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Bog Body, Ancient Assur and a Lost Tomb - Ep 251
3.7k Plays1 year ago
This week we have 3 news stories! First up, a 2,000 year old bog body was found in excellent condition in Ireland. Then, we take a look at the “lost” capital city of Asryria, Assur. Finally, we head back over to Ireland, where a 4,000 year old tomb has been rediscovered.
Links
- Bellaghy bog body: Human remains are 2,000 years old
- The Lost Capital of Ancient Assyria
- Everyone Thought This 4,000-Year-Old Tomb Had Been Destroyed. Then, an Archaeologist Found It
Contact
- Chris Webster chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Rachel Roden rachel@unraveleddesigns.com RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeology Stories
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.
Exploration of Bog Bodies and Irish Tomb
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, Episode 251.
00:00:20
Speaker
On today's show, we talk about a well-preserved bog body, the ancient Assyrian capital, Asher, and the rediscovery of an Irish tomb. Let's dig a little deeper into those tasty bogs with all the fun stuff in them. Bog butter? Bog butter. All right, welcome to the show. Hello.
00:00:42
Speaker
So I'm going to talk about news today. We are going to talk about news today. Yeah. The first part of news is we're back in Mexico. Yeah. Were we here last week when we recorded? I don't think we were at organ pipe. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And we were staging. Yes. But now we are here for real. And oh my gosh, I don't think we could have like asked for better weather weather than what we have right now. It's
00:01:04
Speaker
Amazing. Yeah, it's been pretty good. Sorry to anybody who's got rain and snow and stuff going on. An actual winter. Yeah, but we drove here on purpose to avoid that, so yay. It's working. It's not cold here. It's sunny and beautiful.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yes, you know who else is cozy?
Discovery and Details of a Northern Ireland Bog Body
00:01:23
Speaker
Bogbodies. Oh my god. I mean, the people excavating this body look like they are quite cozy in their hazmat outfits and bubble. They have geodesic bubble thing. That's not the right word, is it? I don't think so. Geodesic implies a shape. Yeah. It is a little fort. Like a geodome thing. Yeah. What's it got to be, geo? Oh no, it just does. OK.
00:01:51
Speaker
Well, this place that they're digging in is geologically interesting. It is indeed. Yeah. All right. What do we got? Yeah. So, this article is called, Belagi Bog Body, Human Remains Are 2,000 Years Old. Well, they kind of just gave everything away right in that title. Yeah. All right. I'll have a segment two. All right, done. Nothing else to talk about.
00:02:12
Speaker
So this article is from the BBC and it is exactly what the title sounds like. There is a bog body that was discovered and these ancient human remains date back to more than 2000 years ago and they've been recovered by the police service of Northern Ireland. So it's a interesting situation because they had no idea how old these remains were going to be. So that's why the police were involved. Yeah.
00:02:38
Speaker
The fact that they are preservable enough that they were concerned that they might be more modern is crazy because they are not modern. They are 2,000 years old.
00:02:47
Speaker
Anytime, unless you're doing an archeological excavation in a known area where you could find something, even if you're an archeologist and you're out and you just find human remains with no context, you immediately call the police. Yes, because they can look newer and they can look older than what they actually are and you just don't know. That's how the police ended up involved, I'm sure.
00:03:08
Speaker
Yeah. So these bog lands in this part of Northern Ireland, first off, you hear about bog stuff, not just bodies, but things have been chucked into bogs. I mean, there's animals, there's all kinds of these different things. And just the low oxygen environment, once it really gets in there, it just preserves stuff. Yes. Yeah, it does. It's a really cool area.
00:03:28
Speaker
I heard about bog butter one time. We talked about it on the show. Yeah. Super gross. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a series of bog lands that are north of low night. It's L O U G H a new word. N E A G H. So not entirely sure how to pronounce that, but yeah. And they were formed by glaciers. So that's the sort of geological history of this area. It's probably loch.
00:03:56
Speaker
Yeah, sure.
Preservation and Archaeological Process of Bog Bodies
00:03:59
Speaker
And so they've done some initial carbon dating on these remains and it is placing them between 2,000 and 2,500 years old. They also did a forensic study on the remains just to sort of figure out how old this person was. And they've determined that the individual was a male between the ages of 13 and 17.
