Unearthed! in July 2025, Part 1

And now we will get on to the episode. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. It's time for our quarterly installment of Unearthed. If you are brand new to the show over the last few months, this is when a few times a year we talk about things that have been literally and figuratively unearthed. This time it's once again two part episode.

Today we have updates. We have so many updates that it is two thirds of this episode being updates. We also have art finds in this episode, and we have a little bit at the end that I'm calling adult content. The last part of this episode has some archaeological finds and whatnot that are related to things like drug use and sex. It's a little more mature than often what

we talk about on the show. And I just put that at the end of this one so that if you're listening with maybe little kids or in a classroom or whatever, and you need to just end the episode there, it will be easy to do it. So smart. So Tracy started out our last installment of Unearthed by talking about actions that were being taken to the federal level here in the US and how those actions were impacting her work on the show and how they might affect

the show in the future. And this includes budget cuts and grant freezes affecting academics, researchers, and institutions that we rely on for our research. A lot of that is still ongoing and still in flux, as universities and other institutions reckon with new financial constraints and with federal hostility to the idea of DEI. There are still some legal cases related to all of this that are still working

their way through the courts. Some of those cuts have already had an effect on a show, For example, as of July fet I no longer have access to a long list of databases, several of which I have been using for many, many years, which were being funded through the Institute of Museum and Library Services Grants to States program. As we talked about last time, the IMLS was targeted by an executive of order. Its entire staff was placed

on leave. But the Congress also passed a budget and spending bill that was signed into law on July fourth, that's of course connected to all of this. Since we are recording this just a couple of weeks after I lost access to those databases, Like, I'm not really sure what the next step is with it, and the President has also asked for a recision package in addition to that budget that was already passed that would cancel additional

funds that were already previously allocated. This precision package that's still in the works, it is expected to target foreign aid and public media. The foreign aid cuts aren't really directly related to our podcast, which is what we've been kind of sticking with with these updates, but given the scope, it just seems weird to me to not mention them

at all. Research that was published in the Lancet at the end of June concludes that cuts just to the United States Agency for International Development will lead to the deaths of fourteen million people around the world who otherwise would have lived by the year twenty thirty. In terms of this recision package and what does directly apply to our show, we really cannot count the number of times we have cited reporting and documentaries and other work from

NPR and PBS. I just went into the file where I have all of our old outlines and I put the words NPR and PBS in there to see how often they showed up in source lists. It again was too many to count, so hundred. The idea of losing funding for those is something else likely to affect the show. Also still in the works our federal departments taking steps to align with the executive orders that we talked about last time, one of those being the one that's called

Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. I had a stomach ache just saying that executive orders are basically memos from the President to the federal government about how to operate, and then it is up to the relevant departments to figure out how to implement those instructions. To that end.

In May, the Secretary of the Interior issued Order thirty four to thirty one, also titled Restoring Truth Insanity to American History, and this order reiterated the administration's policy to quote restore federal sites dedicated to history to Solomon uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect union, and unmatched record

of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. The Secretary's order then gave directions to the heads of the government's land management bureaus, including the National Park Service, on the concrete

steps to take to implement the executive order. These steps include reviewing and reporting on changes to quote any public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties that had happened since January first of twenty twenty, as well as reviewing those properties for quote inappropriate content and removing content that is inconsistent with the

purposes of that executive order. The Secretary's order also instructed the Land Management bureaus to post signs throughout each property with QR code that links visitors to a form they can fill out at a government website. The signs read quote name of property belongs to the American people and name of land Management Bureau. Wants your feedback. Please let us know if you have identified one any areas of the park area, et cetera, as appropriate that need repair,

to any services that need improvement. Three any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans, or that fail to emphasize the beauty and abundance of

landscapes and other natural features. Just to spell this out as just one example, there are now signs at places like Man's in our National Historic Site, which was the site of a concentration camp where the United States imprisoned Japanese immigrants and their US citizen children during World War Two, and those signs instruct visitors to report negative signage they see at the park. We talked about these concentration camps in our two part episode on Executive Order ninety sixty

six on February twelfth and fourteenth of twenty seventeen. Also, there are so many people who work in interpretive roles at parks and historic sites who have talked really publicly about visitors finding things like any mention of slavery whatsoever. At a site as cause for outrage. We have seen

this over the years. In our own email. On June eighteenth of this year, the Organization of American Historians, which is a professional society for the teaching and studying of US history, issued a statement in response to this order, saying that it quote represents a clear and troubling intrusion into the integrity of historical presentation within the National Park Service.

