:59
Speaker
So, this area eventually, you know, they came in, they settled it, they mixed with the local Britain population, and they became the Anglo-Saxons. So, that's where we're at.
00:06:09
Speaker
interesting tie-in for later on. It was another Germanic tribe that destroyed the evidence for Sutton Hoo in World War II, so we'll talk about that. I'm not sure you could call them a Germanic tribe. I mean, they're kind of a Germanic tribe. So by the early mid-fifth century, Sutton Hoo is basically part of the Kingdom of East Anglia.
Significance of Sutton Hoo Ship Burial
00:06:30
Speaker
It's a very powerful kingdom and
00:06:33
Speaker
They were at the height of their power in the first part of the sixth century, and that is when the ship burial happened, the so-called ghost ship. This is in the sixth century, super powerful, lots of money, and they're under the rule of a really powerful king named Redwald of East Anglia.
00:06:52
Speaker
The cool thing is, this river, as you said, played a huge important role in this. It must have been a decently sized river at the time, but also these boats, these really big boats. I think there was a graphic of this in the movie and I've seen some other stuff online. There would have been something like 40 rowers on this thing in order to move it. Also, these ships of that era
00:07:15
Speaker
were big and heavy, but also low draft. They didn't go down that far in the water. This wasn't like a massive sailing ship or something like that that was really heavy and had a lot of decks. So it could have floated in relatively shallow water. So they get this thing seven miles up the river
00:07:32
Speaker
and then essentially dragged it over land to where it is. Yeah and that's how we know that this ship burial must have been for somebody incredibly important and powerful and rich because the manpower it would take to drag this giant ship up onto the land that it was eventually buried on like you have to be a commanding presence to get people to do something that might seem completely ridiculous. They're a pagan so we don't really know what they're like
00:07:59
Speaker
spiritual beliefs and practices were because there's so many variations on that back then but yeah. Well and something I always wonder too is it is it really like
00:08:10
Speaker
Veneration of a leader like people are crying when the leader dies and they're just like oh my god What are we gonna do or is it? The tradition and because presumably a new leader took over when this person died whether it was So the Sun is gonna be obviously emotionally invested in in the dad right, but now the Sun is king and it's time to establish you know a death is a is a good way to not only
00:08:37
Speaker
I guess unite the people, but it's also a good way to reestablish your dominancy by saying, let's look at this guy who died. It's time for the family to keep this thing ongoing and let's have a huge event here to do this. Yeah. It's almost like showing how powerful you are because you can throw such a large and impressive funeral for whoever you're replacing. So that's, that is a really good point. And I'm sure that that did play into it.
00:09:03
Speaker
to some extent, although I do wonder a little bit if preparations for this incredible funerary monument took place before his death in a similar way to you hear about Egypt with the pyramids, how they started building them basically when they took power so that they were ready for their death. This wouldn't have taken quite as long, but
00:09:25
Speaker
Yeah, this may have taken weeks, possibly months, but probably more like weeks, because if you've got enough people digging a big hole in relatively easy soil to dig in, I don't know what they had as shovels, but they would have figured something out. If they can make ships like that, they've got some pretty good technology, so I think that they would have figured it out. But one thing I'm wondering too, from an archaeological standpoint, and stop me if we talk about this later in Segment 2 or even Segment 1, but
00:09:49
Speaker
I'm wondering if there's evidence of the party, for lack of a better words, right? Was there a pre or post party? And also, where were the people staying? We're going to talk about some other stuff that was found there from a burial standpoint, but what about evidence of them camping there?
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, perhaps their excavations and explorations did not focus on finding that kind of thing. And there were three excavation periods, which we'll talk about in segment two, but they never, or at least in my research, I never found any talk about people occupying this area. It was purely graveyard purposes. And there's some earlier stuff. Then there's the time of the ship burial. And then there's some later stuff too. And the later stuff is actually really interesting. We'll talk about that.
00:10:34
Speaker
So, they didn't sail from the Germanic regions to bury all of their dead. These people
Post-Redwald Era and Cultural Shifts
00:10:38
Speaker
lived here. Oh, for sure. Actually, that's a good jumping off point. Let me give a little bit of the history here. So, East Anglia, by the time it was settled, it was truly a kingdom and it was well settled by the
00:10:51
Speaker
mid 500s, late 500s for sure. And when Redwald came to power, he really like turned it into a rich and powerful kingdom, right? And then he died in 624.
00:11:05
Speaker
And that left a bit of a void again when a powerful ruler dies. It doesn't matter how big his funeral is. If he's not replaced by somebody just as powerful, you know, it creates a void. And basically what happened is the area sort of, you know, red old son came to power and then there was a couple other family members who, but they just sort of started losing everything that they had gained. And eventually the Danes came in and they call them Vikings and the sources I saw. So these Danish Vikings come in,
00:11:34
Speaker
in the 800s and they basically take over the whole area and they use it as a jumping off point to start really getting into England and start conquering and there's a nearby kingdom called Mercia who ended up really battling with the Danes and anyway there's a whole like complicated history here with the Danish and the Germanic tribes and
00:11:58
Speaker
the Vikings are there for a little while and they set up camp. And this is probably why in the movie, they think that the ship is Viking because they know that the Vikings occupied this area and use it as a jumping off point to get into England. But anyway, they're there for a little while. And then finally, by the 900s, this area is taken back by Mercia and the other large kingdoms on the mainland there, and it becomes folded into England.
