0:40

Hello, this is

0:43

let's talk about myths, baby, and

0:45

I am your myth obsessed nerd

0:48

host who is sort of out

0:50

of place right now in this distinctly historic

0:54

series of episodes, and of course

0:56

I've managed to make it as mythological

0:58

as possible all the same.

1:00

But as we get further and further

1:02

into this collapse of the

1:05

Bronze Age and all of its many

1:07

causes, all the little things that

1:09

went into this collapse of the elite

1:12

power structures, oh

1:14

it's utterly fascinating. Oh my god. So today's

1:17

episode is with another returning guest,

1:19

doctor Flint Dibble, who talked

1:21

to me about Atlantis last

1:24

year the year before What is time and

1:26

Flint came back to talk about this Bronze

1:28

Age collapse and how it relates to what he studies,

1:30

which is like animal bones

1:33

and like eating via. Like

1:35

it's fascinating, fascinating stuff s type

1:37

of archaeology that I just didn't even think

1:39

about until I learned, Like, of course it's a thing, and

1:42

we can learn so much from animal

1:44

bones in terms of like how they

1:46

sacrifice the animals, how they ate

1:48

them, what they prioritize, like all of these

1:50

different things, and also the climate

1:53

as it aligns with food completely

1:55

fascinating. We have such a great

1:57

conversation coming, and I just have to

1:59

say, the biggest joy that has come out of this

2:02

Bronze Age collapse episodes

2:04

like the whole series is my

2:06

realization that I

2:08

knew about the collapse for sure, I did

2:11

not know how much climate change came

2:13

into play with it, and how much

2:16

these experts on this stuff are

2:19

just so so aware of

2:22

the modern ramifications like I just

2:24

yet, I didn't expect it to be like a very very

2:28

forceful wake up call in terms

2:30

of climate change. So stay

2:33

tuned for that. And without

2:35

any further ado from me, let's

2:37

listen to how food can

2:40

tell us so much

2:42

about the collapse of the Bronze

2:44

Age

3:00

conversations. The evidence

3:03

is in the thigh bone climate and

3:05

collapse in the Bronze Age with doctor

3:07

Flint Dibble. So,

3:23

I mean, I'm very excited for this. Climate

3:25

change is like my obsession in the modern

3:27

world. So I like to hear about like

3:29

you know, I mean, I know it's obviously a very different climate

3:32

change, but the

3:34

Bronze Age and the food ways and all

3:36

of the different things that that you know, affected

3:39

that whole time. Period is utterly fascinating.

3:42

So do you want to just give me like a kind of overview of what

3:45

what that means, like you just food wats broadly

3:47

or what you know, what you study regarding this.

3:50

Yeah, so I specifically study

3:52

ancient animal remains. So

3:54

I look at sort of the bones and the teeth

3:56

from sheep and goats mostly, but

3:59

also some cattle, pigs, dogs, you know,

4:01

all range horses, donkeys.

4:04

That's kind of wild to me.

4:05

Specific I don't actually study

4:08

too many why out animals a few, but I

4:10

focus on larger mammals, and then I

4:12

work with people that focus on fish and birds

4:14

and really tiny mammals. Though

4:16

I will study deer and hair.

4:19

I'm really interested in hair, but that doesn't

4:21

have anything to do with the Bronze age. But so I study ancient

4:23

animals and what

4:25

that lets you put together, and in particular,

4:27

since I look at mostly domesticated animals

4:30

is kind of the agricultural economy, right,

4:32

that's the kind of evidence that we get out

4:34

of this food waves in a sense, how do people

4:37

produce these animals in terms of manage

4:39

them? Did they move them around the landscape,

4:41

what were the animals eating? How large

4:43

were the herds even and

4:46

so that's the underpinning, of course of

4:48

economies in the Bronze Age and the Iron

4:51

Ages, agriculture and animal husbandry.