That statement went on to say, quote, the directive demands that the NPS revised educational materials, exhibits, and programs to avoid what it calls ideological bias, language that in practice seeks to sanitize complex histories of race, environment, gender and sexuality, immigration, indigeneity, labor, and religion. The directive further undermines the NPS's long standing mission to present inclusive, evidence based, and publicly accessible history.

The Organization of American Historians statement also responded directly to that signage we just mentioned quote. National Parks have been and remain enormously popular with Americans, and visitors to NPS sites have always been free to voice their opinions about programming and their experiences through the NPS website, comment cards, and other mechanisms. This new directive is a manufactured crisis. It evokes tactics of authoritarian regimes, not principles of a

democratic society. The oh also recommended its members make use of those same forms to recommend improvements that will quote make the histories told at NPS sites accurate, more inclusive, and more democratic. The American Historical Association, which is a

professional association for historians, endorsed this statement. The OAH and the AHA had also issued a joint statement in March about the executive orders and policies that we talked about last time, which was signed by nearly thirty professional and academic associations connected to the field of history, including the National Council on Public History and the World History Association. Moving on to other updates, we have an episode on Hatshepsuit that we ran as a Saturday Classic on April

twenty sixth. One of the things that we talked about in that episode is that after Hatshepsuit's death, her successor, Tutmosa the third whose name we have also heard pronounced just Tutmos, had her name removed from the official list of kings and ordered the destruction of statues and other

depictions of her. When her mortuary temple was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, archaeologists didn't initially know who she was, and once they started piecing that together, they concluded that she must have been some kind of stereotypical wicked stepmother figure, and that Tutmosa must have ordered this destruction out of

anger or vengeance. Historians and archaeologists started revising that view in the nineteen sixties after egyptologist Charles nimbs pinpointed this destruction as starting twenty years after hat Shepsu's death or possibly even later, making it unlikely something that was motivated

out of fury. We gave some other possible reasons for this destruction, including that there might have been concerns about the strength of the claims of Tutmoses's successor, a Menhotep, the second to the throne, or that it was connected to greater concerns about the appropriateness of a woman acting

as king. Research published in the journal Antiquity in June casts further doubt on the idea that hostility was a factor in the statue destruction, noting that a lot of statues of Hatshepsuit are in relatively good condition, and many of those that were broken were broken across the waist, the neck, and the knees, and that's something that was also done to the statues of other Egyptian kings, possibly as part of a ritual deactivation of the statue and

the power associated with it. At the same time, the paper's author, juny Wong of the University of Toronto gave a statement to Live Science that included this quote, there is no doubt that hat Chepsu did suffer a campaign of persecution at many monuments throughout Egypt. Her images and names have been systematically hacked out. We know that this campaign of persecution was initiated by tutmost of the third but we are not exactly sure why uh as is

so often the case on Unearthed. There was a lot of reporting around this paper, and a lot of that reporting frames it as conclusively resolving a long standing mystery. But aside from the idea of ritually deactivating Egyptian statues, a lot of what's in this paper is not actually that different from what we talked about in the episode. Also, again, this paper is only about the destruction of the statues,

not the other elements of it. That the paper describes as quote the wider campaign of persecution enacted following her death. We have more updates coming up, but first let's take a quick sponsor break. Pompeii was covered on the show in October of two thousand and nine, and we've had a lot of updates about it on Unearthed. Most recently, archaeologists excavating a tomb at the Portasarno Necropolis m Pompeii found two nearly life sized relief sculptures next to each

other in a niche in a wall. One of these sculptures depicts a woman wearing a tunic and a cloak, along with earrings, rings, bracelets, and a pendant that shaped like a crescent moon. She's holding what looks like a laurel branch and a roll of papyrus, and then all of this together means that the woman being depicted might

have been a priestess of series. The other statue next to her is of a man wearing a toga, and other than the fact that the toga suggests that he was a Roman citizen, less has been speculated about him. The depiction just as not as detailed or elaborate. It's possible that these two were a married couple, but we don't really know. This was unearthed last year, but it