00:12:24
Speaker
I never really thought of Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail as historically accurate. However ... Don't think you should ever think of it as historically accurate. However, I believe when the movie starts, it says something like 944 AD or something. It's nine something. And the Kingdom of Mercy as mentioned several times. I don't know much about English history, and that's just peeking out in my brain. Yeah, you're totally right. It does say that. Okay, so maybe there ... So they did some research.
00:12:50
Speaker
Maybe there's a little bit historically accurate about Money Python. But yeah, that's a very quick overview. And I probably got some things not totally right, because I didn't fully dive into that. But that is what is happening in that time period there. And these tribes and these groups of people, they'd come to power. There'd be one really powerful ruler that everybody could get behind. And then that ruler is gone. And it just leaves a void. And it allows this area to just sort of keep
00:13:16
Speaker
you know, revolving through different tribes and people and groups and whatever. So it sounds like their burial practices, they commonly buried their dead, they cremated their dead.
Religious Transition in Burial Practices
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, so they did a couple different types of burials. There's inhumations, of course, which is just burying people in the soil. And then there's cremations where there's actually cremains in some kind of container that were buried. And they did find both types at Sutton Hoo. And they do think that the cremation burials are older and the inhumations seem to be newer. And there is some speculation that that might be that transition from pagan to Christianity.
00:13:56
Speaker
because the other interesting thing here is Redwald, the king that I keep talking about being the most powerful guy. I'm gonna come back to him. So keep him in your brain. He was the first ruler to convert to Christianity. And I can only imagine it was like a reluctant conversion like, yeah, okay, whatever. If you'll stop bothering me, I'll be Christian now. But yeah, the area is starting to shift from pagan to Christianity, which might be why you see that shift from cremation to inhumation
00:14:26
Speaker
In a day in time of such fluctuating religious power, I would imagine that shifting one's religion and an entire nation's religion based on the king or whoever the ruler is, was just about as common as marriage for kingdom reasons.
00:14:43
Speaker
Oh yeah, I have gone on many personal journeys in my life into history. I just love reading about the history of, especially English history is just fascinating to me and European history in general and the way the rulers, they just would convert religions for their own personal purposes. Like Henry VIII is the best example of that, converting for his own
00:15:05
Speaker
own desires because he wanted to marry somebody else and he could only do that if he left the Catholic Church. Anyway, so I'm going off the rails here, but yeah, religion was a tool for rulers, especially in this time period. religion is definitely a tool, but I remember a British friend of mine. This is just kind of an aside.
00:15:24
Speaker
I was like, isn't the English religion basically Catholic or something like that? And she's like, it's Church of England. And I was like, yeah, but what's the religion of the Church of England? She's like, it's the Church of England. I was like, yeah, but what religion is it? And she's like, it's the Church of England. That's what they call it.
00:15:41
Speaker
Well, it's Protestant though. It's based on that, but it's not just Protestant. It's like their own thing. So I didn't actually know that and I still don't really get it to be honest. Yeah, it's definitely an interesting thing. So yeah, but religion certainly played a role here. And I think that the ship burial in particular, there's a lot of pagan
00:16:04
Speaker
Ritual and stuff going on with that burial because it's certainly not Christian to bury somebody with his ship But like I said, you know, they were starting to convert at this time. So right. Yeah, so The overview ends here basically with saying the burial was definitely ceremonial I mean some dude was buried in a ship. It wasn't I mean, it's just this king that you mentioned Redwald. He just kind of Matches up in the time period here, but we can't actually confirm that that's who it is
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, I was being kind of cagey about that, but there's a lot of speculation that it is Redwall. The time period and everything works out. But either way, it was a super important person, likely a king, just based on what we know of the area. With that, let's take a break and come back and dive into some of the excavations and stuff that happened in the 1930s in Segment 2. Back in a second.
00:16:55
Speaker
Hey, this is Chris Webster just jumping in for a minute between segments to remind you that we have a membership program. It's arcpodnet.com forward slash members for more information. It's basically $7.99 a month, but you get a 25% discount if you get it for the year. And what you get for that is you get episodes early.
00:17:14
Speaker
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00:17:37
Speaker
having this much content and this much volume of megabytes in audio going out to your ears for free every single week and usually several if not up to five episodes a week sometimes. Again, arcpodnet.com forward slash members and thanks for listening to this promo episode on your normal feed. Now back to the show.
00:17:58
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 111 of the archeology show. And we are talking about Sutton Hoo because it's such a fascinating topic and the new movie that just came out really got our brain juices flowing about what was going on there. So we're talking about Sutton Hoo today. I'm just gonna say one more time that they missed a big opportunity to just call this Whoville. That's all I'm saying. Like I get it, but it should just be Whoville.
00:18:25
Speaker
I don't even know what to say to you. All right, moving on. Let's talk about the excavations that have taken place on a Sutton Hoo, because there have been several phases over the years. And in fact, there's been three main phases.
00:18:41
Speaker
But even before those three main phases that were done in a scientific way, there are what you could call excavations that happened earlier than that. So let's start there. So obviously, there's been looting. And what would happen is back in the sort of Renaissance times, what looters could do is get a permit from the crown to just go dig on the land and see what they could find.
00:19:04
Speaker
I can't imagine somebody getting a permit in Renaissance times. How does that even happen? It takes like six months. I don't even know. I don't even know. But the deal was that they had to share whatever they found with the crown. Oh yeah. I'm sure that happened. That was the deal. I don't know how well it worked out, but you definitely see evidence of looting. And the looting that happened in these mounds, a lot of it was likely from the Renaissance time. And I'm not sure how they were able to know that maybe. Well, I'm not going to speculate, but they do think that some of it was Renaissance looting.
