EP26 Dig This!
01:42:00 Share

Hey everyone, make sure to stay tuned at the end of today's show for an important announcement. It's Hardcore History. One of the other big history podcasters that I stay in regular touch with and have known for years is the wonderful Daniele Bolelli, host of the History on Fire podcast, which if you have not checked that out and you like my show, you really ought to because you'll like that probably as well.

And for a while, up until recently, it was behind a paywall, but now it is free for everyone, just like my show is. So go check that out if you haven't, or if you haven't checked it out in a while, there's going to be a whole bunch of new shows you haven't heard. Daniele is a university lecturer. When he's not doing podcasts, he has degrees in history, anthropology, Native American studies, a subject on which he is an expert.

He's written four books. The first one was published when he was only 22, so he's a very accomplished guy. And we were talking the other day, and I was working on ideas for a hardcore history addendum, and he said, you know, we should talk about archaeology.

Now, saying we should talk about archaeology is a little like saying we should talk about history. I mean, it's a giant subject, isn't it? And neither one of us are archaeologists, although he's more qualified to talk about it with his anthropology degree than I am. But we're both kind of geeking out about it for a while. And so we decided, you know what, we'll have this conversation and we'll just sort of talk a little bit about, you know, our history.

interesting stories or things that we would like to see or things from the past that, you know, would resonate maybe with the listeners and maybe talk about it in terms of, you know, I proposed an Ebenezer Scrooge Christmas Carol kind of organization, right? The ghost of archaeology past, the ghost of archaeology present, and the ghost of archaeology future. And

Sounds great in my head. We'll see how it works out in practice in this discussion with the wonderful, charismatic, and intensely knowledgeable Daniele Bulelli, host of History on Fire.

All right. With me right now, my long-term friend, Daniele Bolelli, to talk, well, like a couple of geeks geeking out about archaeology, really. And as I said, I think what we'll do is organize this into sort of a ghost of archaeology past, ghost of archaeology present, and ghost of archaeology future. And we'll leave those categories a little fungible. We might be moving between them a little bit.

But let's start off with sort of the early things that you can find out there where early peoples showed an interest in their even earlier past. I mean, I always wondered how the ancient Egyptians thought about their ancient history or what the ancient Chinese from the Shang Dynasty thought about history a thousand years before them or if they knew anything about it at all. So I was doing a little research.

And I found some material that shows that certain kings or sons of kings in places like Egypt and famously in Babylon during the Neo-Babylonian Empire about 550 BCE, where they showed an interest in empires that came before them. So, for example, in Egypt, they would often maintain temples and tomb sites, uh,

sort of reverently. And this was connected, I think, to the fact that the religion that was being worshipped was still viable. And you'll often see that where sites will be protected and refurbished. And sometimes if they've been robbed in antiquity, put back together again, as long as the belief system holds.

But once the belief system is replaced by another belief system, those things often became relics of the past that were either ignored or deliberately shunned. I was reading that after Rome converted to Christianity, some of the ancient temples from the polytheistic era were not just

Sometimes they were just reused, but other times they were actively avoided because it wasn't that the Christians didn't believe that the previous gods existed. They did believe they existed sometimes and thought they were demons and devils. So better to avoid those sites altogether. In some of these early attempts at what you might call proto-archaeology, too, there was a vested interest in

The kings that were looking back, like Nabonidus looked back toward the Akkadian Empire of Naram-Sin, for example, which existed, I believe, more than a millennia before he did. But part of this, rather than just trying to do what a modern-day archaeologist would do and try to reconstruct the past, sometimes this was a part of...

establishing the royal pedigree of some of these rulers, right? If you were connected to this great king of the past, it made you look like you were even more august and that your heritage was even more royal. So some of this stuff we would say today was perhaps had a vested interest for the rulers and stuff involved.

I mean, that's a classic, right? You see in just about every culture, there's that desire to connect yourself to some mythical past. Like, for example, in Mesoamerica, long after Teotihuacan declined and only memories remained of the splendor that had been Teotihuacan, just about every other state that propped up in Mesoamerica tried to connect themselves to Teotihuacan.

whether there was an actual connection or whether it was completely invented because it was a cool story and everybody likes to be connected to some cool mythology that everyone else knows about.

I think it also bolsters your credentials to rule, right? And it wasn't just attaching yourself to earlier rulers. I mean, sometimes when you, well, oftentimes when you look at the invented lineage of some of these people, sometimes going back, you know, 60, 70, 80 generations, eventually you find it going back to some deity somewhere. So, you know, you're descended from a god if you go back far enough, right? So who better to rule, right? Yeah.

That's what I love about invented genealogies or invented connection with the mythical past. If you look at it through the eyes of a strict historian, those would be considered lies.

There's something interesting about why those lies come into being in the first place. What does it say about the necessity to make those claims? What does it say about the culture? You know, again, even though they are fully invented, they may tell you a lot about a particular time and place and the culture of the people living in it.

I think it just tells us about human beings overall, right? What's in it for me? What can I get from this archaeological discovery, right? Rather than the sort of amorphous idea of let me reconstruct the past so I better understood what came before me. It's more how can reconstructions of the past benefit me? So, I mean, you take a guy like

uh, Ramesses II's son who supposedly goes in and rediscovers, uh, temples and, and cleans them out and fixes them up or tries to bolster up or restore pyramids that came from a long time before his lifespan. Well, he may have been doing this for sort of generalized philosophical reasons, but he's the kind of guy that stood personally to benefit from this. I mean, take a guy like Nabonidus that we mentioned earlier, right? Uh,

550s BCE, a Neo-Babylonian king who stumbles upon what are ruins for him in 550s BCE, finds some of the sites connected to an ancient Akkadian king named Naram-Sin. So he's from about the time where you have guys like Sargon of Akkad, some of the great first empire builders in

and Nabonidus may be just generally interested in this stuff. On the other hand, if you connect yourself to some of the first great true kings, I think that's what Sargon means, true kings, it benefits you personally.

He's supposed to have actually tried to date this stuff. If you can imagine a guy in the 550s trying to date something from 1,000 or 1,500 years before his time period. Sometimes people call him, by the way, the first archaeologist, and they call Ramesses II's son sometimes the first Egyptologist.

But you obviously have ruins and past histories the world over, right? So it's hardly just people from ancient Egypt or the ancient Near East. I mean, the Chinese have a long and very deep history, and they had people who were interested all during their history in studying their past, but oftentimes for the same reasons, right? What can we get out of it?

Can we find some artifacts? Can we find some hidden knowledge that we can use now? Every now and then, though, you find these people, and I don't want to tar them with the same brush as all these what's-in-it-for-me types, who seem to maybe have a generalized interest in re-sort of

connecting the world of the past so they understand it better. And some of these Chinese scholars may have fallen into that category. There's a famous medieval Indian scholar who may have written the first Indian history book.

a guy named Calhoun, I believe, who may have been one of these people with a real, you know, sort of a general interest in history for history's sake rather than what's in it for me. But of course, it's the period when Europeans start dominating this whole thing that gets the lion's share of interest because they're so overwhelming in the 1700s and 1800s. And I was reading

in one of my books on the history of archaeology, and they were connecting this whole resurrection of interest in the past to the Renaissance, where Europe first sort of rediscovers the classical civilizations of places like Greece and Rome.

And it's the era where the writings of Greece and Rome start influencing things. And this becomes very important. I mean, Aristotle and Plato and all those guys are sort of rediscovered and infuse the Renaissance era science and philosophy with a lot of the ancient classical values. But it also means people start getting interested in ancient Greece and Rome again.

And just like the people in the past, one of the things that they're most interested in, rather than some generalized knowledge about what did the past look like and how can we better understand it, is where are the artifacts, right? It's a little like, you know, a giant treasure hunt, right? Where can we get the stuff?

Absolutely. And I think that's what the before there was an archaeology, that's what people were looking for. They were looking for the shiny gold object that makes everybody go, oh, wow, more than necessarily trying to reconstruct the past carefully the way an archaeologist would do today. And it's funny to me, you know, you mentioned the example of Rome. It's funny how certain things that today we consider archaeological treasures are

were preserved for very different reasons at various points in their history. Like one thing I read at some point is that the Colosseum in Rome, at a time when pretty much everything was torn down for building materials by later generations, the Colosseum was preserved because some of the early Christians believed that many Christian martyrs were killed in the Colosseum.

So that made it somewhat of a holy site in a way. And so you wouldn't touch it. Now, today we know that probably many of those massacres did not happen the way we think. Maybe they did happen on a much, much smaller scale, but people believe they happened. And so then it was like, OK, it used to be a pagan thing, but it was made holy by the blood of the martyrs. So we need to preserve it.

Fast forward another few generations and people don't necessarily believe that anymore, but now they are interested in the Colosseum for its historical importance, once the Roman traditions are rediscovered and all of that. So it's interesting how the same bunch of rocks can be perceived in such different ways and is preserved for different reasons over the centuries.

Well, and you know what? I'm fascinated by the amateur nature of a lot of the early archaeology after the Renaissance period. Because when you read about a lot of these guys, some of whom are not treasure hunters, we should say, some of them are more hobbyists where they're, you know, diagramming and making sketches and stuff of the various things they found, the megaliths or the great buildings or what have you.

