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I See Dead People - Episode 5
55 Plays11 years ago
Welcome to Episode 5 of The Struggling Archaeologist’s Guide to Getting Dirty, “I See Dead People!”
And boy do I ever, well, at least while researching for this episode! I tried but I just couldn’t avoid more mention of mummies, but I think after our discussion of archaeological execution sites and bog bodies you won’t mind a boring old mummy or two!
The discovery of a pit full of 14th century German execution victims is why today is all about death, so I felt it necessary to delve into the world of bog bodies as well- since who doesn’t love those, am I right?! Don’t worry, in today’s shorty news I figured I should talk about something full of sunshine and rainbows to make up for the macabre first act of the podcast- so I briefly consider the merits of space archaeology…. yes, space archaeology.
Oh yeah, and if you were planning on doing a field school this summer you should get your booty on it asap! Check out shovelbums.com, archaeologyfieldwork.com, about.com, archaeological.org, digs.bib-arch.org and other similar such sites for field work opportunities around the world for this summer!
Peace of my Nerds!
McNiven OUT!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & New Microphone
00:00:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:20
Speaker
Why hello there, listeners! Welcome back to another episode of the Struggling Archaeologist's Guide to Gettin' Dirty. This is Jenny. I'm here on my fantastic new microphone. I hope you all like it. It'll be a little bit less popping and buzzing from me. Uh, since I have this super
Medieval Execution Victims Discovery
00:00:40
Speaker
snazzy new mic.
00:00:42
Speaker
And it's going to be helping me guide you through the exciting world of archaeology, history, and all other things cool and fun to talk about today. And today, I think we have a pretty exciting episode planned. We're talking about death. Not like deep existential, what's the meaning of life, what's the meaning of death.
00:01:06
Speaker
type of thing. It's more of like a cool things about death in archaeology episode. I guess it comes from
00:01:17
Speaker
This article I found on, it's a German magazine online called Der Spiegel magazine online. Not to be confused with Der Spiegel magazine. In-depth talk on all things golem. No, this one is a, this article was translated by Paul Cohen and it's called The Hangman's Tale. Archaeologist digs into history of execution. And it's about the recent discovery.
00:01:43
Speaker
of 70 skeletons outside of Alkerschleben, Germany, that were found in a pit believed to be basically a big pit full of medieval execution victims from the 14th century. And I guess in
Execution Methods in the Middle Ages
00:02:00
Speaker
that, in Alkerschleben, in the 14th century, that would have made them criminals of the Kürnberg court, which was run by the Counts of Schwarzburg.
00:02:11
Speaker
So you know, they must have been efficient at all things execution. And that's why they have so many victims found in the pit. You know, they go boom and fall down and they go in the pit. That was my terrible German accent.
00:02:28
Speaker
Anyway, these 70 remains are being analyzed at the Thuringia State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, and the primary scientist is Marida Genesis, who is a former model turned archaeologist who specializes in execution sites, which I thought sounded pretty darn fun. So maybe when I do my dissertation, I'll be another one of those, you know, former model slash
00:02:55
Speaker
actors turned archaeologists to specializes in execution sites like the Merita Genesis lady who I'm sure biological anthropologists everywhere are very jealous of because she's got some pretty interesting stuff to investigate right now these the remains of these 70 people and
00:03:18
Speaker
indicate all types of injuries known to result from various styles of execution practiced in the Middle Ages for a bevy of criminal activity, and they appear to have been unceremoniously discarded or left behind after their deaths due to the disdain with which they were regarded at the end of their lives.
00:03:38
Speaker
There are some pretty interesting case studies here. One victim was left with their limbs still bound. Another was tossed in there with an iron strangulation chain, which is probably how they were killed. A third was put in there with a really sharp blade, which was probably the murder weapon as well.
00:03:57
Speaker
I like the mindset here. You kill him and then you don't reuse the murderer stuff, you just toss him in with there so that like 500 years later, archaeologists aren't confused, you know?
00:04:10
Speaker
pretty much just put it all out there and well it's good because this is probably the only evidence that would ever come forward to help explain what happened to those people because there's not a lot of records that exist concerning the practice of execution past like the verdict of Uganda, you know?