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah, they initially found, just like, you know, doing investigations, tibia and fibula from the left leg and a humerus, ulna and radius of the right arm on the surface. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I guess prompted this whole thing.
00:04:34
Speaker
Yeah, they excavated further and about five meters south, they found more long bones protruding from the surface. And so that caused a larger scale excavation to happen. And between these various surface finds that initially drew them to the area, they found finger bones, wrist bones, toe and ankle bones, ribs, a few vertebra clavicles, and of course more of the arm and leg long bones. And that was all buried. Yeah, they're sure it's all from the same person?
00:05:04
Speaker
Well, they probably think that because they don't have any doubles. If you have doubles, then you know you have more than one individual. So MNI is minimum number of individual. And usually when you have a fragmented burial recovery like this, where you don't know, you just have to pick a bone. And then however many instances of that bone you find is how many individuals there are. And so I'm guessing that's what they did. They don't really talk about that in this article, because this article is just more of a like,
00:05:32
Speaker
a press release kind of a thing rather than a scientific study situation. What makes this super interesting and the fact that it's in a bog is some of the other stuff that they found that's preserved like intact fingernails, toenails, skin, possibly a kidney, 2,000 years old. They said possibly a kidney, but if you look at that picture,
00:05:53
Speaker
That is a kidney. What else could that possibly be? So that's insane. A 2,000-year-old kidney. Fully preserved. So crazy. The one thing this kid was missing was his head though. Or her head. What was it? Mail up? They said it wasn't clear if the head was removed before or after death, but I guess we don't have the part of the vertebral spine where it would have been disconnected.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah, in the image, I definitely saw a couple of vertebrae, but I don't think that the ones from the top weren't necessarily there. So yeah, that's probably what you would need to know how the head got separated. All these remains that they found were about one meter below the surface, which geologically matches about 2,000 to 2,500 years of a date range. Yeah. So it corroborates the carbon dating that they were getting as well, which is always good when you have two different dating methods that sort of
00:06:47
Speaker
produce the
The Historical Significance of Asher and Assyrian History
00:06:48
Speaker
same results. So that's great. Yeah, they also found a cluster of fossil tree remains, which I'm kind of surprised that a tree could fossilize in that environment. Yeah. Anyway. That was interesting too. And it looks like the individual might have been purposely placed there. It's possible.
00:07:05
Speaker
But, you know, there's always other reasons too that you have to consider, right? Maybe he just naturally died among the trees and that's where his body, you know, naturally came to rest or he could have washed in from somewhere else and got caught up by the trees. And then that's why he's tangled up in this fossilized tree remains. But it is interesting to speculate because
00:07:25
Speaker
If it's a purposeful burial, then that would be an interesting custom for this group of people at that time. But I just don't know that they're going to be able to say that for sure. They would need to find more artifacts, more evidence that it was a purposeful burial. Or more burials that are like it, I guess, would also help with that argument.
00:07:45
Speaker
Gonna have to keep digging in the bogs. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. So lots of cool things in the bogs. Yeah. Kind of like the La Brea Tar Pits. Oh, man. Lots of good stuff in La Brea. That's the worst show on TV. I wasn't even going to talk about it. I'm literally talking about the Tar Pits. Yes, I know. But I know what's in your head right now. And you're thinking of this terrible, awful show. Which we've mentioned here before. Yeah. You did a whole episode on it. Oh, yeah. Probably because I refused to join you because I was like, this is the worst show ever.
00:08:12
Speaker
I just love the time travel premise. Yeah, it's not super well executed, but it's also kind of fun, I guess. Indeed. All right. Well, something that was super well executed was the lost capital of ancient Assyria. They did a good job, then they lost it. Back in a minute.
00:08:30
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 251. And this time around, we are talking about the lost capital of ancient Assyria. It's an article that just was out in National Geographic. It's not really news, so to speak. I mean, aside from the fact that it was in a recent episode or episode issue of National Geographic. So that's why we're talking about it.
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah, so basically in the early days of the Assyrian Empire, Asher was its first capital and also the origin of its ruling dynasty. So pretty important place back in the day. Yeah.