But that quickly gets followed by the guys that I like to think of as the Indiana Jones version of archaeologists, right? The guys who are hired by rich folks in places like Europe to go get them antiques and artifacts and whatnot. And I was reading one book recently.

Because I pulled out one of these books I have on the history of archaeology. It's called Uncovering the Past, a History of Archaeology by William H. Stebing Jr. And he sort of goes over the history and talks about how these early guys started when Napoleon invaded Egypt and...

You know, there's that great line from Napoleon where he's addressing his troops right before they fight the Mamluks in Egypt. And he tells them, soldiers, 40 centuries of history are looking down on you because the pyramids are right there, right? But what Napoleon did was he brought a lot of scientists with him and his army. And while he's conquering Egypt and fighting in that part of the world, these scientists are examining the ruins of Egypt and

And it's part of what starts this real craze for Egyptian artifacts and everything connected with that. And then what ends up happening, of course, is because he's fighting the British in that area, there almost becomes a scramble for who's going to get their hands on the Egyptian antiques. And they both, you know, it's funny because normally you would think they would go in there and rape and pillage the antiques. But because it's two European powers sort of vying for the antiques,

they would actually go to the authorities. At that time, the authorities were not Egyptian. They were Turkish. And they would try to seek the approval and get permits from the authorities so that they could use those permits against, you know, if it was the British, they could use the permits against the French or vice versa and say, you can't dig here. We have the official, you know, signature, which otherwise they probably wouldn't have cared about if there hadn't been another European power, you know, opposing them. But this is where you start to see now,

very wealthy Europeans who want to hire individuals to go find them stuff that can be carted back to museums or even, and I always find this interesting, even to their personal property. Like a lot of statues and obelisks and things like that ended up as like backyard pieces in some Englishman's garden or something. And the guy who I always love from this time period, if you can love somebody who destroys tons of things while he's looking for artifacts, he's

is the great Giovanni Belzoni. And if you go and you look at Belzoni's stuff, he's famous because he made sure he would be remembered as the guy who, let's call it rediscovered, because tomb robbers found a lot of these places in antiquity before he ever got to them, but rediscovered a bunch of these tombs in the Valley of the Kings and stuff. He would constantly

carve his name graffiti style, and it's still there today, into the walls as sort of a way to say his version of Kilroy was here, right? Wow. Giovanni was here. That's your father of archaeology. That's hilarious. Well, and remember, he was, to show you what an amateur this guy was, he was a circus strongman, six foot seven inch tall, this massive guy,

And, well, I actually wrote down or recorded one of the accounts where he wrote about one of these places that he was excavating. And it's mentioned in the history of archaeology book that I have. And when you realize, as many of us do today, how painstaking modern archaeology is and how many years archaeologists can spend working on just one temple or one tomb or one dig, it's

Listen to what it was like in like the wild west of the Indiana Jones era of discovering these places, because here's what Belzoni writes about one of these. I think it was a temple or a tomb or a mortuary that he that he broke into and starts telling you what it's like when he gets in there.

So let me do the lead in that William H. Stebing gives, and then I'll give you the Belzoni quote. So Stebing says, quote, throughout his explorations, Belzoni continually looked for portable antiquities and papyri that he could sell to the consul general or other European collectors. He openly admitted that his purpose in entering ancient tombs was to, quote, rob the Egyptians of their papyri, end quote.

From Belzoni's account of his experiences while exploring dark, unventilated tomb passages and chambers, one can get an impression of the amount of destruction that must have taken place during this era. And now he quotes from Belzoni's writing. So listen to what, you know, listen to the care that Belzoni took in, in,

exploring these ancient places where he was often the first person to enter into these areas since maybe tomb robbers had been in there in the ancient world. He writes, quote, this is from Belzoni.

after the exertion of entering into such a place through a passage of fifty a hundred three hundred or perhaps six hundred yards nearly overcome i sought a resting-place found one and contrived to sit but when my weight bore on the body of an egyptian it crushed it like a band-box

i naturally had recourse to my hands to sustain my weight but they found no better support so that i sunk altogether amongst the broken mummies with a crash of bones rags and wooden cases which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour waiting for it to subside again

once i was conducted from such a place to another resembling it through a passage of about twenty feet in length and no wider than a body could be forced through it was choked with mummies and i could not pass without putting my face in contact with that of some decayed egyptian

but as the passage inclined downward my own weight helped me on however i could not avoid being covered with bones legs arms and heads rolling from above

End quote. Can you imagine the tears of the modern day archaeologists thinking how they would have lovingly used a paintbrush to just remove the tiniest bits of dust off every one of those objects? Yeah, today that same thing he described would have taken probably three years to go slowly inch by inch, layer by layer. And he's just blabbering.

bulldozing through the whole thing, rolling over skeletons. You truly can, at the end of this quote, you truly can hear the tears of archaeologists worldwide. Then again, we can possibly cut this guy a little slack because he was in the early 1800s when archaeology, as we understand it today, wasn't even on the horizon.

No, and it's interesting because the author of the history of archaeology that I read actually tried to grade Belzoni on a curve, if you will, and compared him to some of his contemporaries, one of whom I believe was an Englishman who, when he couldn't find the entrance to the third pyramid at Giza, just put gunpowder between the stones and blew a hole into the side of it.

So that gives you an idea about this Indiana Jones period of archaeology and how nobody was waiting years, you know, to get the artifacts that somebody was paying them to go grab for them.

I guess when the bar is that low, yes, maybe it's not that hard to be above it. But yes, you know, when you look at what was done in the 1800s, never mind before that, but even just as recently as the 1800s, that's more than enough to make modern archaeologists cry. I mean, think about even like one of the most famous early figures in archaeology, Heinrich Schliemann, the guy who discovered Troy and the whole, his fascination for the Trojan War and all of that.

I mean, the guy was like, on one hand, people give him credit because he believed in the Homeric story. He was actually able to find something to back them up and find some evidence for the Trojan War.

But on the other hand, the fact that he started just bulldozing through the site, digging everything, and even ending up digging the wrong layers at times, like destroying some of the layers where the conflict would have taken place because he believed that the real stuff was below that. Yeah, that's not exactly the best kind of archaeological work ever done.

No, but there's almost like a little karmic justice in it, right? Because so the story you're talking about is how Schliemann, his life's obsession was the Troy of the Trojan Wars from the Iliad, right? So he finds this mound in Turkey called Hissurlik, which had often been linked to the Trojan Wars, right? So these mounds, a lot of these architectural archaeological digs

revolved around these mounds because a lot of these big locations like cities from the ancient world, they turn into these giant, they look like hills or small mountains sometimes. So he goes to Hisserlich and he didn't expect that the site was going to be occupied through many different eras.

And as we know now, you know, there's strata, right? There's layers. And as you go down, you're going earlier. So one layer of occupation might be nearer to the surface. And then you find another one 12 or 15 inches below that. And that's an earlier era. And so when Schliemann goes and finds this Troy that he's, you know, this is his life's obsession with,

he doesn't realize that there are multiple layers. And when he runs into the multiple layers, he makes an assumption. And the assumption is that his Troy, the one from the Iliad from Homer's era or from Homer's, uh, from earlier than Homer's era is going to be the very lowest layer. And,

And instead of doing what a modern archaeologist would do and painstakingly, you know, go layer by layer and excavate, he just bulldozes through the layers, destroying much of what exists above them, gets down to the lowest layer, having destroyed much of the above layers, only to find that the Troy he was looking for was in a middle layer, and he had done tons of damage to it on the way down. So there's a little karmic justice in there for the bulldozing archaeologist. Definitely. And I think, you know, one thing that we...

probably should have mentioned early on, but it makes sense, is the fact that we need to remember that archaeology is a destructive form of research and may not be in the future if we discover progressively more sophisticated technologies to look deep into something without destroying the top layers.

But the reality today is that still to this day, let alone in the previous decades, once you dig up a site, you get whatever information your current technology is able to give you based on the evidence, but you also destroy often a whole lot of the evidence in the process. And so it's always that, you know,

In some cases, we discover sites and we're like, maybe we should hang on on digging through much to it because maybe down the road in 20 or 30 years, our technology will be better and we'll be able to do the job in a much cleaner fashion, in a less destructive fashion. Of course, these were not the kind of concerns that people like Schliemann had because they

Not only they weren't wired that way, they weren't educated that way, and they didn't even have the perspective that that could be something that in the future things would change.

It reminds me of things like earlier crime scenes, right? If they had known that we would want DNA evidence today, they would have gone about investigating the crime scene differently a hundred years ago or what have you, but you're stuck with it, right? I mean, because by the time you look back on it now, the entire thing's been contaminated. You don't have the original stuff anymore. And the people back then were investigating in a totally different way than the way we would do it today. A hundred percent. And that's the,

the trick of archaeology that we we want to dig as much as possible to have the information today and we want to do it before whether it's climate change or anything else that could be damaging to a site whether is Grave robbers coming in because they hear that there's something to be found or whether it's because changing climate exposes to different conditions aside to the leads to destruction

So we have that pressure to rush to it. And at the same time, we have this pressure of, ah, maybe we should hang on a second until our technology improves.