4:53

We all think about monuments and architecture

4:55

and gold masks and stuff like that,

4:58

but that's just sort of luxury stuff that's

5:00

on the side. The reason the elites are wealthy

5:02

is because they own so much land, right,

5:05

and so this is what underpins the

5:07

entire sort of palace economy in the Bronze

5:09

Age. It's what underpins the economy and the

5:11

Iron Age, I mean into down through

5:13

the Roman period, the Medieval period until really

5:16

the Industrial Revolution. That's the underpinning

5:18

of all human wealth and

5:21

power and structure around

5:23

which societies manage themselves.

5:27

So yeah, so that's that what by studying

5:29

animals and food that gives you an

5:32

inn, let's say, to tackle

5:34

a lot of different questions, so from

5:37

economy but also sort of ritual

5:39

So the ritual feasting you could think of this

5:41

is how elites bring people together is

5:44

to eat, right. I mean, I don't know if anyone

5:47

listening to their students, but you know how you

5:49

get food at a party or drinks.

5:51

That's one of the huge draws. Even after

5:54

a lecture, if it's a good

5:56

lecture series, you'll have some little like wine

5:58

and cheese or something like that. And so

6:00

food is what brings people together, whether it's

6:03

a holiday or whether it's just a family meal

6:05

or whatnot. And so therefore

6:08

food lets you look at things like religion

6:10

or everyday

6:12

life at home, but also

6:15

not just the production of food. You can think about

6:17

the distribution of food. These animals

6:19

go to butchers who then butcher it up, which

6:21

then either gets sold or given away

6:23

at a festival or something like that, and then it's cooked

6:25

in different ways until it ends up on

6:28

somebody's plate who eats it, and then the bone

6:30

gets tossed in the midden. And

6:32

then I look at those bones and try to work

6:35

the way back to what they can say

6:37

along each of those steps along the way.

6:40

And it's the combo of

6:42

those steps that makes it food ways. So

6:44

food waves is the study of the interaction

6:47

of those different steps, from the production of

6:49

food through to the consumption

6:52

of food and disposal

6:54

of trash.

6:55

Yeah, just I love that. I mean

6:57

to's the idea of It's like, ultimately you're just digging

6:59

through garbage and finding this kind of

7:01

done. Like I mean we

7:04

were talking about this before, you know, like it'll

7:06

be off off the microphone. But so just

7:09

for the listeners generally, But what

7:11

is really like so interesting is the

7:13

reality of archaeology and

7:16

like the really nerdy, weird stuff

7:18

that you can learn from just

7:20

like everyday life garbage. And

7:23

I mean, yeah, it's you know, this

7:25

this series less so than Atlantis,

7:28

but it is still about you know, kind

7:30

of debunking some of the myths

7:33

about the Bronze Age and it's collapse and

7:36

so you know, it's it's obviously less, but I still

7:38

I'll remember forever. This

7:40

time. I was just like on Instagram and this

7:42

real popped up of this.

7:44

You know.

7:44

He's like one of those influencer history

7:47

bros who gives you like a minute worth of

7:49

history and says it's all true and real absolutely,

7:52

and then you know, proceeds just about utter nonsense.

7:55

And this guy, this guy is talking

7:57

about the Mycenians and he's like introducing

7:59

this whole thing, and he's got some accurate stuff about

8:01

the Mysonians and then he's like and then one day they

8:04

just disappeared completely

8:06

and Greece descended into a Dark

8:09

Age. And they he said

8:11

that they lost the ability to

8:13

read and write. And then from

8:15

that dark age of no words

8:18

Outsprung Homer, a man

8:20

who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey

8:23

and and so like, I think about that in relation

8:25

to this series because it is so about,

8:27

you know, the end of the Bronze Age. And you've already said Iron

8:29

Age, so you've already you know, introduced the idea that there

8:31

was no Dark Age, there was an Iron Age.