00:04:28
Speaker
So we know obviously that in medieval history there were a lot of beheadings and there were a lot of hangings, but some of these other alternative execution methods really aren't well documented. So the archaeology
Executioners' Roles & Burial Customs
00:04:40
Speaker
is like the only chance we ever get to learn about them. So this is actually a pretty good find as far as our knowledge of these things goes.
00:04:48
Speaker
Ooh, hit my hand there. Sorry, I was hand talking because I got so into it, you know? I'm not Italian. I'm Dutch and Scottish, but I'm from New York. I lived with a really big Brooklynite for a couple years. I think I inherited some of his Italian used guys like hand talking stuff, you know? So sorry about that. I'll try to keep the sound effects down from now on. So anyway, back to these execution victims.
00:05:16
Speaker
I think if these guys, the ones that they're studying now, made it to their grave with all of their body parts still intact, except for their heads, for a couple of them, they were most likely the lucky ones since executioners were known to take part in the trade of corpses and body parts for medical study or the concoction of magic remedies and spells.
00:05:40
Speaker
So I guess it was pretty common for people who no one really cared about at that point, criminals of the state and whatnot, to have been kind of dismembered and spread throughout the land to do good wherever they could.
Brutality of Medieval Executions
00:05:56
Speaker
anyway so yeah there's a lot of that going on which is kind of nasty but apparently a lot of these people were just sort of taken out and done with and then tossed in the pit which sounds like a lovely way to go so the article
00:06:12
Speaker
Did I mention who it was by? I don't think I did. It's by Matthias Schulz, the Der Spiegel online consultant. It goes on to talk about the lonely life of the executioner for a bit. They were largely ostracized by society for their dirty work and dealings with dead bodies, which was kind of like taboo, you know?
00:06:38
Speaker
They were apparently also really good at performing medical procedures having to do with amputation and castration, though I can't imagine why. They didn't just kill people either, they were so misunderstood, they tortured and maimed as well. Sometimes they resorted to the wheel, where prisoners limbs and ribs were broken so they could be weaved through the spokes of a large wheel and put on display in the town square.
00:07:07
Speaker
They also, you know, went to do good old fashioned drawn quartering, where the limbs were ripped off of their bodies by horses running in four opposite directions while attached to each of them. Sometimes they put a Fitz one in there for the head. Not always, but if you were lucky. And then there was the always delightful disembowelment, a la William Wallace. Such was the risk of being a bad boy or girl in the Middle Ages.
00:07:35
Speaker
You know, I always used to think it'd be really fun to be alive in the middle ages. Like, you know, I love history. I read Philip Gregory and all this stuff. And I was like, wow, that'd be so cool. I could wear my hair in braids all the time and be like Robin Hood everywhere. But now, I don't think so. Not so much.
00:07:55
Speaker
Nope. I'm... I'm good. I think I'm good at staying in the 21st century, so... Not a lot of drawing and cordering going on nowadays. Not a lot of disembowelments, you know, here and there. But for the most part, it's, uh... You know, just good old-fashioned jail time. And I think I'd probably prefer that. Especially with
Monty Python & Historical Humor
00:08:15
Speaker
all the witch burning, you know? Not very pleasant, that. Not at all. What makes you think she's a witch? Well, she's turning me into a newt!
00:08:26
Speaker
A nuke. Got better.
00:08:39
Speaker
Oh, well, Monty Python's Middle Ages, of course. I would have totally rocked. Speaking of, Spamalot? Awesome musical. I saw it on Broadway when it came out. Tim Curry as King Arthur. Brilliant. Sarah Ramirez as the Lady of the Lake. Oh my gosh.
00:08:57
Speaker
For those of you Grey's Anatomy fans who don't know, Sarah Ramirez, aka Callie Torres, not just a doctor on television, also a Tony Award-winning kick butt singing actor on the Broadway stage. She's awesome. But anyway, enough of that. We were talking about what archaeology helps us uncover about the details of this type of stuff, like executions and stuff like that.
