The Dirt Podcast

Hi friends,

We've got a real banger of an episode recorded and ready to edit, but ...Amber and Anna are both recovering from Covid. So things are moving a little more slowly than usual. Keep your ears ready, though, because this week's episode will be out soon, and it's a TREAT.

Stay safe! We love you!

The Neolithic period in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) saw lots of changes happening. Hunter-gatherers gradually adopted a less schleppy lifestyle, embracing agriculture. This happened over thousands of years, and wasn't quite the dramatic "rise of cities and civilization" that often describes the Neolithic. But speaking of cities...what's up with those T-shaped pillars and animal carvings, huh?

It's five years in, pals, and we're finally talking about Göbekli Tepe, with our signature flavor of "hey what about the people that lived there, though?" We discuss the idea of the "Neolithic Revolution," the brainchild(e) of archaeologist V.G. Childe, and the pitfalls of flattening time into "ages."

Title drafts for this episode included:

Let's GÖ(bekli Tepe)

The Dirt is a T-shaped Pillar of the Community

The Revolution Will Be Podcasted

Show notes:

Neolithic Period - World History Encyclopedia

https://lens.idai.world/?url=/repository/eDAI-F_2020-2/eDAI-F_Clare.xml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe

Gobekli Tepe - Download Free 3D model by rmark (@rmark) [5a4d25c]

https://www.dailysabah.com/arts/new-karahantepe-settlement-may-be-older-than-gobeklitepe/news

Geometry and Architectural Planning at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey | Cambridge Archaeological Journal

An Investigation of Ancient Water Collection and Storage Systems Near the Karahantepe Neolithic Site Using UAV and GIS

The phallus of the greatest archeological finding of the new millenia: an untold story of Gobeklitepe dated back 12 milleniums | International Journal of Impotence Research

Bread and porridge at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe: A new method to recognize products of cereal processing using quantitative functional analyses on grinding stones - ScienceDirect

“HUNTING GROUND ECONOMY” AND THE ROLE OF SPECULATIVE “KNOWLEDGE”*** GÖBEKLİ TEPE KÜLT

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/death-rituals-social-order-and-the-archaeology-of-immortality-in-the-ancient-world/gathering-of-the-dead-the-early-neolithic-sanctuaries-of-gobekli-tepe-southeastern-turkey/4DD3B6952FED9057D595DE0E9D8C910F

(PDF) Buried Buildings at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Karahantepe/ Karahantepe Çanak Çömleksiz Neolitik Dönem Gömülü Yapıları / 2021

BAOBAB Yayınları - Kitaplar: Tepe

To celebrate our brand-new coming-soon sponsorship platform, Ghost, it's a release from the vaults of Patreon bonus episodes! Recorded around this time last year, when Anna was too hot and sweaty and dreaming of the ocean, this is a goofy look at some miscellaneous mariners' myths! Learn who Jenny Haniver is, and why Amber never wants to meet her. Brush up on your boating superstitions. Plus, hear about some of the fascinating/bonkers/incredible bonus material available for all new subscribers!

Support us by listening, sharing episodes, leaving reviews, and--if you're so inclined, by joining us over on Ghost! We'll be sure to notify you as soon as the page is live.

To learn more:

Historiae animalium (Biodiversity Library)

The Long, Strange Legacy of One of the World’s Earliest Fake Mermaids (Atlas Obscura)

Jenny Haniver: The Original Fake Mermaid (OddFeed)

What’s Behind the ‘No Bananas on a Boat’ Superstition? (Snopes)

Top 20 Sailing Superstitions (New Zealand Maritime Museum)

Umibōzu – The Sea Monk (Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai)

Black Mermaids: The Waters Beyond Eurocentric Mythology (Tor)

In case you missed it:

Beginning August 2– the day our next episode drops— the full back catalog of The Dirt’s premium content will be available on Ghost at your choice of two tiers, at half the previous price. Plus new stuff! At regular intervals! More Dirt, less money!