00:09:03
Speaker
And also, Asher, the city's namesake, was the most revered god in ancient Assyria. So the city was named after that god. Yeah. You just study place names. Man, you go back in certain areas and everything's named after religious figures and gods and things like that. I know. I know. Yeah, totally. Yeah. It's located on the western shore of the Tigris River in what is today Iraq. Mm-hmm.
00:09:25
Speaker
And the site has an Arabic name as well, which is, and forgive my pronunciation here, Qalat-Shirkat. We'll go with that. So this city would have been kind of a link between Assyria and Anatolia. And Anatolia is, of course, today's Eastern Turkey area.
00:09:45
Speaker
The city was a capital of Assyria, like we said, from the 14th to the 9th centuries BCE. I mean, we talk about progress, we talk about all kinds of stuff. That's like twice as old and more than the United States is. Yeah. That is a really long time for it to be the capital for a civilization to be strong enough to have a capital city for that long.
00:10:09
Speaker
Right, but these people knew what they're doing. If you recognize the Tigris River, the Tigris in the Euphrates, which is also right over there, that little area between them is what's known as the Fertile Crescent, and that's where everybody pretty much agrees that agriculture was first developed in this world. Not that it was
00:10:26
Speaker
developed there and then spread around. But the earliest example of it that we think of was right there. And some of the oldest cities in the world are in that area. So it makes sense that these guys... They knew what they were doing. Yeah, they were definitely building big civilizations early in this area. So that's why it's so old and it lasted for so long, probably. In 879 BCE, the capital was replaced by Kalu, known today as Nimrud.
00:10:52
Speaker
And the Assyrian kingdom was conquered by the Medes and the Babylonians in the 7th century BCE. So yeah, they made it a couple hundred years after Asher was no longer at the capital, but I guess they were there on the decline at that point. So yeah.
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, they only lasted about another thousand years, the city litters. That's true. So the Assyrians might not have been an empire anymore, but the city, yeah, like those people didn't leave. They weren't gone. They didn't all die. They continued on in the city was a city for another millennia. They just were under various different occupations, the Persians, the Parthians and probably others that, you know, weren't even mentioned in this article. Sounds like Crete.
00:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, just like somebody would come along and they'd be like, okay, cool. We're part of you now. So in 240 CE, there was a final sacking of the city by the Sassanian Persians. And that really did truly leave the city in ruins. It sounds like basically everybody took off and the city just was not occupied anymore after that point. I mean, these cities that are made out of stone, it would be difficult to rebuild in any sort of efficient way.
00:12:05
Speaker
almost easier just to go live in another city or build somewhere else, because the infrastructure it would take to just build all that back up, I can't even imagine. If you had someplace else to go, just as a citizen, it probably would be easier to just go join a branch of your family somewhere else rather than trying to rebuild. I could see that being a game of attrition, basically, as people just slowly left. And then it just became ruins, the ruins that it is today.
00:12:33
Speaker
The city itself, you know, archaeologists have known about it for a while, but it was somewhat overlooked by the early archaeologists of the 19th century. And the one of the reasons for that in this article is that it might be because it doesn't have biblical importance like Babylon or Nineveh.
00:12:51
Speaker
So maybe, I mean, it's not mentioned in the Bible anywhere. So that could be why it wasn't, that could be why early archeologists weren't really interested in it. Right. Yeah. It would have had equal importance in the ancient world to other great cities we've heard of like ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt. Yeah. But they're just saying that this was an important big city that everybody knew about. Like when you're looking at these, these cities, right? These other cities that have been well excavated and well-documented and everybody knows about and like anybody walking down the street, you can ask them,
00:13:20
Speaker
you know, name an ancient city in Europe and they could probably say Greece or Rome or whatever. This one would be equally important. It's just that it hasn't had the work done on it. It's in an area of the world that is constantly experiencing upheaval and strife through various civil wars and other wars. So like it's just not been studied as well as some of these other places.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, the first excavations here finally happened in around the early 20th century by the German Orient Society. Sounds like a fun place. Led by Robert Coldaway and Walter Andre. Yeah, Coldaway was a super meticulous guy. And I love this so much because you don't really hear about this with early archaeologists too much. But he put a big emphasis on understanding how past societies functioned, not just an artifact grab or
00:14:10
Speaker
That kind of thing, you know? So because that was his interest and he was the lead, the leader of the dig, he made sure that every artifact and every structure was accurately documented, like down to every detail. And the way that they fit together too was documented. He was very interested in context.