Execution Mishaps
00:09:26
Speaker
For instance, here's an example. You learn a lot from archaeology. You would think that chopping people's heads off or hanging them, those two would have been pretty much the executioner's mainstay in the Middle Ages, so they'd be like really good at it. But it's not always the case. We see in archaeology sometimes skeletons from that period that reveal very clearly that the blow intended to cut at the neck of an individual with a halberd or something when they're cutting their head off,
00:09:55
Speaker
Sometimes it missed, didn't quite hit its mark, and instead it chopped through the middle of their back or through their skull instead. Yeah.
00:10:06
Speaker
and sometimes in hangings when the gallows weren't tall enough the victims would unfortunately miss out on the quick death of a broken neck from the fall and instead die slowly of asphyxiation instead. So yeah, things did not always go smoothly for our poor old executioner and even
Introduction to Bog Bodies
00:10:25
Speaker
more unfortunately for his victims.
00:10:28
Speaker
So anyway, now I guess more and more archaeological sites related to medieval execution and torture, punishment, and stuff like that are being uncovered in Europe and studied for also the larger social implications they held for the period and for individual stories of the condemned.
00:10:46
Speaker
So we got a lot of questions, like there's this woman who was unearthed in a ditch near an execution site in Selchow, whose head was found laying on her lower leg, but she was completely missing her neck. So what the heck happened there?
00:11:03
Speaker
Or there's a man whose body was found near the mass grave in Alkirshleben who had been buried under a thick layer of stone so that it was impossible for him to escape his grave, which I guess was a popular way in the middle ages of trying to stop vampires from rising from the dead. So was this individual believed to be a vampire?
00:11:29
Speaker
Perhaps. And not the sparkly kind, either. And for those of you interested in medieval punishment, I also suggest doing some research on the bog bodies of Northern Europe. And if you listened last week, I'm sure you noticed at the end of the podcast, I kind of threw out there, just off the top of my head, hey, maybe I'll talk about bog bodies.
00:11:51
Speaker
And I find it odd that they totally, like, played into this whole story about execution. So what the heck, I'm gonna talk about bog bodies too. So yeah, bog bodies are freaking insane. It's kind of a miracle of the natural world that the conditions exist in certain places for the natural preservation of the organic material of the body.
00:12:16
Speaker
And as most of you know, mummification, which is another form, is famous for its use by ancient Egyptians. That idea was actually inspired by the natural mummification of bodies buried in the hot, dry desert sands early in Egyptian
Preservation of Bog Bodies
00:12:30
Speaker
history. And so that's one of the conditions for natural preservation, hot, dry. And if you're into history and archaeology, then you of course know who Atsi the Iceman is. He's a famous, naturally preserved mummy.
00:12:46
Speaker
from the Chalcolithic or Copper Age found in a glacier between Italy and Austria. So yeah, extreme cold is another, usually, a good preserver. And then the other common situation is when you become waterlogged in a place with the right chemical conditions and a lack of air and humidity. And the bog bodies are the example of this third process. They come usually from peat bogs in England and Northern Europe.
00:13:16
Speaker
And for a body to be preserved like this, it has to be deposited. There have to be like perfect conditions. It has to be thrown in there in a cold time of the year when the body tissue can be saturated with acid and bacteria can be prevented from growing before the decay would naturally begin. So the body has to be pretty fresh when it's thrown in there. Yeah.
00:13:38
Speaker
It's also important in the bog for there to be peat actively growing at the time because it's the rotting of the old peat underneath the new that creates humic acid.
Challenges of Excavating Bog Bodies
00:13:50
Speaker
And that acts like a vinegar in the pickling process. It basically just pickles bodies, I guess. Odd side note, the night my mother went into labor with me.
00:14:02
Speaker
They were in the movie theater with my grandmother watching Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back, which is probably why it's my favorite Star Wars movie. Can you believe that? Seriously. And anyway, she went into labor during the movie, but she was only having contractions. So they went home and then she kept having contractions all night long, but they needed something to do. So they pickled for like six hours straight or something like that. They made pickles.
00:14:30
Speaker
So, and oddly enough, my aunt in Michigan also lived right next to a pickle factory. So whenever I used to go visit her at her house, her and my uncle Cappy, the entire neighborhood smelled like pickles. So yeah, those are my connections to the pickling process. I hope you enjoyed this interlude from Jenny, queen of the random interlude.