You know, one of the things, it's a great point. One of the things that destroys a ton of these archaeological sites are the creation of dams and the flooding of places into reservoirs. And I always said, if I, if the only way I think I would have the patience to be a modern archaeologist, I call it Dan Carlin archaeologist. If you said we're going to flood this entire valley and all the antiquities in it are going to be flooded and lost forever, you have six months to get everything out. And then I could pull down

down the bulldozers and I forget the little, you know, paintbrushes that get the dust off the shards of pottery. I'm going in and saving what I can. That's the only way I would have the patience to do it. Rescue every mummy you can before they flood the whole region. I can hear listeners wishing that there was the equivalent of the dam for your episodes. It's like you have three months to get an episode out. Whether you like it or not, it's three months. My wife would feel the same way. Yeah.

And, you know, the part that we didn't get into, too, and this is when you really start to see, I think, the ability to have earlier societies talk to us now and almost like adding water, allowing them to sort of revitalize and talk again is when they start talking.

translating and deciphering the writing and the language of these peoples from so long ago. I mean, for example, the coming up with the ability, I mean, these guys are like archaeological code breakers, but when they start doing things like deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Mayan writings or Akkadian or any of these various things that allow all of a sudden the people from, you know, thousands of years ago to understand

talk to us again and give us an idea. I mean, we have from ancient Sumeria, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is a story from a people that have been gone for thousands of years, but because somebody wrote it down and somebody was able to translate that, all of a sudden, the Sumerians and their worldview and the way they thought and the stories that they listened to are allowed to live again. It's like a resurrection, isn't it?

Absolutely, because that's the reality that when we are talking, I mean, now you're going from just artifacts to actual writing. When you can recover writing, in some cases we have recovered writing and we have no way to say, to know what they say because we haven't deciphered it. But when you can recover writing,

and you can decipher it. Well, now you are, it's basically the archaeological dream. It's as good as it's ever going to get. Now, of course, people can lie in their writing. Of course, you're going to run into bias, of course, you know. But that's like a real primary source where people, you can hear people's thoughts. You can hear their words. You can hear the way they describe the world they lived in, to some historical events that happened. So, of course, that adds a layer of context

that often pure archaeology cannot give us because sometimes it can give us this one quick snapshot in time, but we don't know what's around it, what happens before or after or where the character's involved. And for that kind of depth, it's hard to find any substitute for writing. Writing is the thing.

It reminds me of the line that is attributed to Cicero, the ancient orator from Rome, who's supposed to have said writing is the only true form of immortality. Yeah, of course, that's given that the language survived because, of course, languages are constantly changing and many languages die off without anybody having an idea how to translate them centuries down the road.

So, you know, it's still slightly on the optimistic side, his quote. But I can see the point, you know, compared to most other things. Yes, that's where you have a better shot at things being preserved, for sure. But sometimes you get lucky, right? And this is something archaeology can do, too, like the discovery of the Rosetta Stones.

And the Rosetta Stone, for those who don't know, is a perfect example of what Daniele was talking about earlier, where let's call it recycling, to be kind, when earlier peoples would tear apart structures and things that we would consider to be...

UN cultural heritage sites because they wanted the building material again. And they found this stone embedded in one of the walls, reused as a piece of building material. And the stone had a message from, I believe it was a Hellenistic ruler of Egypt.

and he was trying to make a proclamation and he wanted to make sure his people could read it. So he wrote it in three languages, one above the other. And by the way, the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum and you can see it today. And the two languages that he wrote for the Egyptians was unknown at the time that the Rosetta Stone was found,

But the third language used was Greek, which they had already deciphered. And so by having the Greek there, it was almost like having a code-breaking tool where they could then sort of reverse engineer what the hieroglyphics above that had said and what another Egyptian writing system had said. And so it's like a shortcut to deciphering an ancient language. And when you think about how many of these

pieces of writing that they've found, this is the part that boggles the mind. There are so many more pieces of writing and tablets and records than we would normally think. I mean, in one city alone, a place called Nippur in Western Asia, they found 30,000 tablets just in that city. Administrative stuff, all sorts of commercial records, diplomatic records, all sorts of things.

And in places like Nineveh and some of the excavations they've done in Babylonia, I mean, they find tons of this stuff. And so when you talk about what would be missing, if you play the what-if game and ask, what would we know about these places if we couldn't decipher this stuff? It is shocking. Yep, 100%. And that's why...

That's why you also have the feeling of like, what are we going to find out in the future? What are the history books going to look like down the road? Because, of course, you know, the reality is that we are constantly discovering new things that shine new light on history that sometimes have been forgotten until this point. Or maybe it hadn't been forgotten, but we know only a tiny sliver of it.

And that's where I keep hammering on this idea of context, because to me, context is everything. Without context, I mean, I was thinking there was this beautiful archaeological discovery that they made in New Mexico where they found these footprints dating from roughly around 10,000 years ago. And these footprints, they give you

It's a perfect window in time because archaeologists were able to figure out that this was either a woman or a young man walking along with a toddler who sometimes is clearly they are carrying this toddler. And sometimes suddenly these small trucks pop up next to them as they put the toddler down to get them to walk.

They could figure out from where to where they were going, so they followed these footprints for a long distance. They could figure out that it started raining shortly after their walk 10,000 years ago. They figured out that the person carrying this toddler came back the same way without the toddler. We don't really know what happened to the kid, whether he was left at the village or what happened.

They could see how a mammoth and the giant sloth crossed their tracks within just minutes or possibly at most a few hours of them walking by. So you have this, you know, if you let your imagination go, this is a fantastic picture because you really get this snapshot in time of these two individuals crossing this environment, the kind of animals that lived in there.

And yet we don't know who these people were. We don't know what happened. We don't know. We don't know anything. You know, on one hand, we know so much, like to the point where really you can see at what speed was the person walking with the toddler in arm. And on the other hand, we know nothing because we don't know the context of the story. And often archaeologists, that's kind of what the field does. It gives you these little tidbits that seem so precise and

but lacking the necessary context. This, of course, is precise only to a point. And instead, what you just described, when you find the miracle discovery, when you find the Rosetta Stone of the story, suddenly all kinds of contexts become available to you when you start fleshing out and adding layers to stories that maybe you knew just a tiny, tiny bit about. You know, that's fascinating. It's like a moment frozen in amber.

And when I think about that idea of a moment frozen in amber, I always think of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and cities like that. And, you know, one of the things I don't know how current this is because my history of archaeology was written about 30 years ago. So this may have changed. But what the author talks about is he said in in I think it's in.

Herculaneum, where it was buried in... I guess Pompeii was more ash, and its sister city was more like hard lava. So they're actually chipping away and getting that city out of stone when they're excavating it. But they found a library...

of burnt scrolls that when they found it, Stebing says they looked like logs, like they'd been burnt. And then what happened is the outside layer had been burnt, but all of the inside layers are still okay. And they just require the technology because you can't really unroll them without tearing them to pieces now.

And if you could just use the technology to read what's on the scrolls, and 30 years ago they may not have had that. They may be doing that now. I'm not aware. But that's an example because Stebing says that much of the stuff we have from Rome, whether you're talking about Livy or Polybius or some of these great writers that we have, there's often big chunks of their writing that have disappeared over the eras.

And we may be able to fill in some of those gaps when these scrolls are deciphered or even have authors that we were never exposed to. So one of my big fantasies is that they continue to find these libraries all over the world and we'll be able to flesh out a lot of stuff we don't know right now.

14-year-old me would be very disappointed in this because in high school in Italy, I had to, they tortured me, making me translate ancient Latin and ancient Greek. If there was even more material, like I remember going through all of those guys, Levy, you know, just about every one of those writers from back then.

If suddenly you were to triple or quadruple the material available would be a great thing for history, a less great thing for 14-year-old Daniele translating all this stuff.

Oh, but I'm jealous that you got to read them in basically closer anyway to the original language. You know, it's funny, though, because with those languages, because they are not languages that people use all the time. I mean, I've seen later people starting to try to revive Latin and actually have conversation in Latin and all that. But when you deal with a language that's essentially a dead language that people are not using on a day-to-day basis, it

It's very different. Like, you know, if you learn Spanish today, after a while, you'll be semi-decent at having a conversation. With Latin or Greek, for some reason, despite years of studying, I always found it was still a challenge. I mean, you do pick up layers that you wouldn't pick up if you read them in translation, for sure. But it was still a much harder challenge than learning a living language.

Well, and as you pointed out earlier, languages change. I mean, look how different English was in Shakespeare's time, and that's a much shorter period of time between then and now than trying to take Cicero's era and read his Latin. Yep, yep, for sure.

