The Dirt Podcast

The Dirt Podcast

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The Dirt Podcast episodes

  • JANUARY HIATUS CLASSIC - Where Do Babies Come From? - Ep 174

    This week, we bring you the MIRACLE OF BIRTH. Join Amber and Anna for a brief frolic through some ancient birthing wisdom and evidence of pregnancy and childbirth in the archaeological record. We're also joined by the brilliant Dr. Natalie Laudicina, who takes us on a fascinating and slightly terrifying journey through the surprisingly complicated landscape of the primate birth canal. Content warning: some of the subject material in this episode may be upsetting, but we try to give listeners a heads up.

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        • 1 hr 4 min
      • It's Jennauary! - Ep 173

        We’re finally introducing our producer, Jenna Hendrick, in an episode! Jenna has been working with us behind the scenes on our social media posts and some of the nuts and bolts of episode organization for several months now. We chat about popular media portrayals of human life in the Paleolithic, and how those affected popular perception of the human past.

        Tune in to the full episode on Patreon for our best/worst Pop-Paleo Awards show!

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            • 37 min
          • The Queen of Sheba - Ep 172

            It's another January Hiatus episode--this time a cleaned-up excerpt from Dirt After Dark. Amber drags Anna back to Arabia, where we discuss possibly its most famous inhabitant of all time: the Queen of Sheba. We look at the source material and the archaeology before really getting into it to discuss racism, misogyny, and--of course--camels.

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            Links

            • 1 Kings 10: The Queen of Sheba Visits Solomon
            • 2 Chronicles 9: The Queen of Sheba Visits Solomon
            • Surah an-Nami
            • The kingdoms of ancient South Arabia
            • In search of the real Queen of Sheba
            • Camel bones challenge the timing of some Bible stories
            • How black women were whitewashed by art
            • The Queen of Sheba’s Hairy Legs
            • Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam
            • Bilquis, Queen Of Sheba, And American Gods

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              ArchPodNet

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                  • 43 min
                • Race and Biological Anthropology with Dr. Rachel Watkins (131) - Ep 171

                  Recently, Anna and Amber sat down with Rachel Watkins, a biological anthropologist and scholar-activist whose research centers on social and biological histories of Black Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Learn about the social history of biological anthropology, the exemplary case studies with which Dr. Watkins has worked, why you shouldn't discount the creepy things small children sometimes do, and so much more!

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                  Links

                  • Rachel Watkins Faculty Profile (American University)
                  • Rachel J. Watkins on ResearchGate
                  • The Mismeasure of Man (WW Norton)
                  • The Cobb Collection (W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory)
                  • Watch Now! African Diasporic Activist Scholarship: Beyond the Enlightenment, Toward the Democratization of Science (Wenner-Gren Blog)
                  • Science and Freedom (Washington History)

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                        • 54 min
                      • Neanderthalk with "Kindred" Author Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes (113) - Ep 170

                        We hope you enjoy this great interview from the archives. If you're doing cool research, and want to talk about it on the show, drop us a note at [email protected]!

                        Anna and Amber sit down with Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Paleolithic archaeologist and author of the book "Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art." We talk about Rebecca's education and her love for all things ancient, and she resolves some common misconceptions about our Neanderthal cousins. "Kindred" just came out in the States, so pick up a copy of your very own for an amazing synthesis of current Neanderthal knowledge.

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                        Links

                        • Neanderthals Among Mammoths: Excavations at Lynford Quarry, Norfolk (via Archaeology Data Service)
                        • Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (European Commission)
                        • Trowelblazers
                        • Rebecca Wragg Sykes

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                          ArchPodNet

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                              • 1 hr 9 min
                            • Oh, Nice - Ep 169

                              We're closing out the year with a cozy episode about heartwarming things in the archaeological record. That’s right, we’re just going to find examples of nice things that people did and made in the past and tell you all about them. It’s a little year’s-end treat for us all. There's some discussion of Dads Being Dads, some loud opinions from Anna's neighbor's dog, and an all around good time.

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                              Links

                              • Stone-age toddlers had art lessons, study says (The Guardian)
                              • Cat Left a Pawprint in a 2,000-Year-Old Roman Roof Tile (Smithsonian)
                              • 2000-Year-Old Paw Print Proves Cats Never Cared About Your Stuff (Bored Panda)
                              • Curious Cat Walks Over Medieval Manuscript (National Geographic)
                              • On Lebanon border, salvage op rappels 2,000-year-old vessels down sheer cliff (Times of Israel)
                              • Rembrandt masterpiece thought lost is found after falling off wall (CNN)
                              • For a Surprisingly Long Time, Humans Have Kept Mementos of Dead Loved Ones (ScienceAlert))
                              • Tradition of keeping mementos in memory of loved ones dates back at least 2,000 years, study shows (Science Daily)
                              • Digging In The Dirt Really Does Make People Happier (Forbes)
                              • These archaeologists helped quell a COVID surge in Madagascar (Nature)
                              • Amazing Artefacts: The Amber Bear Of Slupsk (Digventures)
                              • Faience aryballos (oil flask) in the form of a hedgehog (Met Museum)
                              • The Tell Asmar Sculpture Hoard of Prayerful People (ThoughtCo)
                              • Sharjah Archaeology Museum (Sharjah Museums Authority)

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                                ArchPodNet

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                                    • 1 hr 11 min
                                  • How Long Ago Was the Past? - Ep 168

                                    When does “The Past” start, and how far back does it go? How long did it take people to get places in the past? How do we attempt to hold the vastness of time and geography in our minds? Not well, especially in an audio medium, but we’re excited to blow your minds.