00:14:54
Speaker
So back to the pickling of bodies, it's basically the combination of acid and an anaerobic environment, and the cold, that pretty much equals the death of organisms that help in decomposition, and a concentration of aldehyde and organic acids for the preservation.
00:15:14
Speaker
In fact, it works so well in these cases that it also conserves hair, clothing, leather, and rope. And all of these things have been found preserved on the bodies. Well, not everybody. A lot of them are naked. And it's maybe because they might have been thrown in naked or their clothes might have disintegrated and their bodies were left behind. So, we don't know.
00:15:33
Speaker
But it's all this stuff that we find with the bodies that gives us the biggest clues as to why they ended up dead in a bog. And unfortunately, most of them also seem to be victims of human sacrifice or execution. Mmm, fun times. So yeah, in 1965, a German scientist named Alfred...Dieck? Dick? Dyke? Something like that. You have an unfortunate name, Mr. Doctor. Sorry.
00:16:02
Speaker
Anyway, Alfred, as we will call him from now on, claimed that there were 1,850 bog bodies in existence, but we're pretty sure he just made most of those up, so at the moment there are 53 in existence.
00:16:18
Speaker
And those are actually just the surviving ones. There have been more, but several specimens have been destroyed by the rapid decomposition of their bodies when they're improperly removed from their boggy environments for study and people expose them to the natural atmosphere, not realizing the chemical effects it's going to have on it. Unfortunately, that happens.
00:16:43
Speaker
So the oldest specimen is a woman from Denmark dating to 8000 BC, which is old. And the youngest specimens are actually Russian and German soldiers from World War I and II that died fighting on the Eastern Front.
Insight from Bog Bodies
00:17:01
Speaker
And apparently they were fighting in bogs. I don't know why you fight in bogs.
00:17:06
Speaker
But they did. There's also, um, I'll put a picture up on my website of, it's a 22 year old Russian pilot from World War II named Boris Lazarev that crashed his hurricane fighter plane into the bog in 1943 and was found preserved very well in north eastern, I'm sorry, northwestern Russia.
00:17:31
Speaker
So yeah, that I think is the youngest bog body that we have. I'm just talking about ones from northern Europe. There's also apparently in Florida we have another example from a settlement of a bunch of bodies that have been pretty well preserved.
00:17:49
Speaker
in like a little bog down there but and then there's also you know a lot of other natural mummification victims especially in south america in the andes they used to put human sacrifices up on the top of mountains where they died and were preserved by the the arid dry environment up there and i'll put a picture of one of them up
00:18:10
Speaker
the website too so check it out and for those of you who plan on checking out my website blog for this entry just be warned the images of these bog bodies and mummies are you know they're hard to take for normal people so if you're sensitive to that type of thing don't go to the website and check it out don't Google image it I would only recommend doing that if you're ready to handle these site of
00:18:36
Speaker
dead people you know they're very well preserved which is why it's a little bit harder to view for someone anyway so yeah we're oh yeah we're talking about examples of these bodies but i'm sticking to the northern european ones just so you know the majority of them come from the european iron age which spans usually between about 800 bc to the roman era the beginning of the roman era in the first century ad
00:19:03
Speaker
and in some places until the end of the Roman era in the 5th century. So most of these bodies show signs of being really messed up. They're beaten, stabbed, tortured, hanged, strangled, or beheaded. Some of the bog bodies actually they think may have been members of the upper class, which is indicated by they can do chemical tests to see what type of foods they're eating if they had an upper class diet.
00:19:29
Speaker
And then they are maybe more well groomed, they have better hair, better nails, you know, got the latest mani-pedi, that type of thing. So if there's lower class and upper class victims thrown in here together, it actually probably does indicate that they were execution victims because just because you're rich, you can still be executed if you've committed some sort of crime.
00:19:53
Speaker
And as for the people that they think were sacrificial victims, I guess, especially in the early Iron Age and before then in Northern Europe, these type of areas, the bogs, were considered like supernatural places where you could commune with the gods. If you listen to Eddie Izzard, it's like Salisbury Plain, you know, it's kind of like...