00:19:32
Speaker
And then there's later looting that happened again in the 1800s. This time it was like the gentleman archeologist, right, who just wanted to like go find riches. So they looted as well. So we lost a lot of probably really awesome artifacts to this looting that happened before real excavation happened.
Discovery by Edith Pretty and Basil Brown
00:19:49
Speaker
So that's your history. That's why when we talk about looting, that comes from that previous stuff.
00:19:53
Speaker
So then your first real like actual archaeological dig happens 1938 to 1939. And this is the time period that the movie The Dig is focused on. You have a widowed lady, Edith Pretty was her name. She's got a lot of money and a lot of land. She's got these mounds on her land. And she also apparently was very spiritual and liked to talk to dead people.
00:20:19
Speaker
That's not in the movie. I discovered that in my research. But anyway, she just really felt like there were burials there and she wanted it excavated. And so she brought in Basil Brown and then they started excavating. And then once it became clear that it was a very significant site, Charles Phillips came in from the British museum.
00:20:40
Speaker
Interesting thing about Charles Phillips is the movie, which we'll get into later, makes him look like this well-known archaeologist that comes in. I'm sure of the time, there wasn't that many qualified scientific educational archaeologists. You look up Charles Phillips and all he's known for is Sutton Hoo, the biggest things he's known for. I'm sure he did other small things, but his major publications are all about Sutton Hoo. I don't know what he published on before that.
00:21:05
Speaker
Well, before he even entered the picture, it was just Edith, Brittany, and Basil Brown, and they were just sort of deciding what they wanted to do. I think she was hooked up with Basil through the Ipswich Museum, like her little local museum, basically, hooked them up together. And he came out, and he was not a trained archaeologist. However, he had tons of experience, and as all you archaeologists out there know, experience definitely counts for something
00:21:31
Speaker
especially in this time period. So he had a lot of experience. He'd seen a lot of this type of thing and he knew what he was doing. So he had experience as an excavator and knew how to maybe not document from a true academic standpoint, but he knew how to document what he was finding and where he was finding it.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yes, and he knew what he was finding. He didn't maybe know the implications of it, but he knew what he was seeing. So he started by excavating the smaller mounds, mounds two, three, and four. There's 18 total that are identified on this site, but he started with some of the smaller ones because he could immediately see evidence of looting on the big mound and he was like, eh, why bother? Like it's looted and gone. There's evidence of looting on these other ones too, but they're smaller so maybe they didn't find it all or maybe they didn't take the time. So that's where he started.
00:22:16
Speaker
Well, the big mound is the one Edith pretty wanted him to dig on. Yeah, she did. Cause she talked to spirits and spirits told her to excavate that one. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So, and the excavation technique at that time was to basically cut a trench, you know, perpendicular to the mound, just straight through the middle of it, trying to find whatever was there. I think it probably would be today too, if we actually dug mounds anymore. Yeah.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, probably. So that was, that was his technique and that's what he did. And they found basically nothing. Yeah. It was totally looted. There was almost nothing to be found. He found some iron stuff here and there. I think you might've found one burial stuff that was left behind by looters because looters didn't want bodies. They wanted jewels.
00:23:01
Speaker
So the next season, this would have been 1939, they returned to the largest mound. This was highlighted in the movie and I really like that. They decided that the looters might have missed the center of the burial because the
00:23:16
Speaker
mound shape was changed over time by various different things, agricultural erosion. There was possibly some quarrying that happened there in the middle ages that would have changed the shape of the mound. Basically, he was like, well, there's a looter pit here, but maybe they missed it. So he started excavating.
00:23:32
Speaker
And I think he got really lucky and he hit the prow of the ship and realized what he had changed the whole like approach. And that's how you get those amazing pictures of that ship that has been uncovered in the ground. Yeah. So do we want to keep talking about the time periods here or do you want to get into that particular situation and some stuff about the ship?
00:23:55
Speaker
Yeah, we can get into that because it really is the most spectacular thing that was uncovered there. The
Significant Archaeological Find
00:24:01
Speaker
later excavations uncovered more information about the time period, but the ship itself is just so cool.
00:24:11
Speaker
And in addition to like this outline of a perfect Anglo-Saxon ship, which was not Viking, which they thought was Viking, and which is why nobody really paid much attention to it because, you know, they knew about the Vikings and they weren't that interested in them, but they were able to identify it as being Anglo-Saxon because of the presence of coins.
00:24:31
Speaker
Merovingian coins. Yeah, Merovingian coins were there that they found. And there was one coin per what would have been sailor on the ship, which I thought was really interesting too. So that's how they were able to date it and know that it was Anglo-Saxon and not Viking. And it's interesting you mentioned the outline of the ship because they call this the ghost ship, as you found, because acidic soil like that just ate away at the wood over the last 1,400 years, whatever the case may be.
00:24:58
Speaker
So, all you had left was an impression. It's almost the same way fossils are created, right? So, you have things that are replaced by minerals and those minerals basically filter in and replace the exact thing in the shape it's in, in a compact soil environment and create a stone version of something that was there. That's how a fossil is created. Now, this didn't have long enough or have the right minerals or have the right soil composition to actually fossilize the ship, which would be a super cool thing to see.
00:25:28
Speaker
be so cool. But maybe given enough time, that could be a thing. I don't really know. And they're in the right soil environment. But this basically just had discolored and different soil where the wood used to be. Yeah. It sounds like the soil left behind is much firmer. So it was really easy to sort of peel back the softer soil that is not the ship and leave the impression of the ship behind.