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, he was originally trained as an architect and then put his drafting skills to work documenting the city. Because even now, one of the most important byproducts of an excavation is the map. Where is everything in association with everything else? And that was Andre, who was trained as an architect. So that is part of the reason why Coldaway brought Andre in, is because he wanted somebody who could do those really detailed, amazing drawings and maps and things. Yeah.
00:14:58
Speaker
They worked there for nine years beginning in 1903 and uncovered a complex of temples, palaces, and fortifications.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, one of those was the Temple II Asher, which was a lavishly decorated mud rock building that was completed around 1800 BCE. Super old. I wonder how they dated that. Yeah, that's true. I'm not sure. Again, this is more of a like information sharing article from National Geographic, not like a scientific one. So I'm not really sure where they get that date from, but yeah.
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah, apparently the walls of what they call the God's Room Chamber in the temple were once completely covered in gold. And again, how do they know that? I mean, is there gold, some of it there? Yeah. Or do we have historical documents, basically, historical records describing this place from other historians? I would imagine so. It'd been around for a long time. And some of the big Greek historians and things like that, they traveled around and more than likely visited here. But somebody must have documented this, because I'm not really sure where they're getting this information.
00:16:00
Speaker
if none of that's there anymore. You look at the pictures in the article and it is just a bunch of ruins. So I was just looking that up while you were talking because I couldn't remember why they knew that, but apparently there's an inscription by a later sovereign SR Haddon that said that the walls were covered in gold. Now again, this is an inscription by somebody later on who might have wanted to bolster the
00:16:23
Speaker
memory of his previous rulers or whatever. Maybe they were family members or something like that. But that is why they say that it was covered in gold. I don't think there's any evidence of that left because it sounds like they were eluded pretty badly. Like the multiple sackings that the city went through. There was, there were no valuable goods left to be found. So yeah.
00:16:44
Speaker
Well, given its longevity, there were several, and I'm surprised only several, royal palaces throughout the city's time. You'd think there'd be one every new ruling class. But the old palace, they call it, with ancient foundations embellished by the Asher kings as the city became a regional power, was there. And then there was the new palace built in the 13th century BC by
00:17:08
Speaker
Tukulti Nenerta, the first. Tukulti Nenerta. Yeah, that's quite a name. Anyway, a third palace was built much later in the second century C by the Parthians. And that would have been not too long before the final sacking of the palace too, or of the city too, so that was a much later addition to the city.
00:17:28
Speaker
This would have been super cool, just excavating this whole thing back then. But inside the old palace, they found what were the royal tombs of Assyria's ancient kings. I mean, it just, I feel like you don't find stuff like that anymore. I know. Maybe in Egypt. Yeah. I mean, every once in a while you do, but, and it's always looted, right? Even these were looted. It was looted way back in 614 BCE. It's a good thing the looters said, you know, here's, we were here. Yeah.
00:17:54
Speaker
I mean, I think there's just written records of this kind of stuff from back then, either written in stone on tablets or whatever, wherever they left those kind of inscriptions. So they did not expect to find any grave goods or valuables though, same as with the other structures. They were all looted and there's been too much looting and taking over of the cities. There was just nothing left.
00:18:17
Speaker
So this initial excavation was paused with the outbreak of World War I. And before it started, a ship full of artifacts left for Germany in 1914. The idea was to take them there and study them because they knew that things were having to wind down because of the war. But that ship got held in Portugal throughout World War I and all the way until 1926. And they were finally released and allowed to continue to Germany, you know, 12 years after they left Iraq.
00:18:44
Speaker
Is somebody on that ship for 12 years just going any day now? I don't know. The thought of that is just crazy. Was it docked somewhere? Was it at anchor? It must have been. Well, I guess it could have been at anchor. Why not? Yeah, it's crazy, right? Yeah, that's nuts.
00:19:02
Speaker
And so that was sort of it for a while, right? Like it wasn't excavated again for many decades because of political upheaval in modern day Iraq and maybe even potentially like lack of interest a little bit. Like it just, it just didn't get the attention that some of these other big ancient cities did. So yeah, but in 2003, it became a UNESCO world heritage site.
