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Little Baby Jesus - Episode 4
54 Plays11 years ago
Welcome back for Episode 4 of The Struggling Archaeologist’s Guide to Getting Dirty “Little Baby Jesus!”
This week there’s some crazy business going on with a newly translated apocryphal text that was definitely not written by St. Cyril or based on anything resembling reality- but is cute all the same because it alleges that Jesus had super powers (aside from raising the dead and healing lepers and all that) and was best buds with the man that everybody loves to hate- Pontius Pilate! But seriously, the study of texts written in the first millennium after Jesus’ death about his life and early Christianity is little known to the public (unless they made the final cut into the Bible canon). So every text gives us an opportunity to learn more about the evolution of Christian beliefs and practices during its first couple of centuries, when it was extremely varied across the Old World, Middle East, and Northern Africa. I may also throw some knowledge out there about the influence of some other apocryphal numbers such as the Syriac Infancy Gospel- in which Jesus’ diaper does his dirty work (literally) and his circumcision creates one heck of a relic. No offense if I sound less than respectful, believe me- some of this stuff gives amazing insight into humanity and spirituality in the 1st millennium- but some of these texts are just bizarre, so let’s just say there’s a reason they aren’t included in the Bible…
Today’s Shorty News consisted of a story where I marvel at the discovery of a new strain of human Y chromosomes which doesn’t seem to have shared a common ancestor with most of the rest of humanity for 338,000 years! WOW.
The rest of the show is about a project that I worked on a couple years back in Texas which has recently become part of a new book called The Toyah Phase of Central Texas: Late Prehistoric Economic and Social Processes, edited by Nancy A. Kenmotsu and Douglas Boyd. There’s some stuff about hunter-gatherers, my personal thoughts on this newly published research, and then I talk about snails for a while. Yup, Snails.
Enjoy! McNiven OUT!
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
🎵
Introduction and Listener Engagement
00:00:20
Speaker
Wha- hello, Wham-ro-bunny! Welcome back to another episode of the Struggling Archaeologist Guide to Gettin' Dirty. This is Jenny, and I am here to guide you through the fantastic and exciting world of archaeology and history, where we make learning fun. So yeah, thank you for listening, everyone. I appreciate it. I got some nice emails from you folks this week, and I
00:00:44
Speaker
I beg you to keep them coming, I love to hear from you. And Lori, I am sorry that I almost blew your eardrums out with my singing. I will try to keep it down this time.
Adventures in Archaeology: Arcadia Mill
00:00:53
Speaker
And if anybody out there has wondered what it looks like to excavate a toilet,
00:00:58
Speaker
I would like to provide you with an example. I will be posting a picture of a preview that I've been excavating at my thesis site, Arcadia Mill in Milton, Florida, for viewer Kevin, who asked me what exactly it was like to excavate a toilet and how we know we're excavating toilets when we're excavating them. When you see the picture, you might be able to tell fairly easily what a toilet looks like underground. But I can't really explain to you the smell
00:01:25
Speaker
That is something entirely different that I feel like everyone should experience for themselves. So yeah, tune into my blog on jennifermcniven.com for this episode and you'll get to see a fantastic picture of me waist deep in poop. So yeah. Anyway, it's time to move on to our first story of the week.
Shapeshifting Jesus: Fiction or Fact?
00:01:43
Speaker
And since this was an Easter this last week, hope all of you had a great Easter, I thought I'd start off with a story about Jesus.
00:01:50
Speaker
Well, not Jesus per se, but a newly translated text coming out of Egypt that claimed that Jesus was in fact a shapeshifter.
00:01:58
Speaker
And just so you know, the beginning of this section of my notes is titled Jesus, the original Animagus? For those of you Harry Potter fans like me out there, I'm sure you'll understand what that means. I was going to go with Jesus, the original werewolf, but I decided not to take the chance that my readers hadn't also read Twilight and understood that a werewolf in Twilight was actually also a shapeshifter. And then I decided I'd want to reveal to the world that I actually read Twilight
00:02:24
Speaker
Except for right now when I'm revealing to you that I read Twilight. Note to self, never mention Twilight again.