00:20:18
Speaker
You have to watch a user to get that. But yeah, they were zooky boogie places. So a lot of the times they may have some sort of religious rituals that happened there. So it might be the ideal place for human sacrifice if you were into that type of thing. And so the fact that they have some high value
00:20:41
Speaker
items that were like offerings put in the bogs with the bodies does tend to indicate that that may have been their purpose there so and then there are other random reasons too you never know why someone gets thrown in a bog there's a medieval woman from ireland who's actually believed to have been thrown in there because she committed suicide at least that's what her body indicates
00:21:04
Speaker
And at the time, that was pretty taboo. You couldn't be buried in a church cemetery if you'd done that. And so those victims were, you know, tossed to the curb, sister. So yeah. And these cases are pretty awesome as far as the opportunity that scientists get.
Respect in Archaeology
00:21:25
Speaker
to study these different aspects of past people's lives that you don't usually get to study when all you have is an archaeological site with their belongings or maybe just their skeleton, but to have that actual person in front of you with all of their soft tissue, if they have clothing, belongings, stuff like that.
00:21:44
Speaker
It's pretty exciting. You know, you get to see stuff like clothing, you get to study part of their body chemistry that maybe doesn't survive on just a skeleton and maybe DNA as well. Any type of modifications they were doing to their skin or soft tissue injuries that maybe they had on their soft tissue that you can't tell when you just have bones in front of you. Like, I know there's one of the bog bodies, they weren't sure how he had died,
00:22:12
Speaker
I think it's one with the really red hair that I have a picture of. They weren't sure how he had died until they flipped his body over and they saw that the back of his neck had been slashed, like a huge big slash in his skin, but you wouldn't have seen that on his bone unless it went all the way down to the bone. So, you know, it's good for stuff like that too.
00:22:34
Speaker
just the study of the demographics of what type of people you're finding being executed or tossed in the bog for other reasons gives you indications of social relationships between people and the way that they viewed method of death and
Famous Bog Bodies
00:22:50
Speaker
identity so there's a lot of different
00:22:53
Speaker
A lot of different stuff you can learn from them. But, of course, it shouldn't really be forgotten. And just because I go at this stuff kind of off the cuff and I can, you know, I try and joke a little bit. I don't want it to ever be, you know, misread that these aren't real people. Because they are. They're real people. They should be treated with reverence in their death. And especially because we know of such the horrible way that their lives ended. They should get some respect. Some respect. Alright?
00:23:22
Speaker
Definitely, I'm going to put pictures up because I think if you are interested, it's beneficial, but don't like send them to all your Facebook friends, gawking at them and stuff. That's just mean. Don't be mean. Okay? So, and if you want to search some of these famous examples, some of the more well-known bog people include the Toland man, the Grobel man, the Lindau man, and the Yida girl.
00:23:49
Speaker
So check them out. I'm going to put most of those guys up on the blog and do your own research. It's a really fascinating aspect of history. And a lot of it's medieval periods, so if you're into the medieval period,
00:24:06
Speaker
There you go. It's a good place to start to learn about the crappy
Preservation of Space Artifacts
00:24:10
Speaker
things that people do to one another. And with that, I end my treatise on the death of people in the middle ages thrown into bogs. The end.
00:24:29
Speaker
And with that, we are going to move on to this week's shorty news. Shorty news! And when I'm looking through news stuff in archaeology websites, I always like, I don't know, I get attracted to weird things which I feel like need to be mentioned in shorty news. So this week's comes from an article from Space.com called
00:24:52
Speaker
Space Archaeologists Call for Preserving Off Earth Artifacts by Leonard David. And I'm just going to start off with his beginning quote because I think it's a gem. When it comes to preserving history, a group of archaeologists and historians are hoping to boldly go where no archaeologist has gone before. Really original, Mr. David.
00:25:16
Speaker
Anyway, it's about space archaeology. And what doesn't sound more exciting than space archaeology, okay?
00:25:25
Speaker
So this is about basically a panel at the recent SAA conference in Honolulu, Hawaii that began a debate about how to deal with the cultural landscape of space. As now man-made objects can be found on the moon and orbiting the cosmos, as representatives of human cultural heritage and the relationship of man to time and space, they should be preserved and protected for future archaeological inquiry.