And, you know, even with all that was lost from the 1700s to the late 1800s with guys like Belzoni doing the Dan Carlin equivalent of taking like backhoes and tractors to the Valley of the Kings to, you know, to scoop up mummies and everything, you can't help but notice how much progress was made. I mean, the difference between what humankind knew about the world of the past from the time of the American Revolution in the 1770s to

to the 1890s or the 1900 era is night and day. And the difference in the approach of archaeologists is as well. I mean, people like Belzoni weren't really concerned with piecing together the past. So we had a, you know, sort of clarified picture of things, but neither would most of the people in his time period. One of the sort of dirty little secrets of the whole thing is while a guy like Belzoni is sawing

precious multi-ton statues into pieces so he can cart them off across the landscape and take them overseas to Europe. The locals in those areas weren't all that concerned with them either. I mean, he may have, as he said, been stealing the Egyptians papyri, but the Egyptian peasants, I mean, there's a great story of Belzoni having to leave one of these statues that he's dragging across the landscape at one point. And when he comes back,

The local peasants have lit it on fire, trying to turn it into lime, which they can use for things like farming purposes. Right. So nobody was really concerned with preserving these ancient artifacts because they were special to the heritage of the people. And by the way, the governors and the rulers of these areas weren't either. They were giving away artifacts as gifts. They were giving away the rights to dig this stuff up to other countries for diplomatic reasons.

It's only by the time that Heinrich Schliemann is tearing up the mound at Hisser Lake in the 1870s that you begin to see a very different sort of archaeology take hold. Maybe we could call it the archaeology of the ghost of archaeology present today.

where by the time you have Howard Carter in the 1920s opening up King Tutankhamen's tomb, you see what looks much more like modern archaeological sorts of approaches, right? Where they're going more methodically, they're taking their time, they're noting all the strata down, they're marking every location where they find stuff, and they're paying attention to things that a guy like Belzoni would have considered to be archaeological trash, right? Even broken shards of

pottery are important to the modern archaeologists. And so maybe we could say it's about that time period where you transition from the ghost of archaeology past to the ghost of archaeology present.

And once you hit the contemporary era, you start getting into contemporary moral questions, the sorts of stuff that a guy like Giovanni Belzoni never even considered. If you'd have said to him, listen, maybe you shouldn't go into these tombs and destroy all these mummies. After all, this is the sacred resting place of a lot of human beings today.

He didn't even consider stuff like that, but we do. And there's all sorts of questions that a lot of people, especially lay people, ask about archaeology. Like, is it really cool to go in and desecrate tombs and move people from their final resting place and take them for study or maybe even long-term storage in a museum or a university? What do you think about that?

Well, and this is where the modern controversies kick in, because in many cases, when you're dealing with artifacts or even more so when you're dealing with human remains, the question is, who has the right to them?

And in some cases, it's obvious. Nobody goes to dig up your grandma at the cemetery. There's a personal connection. Not yet. Not yet, exactly. But it's like, how many generations need to pass before your grandma is somebody's great-great-great-grandma? And now it's getting a little fuzzier. Now it's like, well, in the interest of science, we want to know what people were doing back then. And

And in some cases, you know, there's still a connection with living people. In some cases, the connection, if it exists, is so long gone in memory that nobody has any idea. And that also goes into the complicated issues regarding identity, regarding race, regarding all sorts of things, because sometimes, you know, you have you make a discovery at one place and

And somebody may have an attachment saying, hey, that was our ancestors. But that's based on the idea that people don't move. In some cases, somebody who lived there 2,000 years ago has next to no connection with the people living there today. Now, not always, of course. In some cases, there is a connection. But it gets...

it starts getting complicated because it brings up political issues at that point. It starts bringing up the meaning of what does it mean to belong to a particular ethnic group? Like, does ethnicity really survive through the centuries, whether on a biological level or a cultural level or any level? And those are all questions that clearly are unsettling because they go

they end up messing with people's sense of identity, which is one of the sacred cows that usually you don't want to mess up if you value your life.

Well, and look, clearly we can look at things like Native American skeletons from 150 years ago that are in museums or in universities now. And that to me seems a very different story than something like the Kennywick man that they found here, so-called Kennywick man that they found here in the Pacific Northwest.

that when they dated it, it was dated to be over 9,000 years old, which means it predates all recorded human history. But some of the peoples in the Pacific Northwest have claimed the Kennywick Man as an ancestor and are upset at the fact that, you know, it's being studied and treated like it's not somebody's ancestor or

To me, there's absolutely no question that the 150-year-old, you know, the head of Mangus, Colorado, the Apache chief, was in some museum for a long time. That, to me, is an obvious case where you can look and say, that's an ancestor of ours because that's relatively recent history. The Kennewick man, well, there's also... I mean, then you start saying, well, if somebody finds a Cro-Magnon man, but it's in the location where your peoples are now, is there a claim? That's much more difficult, don't you think? That's...

putting it generously. You know, when you're talking about thousands of years, the odd that there's any connection becomes next to none. I mean, I remember when I started studying the places where I come, like I grew up in Milan in Italy and I remember reading books and I was like, oh, so this was a site that was first settled on a permanently based by some Celtic tribe. And I was like, oh, cool. So there's a connection with an

And then I turn the page and it's like, and 50 years later, this other group came by and killed them all. And you go like, okay, so not those guys. It's these other guys who are my ancestors. But then 25 years later, this other group came in and they mixed heavily and 50 years. And before you know, once you look at like a deep history, you look at the 2000, 3000 years of history, whatever we know,

you realize that just about everyone and their grandma passed through the area. And so who I am today, I have no idea who I'm connected to from hundreds of years ago. You know, there's this very, very... They are doing better and better job with DNA, trying to... But even that is very...

It doesn't tell you personal stories, you know, it doesn't. So to be able to trace somebody living today to somebody so deep into the past is at best challenging if we want to be generous. In many cases, it's not right, impossible.

Well, and you know, there's a trade-off, I think, that's sometimes missed on some of these deals. In other words, some peoples in some parts of the world may feel like there is a violation going on when tombs are opened and artifacts are removed.

but there's a payoff sometimes. And I notice, I don't want to call it defensive, but I noticed that in my history of archaeology, uncovering the past, the author several times at the end of various chapters will say something like, and because we found this, we allowed these people's heritage to be restored to them. And there's some examples that are maybe worth citing. So for example, you know, the great period is,

when archaeology exploded is in like the 1800s. And as we all know, in the 1800s amongst Europeans, there's quite a bit of racism and ethnocentrism and superiority complexes.

And so the belief system was often that these peoples in the other parts of the world, whether we're talking about the Americas or whether we're talking about places like Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, were unsophisticated and they didn't know how to build great monuments like the great civilizations. And because of that, they extrapolated out

assumptions. You hear it from racists even today all the time about black Africans. They'll say, well, you can tell they're not as sophisticated as we were because where are all their great civilizations? Well, the archaeology, it shows you that they don't know what they're talking about, but the archaeology shows that, for example, sub-Saharan Africa had great civilizations and

And the racism and ethnocentrism is so deep that when they were first discovered, the white archaeologists who discovered them in the 1800s could not bring themselves to attribute their building to the black Africans and had to concoct theories

theories of how there must have been white people there once upon a time who were eventually wiped out. I mean, for example, there's a place called the Great Zimbabwe, which is an archaeological site that they found in sub-Saharan Africa that so bowled over the excavators when they found it that they couldn't believe the locals had built it. And Stebing has an account from...

one of the early archaeologists who found it and was one of the people that couldn't believe the locals could build this, but he described what he saw. And here's his description. So according to Stebing's book,

This site that became known as the Great Zimbabwe was taboo to the people who lived there when the discoveries were made. So they didn't go to the site. And they also were not the original people there because these people had only moved in there about 50 years beforehand. So it had been another group of sub-Saharan Africans. But here's what they found when they uncovered the ruins. In Stephen's book, it says, quote,

During several excursions from the village in 1871 and 1872, Karl Mark...

mock the archaeologist or pseudo archaeologist finally got to explore the stone ruins about which he had heard so much at the foot of a high hill he found a great circular enclosure with granite walls about 20 feet high inside were lower partially crumbled walls and a conical tower about 30 feet high all were constructed of stones about twice the size of bricks that had been fit together without mortar all

On the hill were more ruins, protected by a strong fortification wall that varied between six to twelve feet in thickness. These massive structures, as well as many smaller ones between the citadel and the great enclosure, were overgrown with trees and vegetations.

Mock had found the site now called Great Zimbabwe, end quote. So later on, Steving points out that the people that moved in once this site were found were all these prospectors and people looking for gold. And they did a lot of damage to the site. One of the companies, I love this, one of the companies was actually called the Ancient Ruins Company, which is a great name for a company that's...

that actually deals in ancient ruins. But here's an example of Stephen pointed out, not maybe even sounding a little defensive about what archaeologists have to do to these sites in terms of violating taboos or digging up graves, but points out that because they did, they're able to give back these people's heritage. And he writes, quote,

Archaeology has now solved many of the mysteries of Zimbabwe, perhaps in dispersing images of the Queen of Sheba or King Solomon's envoys walking around the ruins, meaning it was really white people who did it. It also destroyed some of the romantic lure that had drawn Westerners to the area in the past.

but truth is almost always less romantic than myth. Archaeology has restored Great Zimbabwe and other Iron Age sites in Southern Africa to their true builders, thus returning to Black Africans an important part of their heritage, end quote.

So is it worth it, Daniele? Well, and I think that's where it gets. I guess there are two different points to that. Like on one level, of course, it's super fascinating to rediscover aspects of history that would have been long forgotten, that some people would have used for racist reasons to say, oh, you see, these people are below us because they didn't do this and that. And when you discover that the history is much more complicated, well, that's of course is a good thing.