wasn't reported on until this spring. In other Pompeii news, archaeologists at Pompeii Archaeological Park have released a statement about work at the House of Hele and Phrixus, named for a fresco in the dining room of the home. Excavations at the home suggest that during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, four people in the home attempted to take refuge in a small room, which they barricaded with a bed frame

to keep out volcanic debris. At some point it probably became obvious that they would have to flee if they hope to survive, but by that point they were not able to get out of the house. We do not actually know who these people were, though they may have been the owners of the home, or they could have been people who tried to take shelter there after the inhabitants had already fled. Something else that has made frequent appearances on Unearthed does the Roman fort Vendolanda, south of

Hadrian's Wall in northern England. Volunteer diggers working there have uncovered a sandstone relief carving that's believed to be the Goddess Victory, which might have been part of a much larger carving adorning one of the fort's barracks. Most likely when it was created, this carving was very brightly painted, and there's some research underway to see if there are any traces of paint still there. Not really any traces visible to the naked eye, but they might be at

the microscopic level. This carving is also planned to be on display at Vendalanda in twenty twenty sees. A new dig just started there earlier this month, so we may have some more finds from this fort next time. Anthony Gaudi, who we covered in a two part episode in January of twenty fifteen, was declared venerable by the late Pope Francis in April before Francis passed. This is the second of four steps that are part of his potentially being

recognized as a saint. Gaudi's most famous architectural work, the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, is still under construction. Construction started in eighteen eighty two, and the most recent estimates suggest that it might be finished within a decade. One major issue that still persists at this point is that finishing a planned stairway will require evicting about three thousand people from their homes in the areas adjacent to

the basilica and demolishing those residences. Prior hosts of the show talked about the Vasa in their episode More Ship Rate Stories Battleships in twenty eleven. The Vasa was a Swedish warship that sank shortly after setting sail on its very first voyage in sixteen twenty eight, but then it was raised and preserved and is now housed at the

Vasa Museum in Stockholm. So we've talked about this ship and several previous installments of Unearthed, including in twenty twenty three when we talked about the vessel urgently needing a new support structure. The museum opened in nineteen ninety, but the support structure for the vessel was built in the nineteen sixties and by now it was starting to sag. Work on that has now begun as part of a

four year restoration project. The ship's new support will be both lighter and stronger than the earlier one, as well as more resistant to corrosion, and it will also put less pressure on the ship itself. This is a multi phase project involving the installation of exterior support cradles and then an internal skeleton to reinforce the ship. The restoration project is expected to be complete in time for the four hundredth anniversary of the ship sinking that will take

place in twenty twenty eight. Next, the six Triple eight Central Postal Directory Battalion was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in April. Congress voted to make this award back in twenty twenty two, but due to some logistical delays, the actual ceremony did not take place until April twenty ninth

of this year. We alluded to this ceremony in a listener mail that I read earlier this year, but I did not get into the specifics of what we were talking about, because it just wasn't clear to me at that point whether the ceremony, which had not happened yet,

whether that was supposed to be public knowledge yet. The medal was presented to descendants of Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams Early, who was the battalion's commanding officer, and there were more than three hundred descendants of members of the Six Triple Eight at the ceremony. Our episode on the Six Triple Eight ran as a Saturday Classic on March twenty six, twenty twenty two. Researchers in Australia have examined a set

of swords from the West African kingdom of Dahome. We talked about this kingdom in our episodes on the Palaces of a Beaume and the all female fighting Force colloquially known as the Amazons on July twenty second and August

fifth of twenty fifteen. These swords are associated with the Amazons, but they also have some design elements that are found in swords from other parts of the world, including Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, so it hasn't been clear whether these swords were locally made or whether they might be imports. This team used an assortment of non invasive testing methods including neutron tomography, powdered diffraction, full pattern analysis,

and diffraction residual stress measurements. Based on all of this work, they concluded that these swords were locally made, possibly from locally smelted ey iron, but that they did have some influences or inspiration that came from European imports. This research also suggests that the forging techniques that were used for some of these swords was unique to the Kingdom. In our Unearthed installment in the fall of twenty twenty two, we talked about a burial site that had been discovered

in southern Germany. A child had been entombed at this site, which was sealed so well that sediments were not able to penetrate it and form layers around the contents inside, so that meant that the site was well preserved, but also extremely delicate. Archaeologists flash froze the entire interior of the tomb with liquid nitrogen so they could remove the entire block and transport it elsewhere without jostling or damaging its contents, leading this child to be nicknamed the Ice Prints.

