Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past — a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. I’m Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist, and your host.

In this episode, I’m speaking with Rachel from Inside Archaeology, which is a YouTube channel with a dedicated monthly segment reporting on the latest archaeological discoveries from around the world. Rachel’s training includes degrees in Near Eastern and Classical Archaeology, as well as Human Osteoarchaeology. She brings her range of expertise to the stories she shares online.

In this conversation, we explore some finds that deserve more attention. From self-healing Roman concrete to surprising insights from ancient burials. We also talk about how stories about the past get told, and what makes a discovery especially captivating.

 So with all the discoveries that you track every month, what’s one from the past few years that you think really deserves more attention?

Rachel (Inside Archaeology):  So, it’s a pretty common refrain in archaeological circles that Roman concrete is like the be all, end all. What’s the secret to Roman concrete? It’s lasted for so long. It seems to be self-healing. But we haven’t been able to figure out exactly what it is. There was theories that some of it was to do with some of, like, the volcanic ash that was mixed into it. But nobody had been really able to figure out how to reproduce it, exactly. And there were no records of the recipe or anything. 

And so, there was some people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a few years ago that did a study and discovered that it’s not actually this volcanic ash that makes it special and self-healing. It’s these things called “lime clasts.” And they come from the process of making, like, the lime for the concrete. And they are, they have been overlooked the whole time as, like inclusions, and they felt that they were just because of maybe a less refined process for making the concrete. But actually when they did this experiment, they found that these clasts, they would show up in the concrete, and then when there were cracks, the cracks would tend to run through them. And then you’d get water running through those cracks, which would dissolve the lime and transform it into calcite, which would essentially heal the crack. It would heal the concrete. It’s self-healing concrete, which is massive. Like that, the implications of that is, is huge. 

And one of the things that always makes it stick into my mind is because in my day job, I work for an environmental consultancy that does a lot of sustainability and stuff like that. And one of the biggest pollutants, nowadays, is concrete, the making of concrete. It holds a lot of carbon. It’s not very good for the environment. Whereas this Roman stuff, the potential for being able to implement that use into modern day is huge. It would potentially mean we could create a slightly more sustainable kind of concrete, which could have a lot of really good implications. So, that’s one that I always come back to because I haven’t heard of any follow up on whether or not it’s being implemented, but I think that would be really cool if it did. It’s one of those questions that’s been unsolved for a really long time and it looks like they’ve solved it.

Rachel’s Roman Concrete Video

Smiti: That’s really interesting. I’m curious, is there a discovery in the last couple years that you feel has really sparked public imagination in terms of what it could be?

Rachel (Inside Archaeology):  Oh, well, there’s one that I featured recently that, it was just this past January. It is the Octagon Tomb in Ephesus. The Octagon tomb, it’s in the site of Ephesus in on the coast of Western Anatolia, Turkey, and Ephesus was a really important city in its heyday, and this tomb is really unusual in its design. The fact that it’s octagonal. And for a long time people had been saying that that octagonal-ness of it, was an imitation of the Pharos Lighthouse from Alexandria. 

And one of the things that Ephesus is famous for is that it was the place where Arsinoe IV, Cleopatra’s, that Cleopatra’s sister, was exiled there after she was defeated. Because she and one of their other brothers tried to unseat Cleopatra and were famously defeated by her and Julius Caesar. The brother was killed. Arsinoe was paraded in a triumph in Rome, and then sent to Ephesus in exile where she presumably died. So, this tomb was originally opened a long time ago. It’s not intact. And there was a sarcophagus found inside and there was some bones in it. And the initial person who looked into it concluded that they were of a 14 to 15-year-old girl. And so, for a long time people have thought, okay, these are the bones of Arsinoe. So, the person who excavated them, he just took the bones and then he retired, slash, passed away. And they just ended up in their storage space. And they were just like sitting there for ages. 

And so, what prompted the new research was that someone was writing a book on Ephesus and they were asking the university if they still had the bones. They did. So they did a proper, really detailed morphological analysis. And then they also did a bunch of ancient DNA analysis and they found that it’s actually not Arsinoe. It is a adolescent boy that was buried in this tomb. And he had some kind of we think, like, debilitating congenital disease as well. They’re not sure exactly which one it was. And part of why this is really interesting as well is because we don’t know who it is. They had done ancestry research that showed that he is closely related to Sardinia, so Italian. So, it was a Roman city at the time, which makes sense that he has Roman ancestry. 

But my comments were full of people saying, oh my gosh, it’s Caesarion, who is Cleopatra and Julius Caesar’s son. Or they were thinking that, oh, it’s not Arsinoe but maybe it’s one of Cleopatra’s sons or brothers. And that was something that I didn’t think to ask the researcher when we had our interview because it didn’t really occur to me. 