There's another aspect, though, that's funny, that in itself, these kind of discoveries seem to be based on the assumption that you are only civilized, you are only advanced, you are only good, almost on a moral level, if you build complicated stuff, if you have complex civilizations, if you have monumental architecture, if you have urban planning.

which in itself is kind of interesting because to me, I don't know, I may be coming at it from a different angle, but to me, there is no superiority in this. Or rather, yes, that shows that your civilization is capable of building complicated stuff. But complicated doesn't necessarily always mean better on a quality of life kind of way. I mean, look at like,

A bunch of people throughout history who did live in the midst of some of the biggest, greatest civilizations ever from the point of view of complexity were slaves, were absolutely miserable for a whole variety of circumstances. And sometimes when you compare their life with a bunch of hunters and gatherers living with their tribe in a fairly egalitarian scenario, you're like, I

I don't know that that's a superior way of living. It's a more complex way of living. It's a way of living that gives access to certainly many advantages, but also these... So I don't know. To me, I tend to have a little bit of a more relativistic approach to ranking cultures in this fashion, in the way that these guys seem to do sometimes when they were thinking, oh, if we find big cities, that's a sign that you guys are civilized, that you're not primitive.

I think that's a great point. It's almost our own cultural bias and the measurements by which we decide something is valuable or not valuable. Like you said, if we measure it in terms of human satisfaction and happiness, we may come up with a very different answer. Exactly. And that's where I feel that we do. And this is something that we still have in history books to this day. There is this bias that

We are constantly moving from a place of simplicity to a place of complexity, which that in itself is not true because there are many gaps in there. There are many times when more advanced civilizations collapse and are replaced by centuries of less advanced civilization from a technological standpoint. But even if we were to grant that assumption, also the second assumption is that this is an improvement. This is somehow better, right?

And better, again, as you're saying, better according to what matrix? What are we talking about? Are we talking about the capability to affect the environment? Then yes, more complex will give you that. Are we talking about human beings being happier, living more fulfilling lives? Well, then probably not so much. So again, some of these assumptions are unstated, but they probably should be stated because I do feel that they

mess with our perception of it all. I think that's a great, it's a great point. And when I was a kid and when you were a kid and we were reading about things like the fall of Rome's Western empire and the barbarians taking over in the West, it was always portrayed as some sort of a catastrophe. And all of a sudden, you know, the great technology of Rome and all of the things that the Roman civilization brought to these people was replaced by barbarism and a lower level of civilizational technology and capabilities.

But some of the stuff in the last 20 years, and I think we used them in a show we did a while back, some of the great histories written about this lately point out that another way of looking at this is that maybe the people in these areas that formerly were hooked up to the great Roman version of the Internet were...

being better served by what came afterwards. For example, some of these barbarians that took over didn't tax the locals to the same degree that the Romans did. And some of these barbarians that came later were able to better protect the locals than Rome had been near the end. So it's very possible that we're looking at this through our own lens and saying, my goodness, I wouldn't want to lose those wonderful baths and the wonderful aqueducts, but the people there might have made a different decision, might have felt very differently about

Absolutely. And I think that's where the cultural tradeoffs are interesting, because they really are going to run into a civilization that's clearly 100 percent superior to another by and by superior. I mean that any person that you put in at the proverbial crossroads saying you want to go to Path A or to Path B, they all say clearly A is better. In most cases, it's a mixed bag. In most cases, it really depends sometimes on the individual.

on your particular cultural makeup, on your priorities, on your own. That's why, I mean, when you think about it, the fact that, and this is something that Euro-Americans bemoaned to no end in the 1700s and 1800s. Sometime people were captured by certain native tribes in North America. They didn't want to go back when they had a chance to, quote unquote, be freed.

And that clearly mess with the whole set of assumptions that some Euro-Americans said, where the assumption was we are clearly superior in every possible way. And anybody who has a choice would want to be with us. And yet when your own people, once they spend some time in another culture, decide not to come back.

Well, that throws a wrench into all those assumptions. And again, I'm not trying to argue, I'm not trying to argue that one culture is better than the other in reverse by say, kind of having some noble savage kind of thing that clearly the native cultures were better. That's not what I'm saying at all. I mean, to me, like my favorite story in regards to this kind of tale is the story of Gonzalo Guerrero. Gonzalo Guerrero is one of them. And the other one is Jeronimo de Aguilar, where two Spaniards who shipwrecked

on the coast of Mexico in 1511, like 80 years before Cortes arrived. By the time Cortes arrives, the two Spaniards have been separated and they have been living in different Maya towns for a while. And Cortes and this man run into Jeronimo de Aguilar. And de Aguilar could not be any happier. He's like, I prayed every day that this would happen. I'm going to get to see Spain again. You know, he's

ecstatic to be able to be reunited with some Spaniards and to go back to Europe eventually. But he said, oh, we should go look for my friend Gonzalo. I haven't seen him in a few years, but I know he's in a village down the road. Let's go check up on him.

And they arrive and they find Gonzalo Guerrero covered in tribal tattoos from head to toe. He's married to a Maya woman. He has three kids with this woman. And when they tell him, he's like, oh, we are here to free you and bring you back to Spain. He's like, well, nice of you guys to show up. It was good seeing you, but I'm good here. You know, say hello to Spain for me because I...

And the point to me of this story that is beautiful is the role that individuals play in history, right? It's not like all Spaniards would have made the jump or all Spaniards would have been ecstatic to return to Europe. One person is and one person is not. And that's where it adds a layer of complexity to the stories that the oversimplistic version of one culture superior to another tend to gloss over all this stuff.

Well, and needless to say, the vast majority of let's just take North American natives, but this could apply elsewhere. The vast majority when shown, you know, the white man civilization didn't want that. They wanted to go back and live the way they traditionally had. They were happier that way. And as to your point earlier about, you know, if you measure this stuff by happiness rather than, you know, the amount of technology and whatever you have. I mean, there were very few Native Americans who saw white civilization said, give me some of that.

Yeah, exactly. Or maybe you want one aspect. It's like, hey, I like those sharp knives. I dig them. Or I like the fact that with the steel axe, I can cut down a tree and make a canoe in one day instead of a week. But that's it. I don't want everything else. I just want the sharp axe. You know, it's often a selective thing where it's like, yeah, I like ABC that you bring to the table, but I don't want everything else.

When I think of the archaeology, though, and you think about people saying something like, well, you shouldn't dig up those tombs, I always wonder about the what if. I try to examine a lot of problems that way and say, okay, can we really imagine people seeing all these tombs and saying, you know, we shouldn't break into that King Tutankhamen's tomb. It wouldn't be a good thing. There's a curse on it anyway. They wouldn't have wanted us to do it. So we're just going to leave it there.

I find it difficult to imagine human beings doing that, especially if we're not... So like if you said to ancient Egyptians who still practice the religion and whatever that you shouldn't do this, I can see them laying off. But once that religion's gone and the connection to that's over, I mean, we had tomb robbers raiding the vast majority of tombs, especially in Egypt, but all over the world, tomb robbers are raiding these things. So clearly they're not

deterred and they don't care one whit about, you know, what somebody would have felt about their grandmother being dug up. I wonder if there's a little bit like if it's a little like virginity, if the tomb is already raided by robbers in the past, does it matter if you're the second one who comes there anymore? Right. If the tomb is pristine, we don't want to destroy it. But when they've already gone in there, you know, thrown the mummy on the floor or broken open its chest cavity to try to take the scarabs out at that point, does it matter anymore?

Dan Carlin for you, virginity and grave robin. Obvious connection, that's right. A clear, obvious connection. I love that. No, and I think that's where things get really interesting because of who gets to make those choices. And is it even like one of the most fascinating archaeological discoveries of the last three decades or so to me has been the discovery of what sometimes is referred to as the Ice Maiden.

a Scythian mummy from, I think it was the 5th century before Common Era or so. So we're talking a really long time ago where she was dug up and she was so perfectly preserved that you could even see the tattoos on her skin. That's how good it was.

Interesting enough, by the way, the tattoos, there's plenty of people today who, because that discovery made the headlines and ended up in National Geographic and was all over, and because the tattoos are so beautiful, there are plenty of people today who have them tattooed on their skin today.

which in itself is weird. Can you imagine like some lady 2,500 years ago roaming the steps, she gets her tattoo done and some almost 3,000 years later, people to this day walk into a tattoo parlor with a copy of National Geographic and go, I want this.

That strip in itself. But, you know, this was a fantastic discovery. It was beautiful. Oh, sorry, I should nerd out on one more detail on the tattoos. If you pose the image toward the end of Kill Bill 2, that whole one of the tattoos that this lady had on her skin is painted on a wall in one of the houses in Kill Bill 2. So, you know, you see these...

But aside from me geeking out on this stuff, what's fascinating is that they found this woman. They were able to tell so much about who she was, her life, the culture that she came from. There were all sorts of goods that had been placed in the grave with her that give us a snapshot of what Scythian culture was like 2,500 years ago.

But of course, there's also the other side of it. The local population today were like, hey, we don't want Russian archaeologists to come in and take our ancestors. Now, Russian archaeologists come back and say, well, about that being your ancestor, not so sure because we ran the DNA and she's way more European than she's Asian.