Research into this burial site has now been carried out. First, the block had to be thawed in an environment that was very carefully controlled for temperature and humidity. Researchers confirmed that this child died toward the end of the seventh century and was only about eighteen months old when that happened. Based on the analysis of the remains. This child likely died of sepsis following an ear infection, but the family

was probably wealthy and prominent. This child was dressed in linen trimmed with silk, along with having leather shoes on, and was laid to rest on furs. Silver and gold accessories and jewelry were found in the gravesite as well. There was also a short sword, a bronze basin, a comb, a wooden bowl, a cup, and some food offerings. There were also some animal bones in this grave site which were initially thought to be from a dog, but it

turns out they were really from a piglet. Our episode on the Nasca Lines in Peru ran as a Saturday Classic in February of twenty twenty one. These etchings of animals, plants, and geometric figures were created roughly two thousand years ago, and they were named as a UNESCO World Heritage Site

in nineteen ninety four. In May, Peru's Ministry of Culture announced a plan to cut the amount of protected land around the Nascal Lines by about forty percent, as something that led to concern and criticism due to fears that it would leave the site more vulnerable to illegal mining operations,

which are already a known issue in the area. The areas affected are not within the part that's been inscribed by UNESCO, but experts who work with the Nascal lines said that the areas that were being removed from the protections contained some of the oldest and most delicate etchings. Then in June, the government of Peru announced that it was dropping that plan and leaving the protected area unchanged. It did not abandon the idea of changing the borders

of the protected area, though. The Peruvian Ministry of Culture also said that a panel was being convened including archaeologists, academics, and members of international organisations including UNESCO, to evaluate future plans for zoning and land use in the area. And our last update, we covered Greenwood, Oklahoma, known as Blackwall Street and its nineteen twenty one destruction by a white mob in an episode that we ran as a Saturday

Classic on November ninth, twenty nineteen. We have also talked about the search for the grave sites of victims of this massacre on multiple installments of Unearthed. Now, the city of Tulsa has announced a one hundred five million dollar reparations plan called Road to Repair It was announced by Monroe Nichols, Tulsa's first black mayor, during the city's first

Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day. During his address, Nichols noted that the economic harms caused by the massacre were compounded by other issues, including the building of a highway and the practice of redlining, which is something else we have talked about on the show in a two parter in October of twenty fifteen. As of June twelfth, when the last reporting on this happened, there were two known survivors of the massacres still living, both of them more than

one hundred and ten years old. They had previously sought compensation under Oklahoma laws, but those efforts were ultimately dismissed by the state Supreme Court last year. This repatriation plan does not involve direct cash payments to either of them. Instead, it is focused on creating a private charitable trust to address the impacts of the attack on Tulsa's black communities,

which are still present today. It's proposed to include a twenty four million dollar fund for housing and housing assistants meant to counteract the generational impact of the loss of all of those lives and homes and businesses. There's also a sixty million dollar historic preservation fund and twenty one million dollar fund for things like scholarships, small business grants,

and land acquisition and development. It's all planned to be part of this That last part of the funding will also be used to pay for the ongoing efforts to find and identify victims of the massacre. Funds have to be raised for this trust and it is hoped for that to be completed over the next year. Art is on the horizon, but first we're gonna pause for a

sponsor break. Now we've got a number of art related fines. First, work on a bedroom at a hunting lodge called the Ashes in Inglewood Forest in Cumbria, England has revealed Tudor arrow wall paintings under some old plaster. These are black and white paintings. They depict strange animals and kind of weird foliage. This was pretty common for wall paintings at the time. One description of the wall paintings of this air calls them quote an unnatural or unorderly composition for

delight's sake, which I love. Even with that unnatural, unorderly composition in mind, though, experts have described the combination of motifs in these particular paintings as unusual. Based on when the house was built, it's likely that these paintings were created during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First. While these specific wallpaintings are a new find, it's not entirely