But, retrospectively, that’s not possible. But it has captured a lot of people’s imagination. It’s not possible because in the ancestry DNA analysis, they looked for signs of inbreeding and there were none. And Cleopatra’s family before Cleopatra, pretty inbred. Even though her son was not inbred those markers wouldn’t have just, like, disappeared in a generation. Additionally, as well her side of the ancestry would’ve also shown some ancestry probably around Greece and that didn’t show up. So it’s a Roman boy. But yeah, that captured a lot of people’s imagination there. A lot of people were just like, oh my gosh, what if it’s someone else who’s related to Cleopatra. I so would have wanted that to be true because being able to establish a relative would’ve been really useful. So unfortunately enough it’s not, but it would’ve been nice.

Rachel’s Video on the Tomb at Ephesus

Smiti: That makes sense. And I do appreciate your segment where you are reporting monthly on new archaeological discoveries. And one part of your segment that I really appreciate is the interviews you have with people who might be related to the project or the discovery that you are talking about. Has there been an interview that has especially stuck with you?

Rachel (Inside Archaeology):  So, an interview that really stuck with me that I always come back to and think about is one that I did on the Maya Child sacrifices at Chichén Itzá. This was interviewing two people from their project team, the lead researcher, Rodrigo Barquera, and Christina Warinner, who is an archaeogeneticist. And they did an analysis of some child sacrificial bones from a chultún, which is an underground cistern near the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá, which had been found in the 1960s. The Maya did do human sacrifice. And they found in 1967 an array of children’s bones inside of it, presumably who were sacrificed. And they weren’t able to do a lot of osteological analysis on them, in terms of sex. They were able to determine that they were children. 

But the thing about determining sex of a skeleton just by visual analysis, which is what we’ve been doing for a very long time, is the younger somebody is, the less sexually dimorphic their bones are. So, children just don’t have those markers that we look for until they reach puberty. And so these children didn’t have those markers, so they couldn’t really infer anything about that. 

But there’s also this really prevalent idea about the Mayans that they like to sacrifice, like young virginal girls. This was something that the researchers mentioned when I interviewed them. This prevalent myth about them. So they went back and they were doing a DNA analysis of these bones and so they analyzed 64 individuals. It wasn’t everyone in the cave because not all of them were well preserved enough to be able to yield DNA for the study. But of all the 64 that were analyzed, they were all male. They were all children. And within the sample, they found two sets of identical twins and then a bunch of other sets of closely related males. So either brothers or cousins. And that was, it’s like unprecedented. Never found anything like that before. 

So, what they think that this might relate to is rituals and sacrifices involving the Maya hero twins, which is a very long and complicated story.  It’s most well known from a text called the Popol Vuh. In the Popol Vuh there’s a set of twins that descend into the underworld and lose a ball game against the underworld gods. They are then sacrificed. One of their heads is put into a tree, and then it impregnates a maiden. She gives birth to a second set of twins, who are the hero twins, and then they go on a variety of adventures to avenge their father slash and uncle. So, they think that this potential sacrifice of closely related males is probably related to this myth, which is the first time again they’ve ever seen any of that, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. You can read the article for free online if you’d like, but speaking to the researchers it just always sticks in my mind that one. Because it, it has literally, like, changed history in terms of what we know about Maya and their sacrifices.

Rachel’s Video on Mayan Burials

Smiti: Thank you for sharing that. And it just made me think about how some of these archaeological discoveries, even if they happen hundreds or thousands of years ago, that they still resonate with us today. And I was wondering, has there been a recent discovery that has made you really think about some aspect of our present, or I should say rethink an aspect of our current present?

Rachel (Inside Archaeology):  Well, one of the, the big topics that you know goes on at the moment is surrounding gender. There is more and more stuff coming out of the ground that just proves that gender was more fluid than we previously thought that it was in the past. 

So, there’s a case on the Isles of Scilly. It’s just off Cornwall in the UK. They found a 2000-year-old grave that had a mix of grave goods with male and female associations. So, it was buried with a shield and sword, but then also a broach and a bronze mirror. So, those are each, usually for that period, assigned and found in graves of specific genders. But here they were found together. It was really unusual and they couldn’t really do an analysis on the bones because they just weren’t in good enough condition to do it through the traditional osteological methods. And even, stuff like ADNA where you can take a sample from a thigh like the, I think the bones were almost disintegrated. But in these cases, oftentimes, the last bone to disappear or into the soil or to disintegrate is your teeth. Your teeth preserve really, really well in the soil. And there’s a new type of analysis that’s being pioneered at the moment that looks at your dental enamel peptides. They applied this new technique to the teeth, which I think were basically all that was left of this burial. And they found that the burial was female, which has a lot of implications of, like, what does it tell us about female warriors from 2000 years ago? It was a period in this area that was high conflict. 

There was another one that came out at about the same time from Spain where there was a tomb that had been found a while back that have had tons of really high status items, including, a rock crystal dagger, ostrich eggs, and ivory finds. It was very incredibly rich, and again, the bones weren’t in very good condition, but due to the high status of the items and everything, they assumed that the occupant was male. And it was called the “Ivory Man.” And then they applied this dental enamel peptide analysis to the same bones, and they found that it’s actually a woman or female.  Which again, it just completely rewrites the history of this particular find.

Rachel’s Video on the Burials 

Smiti:  So, so far in 2025, has there been a discovery that you wish got a bit more mainstream love?