Early Christian Texts: Apostolic Myths
00:02:33
Speaker
So instead of Twilight, oh shoot I did it. Let's talk about this new book by Roloff van der Broek, Professor of History of Christianity at Altracht University in the Netherlands.
00:02:43
Speaker
And in addition to being one of my Dutch brethren, Mr. VandeBruch also has like my dream job because I have always been a huge fan of biblical history, Christian history, religious history in general, and biblical archaeology, stuff like that. So hats off to you Mr. VandeBruch for being super uber awesome at stuff that I wish I could do.
00:03:07
Speaker
Anyway, he's written a new book about his translation of a 1200 year old Egyptian manuscript that's recognized as a New Testament apocryphal non-biblical text, and I will explain what all of that means later. Anyway, this text is claimed to have been written by Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, who was a 4th century theologian. The manuscript is also claimed to be based on a newly found book written by the apostles, that apparently no one else has ever heard of or seen again.
00:03:35
Speaker
This one is about the life and crucifixion of Jesus, which is what most of the apocryphal texts are written about. Unfortunately, in reality, it seems that this text was written about 400 years after St. Cyril, and by someone else who wanted his version of events to have more street cred by ascribing them to an apostolic source and a respected author like Cyril.
Pre-Doctrine Christian Diversity
00:03:57
Speaker
These are called pseudo-epigraphies, these copies. They were very common in the first millennium, with writers impersonating anyone who had anything to do with the New Testament, including the Apostles, Mary Magdalene, and most famously the Apostle Paul, of which many pseudo-manuscripts exist. That's papers that are written in his name, but weren't actually written by him.
00:04:18
Speaker
Some people actually believe that a couple of these pseudo manuscripts made it into the New Testament because people originally believed they were written by Paul, which was the whole point, but they may not have actually been written by Paul. Oops. Of course, not all apocryphal texts are pseudo-named. A lot of them are actually just anonymous, but they do the same thing. They're telling the story of Jesus and what happened.
00:04:41
Speaker
From different people's perspectives, a lot of the Gnostic Gospels are like this, the Gospel of Judas, Mary, Philip, James, John. They just sort of tell the little tweaks on the story, a little bit of a different perspective, and this appealed to different groups of Christians. There were lots of these texts in the first millennium after Jesus's death, just like this one by Saint Cyril, or the Sapuzid, Saint Cyril. And they were read by different groups of Christians all over the Christian world, or the world that was becoming Christian at this point.
00:05:10
Speaker
A lot of them read them instead of or in addition to the Bible that we know today.
Apocrypha and Its Influence on Early Christianity
00:05:15
Speaker
Different factions of Christians had different interpretations of the biblical story, which comes from the many different sources of Jesus' life that were being disseminated in the three centuries after his death. That's a long time. When there was no official doctrine, no official collection of materials representing what was authentic and what wasn't, they were just a whole bunch of stuff being passed around, and you just sort of
00:05:40
Speaker
believe what you liked. There's lots of different versions of the story at this point because there's lots of different versions of Christianity. And so that's basically how all of these different documents came about. And if you didn't know, Christians still don't agree on which texts are authentic and which aren't, which can be seen by the differing apocryphal texts included in the Orthodox and Catholic canon, but are not included. In fact, they are excluded from the Protestant Bible.
00:06:10
Speaker
Nevertheless, some of these apocryphal texts have had very long-lasting impressions on religion. For example, in the Syriac, which is later called the Arabic infancy gospel of Jesus, which was largely based on the infancy gospel of Thomas, which was written in the second or third century, the story of Jesus' birth and childhood is told a wee bit differently.
00:06:31
Speaker
Even though this one was probably written in the 5th or 6th century, this particular Gospel still had followers hundreds of years later, even though it's not even in the canonical Bible. And it was so influential that part of its narrative was also included in the Qur'an.
Medieval Relics: The Curious Case of Jesus' Foreskin
00:06:45
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So people in the first millennium loved these apocryphal stories. They were kind of like sequels to the New Testament.