surprising that they were there. Similar paintings have been found in other parts of the lodge during earlier work going back to the nineteen seventies. At the same time, though not many Tutor era wallpaintings survive at this point, particularly in this part of England, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport has granted additional protections to the lodge

and its surrounding buildings. In other wall painting news, digs out a Roman villa on the Mediterranean coast of Spain have unearthed a wall painting dating back to the second century CE, but this wall has collapsed, so archaeologists have found this painting in about four thousand pieces. While conservators are trying to reassemble this painting, it is a painstaking process. One of the panels that they've separated the pieces out for has eight hundred and sixty six pieces and as

of the news reporting on this in late April. Only twenty two of those pieces had been put back together into one thing, and they formed a floral garland with birds and a painted molding along the top. In twenty twenty three, a park supervisor on a climbing trip in Itachiaya National Park in Brazil spotted some previously unknown cave art, and the find was just announced to the public earlier this year. It is still very very early in the

process of studying this art. It is believed to be between two thousand or three thousand years old, but experts are not sure about that yet. There's also an ongoing search to try to find other cave art in the area, since in this part of the world caves and rock shelters with artwork are not usually found in isolation, so that is very early in the process as well. Hopefully it will come up again on a future on Earth. Yeah.

I just I like that a park supervisor just happened to be doing non work things and was like, oh, rock art here. Uh, I should tell somebody issue that everybody know. Next, renovation work on the plaster facade of a building near the Rialto Bridge in Venice has uncovered a previously unknown mural that dates back to the sixteenth century.

These kinds of murals on the exteriors of buildings were very common in Venice around this time, but very few of them have survived until today because of Venice's high humanity levels and very salty air, as well as you know, the passage of time other construction and renovation projects that destroyed many of them. This mural depicts three allegorical figures

whose meaning has not been deciphered yet. It's been described as an example of lost heritage, but it was also in very poor condition when it was found, including fading of the colors and pitting of the surface. Conservation work has been ongoing, with experts working to identify and recreate its original colors and elements. Next, the Bronte Parsonage Museum has acquired a painting by Emily Bronte, who was of

course better known for her novel Weathering Heights. She created the painting called The North Wind in eighteen forty two while she was studying at a boarding school in Brussels. It's based on an engraving from Finden's illustration of the Life and Works of Lord Byron. This is a portrait depicting a woman with curly brown hair, and that hair seems to be flowing in the wind. She similarly has

a wind blown blue caper on her shoulders. While Emily Bronte is known to have taken art lessons while living in Brussels, there are many pieces by her surviving today. After a bidding war, the museum bought the painting at auction for thirty two thousand pounds, thus roughly forty two thousand dollars, which was more than ten thousand pounds above the pre auction estimates. The painting is going to be

conserved and then placed on display at the museum. While we're on the subject of the Brontes, the birthplace of Anne Branwell, Charlotte and Emily in Bradford, England, before the family moved to the parsonage, has been restored and opened as a public museum, and there is also a plan for people to be able to stay there in the bedrooms as overnight guests. Are you booking your trip, Well, I wanted to, but when I tried to get information about when that will actually be possible, I did not

find a concrete explanation. You just plan ahead it'll be great. According to research published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, the Milky Way may be depicted in an ancient Egyptian artwork and it may have had some kind of connection to the sky goddess Nout. This research examined depictions of Newt found on ancient Egyptian coffins. Newt is often depicted as a nude woman adorned with stars or solar discs arched over the earth god who is her

brother whose name is either Geb or Jeb. I'm not one hundred percent sure, but on one of the coffins, Nut's body has an undulating black curve adorned with stars. This paper interprets this dark star studded curve as possibly representing the Milky Way and the dark band of dust around it. And lastly, work done by a London based dentist has added a new layer to the interpretation of