Current Patreon subscribers will receive instructions for accessing their complimentary subscription period. That will come to you at the email associated with your patreon pledge, as well as in the lil in-app inbox. You’ll also receive a promotional code that can be redeemed to honor those months or years during which y’all graciously shared your dollars or USD equivalent with us. That’s the part that’s taking more time because amber is not great at math and wrote this copy for me but doesn’t want to give the impression that I personally devalue her math skills. But she probably wouldn’t know it anyway if I did because of the bad at math thing. Ha!

On ghost, subscribers will have the option to pay monthly or annually for one of two tiers. The first, at 5 American dollars each month, gives you access to Old News (explain) and Deep Cuts (explain). The second, at 10 buckaroonies, gets you Old News, Deep Cuts, AND Dirt After Dark. And if you like being parasocial, we also plan to start releasing some looser bonus content where we pal around and get a little loosey goosey.

We’ve been hard at work writing and recording and sticking up acoustic tiles to make this next step and we are grateful and thrilled to have you join us in our fiiiifth year. Watch this space, by which I mean the notes field, and enjoy this episode.

Oh wait, did I mention we’ll have a promotion that snags you a free trial? We sure will.

TRY THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK TO LEARN ABOUT THE PAST, FAST!

We're talking scams, frauds, fakers, and pretenders this week.

Anna just hauled a whole household halfway across the country and is still recovering. So Amber has stepped up with a super fun episode about some of the trickiest pretenders from history (ancient and modern). Tune into some Old Assyrian family drama, unwrap misleading mummies, discover a heroic art movement, and more!

For further reading:

Behistun Inscription (with English translation) (Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative) 

Achaemenes (Encyclopedia Iranica)

The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (Project Gutenberg)

How Ancient Scammers Tricked Consumers (World of Chinese)

The secret letters of history's first-known businesswomen (BBC Worklife)

Women of Assur: and Kanesh Texts from the Archives of Assyrian Merchants (via WorldCat)

Demosthenes’ Against Zenothemis (Perseus)

Bottomry (Wikipedia)

A Third of Animal Mummies Contain no Animals at All (Smithsonian)

Disumbrationist School of Art (Museum of Hoaxes)

Bogus pupil set to lose place at university (The Independent)

Exclusive: Brian MacKinnon Tells The Herald ‘How I Was Unmasked’ (The Herald)

Brandon Lee: The model school pupil who was a 30-year-old imposter (BBC)

If you don't like this episode, well, you can go kick rocks! Just... not these rocks, they're culturally significant. That's right, it's an episode about megaliths, monoliths, and other kinds of -liths that were placed on the landscape by humans. Y'all. There are so many big rocks. We spend some time thinking about cultural memory, heritage, and colonial dispossession of these monuments. We also cover the Stonhenge-ification of megalith sites, learn to tell a dolmen from an orthostat, and find some extremely cool desert kites (not the flying kind). So. Many. Big. Rocks.

To learn more:

MTV Arabia “Dabke Dude” promotional spot (via YouTube)

Monumental Colonialism: Megaliths and the Appropriation of Australia's Aboriginal Past (Journal of Material Culture)

Aspects of the Megalithic Era (Newgrange.com)

Astronomy of Nabta Playa (African Skies)

Interactive Map (Globalkites)

Desert Monoliths Reveal Stone Age Architectural Blueprints (New York Times)

The Use of Desert Kites as Hunting Mega-Traps: Functional Evidence and Potential Impacts on Socioeconomic and Ecological Spheres  (Journal of World Prehistory)

The Sailing Stones of Death Valley (National Park Foundation)

Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

What Was Stonehenge For? The Answer Might Be Simpler Than You Thought. (New York Times)

5 Strange Theories About Stonehenge (LiveScience)

Indonesian Megaliths: A Forgotten Cultural Heritage (eBook via Google Play)

Dolmens of Ancient Korea (World History Encyclopedia)

Gochang, Hwasun and Ganghwa Dolmen Sites (UNESCO)

Dolmens in Gochang, Hwasun and Ganghwa (Korea Cultural Heritage Administration)

Identity and power in the ancient Andes: Tiwanaku cities through time (via Archive.org)

Alien Architects Didn't Build This Pre-Incan Complex, 3D Models Show (LiveScience)

Tiwanaku Lecture Resources (Dr. Alexei Vranich)

Megalithic monumentality in Africa: from graves to stone circles at Wanar, Senegal (Antiquity)

Stone circles of Senegambia (UNESCO) (via YouTube)

Stone Circles of Senegambia (UNESCO)

Hiya, friends! Amber is currently traveling in Saudi Arabia for work so we're re-releasing this extremely relevant episode on Arabian archaeology! We'll be back in your ears with new content soon.