8:34

But I think about that kind of thing like this. You know, they

8:37

they disappeared out of nowhere, and it's like, well, no, and

8:39

you know, we can look at their trash to find out that, no,

8:42

they didn't just disappear out of nowhere. Like all these different

8:44

things are going on, and you know, it's

8:46

early days in my recording of this series, but still

8:49

it's I just I love this idea

8:51

you can dig into some trash and find the

8:53

truth of things. So like, what

8:55

what do we know about, you know, how

8:58

this relates to the Bronze Age, What it says about

9:00

you know, what they were doing and getting

9:02

towards you know, the end of it, Like

9:04

I want to hear with the Bronze Age itself, but also the kind

9:06

of transition you know that they went through,

9:08

because it was a transition, not a you

9:11

know, loss of society entirely.

9:14

Yes, I agree, so a

9:17

few things. One I'm agnostic

9:19

on the term dark Age. Actually, okay,

9:22

I I think that well. First

9:24

of all, yeah, it's not just some sort of collapse where everybody

9:26

disappears.

9:28

That's the ludicrous. I

9:31

agree with the points that, like, you know, Aoni's

9:33

Conos has a paper on the terminology

9:35

the Dark Age and what that means and the problems

9:38

with it, and he was on my PhD committee,

9:40

so I mean I mostly agree with him. He did sign

9:42

my PhD after all. But at

9:45

the same time, you know, to a certain degree, life

9:47

does get worse, and

9:49

we can talk about what the Bronze Age was like, but one

9:52

way you can track that is through people's diets and

9:54

through malnourishment that you can see in people's

9:56

teeth. And so this is not my own studies. It to

9:58

other people that that study human remains.

10:01

But uh Filu and others

10:04

have published on sort of what

10:06

you get in teeth is if

10:08

while your teeth are growing, so you know, when you're a child,

10:11

if you have a period of severe

10:14

malnourishment, your teeth will sort

10:16

of stop growing, they'll interrupt their growth for a period

10:18

of time, and it develops this kind of line that you can see

10:21

on it. It's called enamel hypoplasia. And

10:23

so that line is an indication of

10:26

people that are you know, they don't get

10:28

enough food, and that specific

10:31

pathological marker, that marker of

10:33

this malnourishment. It shows up more

10:36

frequently proportionally in many Iron Age populations

10:38

than Bronze Age. So they are

10:40

eating, they're more malnourished

10:43

from the graves that have been excavated and studied

10:46

more methodically and scientifically. And

10:49

at the same time, you can see this in isotopic

10:51

signatures of people. So

10:54

for example, you know, certainly

10:56

I have nothing wrong with people that are vegetarians

10:58

or vegans, and in

11:00

this case, I guess it's more vegans because what you can measure

11:03

is you can measure animal protein consumption and

11:05

that shows up in the isotopes in your teeth.

11:07

Again, it's laid down while you're growing,

11:09

or in your bones that's closer to the time

11:11

of your death because your bones keep remodeling

11:14

during your life. And again, people

11:16

in the Iron Age, they're eating less animal

11:19

protein on average than people

11:21

in the Bronze Age, though in

11:24

the Bronze Age it's very stratified.

11:26

It's mostly the wealthy men that get a lot

11:28

of animal protein. In the Iron

11:31

Age it's much more even. It looks like everybody

11:35

eats less, and so there's

11:37

definitely the less wealth at least just

11:39

existing, one would think, at least in terms

11:41

of animal wealth at that

11:43

time. So this is why I'm kind of a little

11:45

agnostic about Dark Age. I think

11:47

there's there is. Certainly

11:50

writing does disappear, for example, linear

11:53

b the tablets used

11:56

in that. We find in Bronze Age what we call

11:58

palaces, though it's a really stupid name.

12:01

But I want to explain what that means to

12:03

people, Like they're not I mean, we call them palaces.

12:05

It's very palatial, but like also you need

12:07

to understand what that means, and it's just kind of the word.