00:25:51
Speaker
It's the same kind of concept as if you've ever lived in a forested land. I grew up in a forest basically. We had a lot of trees on our land. I never thought about this when I was a kid, but if you dig down in a forested land, the top
00:26:04
Speaker
Depending on how old the forest is, the top maybe few inches is really dark. And that's because the trees die. Trees fall over, their branches fall off, their stuff falls down. It's all organic matter. And in fact, it's called the O horizon in a lot of texts, the organic horizon. And that's a darker layer of soil. And this is the same thing. Ships were made out of wood. So it would have been naturally darker right there because the wood just decayed naturally.
00:26:29
Speaker
Yeah, even though it could have been I don't know if it was treated with something I don't know about their shipbuilding techniques But it probably had something to seal up between the planks and things like that But anyway, that's what would happen and we've seen this before in the American Southeast when we were digging do an excavation you would see post molds and things like that and they're just a
00:26:48
Speaker
The post is no longer there from whatever structure was created there, but the impression of the post is, and it's not just the hole, it's the actual soil inside of it is like, to be frank about it, it's like the remains of the post.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, totally. So I worked on the site in New Jersey, a cemetery site, and it was the same thing. Now, it was only 200 years old, so the bones were still there, but we were able to find coffins by sort of slowly scraping away until we got to a dark outline. So the wood coffins had already degraded. The wood coffins were pretty much gone, but we would get to this dark outline and you could follow it all the way around and get like a total outline of a wood coffin.
00:27:32
Speaker
the coolest thing, but then we knew we would know there was a body within that coffin. So that was cool. So it's some of the things that they found in the ghost ship. We'll just cover those briefly. I'm not a huge fan of just like a pile of artifacts because
00:27:47
Speaker
It's more about the history. It is. It's more about the history for me. But just very briefly what they found, there's a helmet, which I think is probably the most iconic thing from there. There's a total reconstruction of it that we'll link to in the notes. But it was just a beautiful piece of artwork, really. It's fully carved. And the front of the face basically had a dragon on it. Yeah.
00:28:09
Speaker
So the eyebrows were wings and then the body went down the forehead all the way down the nose and the mustache was the tail of the dragon. So it's really, really cool how they did that.
00:28:22
Speaker
One note on that, because we watched some videos and did some other research on this, and one thing I remember hearing was none of this stuff was, well some of these smaller artifacts were whole, but some of the stuff like this helmet was basically, it was hundreds of pieces. And they found it all together because it wasn't really disturbed, but it had been collapsed on and it did fall apart. I mean, it was probably iron or something iron-based, and it was just the acidic soil just rusted it and took it to pieces.
00:28:48
Speaker
But they reconstructed it within a few years of finding it. And then some guy a few decades later, I don't know the name, but another researcher, I think at the British Museum, basically took the whole thing apart and started over and said, no, that's not right. It started over. And that's what we have now. And I think when you see the helmet, it's like when you see a prehistoric or paleo skull where we only had the fragments. It looks like a whole skull because they basically filled in the blanks and what you can see on the helmet is the pieces that are still there.
00:29:18
Speaker
and the rest of the helmet's been interpreted as what it would have looked like. It's like the hardest puzzle you've ever done in your life. Yeah, because you don't have the box to go from. Right, right. Yeah, but this thing was so like richly created. There's garnets across the eyebrows and it was just very, very cool. And there are other
00:29:37
Speaker
artifacts from the other grave goods, I guess you could call them that were equally rich. There's a gold belt buckle that was perfectly preserved. And when you see it again, we're going to link to articles that have these pictures and stuff so you can go check it out for yourself. But it's just this beautiful carving. It's perfect for the time period that they think it belongs to. It's just a beautiful example. There's shoulder clasps that also they've got inlaid garnets and glass and gold. And they're just,
00:30:04
Speaker
Beautiful. I saw shoulder clasps. What is that like to hold like a cape or like a tunic kind of thing? Yeah, probably to hold your clothing around your shoulders somehow. That's why I can't wear capes because I don't have any shoulder clasps.
00:30:18
Speaker
Rectify that situation. Shoulder clasps on your Christmas list. Anyway. I've always had a cape problem because of that, but anyway. Yeah, yes. Throwing me off course as usual. Anyway, so yeah, the shoulder clasps seem to be some kind of family heirloom probably because the style of them is a little earlier than the rest of the grave goods too.
00:30:47
Speaker
That makes sense. Like cufflinks and stuff are passed on. Sure. Yeah. Yep. Definitely. Definitely. So yeah. And there's more stuff like that in there. And there's a lot of iron artifacts as well. Like the pieces of the ship, they found the bolts and stuff. Yeah. So they found all that kind of stuff. There's axes and various things. So interesting point about that too, is that there was an inquest to see who owned that treasure.
00:31:11
Speaker
right after it was discovered in the early forties. And they decided that because when it was put into the ground, it was put there and never meant to be uncovered again, that it belonged to the owner of the land who was Edith pretty. So she owned it all, but she was given that property and then she immediately gave it back to the British museum. So really a cool lady to do something like that.
00:31:35
Speaker
So let's very quickly go into the other two excavations. After World War II, they had lost all the maps and the notes and things from the initial excavation because it was burned in a building during the war. The artifacts were all preserved. They were hidden in a tunnel. So they were all fine. But Rupert Bruce Mitford, he was trying to study the artifacts and he was like, okay, I don't have enough information here. Decided to go back out into the field and they uncovered the ship in mound one.
00:32:06
Speaker
And it was pretty damaged because it hadn't been backfilled properly before the war. There was enough left to take a cast of it. So they did that and they have the cast impression. So what they did is excavate underneath it to see what they could find. And I didn't see any notes from that. So I don't think they found anything particularly significant underneath.