00:25:55
Speaker
I'm not lying people are really thinking about this stuff. I mean with all like the
00:26:02
Speaker
tens of thousands of years of human history on Earth that we still haven't had time to study, they're really, really worried about the two things we left on the moon. So anyway, the impetus for this conversation is most likely coming from the reevaluation of efforts to make NASA's Apollo space landing site on the moon a national historic landmark, as the site, founded in the 1969 moon landing by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, is set to turn 50 years old in 2019.
00:26:31
Speaker
Archaeologists usually start the process of heritage preservation after something is 50 years old, when they've agreed that things generally usually considered to be regular old stuff magically become artifacts of the past worthy of protection and scientific study.
00:26:50
Speaker
So the debate also, part of the reason it's in the news, is because it brings to the forefront the question of how to deal with areas in the universe which can't be claimed solely significant to one nation on Earth. Yeah, no one denies that the materials left on the moon from the 69 landing belong to the United States, but if we claim the site as a national historic landmark for America, it could be seen as an act claiming sovereignty over the moon.
00:27:18
Speaker
which is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which I previously did not know existed, but I'm glad that I have learned. And the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits such acts as claiming ownership over the moon or any other celestial body.
00:27:38
Speaker
It's a good thing they wrote that out. I'm glad we know that. So, nevertheless, Mr. Joe Reynolds, or Ms. Joe Reynolds, could be, I don't know, of Clemson University, claims that there is a human archaeological site, 223,000 miles away, that needs preservation, and that is all that they are trying to do. So, what do you do in situations like this? Anyway, you look for precedent from previously dealt with stuff, right?
00:28:07
Speaker
So in this case there actually are other culturally significant areas in neutral zones like Antarctica and the deep seas in international waters where, well in Antarctica at least, sites like the base camps of the explanations of the early 20th century are protected.
00:28:28
Speaker
by acts like the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Act, which preserves the concept of rescommunist or public domain, while recognizing the cultural significance of the site.
00:28:39
Speaker
Now, Alice Gorman of Flinders University in Australia also wants to emphasize the importance of space junk. Basically, defunct satellites and rocket bodies that remain in Earth's orbit. You know, those things that break through and threaten to kill everyone and end up just landing in the middle of an ocean. So she calls this technology Wasteland, a robotic colonial frontier which has significance in that
00:29:07
Speaker
It reflects human culture's relationship to space and the technological adaptations of our culture to a new environment. Whatever that means. I'm not saying that this stuff isn't important and that 100 years from now we're not going to want to look back at that technology and see what it did as far as the development of American or world culture, but I think they may be going a little bit out on a limb here, calling it a
Space Archaeology & Frontier Studies
00:29:35
Speaker
colonial frontier.
00:29:37
Speaker
In anthropology, frontier studies are generally used to study the relationships between cultural cores, which are usually larger settlements, and their peripheries. They're called core periphery relationships, or poor periphery relationships, if you get dyslexic like me.
00:29:55
Speaker
And the purpose of this is really to examine the different interaction spheres that happen when cultural groups come into close physical contact or share a space with each other, basically. And a good example of this is in the American West during the frontier period, we often examine
00:30:14
Speaker
the relationships of cultural groups at certain towns core centers and in the west it's mainly like European groups moving into these places and how they interact with like the Native Americans living on the periphery of their location and maybe other cultural groups like in the west the Chinese moved in to do a lot of labor in the
00:30:38
Speaker
building up of the Western environment. So you have different cultural groups living sometimes in close quarters, but also having to interact with the periphery, and how do they deal with it as far as the use of space, as far as trade or the market economy goes, or the way that their cultural traditions maybe interact or share, get shared between each other. And so this is basically the purpose of frontier studies as far as the name goes.
00:31:09
Speaker
And in outer space, I'm not really sure that that applies, unless in the future we have some alien archaeology to study as far as their interaction with our old broken satellites. Maybe then it would have something to do with frontier archaeology. But for right now, I'm not really sure.
00:31:28
Speaker
Anyway, Peter Kalapati of Penn State says that once these objects have ceased to fulfill their mission and been discarded, they should be considered archaeological objects. Because that's pretty much what artifacts are, right? So we should be considering new archaeological methodologies of preserving and studying them. And I agree with him. I think we should be. I just think maybe not so voraciously.