12:10

Yeah, basically at this point, I

12:12

think it's mostly means a large

12:15

monumental complex that includes

12:17

a large courtyard, sometimes

12:20

adjacent to it, sometimes within it contained,

12:23

and so they they're often some

12:25

people want to recall them like courtyard complexes

12:28

or things related to that, because clearly

12:31

there are these large complexes, which means

12:33

lots of rooms, different activities going on.

12:36

Some have throne rooms, some don't, but you

12:38

know that doesn't matter. But then

12:40

the courtyard means that you can gather a

12:42

whole lot of people together, right, And

12:44

so it's these two combos

12:47

of this evidence for hierarchy and

12:49

the evidence and the ability to host

12:51

large groups that sort

12:53

of makes a palace, if you will. And

12:55

it's an Oh, I think I'm

12:57

not sure about this. Don't quote me on it, but uh,

13:00

I guess you're gonna quote me on a podcast.

13:03

But you've already preis you're

13:05

a preface, you're a guy.

13:08

But but I think almost

13:10

all, if not all, of the linear be tablets,

13:13

So the actual writings we have come from

13:15

what we would label as a palace, right, certainly

13:18

most of them do. So yeah,

13:20

so so yeah, that's that's

13:22

something my take on it. So all right, food,

13:27

Well, we can say a lot so

13:29

these and a lot of it comes

13:32

from writing as well, and how it relates

13:34

to the archaeological evidence can be interesting.

13:36

Yeah, I can ask you know, I know you study

13:38

the bones, but like I'm so, I'm

13:41

interested in how the linear be

13:43

tablets that we have, like correspond

13:45

to the food because obviously, I mean what I

13:48

know of linear Be is that you know, primarily

13:50

the records that we have, our palatial records

13:52

are you know, trades and

13:55

like food stores and all of these different

13:57

things that they're just kind of recording, you

13:59

know, for their own just sort of administrative

14:02

purposes, which is why linar

14:04

B is very cool but also frustrating because they didn't write

14:06

down stories, which is just too bad. But

14:09

like, I want to know how those things

14:11

kind of relate, Like, you know, do

14:14

you look at how the bone

14:17

evidence of food like relates

14:19

to those you know, the registers

14:22

kind of that we have in linear Bee.

14:23

Yeah, for sure. So thankfully

14:26

linear Be is well studied and a lot of it's been

14:28

published, and there's actually been a lot of studies

14:30

more probably on food stuffs in linear

14:33

b than of the animal bones themselves. So

14:35

it's something that you can go to and read and site

14:37

and see how it fits together. And the picture

14:39

you get from these linear Bee tablets is this it

14:42

gives a very misleading picture of society.

14:44

Certain aspects are accurate, but it's misleading

14:47

in the sense that it's so palatial

14:49

focused, and so it's

14:52

really like you said, their accounts, and

14:54

so it's goods in and out, and it's

14:56

sort of it shows how they control

14:58

also the larger agricultural economy,

15:01

but it's only what they're focused on. So

15:04

the big thing that you can tell when you compare

15:06

the archaeological record to

15:08

the written record is there's so much

15:10

missing in the written record, right, there's

15:13

a focus on only a

15:15

few food stuffs, and so

15:17

sheep are one of the really big ones, and

15:20

then wheat is

15:23

another really really big one, and olive

15:25

oil and wine are also reasonably

15:28

prominent in there. But it ignores

15:30

everything else, which is oh

15:32

oh. In the animals. They also have some

15:34

mentions of palatial oxen

15:37

tines for pulling plowsh okay,

15:40

So those are what most of the food

15:42

stuffs. And the linear bee tablets,

15:45

sorry, the linear be tablets mostly

15:48

talk about those food stuffs and not

15:50

all the others. They don't talk about, you know, barley,

15:52

for example, nearly as much or lesser

15:55

quality wheats hold wheats we call them emmer

15:57

einecorn, which we're around. They don't talk

16:00

about all the different diversity of beans,

16:02

which are really really important. I know it sounds

16:04

silly.

16:05

I love that diversity of beans.