00:32:21
Speaker
I can't imagine they would, really. Yeah. But this second excavation was really just to fill in the blanks that were left behind by the first excavation. They only went to Mount 1. They didn't really do anything else. They were only, seemed like they were only interested in just getting more riches from it. It felt very, not looting, that's not fair, but they just weren't interested in answering any bigger questions at that time. And I think most archeology wasn't really interested in answering big questions, so that's probably fitting for the time period.
00:32:48
Speaker
So, the third excavation, which for me is kind of the most interesting one, is from 1983 to 1992, Martin Carver.
Martin Carver's Excavations
00:32:56
Speaker
He was more focused on the big picture of the area and he went out there, he left Mount 1 alone, didn't even go near it.
00:33:03
Speaker
He stripped all the top soil off of an area that covered mounds two, five, six, seven, 17, and 18, and all the area in between them too. And what he found was tons of burials, other burials. Some of them were in the mounds, some of them were outside of the mounds. The ones that were in the mounds are the ones that are the cremains and the burials that were
00:33:26
Speaker
probably earlier and not belonging to people of such high standing, although enough that they were given their own separate burials with goods and things like that. And then they excavated the mounds and didn't really find much more in the mounds except for 17. And then the other burials, the inhumations, those, this is so interesting. So I know you're about to tell me that I'm running out of time, but I'm going to talk about this anyway.
00:33:51
Speaker
these burials that were inhumations, they're called sand bodies. And this is the same effect as what happened with the ship where the bodies decayed and it left behind a different soil and they're able to excavate the other soil around it and they get these really ghostly impressions of humans in the ground.
00:34:08
Speaker
And they were not buried ceremoniously. And in some cases, there's evidence of their arms and legs being bound together and various other harm having been done to the bodies. Now we're just looking at impressions so we don't have the actual bodies. We don't know for sure. But then they also found post holes in the ground for a large structure. And so speculation, 100% speculation. They can speculate all they want, but they don't know for sure.
00:34:34
Speaker
But the speculation is that these were the post holes for some kind of gallows or area for execution of criminals. And then they were buried around the structure. So that is the speculation of what was going on with these bodies. I didn't find any like scientific paper saying this. It's possible for sure. These bodies were definitely buried later. This is a later time period in the eighth
00:34:59
Speaker
century. So this area continued to be used as a burial site after the big ship burial, but it clearly shifted focus and these inhumations are from a different type of thing. So real quick, before the end of the thing, does it look like the ship burial was actually the first thing buried there?
00:35:18
Speaker
cremation burials were probably the earliest. Were they? Okay. Yeah. It's like it was, people were buried there and they were less important or whatever. And then it just started getting more and more prestige, more and more prestige. And then finally, like the epitome of important people was with the ship burial. But it's kind of surprising that the King would be buried there, even though other people, like, wouldn't they just, he'd be like, you know what, when I die, you don't bear me with those guys.
00:35:40
Speaker
No, it wasn't the way of the Anglo-Saxons. They just mixed a lot more. There's another burial site that I can't remember the name of right now that also had mixed, you know, basically royals and regular people.
00:35:54
Speaker
We're going to talk about Mound 17, which had some pretty good stuff on it, but we're going to drop that as bonus content for members of the APN. If you want to become a member of the RKLG Podcast Network, it's just $7.99 a month to support us. You get access to our host through a Slack team, which is just a messaging thing, kind of like Messenger and all that other stuff. Also, you get bonus content and episodes early and commercial-free. You won't have to listen to what's about to come up next if you go to arcpodnet.com forward slash members.
00:36:23
Speaker
And you get to learn about the very surprising discovery in Mount 17. Fantastic. So look for that on our bonus content, arcpodnet.com forward slash members. And if you're already a member, go to the website, find the bonus content, log in, and listen to this great segment that'll be on our bonus content. Back in a second.
00:36:39
Speaker
Hey everybody, Chris Webster, one last time, just to remind you to A, go subscribe to the show that you're listening to right now because it's fantastic and you know it. So go subscribe to it if you want to see more of what they have to put out without actually jumping into your podcasting application.
00:36:55
Speaker
go over to arcpodnet.com and click on the logo for that show right on the front page. Also, don't forget about our membership program, arcpodnet.com forward slash members. I just was listening to a podcast about podcasting the other day and somebody who's been podcasting forever said they have over a million downloads per episode and only less than 0.01% of their listeners actually subscribed to their show in any sort of way or give them any sort of
00:37:25
Speaker
I was like, that's actually accurate. But our numbers are a little bit higher than that because I think people like supporting what we're doing over here, knowing that this is not a business by any means. It is a podcast and it just has operating costs and we'd like you to help support that. Anyway, arcpodnet.com forward slash members. All right, back to the show and don't forget to subscribe to it if you like it.
00:37:48
Speaker
Okay, so as I mentioned before the break, if you want to hear the bonus episode, which we fleshed out even more, because there's so much more to talk about. Oh yeah, I'm so excited. I know, arcpodnet.com forward slash members. And if you're already a member, you'll see it pop up in Slack and just go over to arcpodnet.com forward slash members and your member area is there.