Rachel (Inside Archaeology):  So, one that I think should get a bit more credit. Is the discovery of the remains of a waka, which is an ocean-going canoe from the Chatham Islands. They’re very far away from New Zealand, but they’re administered by New Zealand. They’re in the middle of the Pacific. 

And there was a father and his son walking around and they found some wood that they picked up and then later realized was carved. And they’ve now uncovered the remains of this ocean-going canoe, which had been, I think ritually shattered and broken up, in the remains of this creek in the Chatham Islands. 

And it’s unprecedented. They’ve never found anything to that scale of preservation, that much of it. I think there’s also potentially a link to some local stories of like local indigenous stories that might mean they can actually identify the actual canoe or who owned it. So, it’s not, they’re not sure entirely how old it was yet, but they’re doing the radiocarbon analysis and that is just a, a really cool one. And I had a lot of comments from people saying that that was their favorite discovery of the month slash that they were really excited to see that in the news because it’s just not really being covered anywhere else.

Rachel’s Video on the Waka

Smiti: Has there been a recent discovery that’s made you go down a research rabbit hole? Like you couldn’t help yourself, you were just so curious about it.

Rachel (Inside Archaeology): So you might have seen the claims of some guys that they found a bunch of stuff underneath the Pyramid of Khafre recently. Yeah. Using a allegedly new technique of radar or a new application of radar software and artificial intelligence.  The archaeological community at large wasn’t necessarily taking it seriously and why? It’s kind of a suspect discovery. 

But I wasn’t going into too much detail. Partially because there wasn’t a lot of detail at the time when I wrote the video that was out about it. Ironically, I couldn’t do it as thoroughly as I might have liked because they haven’t officially published a paper on their new claims so that you can’t actually look at it in detail. They’ve just presented it in a four hour conference that, at best, is quite vague. So you just have to go off of what they said. And they do have a paper from 2022 where they applied this same technique to the Great Pyramid of Khufu and claimed to have found a bunch of internal structures in it as well that are currently undiscovered. 

The radar technique as far as I can see from what other people who are more experienced in it are saying is well, it’s not been proven. It’s never been used by anybody except this team. And it’s not been independently verified. Everywhere that they’ve tried to use it is either places that they conveniently aren’t going to get permission to excavate or, it’s for a completely different purpose on a different type of structure. Or they already know what they’re looking for. 

And radar data is incredibly easy to misinterpret and to, to like see what you want to see in the data. So, what they really should have done is gone somewhere that’s having archaeological work done and done their scans and then tried to see if what they think they see in their scans matches what actually gets found in the ground. So, they’re not going in with a preconceived notion of what they’re going to find. Yeah. So, that one kept me up for quite a while and captured  my attention until I could write the video, get it all out of my system, and then I’m not gonna think about it again until they release a paper that’s peer reviewed.

Rachel’s Khafre Video

Smiti:  So, from my experience with archaeological field work and research, it takes time and even if you have an initial discovery, there’s a lot of follow-up work. So, is there a recent discovery that you’re really excited to see the progress of?

Rachel (Inside Archaeology): I  am following a few stories quite closely, to see if there’s any follow up. And I always say to all the people that I interview a lot of the time: let me know when there’s an update. 

I did the interview with the team who found a mass Roman war grave of 150 individuals. And they’ve finished the excavation, but they’re just now doing osteological analysis and they’re gonna try and do, like, stable isotope and everything. And so, once that is finished, I’m really excited to see what their analysis is going to reveal about these individuals. You know, were they Roman, were they local? Where did they come from? What was their diet like? Apparently there’s a lot of interpersonal violence, injuries, not entirely surprising. That’s one that I’m really looking forward to. 

Rachel’s Roman War Grave Video

Smiti:  So, what do you hope people take away when they hear these stories of discoveries that might not get as much attention?

Rachel (Inside Archaeology):  What I want people to take away a lot of the time is archaeology is alive and kicking. It is happening all over the world. It is happening all the time. And it’s not just really famous sites that are getting work done. It’s the tiny little sites. It’s the commercial sites that are getting done in advance of construction. It’s people going back to old collections or working on material that’s been studied before. 

And that stuff still has things to tell us. And I think that’s sometimes a popular misconception that people have, that we found everything important that there is to find. That’s certainly not the case, and there’s no way we can even know that. So, there’s also lots of room for everybody to come and be involved and learn about it and connect with it. So, yeah, that’s what I want people to take away.

One of the biggest takeaways from this conversation is that archaeological discoveries aren’t just about what’s found. They’re about how we interpret, question, and share those finds with others.

If you’d like to learn more about Rachel’s work, you can check out her YouTube channel, Inside Archaeology. You’ll find the link in the show notes, along with a link to a full transcript of this episode.

And if you’re curious to dig deeper and learn how Rachel goes about finding her stories, she shares that and more in a Patreon-exclusive video. Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our extra content. If you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too.

Thanks so much for listening, and for cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Rachel: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

Brooke Norton: Production Support

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Thank you to our paid Patreon members for supporting the creation of this episode:

Nancy Fulton, James D., Giancarlo Annese, Thomas Martin, Stuart A. Griffin

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