00:06:52
Speaker
Kinda like when people weren't happy with just the Hobbit, and Tolkien had to write The Lord of the Rings, and then people still weren't satisfied, and all the rest of his work had to be published posthumously, and then we got The Cimarillion and The History of Middle-earth, and then people were like, please stop publishing this stuff, it's not fun anymore, and then they came out with all the Middle-earth lore like The Children of Horan and The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, because they thought, why the hell not? There's enough geeks out there to keep us in business until Peter Jackson decides to make a never-ending series of movies in New Zealand about Hobbits.
00:07:23
Speaker
So yeah, the apocryphal texts are kind of like that I guess. And in this one, the Arabic infancy gospel, apparently Jesus tells everyone moments after his birth that he's God. And then when he's bored of doing good deeds, he has his diaper heal people and free them from dragons.
00:07:42
Speaker
And after he was circumcised, his foreskin was kept in a very special tin and passed down for generations until it became a holy relic. They called it, I'm not joking, the holy foreskin. Or the holy prepuche, or prepus.
00:07:58
Speaker
And in its heyday during the middle ages, apparently everyone had to have one who was a hot item. They worshipped this fake foreskin to feel closer to Jesus. I am not lying. I mean, really, there isn't a better way to get close to someone than to fondle their foreskin, so maybe they were on to something. But eventually, the Catholic Church realized that there were way too many boxes of foreskin out there to support the apocryphal claim that there was only one holy foreskin in existence.
Reimagining the Easter Story: Saint Pilate?
00:08:27
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So they put a stop to the worshipping of these pseudo-skins. Maybe if they just told the people not to believe everything that they read. Perhaps that would have been easier if they read the rest of the infancy gospel, in which seven-year-old Jesus goes around killing other children for being annoying as far as I can tell. Maybe that's cancelled out by all the weppers he cures. Who knows. I'm glad to know at least that for some early Christians, it was the little baby Jesus that got them excited.
00:08:55
Speaker
Like they say in Talladega Nights, I like to think of Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt because it says like, I want to be formal, but I'm here to party too. But enough about Ricky Bobby, let's talk about this hair text.
00:09:10
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This here text was written in Coptic, which is an adaptation of Greek and Demotic alphabets to the Egyptian language, Demotic being like a shorthand for hieroglyphs that was used for over a thousand years and found on the Rosetta Stone. So Coptic was popular with early Christians in Egypt when the religion became common in the second century and was used until the 17th century, so it's a pretty long-lived language.
00:09:33
Speaker
And this text was probably copied several times and sent to different congregations to be read aloud to the largely illiterate population as one of the sermons of the great theologian Cyril of Jerusalem, or supposedly. So we now have two copies of the text preserved in the Morgan Library and the University of Pennsylvania's Museum. But it's what's written in the text that has gotten people talking recently.
00:09:57
Speaker
This new version of the Easter story, which I found appropriate for this time of year, is a bit different than the one we're used to, and the one that had already been canonized in the New Testament for 300 years by the time this was written. So in this version of the last days of Jesus, there is a new hero in town, and his name was Pontius Pilate. Apparently, Jesus' Last Supper wasn't with the boys, as Da Vinci so masterfully demonstrated, it was with his buddy Pontius.
00:10:25
Speaker
At dinner, Pontius tells Jesus to leave town and save himself, and when they come to crucify him in the morning, he will give them his own son to be killed in his place. But Jesus refuses, telling Pontius that he has been deemed a man worthy of great grace. Then, just to show off, he explains that he could escape if he wanted to by disappearing right in front of your eyes, which he does. Pretty cool stuff.
00:10:51
Speaker
Now if you're a guy writing this story and you've always been kind of sorry for poor old Pilate, always getting blamed for stuff, like killing the savior of mankind, then maybe this is how you retain him. And since by this point in Egypt and Ethiopian churches, Pilate was considered a saint, it makes total sense that a text which portrays him in this manner would get written and circulated in this area around this time. So, now comes the really cool part.
Judas' Kiss and the Shapeshifter Theory
00:11:20
Speaker
So in this text, the fact that Judas has to kiss Jesus to identify him for his arrest is explained with an old tradition about Mr. Walks on Water himself. The reason Judas has to kiss him is because otherwise he could have just changed his shape to avoid being found. The text reads,
00:11:39
Speaker
And then the Jews said to Judas, How shall we arrest him, for he does not have a single shape, but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is weak-colored, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is youth, sometimes an old man. Apparently, there were reports of Jesus changing his form from a very early point in Christian history. So it's not like this would have been a huge stretch for people to accept in the 9th century.