00:38:08
Speaker
You'll find it in the bonus content. Okay, so let's talk about the dig. Oh my God, as you're hearing this, there's probably been 700 news articles and every podcaster and blogger about archaeology
00:38:24
Speaker
and Vlogger on YouTube has mentioned something about the dig on Netflix. Yeah. Okay. I don't know if we're just seeing all of it because we're archeologists. So we're like, yeah, we're plugged in, but I feel like it's been everywhere. And to
Critique of 'The Dig'
00:38:37
Speaker
be honest, I'm so glad about it because it's bringing a new group of people to, to this amazing archeological dig that wouldn't have known about it before. So yeah. So let's talk about
00:38:50
Speaker
you know, what we liked, what we didn't like, how accurate it was, what you can take from that movie as reality and what kind of things that they missed, basically. I will say the overall impression that I've seen of archaeologists is this is the movie we've been waiting for. I totally agree with that. It's a really thoughtful approach to how an archaeological dig would have happened in the 30s. And I think it was beautifully shot and beautifully done. I think the only
00:39:19
Speaker
It was like from a movie standpoint, the only thing that kind of was weird was that the narration thing that they were doing. I don't even know how to describe it, but like it was narration over people doing things. And it wasn't, it was taken as narration, but I know as a movie producer myself, check out our YouTube channel, Roadster Adventures.
00:39:37
Speaker
But, I mean, the way you do that is basically what they did was they would often start with a shot of people talking, and then you'd see them talking, but the talking would continue as they're running other shots that are out of sequence. So it seems like narration, but you're just hearing the audio from another clip, another segment of the movie, over another portion of the movie, and it was very disconcerting. I didn't like it.
00:40:02
Speaker
Yeah, it would take me out of it. There's a romantic triangle, of course, because there is in every movie. It's a movie. Based on a book. Yeah. So there's one point where the female, the girl, Peggy Piggott, was her name. She's having a conversation with her husband, but you see her staring longingly at the man she really wants to be with. It was just a little bit disorienting to have it happen that way.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah, it was really interesting, that sort of style. But, beautifully shot. Were they on the real site? I actually didn't find that in any of my research, if they were actually... I mean, I highly doubt it. They might have had some shots from there, but not the inspiration and stuff. They couldn't have done that. Yeah, they must have recreated it. But, mostly, I don't know.
00:40:48
Speaker
I don't know either, but whatever they did, it looked like the real place. It couldn't have been the actual real place because there's an actual museum there now that's built over the ship where the reconstructed ship is. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, none of that was in there. This is all somewhere else, but the entire English countryside kind of looks all the same. At least that area. Yeah, but it was... Scotland for all we know. Right. Yeah, but it was beautiful and they did a really good job of recreating the scene that the excavation took place during.
00:41:15
Speaker
And I kind of mentioned this just a minute ago, but just to really say it, because this affects how the movie was shot too. But the movie was not actually based on the Sutton Hoo excavations. It was based on a book written about the Sutton Hoo excavations decades ago. So the book was written as a fictionalized account, and so some dramatic license was taken to create characters and do things. So I feel like some of the stuff we're going to talk about is about some of the inaccuracies.
00:41:44
Speaker
I think that the Netflix producers, or whatever the production team that did this, but I think that they should have gone back to the original excavation and brought in some of those details while they were using the book as a basis for the screenplay. They could have used that opportunity to put a little more historical accuracies into it, but they're not scientists, they're not archaeologists, and they based this on the book, which left some stuff out and changed some things to begin with.
00:42:08
Speaker
Yeah, like my major, not even objections, but sort of criticisms, I guess, of the movie is not the way they handled the archeology. I think they handled the archeology really well, given how they would have excavated in the late thirties. My criticisms come from the characters and who was included and who was not included in how they were portrayed. But starting with the excavation and how it was portrayed.
00:42:38
Speaker
One thing that I thought was a bit of a miss for me, because I didn't know anything about this site going into it. I hadn't done any of this research yet. I didn't know anything about it. I just was like watching a movie about archaeology, right? And the thing that I did not get was that the ships they were excavating was not actually there.
00:42:56
Speaker
It was just an impression in the ground. And like we talked about in segment two, the wood had rotted away and left a different soil behind that was basically a cast of the ship or an impression of the ship. So I didn't get that from the movie, did you? Not really, no. Yeah.
00:43:15
Speaker
Yeah, later on, later scenes where they had the whole thing excavated out, you could see the holes and where the beams and stuff were where they'd already taken out what the remains of the wood would have been. But the first image of it, I mean, it looked like a ship. Yeah, it did. They almost made it look too much like a wooden ship in the movie. And for somebody who has no archaeological background or knowledge, I think that would have been even more confusing. And I think that's OK, because I see that as
00:43:45
Speaker
the way movies do where they have to basically explain stuff on film without actually saying it to people who don't understand. So if you're not an archeologist and you haven't seen that kind of thing before, you would have been like, what am I looking at? Why is this so cool? So they basically showed a wooden ship there because that's what archeologists see when they look at it. There might not actually be a ship there, but we can see a ship there and
00:44:12
Speaker
they're just like putting you in the mind of the archeologists, putting you in the mind of the people that are seeing that and what they're seeing as they're doing this, not actually what's there on the ground. And that's really just done for, I think, movie and general audience purposes. Yeah. And I mean, in the end, it doesn't really matter if there was a woodship there or just the impression left behind because the result was kind of the same. Yeah, totally. Other than that, I don't have any criticisms of the way the archeology was handled. Everything else seemed to be just the way you would have.
00:44:41
Speaker
So let's talk about some of the big things that are missing from this movie. Some of the stuff that, from a historical accuracy standpoint, probably should have put in. I don't know if they were in the book or not. Like I said, they were using the book as a basis for this thing, not necessarily the excavation, although they had to have gone back to the photographs and stuff that the British Museum had because they definitely tried to recreate some of those scenes from the photographs. Yes, and where do you think they got those photographs from a photographer, maybe a pair of photographers? I don't know. It seems like a young man, according to the movie.