                                    Links

                                    • The Greatest Animal War (Nautilus)
                                    • The last slave ship survivor and her descendants identified (National Geographic)
                                    • How Far Can A Horse Travel In A Day? (8 Facts) (Deep Hollow Ranch)
                                    • RGS-IBG Expedition Handbook (Royal Geographical Society)
                                    • Speed Under Sail of Ancient Ships (Transactions of the American Philological Association)
                                    • An Ordinary Ship and Its Stories of Early Globalism: World Travel, Mass Production, and Art in the Global Middle Ages (Journal of Medieval Worlds)
                                    • Royal Road (Livius.org)
                                    • ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World (Stanford University)
                                    • Modeling Ancient Population Structures and Movement in Linguistics (Annual Review of Anthropology)
                                    • Convergent geographic patterns between grizzly bear population genetic structure and Indigenous language groups in coastal British Columbia, Canada (Ecology and Society)
                                    • Human mobility and innovation spreading in ancient times: a stochastic agent-based simulation approach (EPJ Data Service)
                                    • Optimising human community sizes (Evolution and Human Behavior)
                                    • Size of human groups during the Paleolithic and the evolutionary significance of increased group size (Behavioral and Brain Sciences)
                                    • The Oaxaca Barrio in Teotihuacan: Mortuary Customs and Ethnicity in Mesoamerica's Greatest Metropolis (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

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                                      ArchPodNet

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                                          • 1 hr 38 min
                                        • From The Vault: Portrait of a Podcaster on Fire - Ep 167

                                          This week, we bring you another episode from behind the Patreon paywall. Sure, the title is a stretch, but it's hard coming up with a topical joke about portraiture! This month we dive into some early examples of representing individuals in ancient art from several times and places. Amber inexplicably takes umbrage with the entirety of Byzantine art, and both hosts question what is a face and what is a couple of lines that sorta look like a face.

                                          Links

                                          • The oldest known portrait of a human—usually interpreted as a woman—sculpted from mammoth ivory (via ResearchGate)
                                          • 26,000 years of capturing the human face (Inspiring Ancestry - Genealogy & DNA)
                                          • The woman from the Dolní Věstonice 3 burial: a new view of the face using modern technologies (Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences)
                                          • Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Portrait of Young Jesus in an Abandoned Israeli Church (Artnet)
                                          • The Oldest Modernist Paintings (Smithsonian)
                                          • Scientists Analyze Faiyum Portrait Pigment (Archaeology)
                                          • Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits From Roman Egypt (The Met)
                                          • Egyptian Mummy Portrait Mysteries Solved (Artsy)
                                          • Old Masters (The Guardian)
                                          • The diagnosis of art: facial nerve palsy in ancient Rome (Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine)

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                                            ArchPodNet

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                                                • 56 min
                                              • How Do We Know What We Know? - Ep 166

                                                There are a lot of misconceptions in archaeology that are often perpetuated simply because people don’t think about how the information they take for granted came to be. How do archaeologists know what people were doing in the past? Actually, how do we know anything at all? How do we know what didn’t happen? Tune in and find out!

                                                Links

                                                • Archaeologists Dig For Clues (via WorldCat
                                                • Is there a Solutrean-Clovis Connection in the American Colonization? (ThoughtCo)
                                                • Who really discovered America? The Solutrean hypothesis is the latest in a long line of theories about the discovery of the New World (Skeptic)
                                                • Five Breakthrough Signs of Early Peoples in the Americas (Sapiens)
                                                • The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas (Science)
                                                • People Were Chipping Stone Tools in Texas More Than 15,000 Years Ago (Scientific American)
                                                • Rejecting the Solutrean hypothesis: the first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe (Guardian)
                                                • Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer? The Impact of Gender Studies on Hunter-Gatherer Research (A Retrospective) (The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers)
                                                • Mammoth FAQ (We Hunted the Mammoth)
                                                • Man the Hunter. The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man's Once Universal Hunting Way of Life (via Google Books)
                                                • Female hunters of the early Americas (Science Advances)
                                                • Did prehistoric women hunt? New research suggests so (The Conversation)
                                                • This Prehistoric Peruvian Woman Was a Big-Game Hunter (Smithsonian)
                                                • Whole-genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia (Genome Research)
                                                • The Starchild Project (New England Skeptical Society)
                                                • Oldest case of leukemia discovered: Prehistoric female skeleton shows signs of this cancer (ScienceDaily)
                                                • Leukemia in Ancient Egypt: Earliest case and state-of-the-art techniques for diagnosing generalized osteolytic lesions (International Journal of Osteology)
                                                • A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments (Aeon)
                                                • What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West (WorldCat)
                                                • The Amazon Rainforest Was Profoundly Changed by Ancient Humans (The Atlantic)
                                                • Thera (World History Encyclopedia)

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                                                  ArchPodNet

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                                                      • 1 hr 33 min
                                                    • From the Vault: "Ancient" "Astronomy" - Ep 165

                                                      This week, Amber is finishing grad school applications and Anna had some vaccine booster side effects, so we bring you an excerpt from an episode of Dirt After Dark! Amber brings Anna (kicking and screaming) along on an exploration of some space weirdos who interpreted various bits and pieces of archaeology and ethnography to show that there's another mystery planet out there, and it's out to get us. And also bring us civilization? Anyway, it gets really weird, and we hope you enjoy the ride.

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                                                      ArchPodNet

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                                                          • 53 min

                                                        About The Dirt Podcast

                                                        From the publisher's feed

                                                        Join Anna and Amber; friends, archaeologists, and big nerds, for an exploration of the lives of people in the past.