Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share The Dirt Podcast
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
The Dirt Podcast
The Dirt Podcast episodes
- That Good Old Copper Complex - Ep 135
We’ve been remiss in discussing the Chalcolithic (Copper Age) anywhere in the world, so we’re fixing that by spotlighting one particular technology in what is today the US states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and some of the world’s earliest coppersmiths. Plus, a very salty discussion of the pseudoscience and *bad* historical takes behind some alternative theories for the Old Copper Complex's creators.
Links
- Old Copper Culture (Milwaukee Public Museum)
- Ancient Native Americans were among the world’s first coppersmiths (Science)
- On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in North America: A Comparison of Radiocarbon Dates From Different Archaeological Contexts (Radiocarbon)
- Miners Left a Pollution Trail in the Great Lakes 6000 Years Ago (Eos)
- Copper mining on Isle Royale 6500– 5400 years ago identified using sediment geochemistry from McCargoe Cove, Lake Superior (The Holocene, via ResearchGate)
- Mining on Minong: Copper Mining on Isle Royale (Michigan History)
- Understanding the copper heart of volcanoes: Scientists find link between volcanism and the formation of copper ore (Science Daily)
- How Cold Working Strengthens Metal (ThoughtCo)
- The exceptional abandonment of metal tools by North American hunter-gatherers, 3000 B.P. (Scientific Reports)
- An Exercise in Poo-Tility: Scientist Tries to Make a Knife Out of Poop (Mental Floss)
- Review: How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America (Journal of World History)
- Bronze Age Part II: The Case of the Missing Copper (Chapelboro.com)
- MacIntosh Stone - Nahma, Michigan (Michigan Back Roads - Oddities)
- Reviewing Gavin Menzies' "Atlantis" (Pt. 4) (Jason Colavito)
- The State of Our Knowledge About Ancient Copper Mining in Michigan (The Michigan Archaeologist)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
1 hr 21 min - All the Pretty Horses - Ep 134
This week, we've got one more past Patreon episode for you! Thank you all for your patience as we get back into the swing of things. We'll be back with your regularly scheduled new episodes in May. But for now, we're all horses, all the time. Amber gives you an unbridled (har!) look at the Hittite Horse Training Texts, which are much more than just Kikkuli (remember him?). After that, we veer from horsemanship to horse-man-’ship. First there’s a glimpse into the legal mind of the Hittites, and then some interesting commonalities across Indo-European societies and an overview of equine lives in antiquity. Ohhh neigh.
Links
- Kikkuli (International Museum of the Horse)
- Mitanni (Livius)
- These Asian hunter-gatherers may have been the first people to domesticate horses (Science)
- The Kikkuli Text. Hittite Training Instructions for Chariot Horses in the Second Half of the 2nd Millennium B.C. and Their Interdisciplinary Context
- Catalogue of Hittite Language (Konkordanz der heithitischen Keilschrifttafeln)
- Hittite Laws (Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor)
- Hittites, Horses, and Corpses (The Early Nature of the Bible)
- The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations
- Ancient origins of horsemanship (Equine Veterinary Journal)
- Horse Gear from Hasanlu (Expedition)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
43 min - Sorry to Barge In - Ep 133
This week, Anna and Amber are playing catch-up after attending the SAA conference, recovering from vaccine shots, and life in general. We'll be taking the rest of April off for a short break. In the meantime, please enjoy a cleaned-up version of a Dirt After Dark episode where Anna treats Amber to the story of the Roman emperor Caligula's absurd pleasure boats on a tiny, tiny lake.
Links
- Nemi Ships: How Caligula's Floating Pleasure Palaces Were Found and Lost Again (Discover)
- Divers to scour lake for Emperor Caligula’s 2,000-year-old pleasure ship (Washington Post)
- A missing mosaic from Caligula’s ship served as a coffee table in NYC home for 45 years (The Vintage News)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
43 min - Other People of Size - Ep 132
A follow-up and expansion to episode 99, People of Size, Anna and Amber explore other categories of largeness and how they’re represented in the archaeological record. We discuss fat bodies that are coded male, the strength and bulk of sumo wrestlers, and cultural and historical shifts in the aesthetic of the male body.