16:07

Yeah, there's all these legumes, beans

16:09

and peas, and you know, they're really important

16:12

to sort of agriculture because

16:14

they absorb nitrogen from the

16:16

air and then fix it in the soil. So wheat

16:19

depletes grains in general, they

16:21

deplete all the nitrogen from the soil, while

16:24

beans bring it back. So

16:26

beans are extremely important because they

16:28

regenerate the soil's nitrogen and

16:30

at the same time they're they're very healthy.

16:33

They provide a lot of calories, they're

16:35

easy to grow and to eat

16:38

and prepare and things like that. So we

16:40

know from our archaeobotanical samples

16:42

that have been published that beans and peas are eaten

16:45

all the times, and barley is far more common

16:47

than wheat in the archaeobotanical record.

16:49

It grows better in Greek landscape

16:51

because it's so dry there, which is a key

16:53

point that we'll get to. And

16:57

so yeah, so there's so

16:59

much missing and same thing, pigs and goats

17:01

don't come up very often, and it's

17:04

just and even of the sheep. So there's tens

17:06

of thousands of sheep in the linear BT's

17:08

from Kenosos in particular, because there

17:10

was a huge interest not in the sheet for food,

17:13

but for wool, and so

17:15

they were making textiles. A lot

17:17

of tablets focus on the textile economy,

17:19

including weavers and different people

17:22

working with textiles and uh

17:24

and and we believe it was a major

17:27

export from like from

17:29

Manoan crete and then later on from the Mycenean

17:31

world. I think you'd have to ask

17:33

Eric, but I think there's this fresco in

17:36

Egypt where there's he's published

17:38

on it where they're showing he

17:40

identifies the people carrying textiles

17:43

is as I think Monoan's and

17:45

so it's been a while since ever that paper. So

17:49

so yeah, so, so the textiles are

17:51

big, big business and that's what they're interested in.

17:53

And so what that means is so you

17:56

know, as a zoe archaeologist, sorry, there's

17:58

some kind of fun the tangents. As

18:00

a zo archaeologist, one

18:02

of the big questions we ask of our animal

18:04

teeth and bones is what are the ages

18:06

of slaughter of animals? And this makes

18:08

sense in a second.

18:09

Yeah, So I.

18:10

Promise, I promise, And this is an exercise

18:13

I do with my students all the time where

18:15

I say, all right, so why the heck does this matter? Right?

18:17

Yeah, So let's play a game here

18:19

with You are a goat

18:21

herder on the island decrete, and all you

18:23

care about is milk. You don't care

18:26

about meats, you don't care about the skins.

18:29

All you want to maximize is

18:31

milk production. So what kind

18:33

of goats do you want? In terms of age and sex?

18:37

I mean, as a very

18:39

knowledgeable person on goats, I'm

18:42

assuming the older and female.

18:45

Yeah, you want a lot of female because they give

18:47

birth, which the leads me to them,

18:50

which leads to them producing milk.

18:52

But they give birth fifty to fifty male female.

18:54

And you know, do you keep a couple lucky guys alive

18:57

breeding purposes? But they give

18:59

birth fifty to fifty male female. What do you do

19:01

with the young males?

19:05

Do they just eat them when they're very young?

19:07

Yeah, because they're drinking them milk, right,

19:09

and you want to get as much of that as possible,

19:11

So you know, you look at anthropologically

19:13

ethnographically, this is what people

19:16

raising goats or cattle or sheep if they really want

19:18

to maximize milk. That's the

19:20

age and sex profile you'd have for a

19:22

herd, right, older females,

19:25

infant males bean slaughter. Now

19:28

let's shift that up to wool. So now

19:30

you want to have your wooly

19:33

sheep on crete. You want

19:35

them to maximize their wool

19:37

production. What do you want?

19:40

I mean, I'm assuming that all sheep grow

19:42

wool, and it's not a gendered or thing,

19:45

but so you just want them all and then you just want

19:47

them to live as long as possible. I have

19:50

no idea.