And then the guys from the local population start contesting the DNA results and argue that the DNA shows a much more complicated picture, which was maybe was through. No, it's because people were rarely belong to a single ethnicity back then. There was so much movement back and forth. You know, it gets into this into this fight that has much more to do with modern politics and sense of nationhood and sense of people wanting to

who this lady was twenty five hundred years ago and their relationship to today gets to be the literal truth of it get to be swept under the rug in the name of all the political conflicts that a discovery like these raises

And I find it fascinating to see how people negotiate them, because in some cases they negotiate them very well. You know, in some cases, the local population and archaeologists make a deal. They find a point of agreement. They feel like, you know, the ideal scenario is where archaeologists say, OK, we're going to work on this for 10 years. We're going to discover everything we can. And then we're going to return the remains to you and you rebury them however you want.

And in some cases, they shake hands and do that because they each see a legitimate claim on the other side. And in some cases, they don't. And they go at each other's throat with, hey, we need to know it for science versus the screw your science. This is our ancestor. You don't touch her. And again, I find myself.

switch in my opinion pretty much case to case depending on how long ago we are talking about as you are saying if you're talking about 150 years ago is a very different story than from 2000 years ago so how strong is the connection to the present and and all of that

Well, and you can't have any sacred cows, right? You can't say we can dig up your ancestors, but no one can dig up ours. If it's OK to dig up somebody else's ancestors, we need to be prepared for somebody who want to dig up George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and all those guys, too. Right. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Absolutely. You know, in that sense, you cannot if you lay down a ground rule of what's acceptable and what's not, that absolutely applies to everybody.

And you bring up Scythians, so I can't let that go because you know how much I love the Eurasian peoples of the steppe. And, you know, here in the United States, we're so attached to the issues involving Native Americans and graves and all those sorts of things that it's a known subject. But I don't think many in the United States especially, but maybe even in Western Europe specifically,

Also, I'm not sure they understand exactly how much there is buried on the Eurasian steppe. So there have been some good books that have come out lately. And it's funny how they often come out in clusters and you'll get a few good books on the same subject in quick succession. I have one called Empire of Horses by John Mann that came out recently.

Man is a historian who specializes in this particular area and period. And he talks about, because he visited and was visiting all of these various sites and their giant burial grounds in what's now places like Mongolia or Eastern Russia or Western China. And he talks about the sheer scale and scope of this. And I've been researching these people for years and it still caught me off guard. Listen to this quote from the book to give you an idea of

of not just the scope of this, but how long different peoples, waves of successor peoples were using the same places as sort of like giant hundreds and hundreds of square mile mortuaries. Mann writes, quote, "'The Scythians and many subgroups proved so successful that they built substantial kingdoms, recalled not by cities, but by the tombs of their leaders.'

How many tombs? No one knows. Certainly tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. They run from north of the Black Sea across present-day southern Russia and Kazakhstan into Mongolia and southern Siberia. To my eyes, they are like Braille, dots on the pages of history that reveal truth to those with the skill to read them.

Many were treasure chests of possessions, presumably to sustain the rich and powerful in the afterlife. So for centuries, they were literally gold mines for grave robbers, end quote. He then talks about another tomb area. And again, it boggles the mind. And a bunch of these tombs, by the way, freeze.

on the first frost. And so when archaeologists find these things, they're basically blocks of ice, which is why they've been able to find, as you pointed out, the skin of these people and the tattoos that were on them, textiles, the sacrificial animals. And I was blown away by one of the accounts of them thawing out one of these tombs and the sacrificial horses and sheep that had been put in the tombs started to rot and

And it was the smell was bothering the archaeologist. And you thought this is the smell of decaying animals that were killed, you know, 2300 years ago or something. Man writes this quote.

Scythian subgroups organized prodigious grave sites, often burying vast amounts of wealth. In southern Siberia, for instance, the Minyusinsk, I probably mispronounced that, Minyusinsk Hollow is prime pasture land, some 125 miles across. It and its surrounding territory have some 30,000 kurgans. These are these mounds where they erect over the tombs.

End quote.

So this is wild. We have just, like you said, maybe hundreds of thousands of these tombs. I know that in Russia, they've taken the bodies of something like at least a thousand of these peoples buried in these places back to Russia to study. So it's archaeology and let's just call it tomb excavation on a massive scale. But think about what they learn.

They learn a lot. And in fact, you know, when you look at something like the Ice Maiden or any of these burials, you discover so much. And part of me is extremely thankful for it.

On the other hand, you do understand the controversies that are swirling around this stuff. Because, for example, like today, and you made a good point about people being familiar with some stories in the U.S., perhaps. But when you talk about something happening in Siberia, probably most people don't know the details. And the thing that's interesting is that, you know, you look at the political map and you say, oh, that's Russia.

Yes and no. I mean, because the reality is that you're dealing in some cases with tribal people who have had a very contentious relationship with the Russian government for decades or even centuries.

You deal with the newly discovered sense of selfhood as a people that's clashing with Russian nationalism. So suddenly you discover a mummy there. And it's not just a scientific discovery. It's not like what you or I would say, oh, great, we got more information about the past.

That's like poking the hornet's nest of nationalism, of relationship between the state and particular ethnic groups. And since we don't live in that context, we probably barely are even aware of it. But to those people, that overrides the importance of the scientific discovery. You were talking to me a little bit about the famous Iceman. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, that was probably the one discovery that really turned the light on for me regarding the power of archaeology. Because this goes back to 1991, there was discovery at the border between Italy and Austria, where these, as glaciers were melting at the time, this one perfectly preserved mummified body popped up.

And, you know, there was a whole crazy series of coincidence that allow for it to be found and not to be destroyed. There were so many things that happened that day that been one day before or one day later, we would have never found this thing.

But the fact was, it was found. We found this body. They did, once they started studying it, they realized that it was over 5,000 years old. So you're talking about 3,000 years before Julius Caesar's, more than 2,000 years before the Olympic Games, several hundred years before the pyramids were even there.

And what we found was not only the man's body, but we found all the tools he was carrying with him. They started studying and based on the kind of stuff you were describing by studying his digestive tract, they were able to figure out the last few days of his life, which part of the mountain he was on.

He was probably way up in the mountain, went down into the valley, dropping several hundred feet to go to some village down there, went back up the mountain where he was murdered, where we found evidence that he was shot with an arrow.

by somebody who was clearly a skilled archer, because they could even figure out the trajectory of the arrow, how he was shot from down the mountain. They could figure out how many yards he was shot from. And then whoever shot him just walked up to him and bashed him in the head. So on one hand, it's trippy because we know so much about the guy.

how tall he was, how much did he weigh, how old he was, what he ate as his last meal, where he walked the last few days of his life. We found out even other crazy things. For example, he had all these tattoos that are some of the very first examples of tattoos that we find in the archaeological record. And then doing a study, they realized that all these tattoos, which are not cool,

cool, you know, images. They were dots and lines. So things like, why are you even doing this stuff? They realized almost every one of them was located in a spot where the guy was suffering from arthritis. So they started thinking, oh, this is some form of like ancient acupuncture before there was even an acupuncture.

And so there's all this stuff about like the medicine of it all and what. So, you know, we have all these incredible amount of details about the man's life and

And yet, of course, we're still teased by the mystery of who was he? Who killed him? Why? The people that he belonged to? Who were they? You know, we don't know the broader context and we probably never will. And yet we can know so much about that one little window in time of the last few days of his life, at least part of it.

And so I always found it fascinating because it's like reading a murder mystery in a way where it's adding pieces, it's adding pieces, and you start beginning to see the picture. But of course, since we don't have the benefit of a screenwriter and this is real science, you only get so far. And there are so much more. Well, and I think maybe we're focusing a little...

a little too much maybe on the tomb side of it because there's other things that maybe don't bring up the same level of controversy. So, for example, I was reading about how the new technology, it's called LIDAR, is impacting the study of ancient sites in places where jungle and rainforest tend to hide places

ruins and whatnot from the naked eye. So it's a lot easier, for example, to see the giant structures in a desert in ancient Egypt than it is in Central or South America where the foliage quickly covers this stuff. So for those who don't know, this LIDAR technology, I was reading about it. Basically what it does is it

sees through the vegetation so they can fly a plane over these areas and it exposes the structures underneath. And the amount of stuff they're finding is crazy. So I was reading a story online about how much it's doing. And the story says that before the LIDAR study that was recently done, archaeologists, biologists and historians had identified about 50 sites of importance in this one area in Central America in a decade.

Now it says there are more than 900 settlements that they've found that they couldn't even see without this technology and what it's doing. And this ties into the idea of how, you know, there's a benefit even to the native populations, uh,

to all of this. What it's doing is completely revising the sophistication level of some of these places like Central America. Some of these places they found by looking through the jungle are so large that the people that I was reading who wrote the story are saying that you have to reevaluate how these societies in Mesoamerica can

compared to what was going on in places like Europe or Western Asia or even China during the Middle Ages, because they're every bit they're equal and maybe even larger and more sophisticated than those. So this is a little bit about what the archaeologist who wrote my history of archaeology book was talking about. I mean, this sort of archaeology restores these places to their

to the place that they belong. I mean, for example, in Steving's book, he talks about the early excavations of some of these pyramids in Central America. And it's very similar to what we had in Sub-Saharan Africa, where in this era, the archaeologists were not willing to give the locals credit for building such sophisticated sites.

and tried to find all sorts of weird ways of explaining how it might have happened not involving the people in the area. And of course, they failed to do that. But for example, he talks about this.

