First of all, how does evolution work? Who were our ancestors, where did they live and when, and how did these populations adapt and branch into different species over time? This is part one of Anna's crash course on early humans, with a second installment coming to the premium feed soon!
Image: Skulls of various members of the genus Homo. Photo: Museum of Natural History, London
Read MoreThis week we venture off to Bronze Age Anatolia to pay a visit to the Land of Hatti, and snoop through the royal mailbags.
Image: Stone figures at the Lion Gate of Hattusa
Anna takes Amber through a short history of the blues, specifically as one of the many musical genres to come out of the African diaspora. We start by learning about the clave, which is both an instrument and a rhythm. Then, we wander through a little history, before Anna hauls out a guitar and tries to remember how scales work. What is a blue note? Was there really a deal with the devil at a crossroads? Is a hotdog without a bun just a hotdog? All this and more!
Image: Library of Congress catalog card for Levee Camp Holler recording by Alan Lomax
Anna whisks Amber along on a tour of Neolithic sites in the Orkney Isles, an archipelago off the coast of Scotland. Around 5,000 years ago, this place was a hub for new ideas. Come with us as we visit the houses at Skara Brae, the "hidden" Neolithic village that re-emerged in 1850 (CE).
Read MoreSpooktober 2023 reaches its climax with a special Halloween treat. Amber shares a series of spooky stories from her own childhood back in Appalachia, but not without exploring the many roles of folklore in societies-- all of 'em!
Read MoreHellhole, and welcome to The Dirt! Spooktober continues with an exploration of portals to the underworld. We're bringing you some unexpected sounds from Siberia, a couple of incredible caves, and the science behind sacrificial bulls dropping dead in ancient Rome. Plus, the Medieval European origin of the Hellmouth! Get your spelunking gear and maybe a comforting blanket or two as we journey to the underworld together.
Image: Saint Augustin, De Civitate Dei, traduit en français par Raoul de Presles (Livre I-X)
Source: gallica.bnf.fr
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Français 22912, fol. 2v.
Read MoreGet your eye of newt and toe of frog ready, because something witchy this way comes! Amber is traveling once more for work, and Anna is dealing with some health issues, so we are releasing this Deep Cuts episode from 2020 where Anna tells Amber some witchy stories around the Spooktober campfire. More new Spooktober content coming soon!
Image: The Wicked Witch of the East as pictured in The Tin Woodman of Oz—illustration by John R. Neill (1918)
Read MoreThis week, it's first of four lightly haunted topics with (!!!!) MINIMAL BUMMERS! We're talking about necromancy, the practice of communing with the dead via ritual. We explore a cave full of lamps and skulls, climb into a ghost pit, and flip through some Babylonian spellbooks. Let's ponder the OB together!
Read MoreIn this episode, we cover a few examples of ways that urban archaeology adds richness to our understanding of how people in cities lived. What is a city? And importantly, is "city" the goal? Tune in to learn more!
Image: Archaeologist working in a car park in Leicester, UK (Sue Hutton)
Wendell Phillips was a self-proclaimed archaeologist, adventurer, and founder of the American Foundation for the Study of Man. He was also a significant catalyst for the beginning of Arabian archaeology as a discipline in the 1950s. Most contemporary accounts of Phillips reduce him to a cartoonish, smooth-talking cowboy-wannabe buffoon who stumbled into oil concessions that made him a gajillionaire. But there's way more to Wendell Phillips than that.
Read MoreIt's five years in, pals, and we're finally talking about Göbekli Tepe, with our signature flavor of "hey what about the people that lived there, though?" We discuss the idea of the "Neolithic Revolution," the brainchild(e) of archaeologist V.G. Childe, and the pitfalls of flattening time into "ages."
Image: German Archaeological Institute, photo E. Kücük. - Dietrich L, Meister J, Dietrich O, Notroff J, Kiep J, Heeb J, et al. (2019)
Recorded around this time last year, when Anna was too hot and sweaty and dreaming of the ocean, this is a goofy look at some miscellaneous mariners' myths! Learn who Jenny Haniver is, and why Amber never wants to meet her. Brush up on your boating superstitions. Plus, hear about some of the fascinating/bonkers/incredible bonus material available for all new subscribers!
Image: A Jenny Haniver carving; Atlas Obscura
We're talking scams, frauds, fakers, and pretenders this week.
Anna just hauled a whole household halfway across the country and is still recovering. So Amber has stepped up with a super fun episode about some of the trickiest pretenders from history (ancient and modern). Tune into some Old Assyrian family drama, unwrap misleading mummies, discover a heroic art movement, and more!
Image: Paul Jordan Smith’s Exaltation or Yes, We Have No Bananas
Read MoreIf you don't like this episode, well, you can go kick rocks! Just... not these rocks, they're culturally significant. That's right, it's an episode about megaliths, monoliths, and other kinds of -liths that were placed on the landscape by humans. Y'all. There are so many big rocks. We spend some time thinking about cultural memory, heritage, and colonial dispossession of these monuments. We also cover the Stonhenge-ification of megalith sites, learn to tell a dolmen from an orthostat, and find some extremely cool desert kites (not the flying kind). So. Many. Big. Rocks.
Image: A “desert kite” in what is today Jordan.
The first of our Pass the Mic grantees joins us this week to talk about communities in New Mexico that have historically had a complex relationship with substance use, recovery, and the legal system. Danielle's work focuses on recovery efforts of the past 50 years as a way to understand the changing relationship between recovery science, medicine, and the power of a community to re-shape that relationship.
Read MoreThis week, Anna and Amber tackle the origins of fire use in the hominin archaeological record. We've taken a journalistic approach, so we've got What Fire, Where and When Fire, Why Fire, Who Fire, and How Fire. Plus, how do archaeologists look for evidence of fires that happened up to a million years ago?
Read MoreYou know that cold that made Amber's voice all froggy? Turns out it was COVID. And the flu. But she's on the mend! And to give her time to fully recuperate, we're releasing a portion of the most recent episode of Old News, one of our premium content shows! This batch of news stories includes some Neanderthal food, some African archaeology, some Horse Guy stuff, and more!
Read MoreThis week, Amber is recovering from a nasty cold that has left her normally dulcet tones extremely froggy. So we've made lemons out of that germy lemonade (ew, sorry). It's an episode about the archaeology, prehistory, and history of the common cold! Learn how to tell if a skeleton had the sniffles, figure out if there are ghosts in your colon, uncover the great Vitamin C scam, and more!
Read MoreHello and welcome to a new miniseries! We're doing something different this week while Amber is on a whirlwind tour of life admin stuff. In response to some of the conflict over Graham Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse show on Netflix, Anna has been thinking (and writing) about the double-edged sword of creating archaeology content online. Social media can be a useful tool, but it can also be...well, not great. So, we figured, why not cover two types of content in one!
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