Links
- Professor Chris Forth on fatness (University of Kansas)
- Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy (Herman Pontzer)
- Japanese Sumo Wrestling (The Independent)
- Shinto origins of sumo (Wikipedia)
- The sumo diet (sumo.usa)
- Average body fat percentage (Wikipedia)
- How Strong Were Ancient People? (Discover Magazine)
- Late Pleistocene swimmers compared to modern athletes (Journal of Human Evolution)
- The male image in art history (Artsy.com)
- The forgotten history of fat men’s clubs (NPR)
- Anatomy of The Incredible Hulk (Scientific American)
- Using X Men to teach about hominin speciation (Great Lakes Ethnohistorian)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
56 min - Race and Biological Anthropology with Dr. Rachel Watkins - Ep 131
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!
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)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
54 min - April Fool's: Cursèd Objects - Bonus Episode
Anna and Amber bring you some bonus April foolery in the form of spooky cursed objects and haunted places. What's up with the Victorians and their creepy parlor displays? Can physics explain a haunted statue? Who asked Alexander Graham Bell about any of this? Apologies if the sound quality is different for this one, friends--Anna's laptop might've had an April Fools' curse of its own going on!
Links
- Spinning statue at Manchester museum (Manchester Evening News)
- 10 Haunted Museums (ArtNet)
- Are Ghosts Haunting the British Museum? (The Economist)
- Creepy Museum Object Challenge (Smithsonian Magazine)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
46 min - It's A Pod Mitzvah - Ep 130
Amber and Anna discuss some of the different rituals, ceremonies, and traditions associated with coming of age in cultures around the world and throughout time. From tossing baby teeth up to the roof to tying a vine to your ankles and jumping off a wooden tower, it's all fascinating.
Links
- Young People's Conceptions of the Transition to Adulthood (Youth & Society)
- Voice Changes for Boys During Puberty (Very Well Family)
- Right–left and the scrotum in Greek sculpture (Laterality, via ResearchGate)
- 13 Amazing Coming of Age Traditions From Around the World (Global Citizen)
- Rite of Passage (Cultural Anthropology)
- The Excruciating Bullet Ant Glove Test Of The Mawé People (All That’s Interesting)
- What It's Like to Get Stung by the World's Most Painful Insect (Esquire)
- Seijin No Hi: Celebrating Japanese Youth’s Rite of Passage (Savvy Tokyo)
- Meet Vanuatu's land-diving daredevils, who inspired bungee jumping (CNN Travel)
- Coming of Age Rituals (Hudson County Community Colleges Libraries)
- Girling the girl and boying the boy: the production of adulthood in ancient Mesoamerica (World Archaeology)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
54 min - Archaeology of Childhood - Ep 129
Amber and Anna examine how different ancient cultures viewed children and childhood. We’ll also discuss how the archaeological interpretation of the lives of children in the ancient past has shifted as we’ve gained more and more evidence.
Links
- Children Are Not Small Adults: Significance of Biological and Cognitive Development in Medical Practice (Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine)
- Childhood – an historical perspective (Good Childhood Blog)
- Cultural Relativism (Cultural Anthropology)
- Why babies in medieval paintings look like ugly old men (Vox)
- Role and Importance of Children in the Middle Ages (ThoughtCo.)
- Childbirth, Childhood and Adolescence in the Middle Ages (ThoughtCo.)