Leonardo da Vinci's famous Vitruvian man. That's the one of a nude male figure superimposed with his arms and legs in two different positions, situated within a circle and a square. This is a representation of idealized body proportions, but Leonardo da Vinci didn't explain the ratios behind what he depicted. In a paper published in the Journal of Mathematics in the Arts, Rory mac sweeney notes that there's an equilateral triangle formed by the figure's legs, something that Leonardo also

referenced in his text. Sweeney connects that triangle to Bonwell's triangle, which is a concept from dental and facial anatomy. That's an equilateral triangle formed by the mandibular condiles at the point where the middle bottom teeth meet. Incorporating this triangle into the calculations helped produce a ratio of one point sixty four to one point sixty five between the side

of the square and the radius of the circle. That is very close to the number one point sixty three three, which is often found in nature, especially in very efficient structures like hexagonal close packed crystals. It's also close to ratios that are part of the human cranium. Bonwell's triangle was described by William Gibson Arlington Bonwell in eighteen sixty four, more than three hundred and fifty years after the creation

of the Vitruvian man. So if there really is a connection here, this triangle may be something that Leonardo da Vinci observed hundreds of years before it was described by dentists. All right, it's time for adult content. So we're closing out part one of Unearthed with what Tracy is calling adult content, meaning a little more risque than the beer and wine finds that we often talk about on on Earth. So if you listen with younger folks, this might be

something to prescreen. And as Tracy mentioned at the top, going at the end of the episodes, so you could just stop it right here if you want. First. Researchers from the University of Florida have published work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that suggest that an ancient civilization in the Andes Mountains in Peru, dating back about two thousand years before the Inca Empire, used

hallucinogens to help maintain the social order. This conclusion came from the study of tubes that were made from hollow bones and were found at a prehistoric ceremonial site. Analysis of the interiors of these tubes found traces of nicotine, which of course would have come from a wild relative of tobacco and vilcabine. Residue, which is a source of the hallucinogen DMT. These tubes were found in private rooms that would have held only a few people at a time.

In the words of study co author Daniel Contreras, quote, taking psychoactives was not just about seeing visions. It was part of a tightly controlled rich uu, likely reserved for a select few, reinforcing the social hierarchy. Next, researchers working with the Bayu tapestry have been trying to determine whether there is a greater meaning behind the penises depicted on

the embroidery. According to George Garnett, a professor of medieval history at Oxford University, there are ninety three penises on the embroidery, and eighty eight of them belong to horses and five to human men. Three of the horse penises are larger than all the rest, one belonging to the horse of Duke William aka William the Conqueror, which is

the biggest. The horse of Harold Godwinson, the Anglo Saxon king of England, has the next largest penis, and then the horse of Odo of Bayu, William's half brother, is the third largest. The condition is that the size of the penises of these horses is an indicator of these

three men's relative importance. The human genitilia is shown in figures along the embroidery's border, and all of them are on men who are engaged in sexual activity, and it's all activity that would have been seen as shameful or taboo. Garnett has connected these depictions to stories and fables that are all about deceit, betrayal, and shame. His conclusion is that there's something of a code meant to suggest that the historical events being illustrated in the rest of the

tapestry are suspect. That means the tapestry likely wasn't commissioned by Odo of Bayeux, often cited as the most likely person to have commissioned the embroidery, because Odo would not have wanted those elements of shame and deceit to be a part of it. Past hosts put on an episode on this tapestry, which again is really an embroidery, on July twenty seventh, twenty eleven, and it has made several appearances on Unearthed. I think this is the first time

we have talked about any penises on there. I feel like it's name checked a lot in historical talk, and there is not very frequently a mention of any of the the more adult parts of it. Yeah. This, I don't remember if it was the paper or if it was like interviews related to the paper, but it was pointed out that most of the discussion has been more about how later people working with this textile like tried to minimize the size of them to be a little

more discreet. I love it. Moving on. Back in the nineteen nineties, excavations ahead of a construction project unearthed a fourteenth century brothel in Belgium. During this work, a burial site was also uncovered, one of a baby about three

months old. This raised questions of whether this baby might have been the victim of infanticide, but recent analysis of this has come to a different conclusion that the baby had been well nourished and well care for during its short life, including probably being breastfed, and that it likely died of a disease. Researchers did not find evidence of a number of bacterial illnesses, so it's possible that the

cause of death was viral. It's not entirely clear why this baby wasn't buried in a cemetery, but there is some speculation that his mother just wanted him nearby, so she buried him near the hearth where he would be warm and safe. This also suggests that at least some women doing sex work were able to keep their own children nearby and to care for them in their infancy.

