Short Stuff: Brazilian Jars

vaudeville stuff. It. As I was saying Vaudeville, I was like, oh god, I feel like maybe like Jackie Gleason or Laurel and hard not Laurel and Hardy Abin Costello, maybe from a minstrel show, right, Yeah, but yeah, I think it's like a exclamation and of excitement or um looking forward to something. All right, Well, I see Jackie Gleason on the internet, so hopefully we're covered. You see Jackie Gleason on the internet say okay, good good, let's just

get going. So yeah, this is a short stuff, Chuck, and we're never going to be able to end this now. Um, we're talking today about Brazil, the country that was first landed as far as Europeans go, by a guy from Portugal named Pedro Alvarez Cabral, right, And he landed there in d and things went pretty poorly for the local populations as a result. Yeah, and I think Cabral was one of those people that Brazil had always celebrated as the first European to show up there, and like, you know,

this is our person, and let's celebrate this person. And then in the seventies something happened. I don't know where you found. This is very interesting, but something happened to kind of put that all in doubt. I found a contemporary New York Times article about it. I don't remember how, but I did, and I said, by God, this is a gift from Zeus himself. So here's what was happening.

For a while. There were fishermen off of Guanabara Bay near Rio who for years had been fishing and saying, hey, we'll pull up our fishing nets a lot of times, and we'll get these jars in our nets, and we think this might just be like the local native tribes used to offer these up um, you know, before Cabral actually landed on the scene and maybe these are ancient,

who knows. And then in seventy six a man named Jose two Shara was diving there brought two of them to the surface and said, I think these are really really really old. Yeah, and not just really old too, because that could have been accounted for by the native tribes.

But they were in a shape that people hadn't seen before, and uh to share, I brought them ashore and I guess handed them over to the navy, I think, who kept them um in a tank of sea water for a very long time, um until they were they were they caught the attention of a guy named Robert Marks, who went on to become I don't know if he was or not by this time. I think he was fairly famous, but he wanted to become a world famous, deeply renowned h underwater archaeologists. In fact, he's known as

the father of underwater archaeology. But he caught wind of these jars being found and had to look at him, or got his hands on some pictures of him. And so these are not supposed to be here. These are not some local Brazilian jar. These look a lot like Roman emphora and Roman amphora were jars that were used very famous like vase jars with the double handles at the top um. They were used by Romans, Phoenicians and Greeks back around on the turn of the last millennia.

And there's no good reason that these should be here in this bay in Brazil. Yeah, so after first thinking it might be a hoax, he did say, thinks they're real, and let me get some other divers and go down there and check out and see what's going on. And about ninety ft down, sure enough, they found about two hundred uh intact and broken amphora and they were he said, they were kind of concentrated in an area about the

size of three tennis courts. And he's like sure, and he said, there's no real there's no way that these were planted here. He said, you know these things, some of these were like five ft under the mud. We had to dig him out with our hands out of the mud. And there's just their barnacle encrusted. Some of them have coral, and this coral was killed off like thirty or forty years earlier. So there's no way these

were planted down there anytime. Recently. Yeah, he became pretty convinced that it wasn't a hoax UM and his suspicions were backed up by an expert that he enlisted from U Mass named Elizabeth will who was an expert in ancient Roman m f A, which is like that is a that is a very specific um focus of study.

But she basically she looked at the type of them, looked at their manufacturer, like the what they She got her hands on some of the samples that to Shara had brought up, I think UM and she said, not only are these Roman m f A, I can tell you exactly where they were made and roughly win and she traced the design of these particular m for you to a place called kas ko u a s s Um in what is now present day Morocco, and the Coas M four A of this design were being made

around the third century um CE, so about twelve hundred hundred years before uh Pedro Alvarez Cabral showed up in Brazil. And yeah, so Marx puts that together and says, all right, I have a theory. He said, they used to have boats back then and ships that could make you know that certainly could have traveled over here from the Mediterranean, and I think what might have happened is they were blown off course maybe and they ended up kind of

shipwrecking after they anchored off Rio. Maybe there was a big storm or something that drove this ship onto a reef, and these jars just kind of ended up here, and and no one knew that they were here until these fishermen started pulling them up. Yeah, So I mean that's a pretty good assumption, especially considering that these jars are spread out over about a three tennis court size area that's maybe the size of a Roman ships hold. Um.

And it's possible since they had seaworthy ships. But the thing is, as if that were true, that would totally rewrite history like it was how there used to be vague legends about how Vikings made it to North America, and um, we suddenly found that settlement, I can't remember the name of it, Um that that was a Viking settlement in North America that said unequivocally they had been here before. This would basically be like that, But there

had been no legend before it. Knowing had any any idea that the Romans had made it to Brazil in the third century. UM. So this was a complete It required a complete revision of history. Even if it was just this tangential fleeting contact between one small group of Roman sailors in um prehistoric Brazilian tribes. Uh, it's still was a big deal to to find these things there. All right, maybe we should take our break and come back and talk about the response of Brazil right after this.