00:12:08
Speaker
Personally, I think he might have been more successful as a big black dog all a series black, but whatever. So yeah, that's the craziness of this new St. Cyril text. Well, that and the author also claims that Jesus' Last Supper and his arrest happens on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday, which is just crazy, right?
00:12:30
Speaker
So anyway, whether or not Jesus' followers believed these additions and changes to the story, the one that was ratified by the church in the 4th century, it's a great addition to our knowledge of Christian history to know that at some point there were a bunch of people out there who imagined their Jesus to be a kick-ass shapeshifter like Mystique. Maybe Mystique was Jesus.
00:12:51
Speaker
Okay, I win. So yeah, last week I promised you guys another story about the Y chromosome. And so here I delivered in this week's shorty news.
Ancient Y Chromosome Discoveries
00:13:02
Speaker
Shorty news. Oh yeah. Sorry, oh I forgot to do the jingle for the first story. Um, I'm gonna retroactively jingle that story. News and going sun from around the spheroid.
00:13:17
Speaker
So let's move on to shorty news. Shorty news! This one comes from a UA, University of Arizona news story.
00:13:27
Speaker
by Daniel Stolt called human Y chromosome much older than previously thought, and it's also from a recently published American Journal of Human Genetics article. So, basically, geneticists have discovered the oldest known genetic branch of the human Y chromosome, and the Y chromosome, of course, is the chromosome that determines the male sex. Men have an X and a Y, and women have two Xs.
00:13:52
Speaker
So basically this guy who lives in South Carolina sent his DNA to be studied and they found when they looked at his Y chromosome that it didn't match any of the strains of the chromosome that they knew about.
00:14:05
Speaker
Kinda silly, they had to do some extraneous research to find who the heck this guy was related to and after much looking they found a very small group of men living in Cameroon in Sub-Saharan Africa that shared the most similar variation of the Y chromosome to this dude.
00:14:25
Speaker
So this guy just happened to find out that he is distantly related to some villagers in Cameroon, and also that his Y chromosome just happens to predate the evolution of modern human beings, or the anatomically modern homo sapiens sapien as we are technically referred to.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, this guy's Y chromosome separated from the other oldest Y chromosome strain that we know of about 338,000 years ago, which was before the separation of Neanderthals from our ancestors and before the evolution of the Archaic Homo sapien around 200,000 years ago. So, what does this mean?
00:15:02
Speaker
Well, I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the theory of mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosome atom, that basically all humans are genetically related to this one couple, this one woman and one man, who had a bunch of kids and they had a bunch of kids and they became humanity. But this isn't entirely accurate. It is true that there are
00:15:21
Speaker
Basically, in the world today, there are a lot of different groups of genetically related people. These are called haplogroups, and this is based on our genetic relationship to each other. We're all related to each other when you go up the tree. It's called a phylogenetic tree. If you go up the tree far enough, we're basically all related, but we split off from each other at certain times, and we formed groups, and those groups became genetically more different from each other because they brought with each other and not with everyone else.
00:15:47
Speaker
And so we became different, and that's why we're different people today. Yay! Science! But anyway.
00:15:54
Speaker
So basically you can trace the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree to find out what haplogroup you're in. And apparently this guy's Y chromosome isn't way off the phylogenetic tree. It's not one of the main groups that came from, they call it haplogroup A, the main haplogroup that split into most of humanity. There are outliers, and you find in sciences, especially DNA, there are always outliers.
00:16:18
Speaker
And in this case, most of these groups are in Africa, or they stayed in Africa, and they've been isolated from the rest of the human genome, basically. In this case, they separated along. Before they even evolved, there was a different group in Africa that isolated themselves. They were doing the same thing everyone else was doing. They were evolving. They were living. But they weren't breeding with any of the other groups that were there. And when the other groups spread to the rest of the world, and people did and multiplied,
00:16:46
Speaker
This and several other small groups like the pygmies or the click-speaking caisson decided to chill, hang out where they were, preserve their pristine Y chromosome chains, and just hang out. So I think it's a cool story. Sorry, I like genetics. I think it's cool. You'll probably think it's really lame, but I think it's cool, so whatever. Yeah, whatever, you know?