19:51

Nobody can see me except for you. I'm

19:53

giving you a clue. Oh

19:56

well, I mean I'm

19:58

stroking.

20:00

Yeah, describe what you're

20:02

doing. I mean, I don't like, I

20:05

don't know that. I don't have any idea how sheep grow

20:07

woll. Well, so just like they

20:09

do it, just.

20:10

Like I produce more wool. Yeah,

20:13

Male sheep on average, male

20:15

sheep on average produce more wool.

20:18

Okay, So have you ever been to the beach?

20:21

Yes?

20:23

Okay, So when you scope

20:25

out the beach, you know, looking for potential

20:27

hookups or whatever it is we all do,

20:30

and you think about it in terms of wool on

20:33

backs, who has the most

20:35

wool on their backs?

20:38

Older men?

20:41

Okay, the same is true for sheep. The

20:44

exact same thing is true for sheep. Older

20:47

male sheep have woolier

20:49

backs on average, and if

20:51

you castrate them, they're even

20:53

woolier. I don't know if that works with humans.

20:56

I had no idea.

20:57

Yeah,

21:00

but it is true for sheep.

21:02

And so we call, you know, agriculturally,

21:04

if you're a sheepherder, a shepherd, and you have

21:06

a you're maximizing wool.

21:08

You want older male castrated sheep and older

21:10

male castrated sheep in English are called

21:12

weathers w E T H E

21:15

R, and they're really common throughout traditional

21:17

agricultural economies

21:19

if you're looking at wool production, and

21:22

so that's what you'd be looking for, and that's

21:24

what the linear B tablets focus on.

21:27

They only talk about tens of thousands

21:29

of weathers male castrated

21:32

sheep, and they don't talk about the rest

21:34

of the herd. And so it's up to us

21:36

to try to put that back into place.

21:38

And it seems like according to Paul

21:40

Halstead, who studied both these tablets, and

21:43

he's like the the

21:45

I don't know, he's just retired recently, but he was

21:48

like the guy who's published the most on sort

21:50

of Bronze Age Greek zoo archaeology

21:53

animal. He was also the person who trained me, and

21:56

so he's pointed

21:58

out that the way these tablets seem to be

22:00

working is they're describing tens of thousands of weathers,

22:02

but they're not all within a herd. In fact,

22:05

they're controlled by private individuals, and

22:07

so they're controlling the heard, which

22:09

includes a few palatial weathers or

22:12

a certain number of them. And so you

22:14

can start putting together the larger sheepherd

22:16

economy by looking at the animal remains,

22:19

if you see what I mean. Yeah,

22:21

And so the palatial stuff misses

22:24

out on a lot, right, It's

22:26

missing the larger picture of what's going on.

22:28

Even if we can understand that the palace

22:31

at Kenosos controls you know, castrated

22:34

male sheep throughout the island, and

22:37

the at Pilos, we have

22:39

these records showing the

22:41

control of plow oxen and they

22:43

move them around to different places

22:46

that need plowing, and so there's a lot

22:48

of administration that goes on to kind of plan

22:50

out where they are and

22:52

who they get lent to, I guess perhaps,

22:55

And so that's the sort of way that the

22:57

palace controls agricultural production

23:00

by controlling these plow oxen teams, and

23:03

same thing with the weathers, and

23:05

so they focus on these specific goods,

23:07

and that's what they're sort of focused on, and

23:10

the archaeological evidence gives us the larger

23:12

picture, obviously more diversity, but

23:15

also the relationship is interesting

23:17

though, because sheep are the most common

23:19

animal in the archaeological record. For example,

23:22

wheat is not in the archaeobotanical it's

23:24

par but sheep certainly

23:27

are. And in my study,

23:29

I study the site in southwest Greece

23:31

near Pilos, near the Palace Semester at Pilos,

23:33

it's called nick Korea. And we can talk about

23:35

this one a bunch because it really matters for this

23:37

transition historiographically. It's

23:40

been at the center of how scholars have interpreted

23:43

the change between Bronze Age and Iron Enge.