Two gentlemen, by the way, John Lloyd Stevens and Frederick Catherwood, were discovering some of these temples in the late 1800s, I believe it was, in places like Mesoamerica. And they found, it says, as they began clearing some of the jungle growth, they uncovered stone steles and portions of pyramids even more wonderful than they had imagined. Stevens later described his thoughts at the moment. And this is from his diary, I think. He says, quote,

America, say historians, was peopled by savages. But savages never reared these structures. Savages never carved these stones. We asked the Indians who made them, and their dull answer was, who knows?

There were no associations connected with this place, none of those stirring recollections which hallow Rome, Athens, and the world's great mistress on the Egyptian plain, but architecture, sculpture, and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest.

Orators, warriors, and statesmen, beauty, ambition, and glory had lived and passed away, and none knew that such things had been or could tell of their past existence. Books, he writes, the records of knowledge, are silent on these themes.

End quote. We should point out, by the way, that one of the reasons they may be silent is because the early Christian priests often burned the records of the Maya and people like that when they found them early on. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's very funny. I can't believe you guys didn't preserve your history.

after he got burned and if you were found in possession of any of that, you yourself were probably burned on the public square. But yes, I can believe you didn't do it. It's

Yeah, that's it's a tiny bit tone deaf to say the least. But you can see the tradeoffs here for archaeology, even for some of the people whose sacred sites may be desecrated. It's part of restoring them to their proper place. I mean, it is a question of tradeoffs, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And ultimately, you know, from a scientific standpoint, all knowledge is good knowledge in that regard. Anything that we can discover helps.

Clearly, one needs to be aware of the modern day controversy that one steps into with some of these things. But ultimately,

History is history, right? So there is no such thing as bad information about the past as long as it's accurate and you do your best to cater to just not step on people's sensibility by digging the proverbial grandma. You know, you just make deals, you try to convey the importance of these and ultimately becomes, you know, there's a PR job involved in this. There's a convincing people that what you're doing is valuable, that when the information that you dig up is useful to them first and foremost and

And so you would want people to participate. Like, for example, there's one guy that I always, I love this guy. I did an episode about him at one point, Joe Medicine Crow. He was the last man of the Crow tribe to ever become a war chief for the tribe by performing

Four deeds that you're supposed to be able to perform to be considered a war chief for the Crows, but he did it during World War II. And one of them even included stealing horses from the enemy at the time when he went into this French farm and was able to take a bunch of horses that the Nazis were using.

In any case, Joe Madison Crowe's story is fantastic in itself. He has a clip in a Ken Burns documentary where you can hear him talking about his experience at war. It was awesome. But okay, that was a tangent. Back to the point, Joe Madison Crowe also had a master's degree in anthropology and was well on his way of getting his PhD from USC when World War II broke out.

And afterwards, after he came back from World War II, he became a tribal historian, both very well steeped in his tribe's tradition and history from purely the native oral history side, as well as having a foot in understanding archaeology, the advantages and the problems that comes with archaeology, and that way being able to negotiate between two different worldviews.

And I think that's essential. Anytime you're talking about, you know, if you're not talking about thousands upon thousands of years ago where nobody has a claim, where you're talking about things that are more recent, then I think it's very important to create those bridges.

Well, and as we said, there's maybe a difference if you don't have ancestors' bodies and tombs involved. I mean, I was reading a story the other day about something that I was completely ignorant about, by the way, known as the desert kite traps. And this is something from prehistory, but apparently there's like 6,000 of these things, and they didn't discover any of them until flight was invented because you can only see them from the air. But what they are are these sometimes mysterious

massive traps designed to corner animals that you drive into the trap. And then at the very end of the trap, I guess there are these killing pits and you're able to then drive the animals into, it seems like a maze, but it doesn't curl around in circles and stuff as much. But once you get them into the entrance of this trap and keep driving them, there's no escape. And then they hit

the killing pit and all of a sudden everybody's eating for a long time afterwards. But it's one of these things where not only are these sophisticated things that people did not think people in prehistory could do, but the story I read the other day said that they think that they have found actual blueprints for these

the creation of these kite traps drawn to scale. And they did not think that prehistoric man was capable of drawing blueprints for structures that they eventually built to scale like that. So once again, we're learning more and more that our ancestors in the really deep, dark past could do more than we thought they could do. I mean, just take a look at all of the information starting to come out in Turkey at Gobleki Tepe, right?

Absolutely. That is one of those archaeological sites that has just blown away our understanding of the past. And it's still we are trying to come to terms with the implications of it, because traditionally what we have always believed was that hunting and gathering culture were relatively small. They involve small numbers of people and they could never mobilize the kind of manpower needed to build the monumental architecture.

And then we come up with Gobertil Tepe, which changes everything because either, like the current understanding is that this was built by hunting and gathering people, and yet is this extremely complex structure

I would say some people call it a temple because they believe it has a religious importance. There's all sorts of disagreements regarding what exactly it was, but there's no disagreement regarding the incredible complexity required to build on the scale that they did. And this flies in the face of everything we have ever assumed about hunters and gatherers, and it's really forcing us to rewrite things.

the history, our entire history in that regard. It also complicates things because all their layers at the site are more sophisticated than the more recent ones. And again, we are used to thinking that sophistication is a straight line where we go from simplicity to higher complexity, and that's not the case. The first artifacts are

And then they get progressively worse over time. And it's like, wait, why? How could these people build it if they were hunters and gatherers back then? Why did their ability to put stuff together seem to decrease over time? You know, it's really one of those discoveries that we're probably going to still trying to figure it out 100 years from now.

That was one of the concepts I remember reading in Stiebling's book that blew me away because it reminded me of my Statue of Liberty in the sand idea. He referred to it as a controversy in archaeology that's been solved now known as the unilinear concept, this idea that you move—and you alluded to this earlier—that you move from sort of barbarism to civilization and it's a one-way street.

And he pointed out he was talking about, and again, this is in your area of expertise, but he was talking about the North American mound builder culture. And for those who don't know, it's funny because it's a little, reminds me a little of the step peoples who build their Kurgans in Eurasia. But there were these mysterious mounds. And I think Thomas Jefferson, of all people, was one of the really early guys to sort of dig into it to try to figure out what it was. But when they did dig into it, it didn't help them very much because they...

there is still ongoing trying to figure out what these mound builders, whoever they may have been, were. And what Stebing says is that they've confirmed now that the people who built these mounds all over North America were

were more sophisticated than the people who came after them. And because of that, that unilinear concept, the idea that technology and growth and civilization and capacity always moves in a straight line, isn't true. And that it can sort of rise and fall, decline and fall kind of an idea the same way that, and I love this story because I used it to anchor our show on the Assyrians and

Judgment at Nineveh, but the great line from Xenophon. And for those who don't know, Xenophon was an ancient Greek general who fought in a Persian civil war. He's sort of the key leader in a story that when I was a kid, we all studied called the

the flight of the 10,000, right? The famous 10,000 Greeks who were able to march away from the battlefield all the way back home to Greece, harried by the Persian army the whole way. But in Xenophon's writing, he's writing about the various places that he and his troops come across during this flight from the Persians. And at one point, he stumbles upon what I always refer to as ghost cities, these cities that are literally sort of

turning to dust in the desert. And he doesn't know what they are. And they're grander than anything back in Greece. So you look at these things and you're thinking, OK, here's a city that was inhabited in the past that's more sophisticated than what we have right now. And

And he talked to the locals and said, do you know anything about who built these? And the locals didn't know. And Assyria had built them. But Assyria had only been gone about 200 years. And already they'd forgotten who they were. The cities are degenerating. And eventually, by the way, when they find those in more modern times, they look like Hissurlik, you know, that Schliemann had excavated with Troy. They look like the Kurgans. I mean, they turn to sort of mounds of

material that looked like natural hills almost. But when Xenophon found this, it became one of those examples of what I like to call the Statue of Liberty in the Sand moment from the Planet of the Apes, where all of a sudden you realize that there may have been a high watermark in civilization in the past that's higher than the level you currently are.

Yeah, that I remember when you first mentioned that story on an early episode of yours. I love that story so much. And I love the way you framed it, too, because I had read Xenophone and I read the same story, but it didn't quite stick in my mind the way you described it. After hearing it from you, I was like, oh, I need to dive back. So that was actually an inspiration. One of my very, very early episodes, I did a two-part series on the 10,000 and

and Xenophon, and he was directly inspired by you telling that story because it is an iconic moment, right? It is, you know, think about Xenophon. We're talking so far back in the past compared to us, and yet to him, 200 years before was just as far back in the past, if not more. I mean, we today know more about Xenophon than he did about 200 years before.

And it's, I don't know, it's one of those mind-blowing moments in ancient literature, for sure. Okay, let's move on to the ghost of archaeology future, right? So the idea of our maybe...