Threats to Asher's Preservation and Rediscovery Efforts
00:19:24
Speaker
So that got some eyeballs back on it.
00:19:26
Speaker
And then some more eyeballs got back on it. In 2015, when ISIS was seeing how far their bombs would go and deliberately destroyed Asher's remains, including severely damaging the arches of a historic symbol of the city, the monumental Tiberia Gate. I remember hearing about that.
00:19:45
Speaker
I'd never heard of the place to begin with. And then all of a sudden in 2015, they just started blowing stuff up that didn't support their historical narrative. Yeah. And also probably to make a, just to make a point of their strength, probably like look at us. We can blow up these, you know, ancient remains, I guess. So.
00:20:01
Speaker
I don't know what the Germans are so interested in this place for, but in 2022, a team from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, which is someplace I definitely want to go, in Germany, began working in the Newtown section of Escher.
00:20:17
Speaker
And to make things even more complicated, this was just like an afterthought at the end of this article. And I was like, wait, what? We need to talk about this more. But the entire site, the entire city is currently under threat by the proposed Makul Dam, which would flood the area and would completely drown this ancient city. So not only is it a place that hasn't really been well excavated,
00:20:43
Speaker
it might be underwater soon because of the dam or a new dam, which is crazy. So I guess this team from the German university, they're working on it, but archaeology is a slow science. So I don't know when this dam is supposedly going to be built, if it's going to be built, but they don't have a lot of time. This is like a salvage archaeology moment if that dam is going to happen. Might just make digging easier for underwater archaeologists.
00:21:12
Speaker
All right, well, go check that out. Lots of cool stuff. Obviously, it's National Geographic, so there's pictures, and it's kind of a long article, but it's a good read. It's well put together. It is, yeah. And there's some old photos from the original excavation, which are really neat to see. Some of the drawings from that original excavation have been turned into almost like reconstructions, so you can see what the city might have looked like. And then there's some really cool artifacts that were recovered as well.
00:21:34
Speaker
I said that it was looted terribly and it was, but that doesn't mean that they got everything. So these excavations did turn up some really, really cool artifacts. So there's some great images of those in the article as well. All right. Well, we're going to go from a lost capital city to just one tiny, lost little tomb back in a minute.
Rediscovery of the Irish Tomb and Photogrammetry Techniques
00:21:54
Speaker
Welcome back to the archeology show episode 251. And this is our last story. And this is about a 4,000 year old tomb that everyone thought was destroyed.
00:22:05
Speaker
I know, this article is actually kind of short and there's not a lot to it, but I thought it was really interesting. It's very confusing to me. That it was lost? Not only that, but other stuff. Let's get into it. Okay, so the title of the article is, everyone thought this 4,000 year old tomb had been destroyed, then an archeologist found it. And it was published in Smithsonian, which I know I had said before is basically my favorite magazine for archeology publications. That and Idaho Statesman.
00:22:34
Speaker
Idaho State's been might be my favorite, actually. Smithsonian would be second. So, yeah. We should visit the Idaho State. It's been many tracks through there. Right. I don't know why. They're just so good. The Miami Herald has kind of been coming up, too. Like, randomly, they've got a lot of archaeology stories lately. So, yeah. Good stuff. All right. I wonder if they're connected somehow in the background. Like, somebody owns both of them or something like that, and they're sharing content. I don't know. Anyway, random thoughts about archaeology stories in the news. So, yeah.
00:23:04
Speaker
Anyway, in 1838, according to the article here, English aristocat. No. That's a movie from the 90s. She was a Disney character that we're talking about here. Was that a Disney movie? I don't know if it was Disney or one of the other cartoons. Anyway, the aristocats. Georgiana Chatterton sketched a tomb called El Toire Nagrin, which I'm probably, you know, whatever, which means altar of the sun in Irish, you know, because this is Ireland we're talking about. I don't know if we mentioned that.
00:23:33
Speaker
I'm going to correct your other pronunciation, too. When it looks like Georgiana, it's pronounced Georgiana. Georgiana? Oh, okay. Yep. All right. Well, Georgiana described this as a curious piece of antiquity, once an altar, supposed to have been used for offering sacrifices to the sun. Okay, pause.