23:45

They're all wrong, I'm right, I

23:49

mean to a certain degree most people. Most

23:51

people realized they were all wrong already by the

23:53

time I published my article. But you know,

23:55

it's so so at Nick Korea,

23:58

though, when it starts off in the

24:00

Middle Bronze Age and in the very beginning

24:02

of the Late Bronze Age, is an independent community,

24:05

and then by what's called the late Haladic three

24:07

periods around sixteen fifty

24:09

DC year or so, it becomes dominated

24:12

by the Palace of Nester. And it's at that

24:14

time that we see this shift from pigs

24:16

being the most common animal to sheep. And

24:19

what's really cool is the age of slaughter.

24:22

The sheep gets older and there's more

24:24

male so it looks like they are focused

24:26

they're starting to focus more on

24:28

wool production. It isn't like they're

24:31

only focused on wool production, though, is those

24:33

tablets that seem to show it's part of

24:35

a more diverse economy. But this

24:37

change in control has had an impact on the

24:39

Korea.

24:40

Interesting. Okay, quick

24:43

nerdy question. We call it the

24:45

Palace of Nestor. Is that only

24:47

tied to Homeric tradition or is

24:49

there any kind of like name in linear B No,

24:52

No.

24:52

No, it's it's just we you know, Carl

24:55

Blake, and it's pretty cool. He found it

24:57

like on like the first day, and but

24:59

then World War two broke out and yeah,

25:01

and he went back and activated it. But no, it's just because

25:04

they're you know, ninety nine point nine percent

25:06

sure. It actually is the of

25:09

Bronze age pilos, and therefore

25:11

the palace would be Nestor's palace

25:13

because that's who homer put as the king of

25:15

Pilos.

25:16

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I just was like, do we

25:18

have slightly is there anything? But yeah,

25:21

I know, I mean everything I do love.

25:22

It's not even on the home. It's

25:24

not even on the beach, you know, in in in the

25:26

in the Odyssey, when Telemachus goes there, they

25:29

sacrifice cattle on the beach. Everything's along the

25:31

beach and everything. They call it sandy Pilos.

25:33

That's the epithet. There's no sand there.

25:36

I've dug there. I've spent like seven as

25:38

many seasons, I don't know, four or

25:40

five seasons digging there. I helped find the tomb

25:42

of the Griffin Warrior. I was field director then, and

25:44

uh, there's no sand in sight. It's

25:46

all very clay soil that's really hard

25:49

to dig through. And I don't know

25:51

why Homer calls it sandy Pilos, and it

25:53

really annoys me. I wish it was sandier. It

25:55

would have been easier to dig.

25:57

Well, the Odyssey is a

25:59

little tricky in terms of tracking wear or

26:02

anything is and what it actually looked like

26:04

in reality. So that makes some sense,

26:06

you know, the of it all slash

26:08

every other stop. Autotysseus's

26:11

journey. No,

26:13

that's really interesting. So okay,

26:15

I want to I mean, I wanted to hear kind of anything about

26:18

you know, how we know about this, the food

26:20

and everything, especially in this palace. But I one

26:22

thing I just can't resist talking about, and

26:25

I'm so curious about it because I don't I

26:27

don't know at all how or if

26:29

it you know, we we have evidence of it, how

26:31

it affected things. But I am obsessed

26:33

with the volcanic eruption, and

26:36

I would imagine that that shows

26:38

up in bones, like

26:40

do we have record of like what kind of was

26:43

affected? Because to me, it feels like a

26:45

volcanic eruption of that size would

26:47

affect agriculture.

26:50

Yeah, so but in certain areas,

26:53

so probably on crete only

26:56

only. Yeah. So it was

26:58

obviously a massive eruption destroying Santorini.

