Episode 20: Witch Bottles and Obsidian Mirrors

In this first episode of Season two, we are gearing up to Halloween. In Stuff in the News this week Ashley talks about NYC Mayor Eric Adams taking bribes from Turkey to not acknowledge the Armenian Holocaust. While, Tracey’s Stuff in the News concerns mummies and skeletons, not the Halloween yard decorations, but actual Stone Age mummies and skeletons, and how researchers have been thinking about a system to name them other than dehumanizing numbers. In her piece of stuff this week Ashley’s discusses Witch bottles, probably the most numerous, or at least most recognizable and extant anti-witch devices usually from the Early Modern period, but the example she uses is from as late as the American Civil War in the nineteenth century. Tracey’s Piece of Stuff in an obsidian mirror from Aztec Mexico, used for divination or scrying, but also worn in ritual costumes, as well as being a facet of the god Tezcatlipoca, or the “Lord of Smoking Mirrors.” 

Episode 19: Kreepy Krampus and Two Non-Voodoo Dolls (Part Two)

In this episode, Tracey talks us through the science behind some of the new news about why olive oil is good for you and why ultra processed foods are bad for you. Ashley, meanwhile, tells us about the plight of Jerusalem’s ancient Armenian Christian quarter that is currently the subject of a seriously dodgy and illegal land grab. Tracey’s Piece of Stuff returns to the theme of figurines with nails coming out of them that are not voodoo dolls (Spoiler: Historic Voodoo dolls are a bit of a myth!). This time we are looking at a N’kisi power figurine from the Kongo people and how it ensured social order. To round out our Christmas 2023 offerings Ashley’s Piece of Stuff is a truly creepy greeting card featuring everyone’s favorite Xmas child-kidnapper, Krampus! [SHOW NOTES]

Episode 18: Thanksgiving Fiascoes and Two Non-Voodoo Dolls (Part One)

In this episode Ashley talks about the disgusting way that Citigroup was denying Armenian credit applicants based on their last names. In her Stuff in the News, Tracey talks about new research that suggests an early Jewish Temple in Egypt had priestesses who issued curses. We are exploring possibilities for a Citigroup Defixio (curse). Ashley’s Piece of Stuff is the creepiest Thanksgiving clown ever to terrorize the children of New York city just trying to innocently watch a parade, and a slew of other traumatizing stuff that Macy’s might have wished to avoid in their 97 years of parades. Tracey’s Piece of Stuff is a figure with pins sticking out of it – it’s not a voodoo doll, and along with next week’s figure with pins sticking out of it she’ll argue that (spoiler alert) voodoo dolls don’t really exist, at least not how the West has perceived them. [SHOW NOTES]

Episode 17: Eighth Century Sweet Treats and Mysterious Retreats

In this week’s Stuff in the News, Ashley discusses a new database of searchable information about medieval murders…go waste time. Right now! Tracey’s stuff in the news concerns the ongoing plight of the Uighurs in the Xinjiang province of China, where over a million of them are thought to be kept in prison camps making cheap manufactured goods for Western markets. Both of our pieces of stuff this week coincidentally ended up being from our bailiwick period – the eighth century. Ashley introduces us to an Aztec statue of a merchant holding a cocoa pod, and we talk about chocolate with a lot of glee and giggles. Tracey’s piece of stuff is a clay alien mothman door knocker, not really, but that’s what it looks like. It is from a very remote, very mysterious Siberian island, where a complex was built taking up almost the entirety of the island’s surface and immediately abandoned before occupation. The mystery is solved…but no spoilers here!

Episode 16: Clockwork Computers, Ice Age Americans and Big Foot

In this episode Tracey discusses a new sighting of Bigfoot in Colorado, why Sasquatch is interesting to a cultural historian and could such a creature possibly exist, while Ashley is shocked to discover that new entry requirements for Americans traveling abroad are close to what America has been doing to its own visitors. Tracey’s Piece of Stuff this week is a collection of ancient footprints in White Sands, New Mexico that date to the Last Glacial Maximum, 21k and 23k years ago. Ashley’s Piece of Stuff is the remarkable Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek computer for calculating the movement of stars and the dates of the Olympic Games.

