Or Interesting Things We Thought About While Recording Our Episodes and Wrote Up as a Little Extra Treat for All our Fans.
Angeline Tubbs: The Witch of Saratoga
[Episode 20] When the British were defeated in the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, Angeline Tubbs was abandoned by the British officer she had followed to the United States. The story goes that she walked through the uninhabited wilderness to the base of a hill called Mount Vista a mile north of the village of Saratoga Spring. There she built a crude hut, where she lived with her many cats. She lived by trapping and telling fortunes, gaining a reputation as a witch: The Witch of Saratoga. Very little of her story, however, is actually true.
This is your brain on chocolate. It’s a good thing!
[Episode 17] In her Piece of Stuff this week, Ashley looked at a statue of a cocoa merchant from Aztec Mexico. Chocolate is of course a delicious, sweet treat and pick-me-up if you are feeling physically or emotionally a little down. But does chocolate have real superpowers besides being a yummy caffeine/sugar combo? Chocolate, specifically dark chocolate, seems to have been in and out of the media a lot in the last few years as it was being touted for having all kinds of health benefits. Maybe we are so jaded by too-good-to-be-true diet claims that it is easy dismiss those that show real data behind the hype. Chocolate, however, in its dark form of at least 85% cocoa solids does seem to have real benefits to your mood according to a slew of reports.
Ancient Robots: From Science Fiction to Science Fact in the Classical and Medieval World
[Episode 16] In her piece of stuff this week, Ashley discussed the Antikythera Mechanism, an Ancient Greek clockwork computer about the size of a carriage clock. It was able to compute the position of astral bodies at various times and work out the correct time to hold religious festivals like the Olympic Games. In the episode, we wondered why more mechanical devices like this had not been found, or even their parts.
Conspicuous Consumption (pun intended): Why the Victorians were so obsessed with dying and elaborate mourning?
[Episode 15] In her Piece of Stuff this week Tracey was talking about creepy little dolls, that were found buried in creepy little coffins, in a creepy make-shift sepulcher, in the creepy environs of Arthur’s Seat above Edinburgh. Many theories that have put forth over the years, but Tracey added a new one – creepy kids morbidly obsessed with death in the wake of a major pandemic of a new deadly disease: cholera. This Wednesday-of-the-Adam’s-family type child would not have been alone in her/his/their fixation on the funereal in this period, however, because Victorian society as a whole had a strange fascination with dying, death and the dead.
The Blessing of the Spider Grandmother
[Episode 14] In her piece of stuff this week, Ashley presented a ceremonial staff that had belonged to a court linguist of the Akan people, Asante group, that was topped with a depiction of the West African trickster god, Anansi, in a spider’s web. This put me in mind of an important arachnid figure in the religion and oral traditions of many Native American cultures: Spider Grandmother (or Spider woman). READ MORE →
Why Commit An Archaeological Hoax?
[Episode 13] In her Piece of Stuff this week, Tracey talked about the faked fossils that made up the Piltdown Man assemblage that were “discovered” by hoaxer Charles Dawson in 1912-13 and accepted as real by most of the academic archeological community until 1956. After this, the search for the culprit of the Piltdown hoax occupied the press periodically and at one point even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries was implicated. In 2016, Dawson was exposed as the culprit after years-long research by Isabelle de Groot (among others).
Why is Earl Grey Tea called Earl Grey?
[Episode 10] For her Piece of Stuff this week, Ashley showed us the world’s oldest surviving tea from the tomb og Emperor Jing Di, and we talked about various types of tea, including Earl Grey which is flavored with oil of bergamot. As Ashley was talking, I realized that I didn’t know what bergamot is, why Earl Grey is considered a “posh” tea, or who Earl Grey was and why he had a tea named after him. I had to investigate!
Angokwazhuk [Happy Jack]: Two Pieces of Cosmopolitan Iñupiaq Art in New York City.
[Episode 9] In her Piece of Stuff this week, Ashley was telling us about the diphtheria epidemic in Nome, Alaska, and the extraordinary dog-sledding feat that brought the anti-toxin to the cut-off city in 1925. The dog sledding team included several mushers, both white and indigenous, but only the white mushers were lauded in the press and the names of the indigenous mushers are either lost or extremely difficult to find (we both looked!). This put me in mind of some beautiful engraved Alaskan Native pieces in the Brooklyn Museum that I had photographed a couple of years ago.
A Wee Scotswoman in Transylvania: Emily Gerard’s Influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula
[Episode 8] For her Piece of Stuff this week Tracey talked about Vlad Draculea, aka Vlad the Impaler, whose name was the inspiration for the most famous vampire novel ever – Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. Stoker took the name, the reputation for evil, and not much else from the actual history of Vlad Draculea, so I was curious to know where he had found other inspiration for the blood-sucking count. As it turns out Stoker’s imagination was amply supplied with source material about gruesome details such as the bloodlust, garlic, and the stake through the heart by a Scotswoman named Emily Gerard. READ MORE →
The Arevakhach: An Ancient Armenian Symbol of Eternity
[Episode 7] In this week’s episode [episode 7], when I showed Ashley a pinwheel design painted on the ceiling of a cave in California, her first thought was of the Armenian eternity sign called the Arevakhach. The similarity is striking, but I knew nothing about the Arevakhach so I decided to look into it as the subject of this week’s blog. READ MORE →
One Glorious Tile at the Topkapi Palace
[Episode 5] In her “Piece of Stuff” section of this week’s podcast – Ancient Divination and Ottoman Whining and Pining, Asleigh talked the Harem at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and the slave to queen life of Roxelana aka Hürrem Sultan. Topkapi Palace was more than just the place that the Ottoman Sultan lived, it […] READ MORE →
Ever Wondered What Cleopatra Smelled Like?
[Episode 4] For her “Piece of Stuff” this week Ashley discussed a little perfumed bottle shaped like a monkey from Ancient Egypt, which got me to thinking about what type of perfume might have been in the bottle. This got me to thinking, […] READ MORE →
Saving the Cultural Treasures of Ukraine
[Episode 3] Tracey’s Piece of Stuff this week was a little piece of women’s jewelry from the period of the Great princes of Kievan Rus’ in the tenth to twelfth centuries. As the Mongol-Tartar armies advanced on Kiev (modern Kyiv) in 1240, the temple pendant (so-called because it was worn dangling near the temples) along with […] READ MORE →
Caveman Courtship: Why do we think cavemen beat cavewomen with a club and dragged her back to the cave by her hair?
[Episdoe 2] If someone were to say the phrase “Caveman Courtship” to you, chances are it might conjure up an image like the one above from a 1949 wedding invitation – a caveman clubbing a cavewoman over the head and dragging her back to his place. […] READ MORE →
[Episode 1] Possibly the nerdiest, only-made-me-laugh, visual gag ever – do I get an award or something? This will at least go on the list on possible future merch when our little podcast becomes wildly successful. Our cover art features the goddess Tyche, who came to represent the idea of chance or fortune in the ancient Mediterranean. […] READ MORE →