00:17:12
Speaker
Alright, well anyway, it's time to move on anyway, so there.
Toya Archaeology: Personal Insights
00:17:17
Speaker
The next story we're going to talk about, I remember in the first episode I talked about reading materials, good reads, so I figured why not in this episode talk about some books.
00:17:28
Speaker
And it just so happens that as I was reading the latest issue of American Antiquity, I came upon an ad for a book named The Toy of Days of Central Texas, Late Prehistoric Economic and Social Processes, from the Texas A&M University anthropology series edited by Nancy A. Kenmotsu and Douglas Boyd, and it's got a bunch of other articles with nine contributing authors in it.
00:17:50
Speaker
And I thought this was kind of funny, because Toya is a period that I am actually intimately familiar with. Because I spent a year of my life working in an archaeology laboratory on this exact site. It cites 41 SP220 and 41 NU54 in San Patricio, and the Lower Nueces River Valley near Corpus Christi, where I used to live.
00:18:15
Speaker
So yeah, I contacted the local museum and I got in touch with an archaeology fellow there who set me up in the archaeology lab processing artifacts for them on these two sites, which had been identified as toyophase, meaning there was a cultural group spread across central Texas during this period that shared a material culture, meaning all of the materials that they made, their ceramics, their lithics, they were all using a similar technology and a similar style.
00:18:44
Speaker
And it was a really interesting period because they developed right before those darn epidemic spreading Europeans came to Central America. And it's a really interesting period to study because it spans the prehistoric, proto-historic, and contact period in the area, of which is very, very interesting, right? So I was really excited to see that there was a book out about the Toya, which, because obviously I spent a lot of time working on it,
00:19:09
Speaker
And I also excavated site 41NU54 the summer that I lived out in Texas with my archaeology boss and his field school. So yeah, that was fun and stuff. But I remember thinking there weren't a lot of people, at least it didn't seem to me at the time, there weren't a lot of people working on Toya sites that I knew of. So it felt like we were just kind of out there in the desert.
00:19:37
Speaker
in the bush on our own, kinda like a really boring rendition of City Slickers. Without the cows. Actually, no, there were cows. So yeah, anyway. Enough about me and cows. Let's get back to the business at hand, which is this book. So, yay, good for you, Texas A&M University Anthropology Series people! Glad to see you put this sucker out there for the world.
00:20:04
Speaker
Anyway, I have to add, I noticed that you did not personally thank me for all of the hard work I put into cataloguing the artifacts that you might have used in your analysis. So if that's the case, I accept your apology, and I think we can both move on and be better people from this experience. Anyway, let's talk about this book.
Toya Hunter-Gatherer Identity
00:20:28
Speaker
basically focused on the Toya period as far as their hunter-gatherer identity goes, which is basically summed up by subsistence practices, technology, regional interaction. So they had their relationships with their environment and the people around them. It's like, where did they live? What did they eat? What did they make? Pottery, tools, food remains, shelter.
00:20:55
Speaker
That's pretty much it when you're doing prehistoric archaeology. Your focus is on those main things, as well as trade and interaction. Who else did they know and what did they get from them? Ideas and materials. Very important. And so this is what we want to know about the Cholla, who generally spanned from northern Mexico through the state of Texas between 1300 and 1700 AD.
00:21:21
Speaker
And this book is largely, well, parts of it are focused on the faunal remains, which means animal remains left behind by the Toya, because they were known for heavily processing their kills, meaning they would kill the animal, they would use everything they could, and then they would actually think of other uses for some things that wouldn't normally be done, especially the bone. Not everyone uses the bone after they kill the animal. These people did. They used the bone actually as temper in their pottery.
00:21:50
Speaker
When you are making pottery the traditional way, you have to put some stuff in the clay with it to help provide places for air and pressure to escape to or else the pottery will crack and you won't be able to use it. So a lot of times people put things like sand, like a bunch of crushed up shell, different
00:22:12
Speaker
pebbles, mixtures, stuff like that we call grog. And apparently in this case they used crushed up bone, which is not very common. And I remember when I was in the lab being like, oh, wow, there's bone in their pottery. You don't see that every day. So yeah, so this is something that they're pretty well known for.