Episode 15: Transatlantic Halloween: Coffin Dolls and Headless Horsemen

In this episode Tracey will terrify you all with her Stuff in News, that new footprint evidence that shows that those 10ft tall, 30 mph, huge beaked ‘terror birds’ had another deadly weapon in their arsenal – deadly sharp killer claws. Meanwhile, by our usual neat unplanned synchronicity, Ashley’s Stuff in the News reveals that experts have found that to animals in South Africa the sound of our voices are more terrifying than a lion’s roar. In our pieces of stuff this week we both explore the spooky early nineteenth century, Tracey discusses the mysterious coffin dolls found on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and adds her own unique take to the seven other explanations for them, which include a serial killer’s mementoes. Ashley spins off from a discussion of an 1685 Dutch Reformed church bell, in colonial Sleepy Hollow to explain how Washington Irving gave us not just a whole bunch of Halloween fun with his headless horseman and Ichabod Crane, but also established a lot of Christmas traditions, while serving as US ambassador to Spain and writing a biography of the Prophet Muhammad.

Episode 14: African Halloween: Spider Staff and Significant Skull

In this episode Ashley’s traditionally disturbing Stuff in the News concerns the billion-dollar international trade in monkey skulls and other bits of dead animals you can buy on ebay. Tracey’s traditionally earnest Stuff in the News focuses on a paradigm changing archaeological find from Africa – a nearly half-a-million-year-old, pre-homo sapien, wooden structure that has been unearthed in Zambia. Sticking with African artifacts, Ashley’s Piece of Stuff this week is a linguist’s staff of office from Ghana that prominently features a large spider –  the trickster Anansi. Tracey, meanwhile, continues her story of the Piltdown Man Hoax by interweaving the story of the discovery of a real skull from Africa, that of the Taung Child. While this was one of the most significant archaeological and scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, and could potentially  have challenged a lot of scientific racism, it was dismissed for decades because of the Piltdown Hoax.

Episode 13: Faking Fossils and Reading Livers

In this week’s episode Tracey talks about the Mexican Congressional Hearing into UFO’s and some pretty fake looking alien corpses, while Ashley tells us all about the upsurge of syphilis cases in Texas. Tracey’s piece of stuff this week continues the fakery theme with part of two episodes she will be doing on the infamous Piltdown Man hoax of a 500,000 year old hominid in Sussex. Ashley reveals a bronze object used for divination from sheep’s livers and reveals an unanticipated liver-centric world view in ancient times.

Episode 12: Pan-Mediterranean Mythos and Mummy Bees

In this episode Ashley talks about the news of the shrinking human brain and Tracey thinks about how we should warn people tens of thousands of years in the future about our buried nuclear waste (when we get around to burying it). Tracey’s Piece of Stuff is a Cypriot seal, only an inch high but tells a tall tale of a mythology shared around the Pan-Mediterranean world from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Ashley’s piece this week is the stuff of nightmare – 3,000 year old mummified bees.

Episode 11: A Totem Pole Theft with a Hint of Ancient Vanilla

In this week’s Stuff in the News Tracey talks about a potential future apocalypse if we don’t work out how to label our nuclear waste for 100,000 years and Ashley talks about an apocalypse past, and a cataclysm 930,00 years ago that brought humanity down to just 1,300 people. Tracey’s Piece of Stuff is a ‘living person’ totem pole stolen from indigenous people British Columbia in 1929 and bought by the Scots, and Ashley’s is ancient evidence for Vanilla in a place where vanilla really should not be.

Episode 10: A Spot of Tea and Silk from the Sea

In this episode’s Stuff in the News we talk about Eminem asking a certain GOP candidate not to use his music, and a five thousand year old dragon made of mussel shells that has just been discovered in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. Staying in China, Ashley’s Piece of Stuff this week, was actually five tiny pieces of stuff, tiny tea buds found in the tomb of the Jing Emperor, Liu Qi: the world’s oldest tea. Sticking with a mussels theme, Tracey discusses the history, mystery and miss-history of byssus – sea silk made from the beards of the pinna mussel.

Episode 9 Gained in Transit: A Desert Goddess and Arctic Doggy Heroes

In this week’s episode, Ashley shares news of the possible recovery of an ancient herb, long thought lost, called Silphion, which in its day was worth its weight in silver for culinary, medicinal, and abortifacient properties, and Tracey has a 3-for-1 special on art conservation news involving an organogel, a hydrogel and a scoundrel. Tracey’s Piece of Stuff is an aniconic/anthropomorphic goddess stele from the ancient caravan city of Petra, and why it is okay not to label her, and Ashley’s is a medal celebrating canine heroes who brought emergency human medicine hundreds of miles through the Alaskan ice and snow.