00:23:54
Speaker
apparently a 4,000-year-old tomb. How in 1838 did she have any idea? She probably talked to some farmer and was like, I heard something about the sun. I mean, I can't imagine that was passed down for 4,000 years in Ireland. Oh, there's no way. And that's why they say later on in the article that
00:24:11
Speaker
Like that is the question, is why is it called altar of the sun? And the name could have been given to it when more of it was standing. And maybe there was an obvious like association with the sun through an alignment or something like that. That's possible. Or it's just people, local people decided, hey, it looks like an altar. I bet it's for the sun. Cool. Let's call it that. I mean, you know.
00:24:36
Speaker
Well, not long after that, in 1852, antiquarian Richard Hitchcock tried to visit the site and concluded that the tomb had been dismantled, or that he just couldn't find it. I guess her GPS coordinates weren't very good. The accuracy was plus or minus 18 miles or something.
00:24:56
Speaker
It's extreme arrogance to think that because you can't find something, therefore it's gone, right? How many sites if we try to relocate it and said, I can't find it, therefore it's gone? Yeah, but you- We write that up on a site record. You do say it's gone, yes, but you don't say it's because the local people dismantled it and took it away. I mean- You know, like it's gone because you can't find it because it's overgrown. You know, maybe water activity caused it to be not visible anymore.
00:25:22
Speaker
It's a carved stone. I mean, a good piece, if you need it, and you don't care, it's gonna be in your barn. Okay, well, we'll get to why that's probably unlikely too later on, but either way, you know, he said it was gone. And so from that point forward, future researchers just assumed it was gone, even though Georgina had documented it in her journal.
00:25:46
Speaker
Then we get our next character, who's got the best name ever, Billy Magflone. Floen? Floen. Irish. He's Irish, obviously, by that name. And he's an archaeologist and a folklorist at the Sacred Heart University.
00:26:05
Speaker
And he was not so sure that this whole thing tomb was dismantled or missing or gone or whatever. He was like, no, no, no, no. We should try a little harder to find this thing. Well, he lived near there, too, where it was supposed to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He just had a feeling there was something more going on here. So he decided to start doing some more searching for it.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, and apparently, according to his folklore knowledge, it was taboo to destroy these kinds of sites in the 19th century, which made it a little bit unlikely that it was dismantled in the first place. Yeah, that's what I was alluding to. They just probably wouldn't have done that, given the way people thought about this kind of ancient architecture back in those days.
00:26:48
Speaker
So what Billy did is he started building a photogrammetric model using images of the area. And I was a little confused about this because I'm like, he just took a bunch of pictures or was he using aerial photos to put this together? Did you get a hint of how that might have worked?
00:27:05
Speaker
I mean, you can almost do it from satellite imagery from Google Earth. I mean, if you've got enough to at least start a model, you can start getting some 3D stuff. So it's hard to say. I don't think they mentioned how we got the images. I mean, he could easily have flown a $200 drone over the property. Yeah, true. But either way, he's trying to get a 3D image of the area so he could look for something that might be this tomb that is supposedly lost.
00:27:32
Speaker
And he must have had some relatively decent resolution on that, which makes me think it was a drone. Because he spotted a stone, and these stones were probably human-sized from the sounds of the descriptions. They're in the picture, too, at the very beginning. That's right. But anyway, he spotted one that looked like the one from Chatterton Sketch.
00:27:51
Speaker
kind of don't they all? I wonder if because when you see the picture at the beginning of the article there's like one stone that's sort of mostly upright kind of leaning a little bit that would stick out on the landscape right like if you were trying to put together a photogrammetry like image of an area that would stick out.
00:28:09
Speaker
Yeah, well Billy Mag teamed up with an archaeologist from Ireland's National Monument Service. That was a good movie. Anyway, so these monuments, man.
00:28:23
Speaker
The guy's name was Cayman O'Brien. And together they confirmed it was the long lost El Tor Na Grin. So again, I don't know. I mean, from her sketch, sure. But I'm still not sure where she got that name. It must have been local, something or other. It wouldn't have been etched on it. Yeah. I think she was told by the locals that that was the name of it. Maybe she even hunted it down on purpose to find it and then drew it. Either way, it's very inaccessible today. They had to climb over barbed wire fences.