Innovations in Toya Pottery
00:22:32
Speaker
The pottery was not the only thing they were using bone for, they were also crushing and splitting the bone to take the marrow and the grease out of it as a dietary supplement. So if we look in the chapter Bone Processing and Subsistence Stress in Late Prehistoric South Texas by Zachary I. Gilmore
00:22:40
Speaker
And
00:22:51
Speaker
This is what we will find. It's an analysis of the faunal data, our animal remains from site 41sp220, which I have worked on personally, and it's supposed to measure the level of subsistence stress experienced by the inhabitants of the cab site. And that's the term he uses a lot. It basically just means, were they hungry? Did they have to do anything special? Did they have to find some extra sources of food that maybe they weren't using before? And if so, what does that look like in the archaeological record?
00:23:20
Speaker
And so he's looking a lot at bison and deer bones, and when I read that I remembered thinking, what bone? I worked on the site for a while, and I was usually pretty surprised when I found a piece of bone larger than my pinky nail in a bag. They do exist, but the majority of them were very small, so you couldn't really make a lot of distinctions about what kind of bone it was, like whether it was a mammal or a non-mammal.
00:23:46
Speaker
especially what type of animal it was so maybe he found some more somewhere else I don't know so
00:23:53
Speaker
There's a couple reasons why you might have a lot of really tiny fragments of bone. I assumed that this was obviously because they were using it in their temper and they needed to crush it and so that just created a lot of extra bone little bits everywhere. But this is not always what is indicated by crushed bone. In fact most often it's what Gilmore thinks is happening here. The bone is being used to produce grease and how you do this is you crush it all up after you've killed your animal and
00:24:21
Speaker
Enjoyed your paleo diet for the day. You'll crush up all of the bone and then you'll boil it and when you boil it the grease will separate and then you can take advantage of the nutritional value that you wouldn't be able to get from just munching on the bone. And this is one of the things Gilmour calls fallback food.
00:24:38
Speaker
The other fallback food indicated by bone in this case is marrow from inside the bone and when you split the bone you can access the marrow and then in a site when you see a bunch of bones that look splintered like they've been split in two and little splinters have come off then you know that that is a good indication they might have been splitting the bone taking the marrow and eating it as a supplemental food source.
00:25:03
Speaker
So when you look at your assemblage, which is basically the whole of the artifacts and remains having to do with that particular component that you're working on of a site,
Toya Survival Strategies
00:25:15
Speaker
That's what you look for if you are trying to prove that there was subsistence stress on your people, or rather what you conclude about your people from the evidence left behind, their material culture, which basically means all of the pieces of their culture that have physically remained after they have left that place.
00:25:35
Speaker
And so at this site, this is what Gilmour thought was happening at first, I guess, but there really wasn't as much evidence as he would have liked. There were some crushed bones, but that could just be explained by the pottery or ceramics. So the rest of the faunal evidence didn't really make the case well enough. So he actually concluded that the residents of this site were not processing as much bone for fallback foods as in other toy sites where there is a lot more evidence in the bone.
00:26:04
Speaker
So it doesn't necessarily mean that they weren't under subsistence stress, just that they weren't dealing with it in that way.
00:26:11
Speaker
So he suggests some other ways they might have been coping, such as through social mechanisms, such as trade. They might have been trading to a small extent with some of the other coastal groups nearby. And I thought about this for a minute, and it's possible, but I didn't see a lot that would indicate materials from another culture or especially a coastal group within the San Patricio site, which is actually like an hour and a half inland, I think, something like that.
00:26:40
Speaker
It was in the middle of nowhere, like literally I lived in a tent and we lived out of a little log cabin with no hot water and we had to shower outside.
00:26:49
Speaker
I'm not kidding, I showered outside in front of a blue tarp, like, with a hose on the top of it. And that was our shower. You know what, it sounds awful, but it was actually really awesome. I miss my little tent family over there. Anyway, back to the assemblage we were talking about. I didn't see evidence for trade with coastal groups. I remember a lot of ceramics and a lot of lithics, which are part of the stone tools that they make.