As yet to be discovered things. I mean, we so so we've gone from, you know, inventing tools like radiocarbon dating to the DNA technology to the isotope stuff, which I was reading Kat Jarman's book River Kings for the Viking show that we're doing. And I was shocked by what some of the isotope.

work does. I mean, you know, she was talking about Vikings that they found in places like Ireland and England, but they can do isotope work on them, which shows what they ate when they were children growing up. So they can say, well, this person may have been buried in England, but they came from Scandinavia originally, stuff like that, to the LIDAR technology that we just mentioned. I mean, they're only going to invent more things in the future that help us. So maybe we have a chance of finding some of our

you know, favorite things that we've been hoping for. And you know me personally, I've been hoping that they find Alexander. And for people that don't, yeah, I mean, is it that like, so for people that don't know, when Alexander the Great died, and he was in his early 30s, which of course blows people's

people away when you realize that. I love the story of, you know, whether it really happened or not, of Julius Caesar crying at Alexander's statue because Alexander had already conquered the known world and Julius Caesar was already older than Alexander was when Alexander died. But Alexander dies in Babylon

Nobody knows how. That's one of the great mysteries. Was he poisoned? Was it malaria? Was it? I mean, I even read one book that suggested it was West Nile virus from a mosquito. Another author had talked about the obvious alcoholism that he had. And maybe it was that another, of course, theory is that he was assassinated because everybody wanted him dead because he was turning into like Hitler in the bunker type things, killing everybody. But once he died,

His body became sort of a symbol of rulership and all of his various generals, which split his empire apart into multiple pieces, wanted to get their hands on the body. So I think that I'm going from memory here, but I think they mummified it in like honey or something so that it wouldn't deteriorate, build this giant sort of a caravan and a way to transport him back to Macedonia, Macedonia. And it was hijacked by one of his generals, Ptolemy,

Because, you know, whoever has the corpse is in possession is nine tenths of the law. Right. And Ptolemy takes it back to Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander, puts it on display in a giant place like a mausoleum. And it's on display for centuries. I mean, later Roman emperors would come and.

and view it. One supposedly knocked Alexander's nose off. Another supposedly stole his armor. But then it disappears from history and no one knows what happened to it. I remember when I was working at a news station in Los Angeles and I was just a kid compared to the producers and stuff there. But a producer found out I was into Alexander and lent me a book she had, you know, and it's

both one of the silliest books on Alexander I've ever read, but one of the most interesting because there's a lot of books on the search for Alexander. But this book was like they went and found a modern day psychic and had the psychic try to find Alexander. And so the book would mix like, you know, the latest information we know about where Alexander might be with the psychic stuff. And it was so fascinating. And so ever since I've just wondered where the heck is this honey thing?

preserved mummy that people looked at and were able to view for centuries after he died that's just disappeared. So for me, my favorite as-to-be-discovered thing is where the heck is the body of Alexander the Great? I can see why. That would be if it's with your interest and it's a powerful one.

For me, I think one of the things that fascinates me and frustrates me as somebody who loves history is the fact that what we know about human history is a tiny fraction compared to the time we have been on Earth.

And if I have to pick one thing, one place where I would love to see the spotlight shine a little clearer is what we would call prehistory. You know, the fact that depending on who you listen to, anywhere between 90 to 99% of the time, we have lived as small bands of hunters and gatherers with no writing, leaving behind very little because so much of what we used was made of perishable materials that don't preserve in the archaeological record.

So that would be something that whatever we can find, you know, because clearly we find less than from civilizations that have left behind massive buildings or things that tend to last in time.

But I would love to see something that allows us to reconstruct a little bit what life was like 10,000 years ago, 15,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, 50, you know, all of that. That would be if I have to pick if I have to limit myself to one thing and, you know, I get the genie who tells me you got one wish. That would be the area of history that I would like to know a whole lot more about.

Do you think anybody's ever going to dig up our ruins in the same way? I mean, I remember when I was doing one of the shows we did on nuclear weapons and I was reading, you know, accounts of some of these thinkers during the early nuclear period. They were talking about how one of these days after a nuclear war, when our society maybe returns to the way we were 15 or 20,000 years ago in terms of lifestyle and capability and capacity.

that somebody might eventually come back once civilization had risen up to the levels that it had previously been, right? When our own Xenophon walks by and sees the ruins of our civilization and our skyscrapers are bigger than anything he could imagine, will they one day be digging up our ruins? Does George Washington sleep in safety or are they going to be excavating his tomb one of these days? George Washington is screwed.

They are definitely excavating this tomb, but it's not even... But also, I think one of the big questions is the continuity or not. Because, of course, people are going to want to find out regardless. But whether you have a pretty good understanding of a culture because so much has been preserved and you just want to sort of dig the deeper layers, or whether we have lost so much. Because, again, things don't always...

one of the rules of life is that hardly anything lasts forever so if much of the knowledge we currently have about who we are today gets lost in two three hundred five hundred a thousand years you know you can lengthen the scale and of course the bigger the scale the easier it is for all that information to get lost then it would be interesting because you could have the the person who

as an archaeological being centuries from now, having perhaps as little as an idea of who we are today as we do with people 2,000 years ago.

And the Rosetta Stone of the future, if they want to unlock our writings, may have to have the source code for Microsoft Word written into it, right? Exactly. Because, you know, think about it. So much of what we have today is not material. You know, we don't leave a piece of paper behind. We don't leave something carved in stone. It's all in cyberspace, so to speak. So if you get rid of that,

Well, suddenly these guys didn't really write much. No, they did write a lot, just not in a way that you can access. My friend, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Thank you. Always a pleasure to have a chance to sit down and chat with you. Thank you so much for having me. So I did a speaking engagement, one of my rare speaking engagements at the end of January in Boston.

And at the end of the engagement, there was a meet and greet where I got the chance to meet the attendees and talk to them. And a gentleman came up to me afterwards, identified himself as a businessman and said, can I give you a friendly piece of advice? He said, now, I know you shared news about this event on social media beforehand, but I didn't hear about it. And I follow you.

He said, you need to find a way to be able to reach the people who like what you do directly when you have something that they would want to hear about. And he suggested we explore really an archaic, old-fashioned internet sort of technology, email newsletters. And I thought about this on my way home on the flight, and I was doing some research and trying to figure it out and what was involved and was it worth the trouble and all these kinds of things.

And when I sat down and discussed it with some friends, one of them said to me, well, why are you trying to reinvent the wheel here with some old internet newsletter technology when there are companies today that do this and it's easy peasy? It's all set up. It's ready to go. It takes very little effort. It's easier on the user end of things. Why don't you just sign up with something like Substack?

Now, for those of you who don't know about Substack, essentially part of what it does is what the old fashioned email newsletters do. So if you wanted to follow, for example, what we do, you would go to Substack. Essentially you give them your email address. There's no credit cards or anything like that. You're not paying for anything, at least not with us. And at least not right now. Um,

You give them your email address, and then any time we put out a notification, maybe a new show drops, maybe a new piece of merchandise becomes available, maybe I'm doing an appearance somewhere, you'll get an email about it. And the email will say whatever we type into the text box to say.

Now, Substack is set up mainly for writers to be able to make a living off their writing without having to be part of some giant firm, right? If you work for the newspaper before, but now you leave the newspaper, now you write on Substack, they have a setup, you know, you switch a button and you can charge for your stories.

Now, maybe we'll do something like that someday. But one of the great things about Substack is that you can set that up and still not charge anything for the email newsletter side of things, right? So if I want to tell you about our merchandise, that's always free. If someday we're putting out two articles a week and we want to charge for that, well, we can flip a button and charge for that. But the person who doesn't want to pay for that still gets the merchandise information or the new show drop information or the personal appearance information for free.

So we set up a Substack page. You can get to it off of our website. We linked to it. You can also just go to dancarlin.substack.com and sign up. And then anytime we have something to tell you, for example, a new show drops, we will put it in the Substack text box. It will go out to you and you'll get an email about it.

a direct connection between us and you. And maybe that way, the next time we have something we think you might like, you won't miss it.

So check it out, see what you think. And just a reminder, Daniele Bolelli's wonderful history show, History on Fire, now away from the paywall and available for free anywhere you normally get your podcasts. He also has a Substack account at substack.com forward slash at symbol Daniele Bolelli. That's D-A-N-I-E-L-E-B-O-L-E-L-L-I. But I hope you'll sign up for it. I actually have a couple of things planned.

I didn't think I was going to write articles and stuff because I didn't know that I had anything to say. But lo and behold, if you go there, I wrote a couple. So maybe I was wrong about that. And well, one of them has some stuff about me wargaming with some photos, teasing the audience there with some old photos. Another one has to do with pronunciations of the letter C in Latin and Greek, which is a little...

point of contention sometimes with the listeners. So maybe something worth checking out. I hope you'll sign up and become part of, you know, what the listeners have named the hardcore. DanCarlin.substack.com. Wrath of the Khans, Punic Nightmares, Apache Tears, and of course, Ghost of the Ostfront. Just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from DanCarlin.com.

Every true fan has heard these favorites. Hey, they make great gifts, too.