And lastly, for today's episode, in November of last year, curators at the Reichs Museum acquired a nineteenth century condom, likely made from a sheep's appendix and decorated with a very body image that some people would also interpret as sacrilegious since it involves a nun and male clergy in a sexual situation. Condom might have been a souvenir condom from a brothel. This was the first condom to ever

become part of the Reichs Museum collection. There was actually no way to catalog a condom into the collection before this, and it became part of an exhibit on nineteenth century sex work called Safe Sex, which started earlier this year. This led the Catholic foundation Civitas Christiana to protest outside the museum and to start a petition to have the condom removed. We will have more unearthed on Wednesday. Do you have listener mail today? I do, I have listener mail.

I did not intentionally look for an episode about national parks after our conversation about national parks at the beginning of the episode, but that's kind of where we are in the catching up on listener email, and it's you know, makes it particularly relevant. So this is from Sarah. Sarah wrote, High Ladies, writing to U from the Big Meadows Lodge

at Shenandoah National Park. While I've loved every podcasting release since I started listening ten plus years ago, your recent episode on Skyline Drive and Shenandoah was particularly timely, as my husband took me here for my grad school graduation present and we saved the episode for our drive in. Given the complicated history of the park's founding you shared, I was very interested to see how the park would tell its own story. I am pleased to report that

the visitors center we frequented does not disappoint. There exhibits are transparent about eminent domain forcing people out of their homes, the racial segregation in the park's early years, and the current challenges to the local ecosystems wrought by pollution and climate change. I also spoke with a lovely ranger who told me about the one hundred plus cemeteries throughout Shenandoah, many of which are overgrown and inactive. Is that the

right word dormant? Retired? But others still have family members and the valleys who visit frequently and even plans to be buried there themselves. Learning their stories and those of the indigenous peoples here has been a valuable reminder that these parks have their own histories for many people and cultures that are far deeper than my own little national

park's passport stamp. Finally, the ranger told me how his own home in Alabama has been seized by eminent domain for a highway when he was a teenager, and he used his grandparents' address to be able to attend the final two years at the school heat attendant since he was a child. Ironically, his grandfather had participated in the Civilian Conservation Corps as a young man. I wonder if a history of Eminent domain might perhaps be one for

the episode ideas list. Thank you for ali Do, and I especially appreciate how you have contextualized your episodes recently with current events, making each that much more relevant to our everyday lives. In lieu of my own sweet kitty as pet tax, pleasease enjoy the attached shot of some of the residents at Pittsburgh Squealers, a pig rescue and rehabilitation center near us in the Pittsburgh area. They enjoyed so many pets during our recent group visit, even as

they mistook our fingers for carrots. Cheers, Sarah. PS. We also replayed your episode on John Brown's Raid on this trip as we stopped at Harper's Ferry on our drive to Shenandoah. Thank you for helping us appreciate the complexities of that site before we even got out of the car. Oh my goodness, Peace. Two pigs, A black pig and a white pig more like gray maybe. Uh boy, do

they look excited to be greeting visitors. Pittsburgh Squealers. What a great name, Pig Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, What a great thing to have. These pigs look fairly small. If I had to guess, I would think that they might be that like pet pigs, not farm pigs that people maybe got and found that they could not adequately deal with. That is just my guess lois still maybe so they're

littl they're relatively speaking, they're about knee high. I would like to see one eating a plate of spaghetti, maybe wearing a tiny hat. Thank you so much for this email, Sarah. Uh fortuitous that it happened to align with another discussion of the National Park Service at the top of this episode. That pair of episodes about Skyline Drive and Shenandoah and then the Blue Ridge Parkway were kind of a love

letter to the National Park Service. I might have said that already while also trying to acknowledge the more complicated parts of their history. I don't know if we could do a history of eminent domain because I have not really thought about whether that would be like a local to the US episode or like a more global episode. I don't actually know how eminent domain works in other places, or if it does work in other places. I also, though, have had a family member who was part of an

eminent domain dispute involving the widening of a road. There are a lot of things that exist in the United States because of eminent domain, including a lot a lot of parks and roads just as examples. So thank you again. Sarah for this email. I hope your trip was great, man. I hope you get to just love on these pigs

as often as you want. If you'd like to send us some notes about this or any other podcasts for a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.