00:27:16
Speaker
We had lots of tertiary flakes. Those are when you're making a stone tool and you're napping all the little bits of stone off. Those are just the little ones that are left behind. There were tons of them!
00:27:26
Speaker
But I couldn't help remember what the biggest pain in my butt was.
Toya's Snail Theory: Nutrition in Stress?
00:27:32
Speaker
By far, the most numerous remains of these toy campsites were a species of freshwater snail called the Rabdodus. I spent hours washing Rabdodus, counting Rabdodus, inspecting Rabdodus. The place was infested with them.
00:27:49
Speaker
The inhabitants of the site would have definitely had access to these all along the Nueces Valley, and they would have actually been a really great addition to their diets, because even though it is protein, it also has a lot of carbs and fat, which would have both been a really good supplement for hunter-gatherers with a very high protein diet. In fact, I found evidence to support my theory that perhaps the Toyo were eating Arabdota snails as a supplement,
00:28:16
Speaker
in the analysis by Raymond Neck in 1994 of the Mustang branch site, which is another Toya site, that Gilmor interpreted to have at least faunal evidence of subsistence stress. So he found the bones that indicated through splintering and crushing that they were using the bones for the marrow in Greece because they were a little bit hungry, right? So even though Raymond Neck talks about the rhabdotus, Gilmor doesn't mention them in his subsistence model.
00:28:45
Speaker
I would brazenly propose the hypothesis that perhaps in a period where climate variation or overhunting had resulted in lower numbers of bison and deer in the region, the Chollaiteese sites may have fallen back on another source of needed nutritional supplements in snails. Yes, snails.
00:29:04
Speaker
So, more evidence for this comes from Andrew Maloff, who's a senior archeologist with the Lower Colorado River Authority, and he's actually suggested that, just as I thought, if there was high availability and low cost to acquire the Rabidotis, that they could actually make a lot of sense as a supplement for the paleo diet. And judging by the location at San Patricio, right by the Nueces River Valley, this could absolutely be the case. I do have to add, though,
00:29:34
Speaker
that I am not privy to the particulars of these reports, meaning I have not read these reports, and I'm gonna say it again fast just so you get it. I'm not privy to the particulars of these reports. So any analysis that might indicate whether the Rabdodis was acquired, eaten, and discarded by the Toya as I propose, or maybe it's just the result of a natural accumulation after the site had been abandoned, I don't know that. It is unknown to me. Could be natural, it could not be.
00:30:02
Speaker
But from what I remember, I think it could be a real option based on the association of the Rabdotus with the rest of the Toya materials under the ground.
Conclusion and Future Topics
00:30:11
Speaker
So I would posit that they were a food source for the prehistoric Toya, and one that was possibly turned to in a time of subsistence stress. Mr. Gilmore, I hope you are listening. You're welcome.
00:30:27
Speaker
And you are welcome too, listeners. You're welcome for providing you with such a fantastic podcast full of so much information, laughs, tears, everything you could ever imagine a podcast could be. So you're welcome. I'm glad to provide you with this. And I think that's it for our show today. I know it's sad, but you'll survive. I think next time when I come back, we're going to have another great conversation about, I don't know, something involving
00:30:55
Speaker
bog bodies or ancient mummified cats or shipwrecks from I don't know anyway I'll figure it out I don't know yet but I got some research to do and I'll come up with some great stuff that you're just gonna love
00:31:12
Speaker
So that's it for the Struggling Archaeologist's Guide to Gettin' Dirty episode 4. I think I'm going to title this one, Little Baby Jesus, in honor of pseudo Saint Cyril's attempt to convince us that Jesus was a shapeshifter. Oh man, that's a good one. Although you know what? Jesus would have rocked that. He would have been an awesome shapeshifter. That's what I think. And I'd like to hear what you think, so send me your emails at guidetogettindirty at gmail.com or visit jennifermcniven.com and leave me a comment.
00:31:41
Speaker
and take care now bye bye oh man i love that bricky bobby he's so funny wolf barrel's awesome he could charge 18 bucks for me to sit there and watch me to sell it and i pay it i would