00:31:56
Speaker
Anyway, Reynolds claims that political protection of these objects and interstellar archaeological sites such as the Apollo 11 landing site could be achieved easily by an executive order by the Obama himself, making the site a national monument.
00:32:13
Speaker
and as well as an act of Congress to pass the Tranquility-Based National Historic Landmark Act. That is, only if they can actually get Congress to pass it. And Reynolds adds that getting them to agree on this, or anything these days, is another story. Thank you for your political commentary, Mr. Reynolds. I'm sure that's going to do you a lot of good in getting your Junkie Space Crap Act passed.
00:32:42
Speaker
And as for the moon landing site, I'm pretty sure that stuff's still gonna be up there whenever we get back up to study it, be it 50 years or 1000. It was a highly publicized event that's still extremely clear in our collective public memory. In the meantime, let's turn our attention to some of those sites that we aren't able to study so easily, and events that we really don't know very much about.
00:33:08
Speaker
All I'm saying is that our archaeological talents are needed elsewhere, okay? But, maybe the next time they're up there they could stick a big ol' Made in the USA stamp on those moon artifacts. Or some astronaut crew in 3200 AD's gonna get up there and you know what they're gonna be thinking? I'm not saying it's aliens, but it was aliens.
Field School & Future Topics
00:33:30
Speaker
Oh my god. And that's all I've got to say about space archaeology.
00:33:36
Speaker
On a side note before we wrap up for the day, it's that time of year, guys. If you are interested in getting your hands dirty this summer, you need to register for field schools. Field school registration time is upon us.
00:33:54
Speaker
Usually if you're an undergraduate or graduate student in archaeology, you'll be expected to do field schools during the summer. You might be set up with them through your school, or they might give you an opportunity to sign up for another field school elsewhere. But if you're not in one of those programs and you want to be involved in an archaeological dig, most of them take place in the summer.
00:34:15
Speaker
They're all over the world. There's lots of websites you can go to to research what field schools are available this summer and
00:34:25
Speaker
Most of the time, if there are slots available, you have to send in an application and the fee because most places don't just let you come and do a field school for free. It's a whole program where they teach you a lot about archeology and the history of wherever you are digging. So there is usually a fee and they usually, if it's someplace far away, they're not gonna pay for your airfare or anything like that. So you're pretty much on your own.
00:34:53
Speaker
But if you're independently wealthy, you know, you could pretty much go dig anywhere you like. So have a gander at some of the field schools being offered where you are or someplace that you'd like to be. You can check out shovelbumps.com. About.com has a really simple list. If you're into biblical archaeology, BAR, biblical archaeology review, which is hard to say, has an issue at this time of year that lists all of the
00:35:22
Speaker
digs in places that you might find significant to your biblical history. So check them out. You should do it. And next week I think I want to talk about Australia. I have a love affair with that big old country continent down there.
00:35:44
Speaker
I'd spend a semester in Australia in college, and I'm not saying it was the best six months of my life, but it was the best six months of my life. So I've been really into Aboriginal anthropology since then, and my historical archaeology side actually is kind of
Conclusion & Personal Anecdotes
00:36:00
Speaker
obsessed with convict archaeology, so...
00:36:03
Speaker
Anyway, I'll probably talk about that for a little bit. It's uber exciting. And I don't know when it'll be out next cause I'm going on vacation. I'm taking a long, well deserved trip home to New York and up to Vermont for a little while. So I'll probably be at least three weeks till the next one's out, kids. Sorry to disappoint. You're just going to have to sit there and wait with bated breath to hear your Jenny talk again. Anyway,
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just rambling now, so I'm just gonna go. But thanks for tuning in to episode 5, which I think I'm gonna call, I See Dead People. Because, honestly, I saw a lot of dead people this week researching this episode. And if you go to my website, you will too! Check out www.jennifermcniven.com to see the blog up with this article. There's gonna be lots of bog bodies on there! So enjoy it. Night, folks!
00:37:02
Speaker
I hope if I'm ever on the History Channel like Ancient Aliens guy, I'm well known for more than just my hair and being totally crazy. Like, maybe the fact that I can pee faster than anywhere I know. Or that I can sing this really fun Christmas song in Dutch. I don't know, we'll figure it out someday. McNiven out!