00:45:11
Speaker
Okay, so here, all right, so let's talk about one of my issues. So they needed a love triangle or a love story for the movie. So they created this cousin of Edith Pretty. Sorry, this is like big spoiler territory. So if you haven't watched the movie, like probably stop now and like go watch it and then come back. In fact, you should have stopped it like 10 minutes ago and gone to watch it and came back. So anyway, they brought in this cousin character to be the romantic interest and they had the cousin be the photographer of the site, right?
00:45:41
Speaker
Now, in real life, there were actually two photographers, two female photographers, Mercy Lack and Barbara Wagstaff, and they did all the photography. And this photography became so incredibly important because of the loss of the drawings and the plans and the papers during World War II. All the photos that you see are from these two women, and they're amazing. They did such a great job.
00:46:09
Speaker
and they were completely left out of the story. And I know that you have to do things for dramatic purposes. They needed to bring in this romantic thing, blah, blah, blah. But my question is, why did they have to leave out two really important female characters in order to bring in the love story? And in a time period where women didn't play a huge role in stuff like this, why was the choice to leave those two out?
Omissions and Inaccuracies in the Film
00:46:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it speaks to bigger issues with sexism in our culture, and that's how I feel about it. Yeah, I don't know. I'd like to hear what the producers have to say about it, because I think it's been mentioned lots of times. I mean, it could have been something as simple as casting and stuff like that. I mean, who knows, right? I mean, maybe they're casting, funding. I mean, I don't want to say that they
00:46:58
Speaker
I'm not saying it's not sexism, but I'm just trying to figure out what are all the possible avenues towards why they chose to leave a few people out. But also, they added an extra person in. They replaced two with one. Why didn't they make some BS male character and put a love triangle between that male character and the women photographer, one of them?
00:47:19
Speaker
Yeah. Or they could have easily, like the guys that were assisting Basil Brown, they could have easily had one of them be the love interest. Like there's a lot of directions they could have gone that didn't remove these two key female players. And I feel like
00:47:38
Speaker
It's just this subtle sexism that happens in Hollywood and in our culture in general. It's stuff like that, like, oh, let's just forget the two women that contributed a lot to this site for the sake of the romance. Now, let's talk about another inaccurately portrayed female. Peggy.
00:47:57
Speaker
Yeah, there's a whole like drama here that was created with Charles Phillips. And they kind of made him out to be a bit of a jerk, treated Basil Brown like a jerk, brought in people to excavate. And they made it seem like they made it seem like he brought in Peggy Piggott.
00:48:15
Speaker
just because she was small and would be able to work around this delicate site without harming it easier than a larger man would. That was the impression that is given in the movie and she's of course very offended by that. And in real life, Peggy Piggott
00:48:32
Speaker
was brought in because she was an incredibly accomplished archaeologist. She and her husband Stuart Piggott, they were both brought in because they were incredibly accomplished young archaeologists, very motivated to work on a site like this. She was like 25 or 26 at the time. Yes. And he was only like two years older than her, not more of a professorial relationship that they kind of indicated in the movie. They were roughly the same age.
00:48:57
Speaker
And there's also some indications that he might be gay in the movie. I saw nothing about that. I mean, they were married until 1956. Yes. So like 20 years. Yeah. And they divorced. Doesn't mean he wasn't gay. Doesn't mean he wasn't gay. There's nothing online that I could find saying he's gay. So we're not going to put that out into the world because if he didn't want it out in the world, then it's not our place to put it out in the world. So we're not going to do that. But we don't know anything about it. They did get divorced eventually, though.
00:49:25
Speaker
Peggy Pigott though, she was an archeologist. She primarily focused on the Bronze Age, Hillfort, and Roundhouse excavations. She got pulled into Sutton Hoo just because of the enormity of it, and she was just amazing, and she shouldn't be remembered as somebody who was brought in because she was light.
00:49:45
Speaker
Right, right. And she became a powerhouse in British archaeology too. She had a career spanning almost 60 years and published more than 50 articles and books between 1930s and 1990s. Yeah, see, she's amazing. And this is early in her career, so we...
00:50:03
Speaker
Obviously she hadn't really established herself yet, so maybe that is why some of the attitude towards her is just a young, inexperienced female in the movie. We should see if, and maybe we'll put this in the show notes if we find it, but there is a blog called Trial Blazers, and they are a group of fantastic women archeologists that
00:50:23
Speaker
blog about other fantastic women archeologists that are not really talked about much through history. We should see if they've done a Peggy Piggott article. We might have to look at the research on that because she went by Peggy Piggott, but she was Margaret Preston. So I did read about that. Her maiden name was Preston. When she married, she became Peggy Piggott. After she got divorced, she got married to a man whose last name was Guido. And she retained that name for the rest of her life, even though they did get divorced after a while as well.
00:50:49
Speaker
And Margaret seems to be her middle name on her Wikipedia page. It says, Cecily, Cecily Margaret Guido. So the takeaway here is Peggy Piggott should be remembered as a incredibly important archeologist, not just a lightweight young female. A flighty schoolgirl that's having sex near an old building on the river. Oh, again, that's all made up for the story, guys. I mean, who knows what she did back then, or the other guys for that matter, or the other women photographers.
00:51:18
Speaker
You know what happens in the field stays in the field, right? Archaeologists know stuff goes down on a field site. Right, for sure. But we don't really know. And the thing to remember about her is she was an amazing archaeologist. Yeah, absolutely.
00:51:32
Speaker
What about Edith Pretty? There's only one other thing that comes up in Edith Pretty. The actress that played her, she is actually decades younger than Edith Pretty was in real life. Edith Pretty was in her mid-50s. People think I'm decades younger than I really am.