Amber takes Anna on a guided tour of her beloved Arabia. Learn about the varied mountains, deserts, and oases that are nowhere near as empty or inactive as Western explorers might have you believe. We examine the archaeology of Tell Abraq, get scammed by a guy named Ea-Nasir, solve the mystery of Magan (hint: not actually a mystery), and share insights from skeletal remains about community care and compassion thousands of years ago. Disappointingly, we still don't know what Dilmun onions are.

Hooray! It's the first of our episodes highlighting the work of our 2022 Pass The Mic travel grant recipients! Danielle Kabella works with communities in New Mexico that have historically had a complex relationship with substance use, recovery, and the legal system. Danielle's work focuses on recovery efforts of the past 50 years as a way to understand the changing relationship between recovery science, medicine, and the power of a community to re-shape that relationship.

The Pass The Mic grant comes from listener support, and lets us fund travel and outreach trips for undergraduate and graduate students. To learn more, or to support the grant with a donation, head to thedirtpod.com/passthemic.

Find Danielle on Twitter @dmkabella

To learn more:

Drug Ethnographies

Michael Agar (1973) Ripping and Running: A Formal Ethnography of Urban Heroin Addicts

Philippe Bourgois (2003) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

& (2009) Righteous Dopefiend * is a photo essay

Angela Garcia (2010) The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Todd Meyer’s (2013) The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy

Kelly Knight (2015) Pregnant. Addicted. Poor

Helena Hansen (2018) Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries

& (2023) Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Heroin in America

Natasha Schull (2014) Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas * sts focused

Nancy Campbell (2020) OD: Naloxone And The Politics Of Overdose *not an ethnography, but a history of technology and very STS focused

Harm Reduction & other Organizations Danielle works with:

Sonoran Prevention Works (AZ)

Casa de Salud (NM) * 1st ethnographic study with McNair Program

Trans Queer Pueblo (AZ) bringing access to HRT/ primary care for migrants, etc.

Sick burn, breh--This week, Anna and Amber tackle the origins of fire use in the hominin archaeological record. We've taken a journalistic approach, so we've got What Fire, Where and When Fire, Why Fire, Who Fire, and How Fire. Plus, how do archaeologists look for evidence of fires that happened up to a million years ago? Amber also shares some Big Life Updates!

To learn more:

Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

When Did Early Humans Start Using Fire? To Find Answers, Scientists Enlist Artificial Intelligence (Smithsonian)

Hidden signatures of early fire at Evron Quarry (1.0 to 0.8 Mya) (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Fire Use (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology)

The Earliest Example of Hominid Fire (Smithsonian)

Sparking controversy, or putting out the fire? (Nature Ecology & Evolution Community)

Arsonist falcons suggest birds discovered fire before humans did (New Scientist)

Phylogenetic rate shifts in feeding time during the evolution of Homo (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Experimental Approaches to Archaeological Fire Features and Their Behavioral Relevance (Current Anthropology)

Selection and Use of Manganese Dioxide by Neanderthals (Nature Scientific Reports)

Fire Plow: Tips and Tricks (Fire and Fungi on YouTube)

Bow Drill Friction Fire (Donny Dust on YouTube)

It was Anna's turn to get sick, so this week we bring you a portion of the most recent episode of our bonus series Dirt After Dark. Most of that episode is about Ashayana Deane, a purveyor of pseudoscience and ancient aliens accounts, and a very complicated lady. However, in the first part, Anna recaps some takeaways and opinions from the recent Faking it and Making it panel on pseudo-archaeology at the SAA meetings in Portland.

We're naming names this week! An aspect of studying the past that might surprise you, names can add some fascinating nuance to our understanding of people and places. What did ancient people call themselves and everything around them? What kinds of meanings can names hold? Hold onto your butts, it's time to think some big thoughts!