Unruly History in the News #51

Hello everyone,

It is once again raining in Los Angeles, so I’ve been cozied up reading a lot of history news all weekend—this list is extra long because of that!

I’m also excited to share that I’m in the LA Times this week, writing about a how rebellious pirate queen in Morocco came to be “The Spirit of California.” This story was one of my favorite rabbit holes from researching my book, so I’m excited that I finally got to write about it.

This week, in history acting unruly…

• Your sushi might be about to get more expensive: Turns out wasabi isn’t just great with soy sauce. Recent experiments have determined that the spicy topping is also extremely useful for preserving ancient papyri suffering from fungal damage. Other methods—chemicals, UV light, etc—didn’t work without damaging the document. But vapor from wasabi paste “eradicated microbial growth in both painted and non-painted papyrus samples with a 100% inhibition efficiency” and strengthened the papyrus itself.

  

  Wasabi. Source: Britannica.

• It’s officially Women’s History Month so let’s talk about how women feel—or, rather, what they journal about. Over 400 years, the predominant emotion expressed in women’s private journals was frustration. It didn’t end when women got the right to vote.

  • And since it’s March, did you know that this month’s name in English was only recently solidified (relatively)?

• Remains found in Pozo de Ibarra, Mexico might be able to shed some more light on the history of the area before the Spanish invasion. The bodies were stacked and buried in a way that suggests a ritualistic purpose, but exactly what hasn’t been fully uncovered yet.

• Who really were the swans, the women in the new movie about Truman Capote?

• In archaeological news…

  • The archaeological site of Beaumont Abbey in Tours, France has been excavated in its entirety in one go, something that has (allegedly) never been done in Europe. The abbey ran for nearly 800 years before it was shut down during the French Revolution. The finds from the dig are fascinating.

  • A remarkably well-preserved Roman cellar was found in Frankfurt, Germany. It was originally built beneath a residential home that burned down in a hot blaze—melted glass was still inside the cellar.

  • Here’s something tasty: A forgotten 19th-century chocolate factory was just unearthed in Barcelona.

  • A piece of metal found at an excavation site in Maryland turned out to be a rare type of armor—a tasset, which hung from a breastplate to cover a soldier’s legs. This particular one has hearts stamped into it, which is sweet.

    

    An x-ray of the tasset revealed the heart design at the bottom. Source: Historic St. Mary's Commission.

• A metal detectorist named Ian Porter discovered 16 incredible artifacts near a sacred spring in Anglesey, Wales—made more interesting by the fact that the site mixes Iron Age and Roman artifacts, suggesting how the two cultures blended during the Roman invasion of the British Isles.

• A single song passed down by a woman’s enslaved ancestors led her to where they had been kidnapped from—a remote part of Sierra Leone.

• Everything we thought we knew about the Maya is being upended thanks to LIDAR technology. Unveiled in 2018, the technology is showing archaeologists new thriving places to dig inside what was once thought unhospitable forest. Places once thought to be centers of Mayan civilization are now being revealed as suburbs, which changes our understanding of the culture.

• Often forgotten, Genghis Khan’s principal wife, Börte, played an incredibly important role in managing his empire.

• A six-ton (that’s over 12,000 pounds!) Roman funerary altar was recently uncovered on a riverbank in northeast Italy. It was removed and is being preserved now.

  

  The 2-ton altar has been underwater for nearly 2,000 years. Source: Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio del Friuli Venezia Giulia

• Who looked at peanuts and said, “I bet if I crush these just right, I can make a delicious spread for my sandwich”? This is a surprisingly fraught question, with people making claims for ancient civilizations like the Aztecs or the Maya versus any of several men in the 1890s.

• How Simo Häyhä became known as The White Death: When Stalin invaded Finland, everyone expected Finland to fall quickly. Instead, the country emerged victorious, in no small part because Simo Häyhä killed over 500 Russian soldiers alone with an antiquated rifle, making him the most successful sniper in history.

• Banksy’s “Ghetto 4 Life” mural, painted in the Bronx, is being relocated to Connecticut. The building it was painted on has been demolished. The community is saddened by the loss.

  

  I’ll just leave this here. Source.

• Ancient texts are helping scientists understand solar auroras, a phenomenon that once made our ancestors nervous but today we photograph and call the aurora borealis. As we are currently entering a period of unstable solar magnetic field, finding more data about the sun is important.

• An incredibly rare 4,000-year-old dagger was just discovered in a forest in Poland. It’s the oldest metal dagger found in this part of Poland and it invites several questions, the most pressing of which is: How did it get there?

• Here’s a question I never thought I’d ask: Was the Trojan Horse real?

• Could the mysterious inscription on this lead tablet be an early form of Lithuanian? The object has been dated to the 13th or 14th century but is otherwise little understood. It was found twenty years ago near a castle, but the script still has not been deciphered.

  

  No, this is not from a recent sci-fi movie set. Dated to the 13th or 14th century, this script remains undeciphered. Source: Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania Museum.

• What was the Little Ice Age? And how did people survive it?

• WWII might have ended nearly 80 years ago, but the search for downed pilots continues.

• Did ancient Egyptians understand that meteorites did not come from Earth? A line of hieroglyphs in a 4400-year-old pyramid suggests that yes, they did. So then why did it take European scientists until the 18th century to propose the same idea? Partly, it’s because Egyptian knowledge was “embedded in metaphors and rituals” which were easily dismissed by later generations as folk tales.

• Speaking of Egypt, what do you know about Neferusobek, the first woman to become pharaoh? She doesn’t have the name recognition of Nefertiti or Cleopatra, but she might have paved the way for them.

  • If you’re into stories of female pharaohs, you’ll my episode on Hatshepsut.

    #35 - Hatshepsut

• What do “Jerusalem fever” and “Paris syndrome” have in common? They’re forms of culture shock—a term that is falling out of favor with psychologists. The forms of mental distress have been tracked for generations, however, going back to at least Mark Twain.

• Meet the 5 iconic women being immortalized on US quarters this year.

• An iconic Roman road—once used by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce—has been rediscovered in a backyard in Stirling, Scotland.