00:51:49
Speaker
Okay, baby face. That's fine. I saw a couple articles online talking about ageism in Hollywood and how older women can't really get the roles, but I'm not sure I completely buy that in this case because I also read that Nicole Kidman was originally supposed to play Edith Pretty, and Nicole Kidman is the same age that Edith Pretty was. Is she the same age? She's probably in her 60s by now, isn't she? Or is she in her 50s? Early, mid-50s, yeah. Basically the same age that Edith Pretty was at this time.
00:52:18
Speaker
So I'm not sure it's really ageism, like Nicole could have been dropped out and they had to find somebody who could embody this character. And the actress that they did, I can't remember her name right now, but the actress that they got to play her did an excellent job, I think. That sort of ephemeral lady of the manner type of attitude, but also like really smart and
00:52:39
Speaker
And not doing too well health-wise, she really did die several years after this was excavated. Yeah, she did like 1942 or something like that. I think she passed away soon after this happened. But she was an interesting character too. She didn't just have an interest in
00:52:55
Speaker
She didn't just wanna find the riches basically. And I don't think they portrayed her that way in the movie, but just to reiterate, she wasn't just interested in the riches. She had a history of going to archeological sites. I think her father or her grandfather had done some excavations. She had been around archeology. She was well-traveled. So she had been to other parts of the world where she had seen archeological sites. So she was just a hobbyist and very interested from her life experience. She looked at these mountains. She was like, there's gotta be something there.
00:53:23
Speaker
And then in like the 30s, early 30s, after her husband passed away, she really got into this like spiritualism movement that was going on in the time, like siances, talking to dead people, that kind of thing. A lot of that in Britain at the time. Yeah. So like, I think she decided that she was like talking to the ghosts on her property. So there's a little bit of that going on. I hate that she was right.
00:53:46
Speaker
Well, she doesn't know she was right. I'm going to save this little bit for the bonus content. The overall impression is you can watch this movie and get a pretty good idea of two different things. One, the original Sutton Hoo and what it was all about and how they excavated it.
00:54:08
Speaker
an excavation in the 30s and early 40s and what that looks like. Don't think that that's necessarily how archaeology happens today, although it wasn't that far off. Really, we dig down systematically and we record things as we go. We map everything as we go. They didn't really show a lot of that, but they did show a lot of the systematic process of it. Archaeologists will still, if they find something cool, it's really hard not to just pull it out and say, look what I found. That happens today. But then we'll put it back and take pictures.
00:54:36
Speaker
I mean, it's not like you're ripping something out of the ground and taking a bunch of stuff with it. No. I mean, I think that there was a slight element of treasure hunting going on here just a little bit, but not enough that it destroyed the integrity of the site itself. I think they got all the information out of it that they could.
00:54:56
Speaker
I don't like to glorify artifacts because it adds a value and a worth to them and their value is really to history. And don't get me wrong, when you're in the field, you're there to find artifacts and features because that's what tells the story of the place that you're in and it tells the story of those artifacts. An artifact by itself, a shoulder clasp sitting on the ground is not going to tell you anything. A shoulder clasp sitting in an Anglo-Saxon ship burial around a dead king is going to tell you lots of things. So context is king in that matter.
00:55:26
Speaker
That being said, it's still pretty exciting to find stuff in the field. You can't take that away from it. It's the whole reason you're out there is to find these things, but then the next reason that you're there is to write about them. If Peggy and Charles and all these other people hadn't written all this stuff about Sutton Hoo, we wouldn't have the book, the movie, and all the stuff we know about it today.
00:55:46
Speaker
Yeah. We're lucky that they were a little bit more forward thinking archeologists because at the time it was a little bit more about just finding things, but archeology was starting to shift to more of a context focused exploration. So we're lucky that they did take more of a context approach to it because if they had just been basically treasure hunting, then
00:56:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he was pretty in 1939, and even before that, when her and her husband recognized the value of the land and the mounds and stuff that was on there, that's why they bought it, according to the movie. I don't know if that's historically accurate. It sounds like it was mostly true. But the wealthy enthusiast like this, that was all of British archaeology and early archaeology from the last hundred years before that.
00:56:31
Speaker
I mean, just about every major discovery that was made was by somebody with money that says, that's cool, let's dig it up. And they just got better at it as time went along. They got better at understanding and documenting, and this is how the British Museum was filled with so many things by rich people going around the world and basically just excavating whatever the hell they wanted and taking it back.
00:56:49
Speaker
Yeah, those Renaissance era looters that I talked about, any of the riches that they pulled up from underground, they melted it down. They melted down the gold and turned it into money. No, they weren't interested in the history at all. We've come a long way. It's only been in the last 80 years or so that we've started recognizing
00:57:08
Speaker
history from all cultures for history's sake, and not just recognizing our own history, whoever our is, whatever your history is, but recognizing other things that are buried in the ground and other structures that aren't maybe part of your history, but are important for the world. World history and understanding these things is a very new concept, and there are people alive today
00:57:31
Speaker
that we're alive in a time when that wasn't true, which is crazy. Yep, totally. Well, again, check out the bonus content at arcpodnet.com forward slash members. That's not actually the address of the bonus content page, but you can find it there. If you're a member, you know where to find it. If you don't, let me know. If you aren't a member, again, arcpodnet.com forward slash members for the bonus content. Next week, we're going to come back with another fantastic episode and we will see you then.
00:58:07
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. You can also find us on the Lyceum app, a podcast app just for educational podcasts. 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.
00:58:35
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by 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.