- Children in the ancient Middle East were valued and vulnerable — not unlike children today (The Conversation)
- The composition of a Neandertal social group revealed by the hominin footprints at Le Rozel (Normandy, France) (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science)
- Neanderthal children's footprints offer rare snapshot of Stone Age family life (ABC News
- Neanderthal children shivered and suffered in ancient Europe (Science)
- Neanderthal children grew and were weaned similar to us (EurekAlert)
- What ancient footprints can tell us about what it was like to be a child in prehistoric times (The Conversation)
- Prehistoric children as young as eight worked as brickmakers and miners (Nature)
- 400,000-year-old 'School of Rock' Found in Prehistoric Cave in Israel (Ha’aretz)
- These Miniature Tools Taught Ancient Children How to Hunt and Fight (Smithsonian)
- Archaeology and Developmental Psychology: A Brief Survey of Ancient Athenian Toys (American Journal of Play)
- What prehistoric toys can tell us about human evolution (ABC News)
- Why Ancient Toys Are Elusive Artifacts (Discover)
- Is It Ritual? Or Is It Children? Distinguishing Consequences of Play from Ritual Actions in the Prehistoric Archaeological Record (Current Anthropology)
- Discovering Childhood: Using Fingerprints to Find Children in the Archaeological Record (American Antiquity)
- Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema (Antiquity)
- Make your own version of a Palaeolithic Toy and a Thaumatrope (Beanie and J's Creative Adventures)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
48 min - March Madagascarness - Ep 128
This week, Anna and Amber journey to the island of Madagascar. Yeah, sure, there were once man-sized lemurs there, but we’re talking about the people of Madagascar, how and when they arrived on the island, their history, archaeology, and more! Plus, Anna discovers that maps are super useful.
Links
- Malagasy? Or is it Madagascan? Our research provides the answer (The Conversation)
- Indian Ocean: Five Island Countries (Library of Congress)
- Madagascar: Precolonial Era, Prior to 1894 (via the Wayback Machine)
- Researchers confirm timeline of human presence on Madagascar (Phys.org)
- Ancient Madagascar Shows Humans Make New Places Suit Them (Futurity)
- Genomic landscape of human diversity across Madagascar (PNAS)
- What are single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)? (MedlinePlus)
- Ancient rice 'first evidence' Madagascan ancestors crossed Indian Ocean from South-East Asia (ABC)
- Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion (PNAS)
- The culture history of Madagascar (Journal of World Prehistory)
- Chapter 15 - The Austronesian Expansion and the First Malagasy Cultures (The Worlds of the Indian Ocean)
- Time and the ancestors: Landscape survey in the Andrantsay region of Madagascar (Antiquity, via ResearchGate)
- Toward a just and inclusive environmental archaeology of southwest Madagascar (Journal of Social Archaeology, via ResarchGate)
- Madagascar / The Great Island: Contemporary Artists from Madagascar (Google Arts + Culture)
- Madagascar of to-day (Internet Archive)
- Situating Madagascar: Indian Ocean dynamics and archaeological histories (Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, via ResearchGate)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
1 hr 13 min - Anna's Birthday Podcastle - Ep 127
This episode happens to fall within Anna's birthday week, so Amber has very kindly indulged Anna's childhood love of knights, castles, magic, and adventure. This week, we're exploring Arthurian legend, and some of the...unique legacies it has left behind. We firmly establish that Arthur had TWO different swords. We also confirm that no, Robin Hood was not a Knight of the Round Table. Plus, the Yelp review that made Amber laugh until she cried.
Links
- Guide to the classics: the Arthurian legend (The Conversation)
- King Arthur: Myth-Making and History
- Was There A Real King Arthur? (Archaeology)
- King Arthur’s Ancestor, the Legendary Brutus of Troy, Is Focus of New Biography (Children of Arthur)
- The Literary Development of the Arthurian Legend (World History Encyclopedia)
- The Legendary King: How the Figure of King Arthur Shaped a National Identity and the Field of Archaeology in Britain (via Digital Commons)
- Great Riddles in Archaeology: King Arthur, Camelot, and the Quest for a Holy Grail (Penn Museum)
- Archaeologists Have Uncovered a Massive Palace at The Legendary Birthplace of King Arthur (Science Alert)
- How Medieval Times survives in the digital age (Toronto Star)
- Zounds, Milady! (Slate)
- Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture
- The Utopian Vision That Explains Renaissance Fairs (Bloomberg CityLab)
- Wildnote
- TeePublic
- Timeular
59 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.