M alright, so Marx has this theory, he's got these jars. The Brazilian government steps in and they don't say, this is amazing, thank you. Why don't We're gonna have a press conference and here's a podium and we want to hear all about it. They said, you know what, you're shut down. We're shutting down your operation. We don't like the looks of this. Uh. He he started excavating, excavating again, I think in eighty three or was that the first one, No,

that was the second time. The first time was when he found him and said he found like a couple of hundred of them and that they were spread out over the tennis court. This is when he returned the next year to really excavate the site in earnest and he also found out that the navy, the Brazilian Navy like literally covered this stuff but dumped a bunch of fil dirt over the site and said, you know what,

we we think you're a plunderer. We want to keep it from being plundered, and we covered it up, and you're banned. You can't even come into our country anymore. Yes, he was accused of having stolen artifacts from other sites in Brazil and selling them on UH European auction houses, essentially on the black market, but out in the open um. They had just been basically stolen from Brazil. That's a

huge accusation to level against somebody. But apparently the Brazilian authorities were convinced enough by it that they actually banned him from Brazil and shut down all UH marine archaeological excavations in the country. There was just all like a blanket band on them because they had just been so I guess rattled by the perceived theft of of relics. The thing is is, you know, if if um Robert Marx had been anybody else, just some dude, it would have um, you know you you it would have been

easy to buy that that had happened. But he really had a good reputation, especially by the end of his life in two thousand nineteen. Right, Yeah, he was knighted in three countries. He Uh. He wrote the UNESCO Laws about underwater archaeological digs, and he was a book writer. I think he's kind of the the granddaddy of underwater archaeology. He was very much not a plunderer of things. So it seemed like Brazil was being a jerk. It does. So that seems like a bit of a twist that

they would literally cover up this history rewriting site. And at the time, in that New York Times article, I think Robert Marks suspected that it was because they were so venerating of cabral Um that they couldn't stand the idea of somebody, some other Europeans having beaten him there by hundreds of years. The thing is, it's entirely possible that the Brazilians didn't cover up that site, and that there wasn't two hundred of those amphora, and that there

was no Roman galley that sunk in Brazil. Uh, there's a it's possible none of this happened at all. Yeah, I mean, this is the real cool twist here, is in there was a diver or a free diver name a Medico Santarelli, and America said, Hey, you know all this hullabaloo about these M for a, these are mine, These are replicas, and I buried these out there to try and age them. Dropped sixteen of these things out there to age them, and that's what they are. Yeah.

He'd spent some time in rome Um and had kind of fallen for M four A. They were his thing, kind of like how some people collect different outfits to put on their concrete geese that they keep out in the front yard. This guy was into amphoury like that

the thing is is okay? So Americo Santarelli claimed that those were his M four A. After this world famous underwater archaeologists had declared that there were two hundred of them buried five ft beneath the muck that a U mass expert had declared that they were made from Coassu in Morocco in the third century. Um. This guy says, no, they were mine, and there were only sixteen of them, and I dropped them there in the sixties. Yeah, that's the one thing I couldn't reckon with. Were there not

two hundred? Was that just b s. Here's the thing, it's kind of like the end of the Usual Suspects. If you go back and look at all of the evidence we have, almost almost all of it is coming out of Robert Marx's mouth. He's the one who saw the two D M. Four A. He's the one who said that they were spread out over a few tennis court sized fields. He's the one who said they were encrusted by barnacles. He's the one who's sang in a

barbershop quartet and skok Illinois. That's exactly right. And when you go back and you look at this, you say, well, wait a minute, there's there's not really much other evidence. There's that to back up this idea that he has, aside from him saying all this stuff. And I think the most telling thing about how they actually were Americo Santarelli's sixteen and four that he dropped in the Bay to age Um is that Robert Marks has kind of dropped the whole thing that nothing. There's like, the whole

thing goes cold after that. Yeah, isn't that weird? It is very weird. He even wrote a book in that was about prehistoric contact between Europe and the America's And as far as I know, he didn't mention the jars in the bay in Brazil, and that's that's that, as

far as I'm concerned. You know, I think since we mentioned Usual Suspects, we should shout out friend of the show, Kevin Pollock, one of the stars of Usual Suspects in a role where he gets to play the rare heavy And Kevin has a great in prov comedy showing your network called Alchemy This. Yeah, that is a great show. And actually he has a cameo in our book too.

I can't remember what part we talked about, but there's one of one of the footnotes is about the live show in l A where he brought us water because we said we were thirsty. He brought us water up on stage. That's right. And he also played the role of Christopher walk In in my movie Crush April Fool's Interview a couple of years ago that delighted a lot of people and angered few. Hey man, if you're delighting and angering at the same time, you're doing something right.

So hats off to both of you for the love. Pollock, good, good dude, good dude. Um. Well, I think that's it, right. You got anything else about Kevin Pollock or Brazilian jars? No, I want to get my hands on one of these. Well, just start diving and you will find one in Brazil off the coast of Rio uh. And since I said that everybody that means short stuff is out, stuff you

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