Episode Eight: Swaggering Samurai and Dracula’s Bloody Tears

In this episode, we discuss important stuff in the news such as a doggy surfing competition in California and a seventeenth-century child’s anti-vampire grave that has been discovered in Poland (no stereotypes there!). For her Piece of Stuff, Ashley closely examines a set of eighteenth-century Samurai armor and the accompanying helmet and reveals clues that indicate that it may have been used more for swaggering than for battle. Bad Lad Vlad, of impaling and inspiring Bram Stoker’s Dracula fame, is the subject of Tracey’s Piece of Stuff this week, as she takes probably too deep of a dive into what proteins left behind on a tax receipt by the fifteenth-century voivode of Wallachia can tells us about his health conditions, the hot mess that was Wallachian politics, and how Vlad got his reputation for cruelty.

Episode Seven: Snake Women, The Devil’s Trumpet and Disco Planet

In this episode Tracey talks about news of missing Icelandic skulls and Ashley is extraordinarily happy about a giant, space disco-ball. Tracey’s piece of stuff discusses the plant datura (or devil’s trumpet) and people trippin’ balls globally on it for recreational or religious purposes, while Ashley examines the transregional phenomena of snake deities being depicted as women. Strap in we are in for a bumpy ride!

Episode Six: Sicán Funerary Mask, Shang Ritual Owl and Another Kick-Ass Queen

In this episode Ashley shares the news of over-the-counter birth control in the US and Tracey responds to another dumbass – this time explaining why it is inappropriate to say the Jews survived in the Holocaust if they were useful. Ashley’s piece of stuff is a glorious Sicán funerary mask (a culture that precedes the Inca in Peru) and Tracey talks about a Shang period bronze owl-shaped ritual vessel used in ancestor worship and the extraordinary kick-ass queen/priestess/general who owned it.

Episode Five: Ancient Divining and Ottoman Whining and Pining (7/23/2023)

In this episode we talk about why we think it is wrong to teach children that slaves were able to parlay skills they were taught for their “personal benefit” “later in life,” and what is going on with Northern California’s plague of penis fish. Our pieces of stuff this week involve evidence of necromancy in Israel of the second to fourth century CE and evidence of genuine affection between an Ottoman Sultan and his slave/concubine and the difficulties she overcame to become the most important woman in the empire.

Episode Four: Perfumed Monkeys and Masked Madams (7/18/2023)

In this episode we talk about why we think it is wrong to teach children that slaves were able to parlay skills they were taught for their “personal benefit” “later in life,” and what is going on with Northern California’s plague of penis fish. Our pieces of stuff this week involve evidence of necromancy in Israel of the second to fourth century CE and evidence of genuine affection between an Ottoman Sultan and his slave/concubine and the difficulties she overcame to become the most important woman in the empire.

Episode Three: A Man’s Best Friend and A Ukrainian Woman’s Revenge (7/11/2023)

In this episode we discuss medieval criminal surnames, how to deal with nuclear materials for the continued history of our planet, jewelry and a kick-ass queen from medieval Ukraine, that not all bird women are bad, and the origins of domesticated dogs.

Episode Two: Prehistoric Pee Pee and Pinot (7/4/2023)

In this episode Ashley Bozian and Tracey Cooper delve into whether or not cut marks on prehistoric bone are evidence of cannibalism, explode the myth of man the hunter and woman the gatherer, explore the earliest known winery and think long and hard about the earliest (42,000-yearr-old) anatomically accurate penis pendant.

Episode One: Chess and Cleanliness (6/27/2023)

In episode number one Ashley discusses the history of a common bathroom item and Tracey discusses the trade networks behind the discovery of hoard of medieval gaming pieces.

Picture Credit: National Museum of Scotland, shared on Wikicommons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NMSLewisChessmen21.jpg.

Picture Credit for soap and shell image for link on main page Malene Thyssen https://wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Handmade_soap.jpg

Show notes with full citations of all our sources and a few corrections, additional explanations and missing citations can be accessed by clicking on the little info “i” above.