00:28:53
Speaker
and stuff like that. And I know, I know, I know you're laughing right now. I know. Because like climbing a barbed wire fence is like a daily activity when you're working in the Western United States. I've got the scars on my hands and my leg to prove it. You do, you do indeed. I definitely got bit by a barbed wire a couple times too. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not really, I mean, I guess it depends on the barbed wire. If it's in terrible condition and rusty, it would be pretty dangerous. But yeah. At least it was the female kind. That's because barbed wire is really hard to get over.
00:29:20
Speaker
Barbed wire is really good. Wow, that was a lame joke. That really flies in Nevada though, because everybody calls it Bob Wire. They do call it Bob Wire. All the people out in the hills. Just because we're funny, whenever we're doing fake data, like in the company I work for Wild Out, whenever I'm putting fake data in, I always name my fake person who's entering the data Bob Wire, or sometimes Barb Wire.
00:29:45
Speaker
Well, I have fake names I use, too, in the software that I work with. I had to create fake users. And I've got the whole Wire family. I've got Guy, Barb, and Bob. Guy. I forgot about Guy. He's such a dork. And then sometimes their uncle Mark Waypoint comes up. Yes. Yeah, don't forget Mark. Mark Waypoint. Mark Waypoint. OK. Well, we're lame.
00:30:07
Speaker
Anyway, these guys think that there's more stones buried below the soil, which would only make sense. It's been there 4,000 years. It's possible that the ones that are buried, and you can see a couple of them either partially buried or falling over in that image, maybe they were standing when Georgina originally sketched it and now they've fallen over and that's why it looks so different when our next fellow went looking for it 20 years later or whatever.
Conclusion and Future Archaeological Stories
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, this tomb is located in a place where you would kind of expect a tomb to be for maybe somebody important or something like that, but it's on top of a hill near... Bali Faridar? Yeah, near a town called Bali Faridar, which is a small village on the Dingle Peninsula. On the Dingle. That can't be the real name. Yeah, I live on the Dingle.
00:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, this was a wedge tomb, which is common to the region. You see these all the time. And it's basically a large upright stones arranged in a rectangle, and then a large capstone placed on top. Again, 4,000 years ago, and they're just like throwing these stones around like they're nothing. Yeah, I mean, those, they're heavy. You know, they had to have some kind, I mean, a lot of men to carry them around, or some kind of, you know, levering situation to get them up and maneuver them, you know? I'm guessing before the Lovelock Giants got to America, they were here moving stones around.
00:31:21
Speaker
Are you like teasing a future episode? So this particular tomb likely dates to between 2500 and 2000 BCE and they definitely don't expect to find any remains with this tomb because the wet soil will not preserve them all but anyway it's super interesting I think for me the reason this story jumped out at me is because of the whole it's gone
00:31:45
Speaker
And like, archaeology is like that, right? Like, grass grows up around things and you can't see it anymore. There's just so many ways that something on the surface like this can be obscured. And I don't think the right assumption is that it's gone or been dismantled. It just...
00:32:00
Speaker
All you can do is just note that it's not there anymore, but saying that it's gone, I think, was just going one step too far by the gentleman back in the 1800s. I mean, it happens, though, if you're trying to find something and you think you're where it's supposed to be. I mean, we're reading this a long time later and saying, well, the determination was it's no longer there, but he probably wrote, I couldn't find it, and I looked here, here, here, and here, and that's been interpreted over the century as it's gone.
00:32:27
Speaker
It's gone, yeah. Yeah, so why look? Gone is just so final. You gotta leave that door cracked a little bit because all it took was Billy Mag here. He cracked that door wide open and was like, nah, I'm gonna find this. And then he did, and it's really cool how he used technology to help direct them to the right location to find it. All right, well that's it for this week. I guess we'll be back next week with something else. You guess? Maybe not? I guess, I don't know. Sometimes we don't show up.
00:32:53
Speaker
Who knows what's going to happen? Flaky, flaky, flaky, T-A-S people. While we're down in Mexico having fun. We are. It's true. Anyway, all right. See you guys next week. Bye.
00:33:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:33:32
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.