27:01

And then there's a part of

27:03

the signature on crete. Most of what it

27:06

does actually is so what comes

27:08

to is tephra, right, and so there

27:10

are tephra layers that have been excavated,

27:12

like in eastern crete

27:15

at Polycastro, I believe, and elsewhere,

27:19

and so, but it doesn't seem

27:21

to have gone say so Santorini's not too far

27:23

from crete even and so it's not like

27:25

we have any tephra layers on the mainland,

27:27

and even these tephra layers on

27:31

crete are you know, there are very ephemeral

27:33

layers, and so

27:36

we do scholars do think when you model

27:38

it in a sense, having observed more modern

27:41

volcanic eruptions and historical descriptions

27:44

of it, it certainly the would have impacted

27:46

the crops around Crete and around some other

27:48

Edgean islands and the cyclides and stuff. With

27:51

taffyra coming down, maybe having the sky

27:54

darker, the sulfur could

27:56

potentially have cooled the temperature a little bit,

27:59

But it wasn't some major impact

28:01

that you can see in people's or animals

28:03

bones or as far as I know from

28:05

any seeds that have been published. Not

28:08

to say it would not have had a big impact, but it would

28:11

have been fairly temporary and less

28:13

unless, of course you lived right there and you died in it

28:15

and stuff like that. That's of course.

28:17

Well, you know, there was probably like a refuge or

28:19

I remember whenever I learned about this last which

28:21

was probably in school, like refugee

28:23

crisis kind of thing happened.

28:25

Perhaps, yeah, people.

28:26

Got out or a lot of them.

28:27

I mean, who knows. It's tough

28:29

to tell, and because we just don't

28:32

have so it's

28:34

mostly so it doesn't really have to do at the end of

28:36

the Bronze Age either. It's a lot earlier, right, Yeah,

28:39

several hundred years earlier, and it certainly would

28:41

have impacted sort of circulation networks

28:43

in the sicklidies, because Santorini was

28:45

a really important acriteria. I mean,

28:48

it was a very important settlement, and it had

28:50

important interactions with both the Monons

28:52

and the Mycenians and in the middle

28:54

of the Asia Minor and stuff like that, and so

28:56

yeah, it would have been it would have

28:58

been really devastating economically, one

29:00

would imagine, But yeah,

29:03

there isn't. It's one of

29:05

those things that scholars argue about NonStop,

29:08

is what kind of impact that really had,

29:10

And mostly it's tough

29:13

to detect that archaeologically,

29:15

just like Pompei erupting, that should

29:17

have had a huge enormous impact on the Bay of Naples

29:20

region, right, and the Bay of Naples

29:22

region was sort of the hotspot for the Roman

29:24

elite. And so yet it's

29:26

almost like a side

29:29

mentioned in history, you know, in the histories

29:31

that we get it's an important archaeological

29:34

find and all this kind of stuff, but it certainly

29:37

was not something that and we would

29:39

imagine refugees and stuff like that from as well,

29:41

and no descriptions of that made history

29:43

or anything. Again, no real clear archaeological

29:45

evidence. And don't believe the recent headlines

29:48

that they found plenty of the elders Villa

29:50

or something like that. That's

29:53

total crap.

30:24

No, I it's interesting. I definitely

30:26

was under the impression that the that the eruption of Thera

30:29

was like considerably bigger than POMPEII,

30:31

I guess. And I just

30:33

think of like the historic eruptions

30:35

of you know, the whatever the one

30:38

was, where like basically they got a year of darkness

30:40

like all the way up in the UK, and I think it

30:42

was a volcano in Indonesia or something. So I

30:44

just imagine of like just the

30:46

the kind of because to me, like, I mean, Sanderini's

30:48

far from the mainland, but it's not that far, you

30:50

know. So I'm just interested to hear that that it didn't necessarily

30:53

at least.

30:54

Not in any detectable way. I don't

30:56

think I've ever seen anybody published tefra from

30:58

Santerini outside of crete or ice

31:01

course or or closer

31:03

a field like in thessivilities. I

31:05

don't think I've ever I've never excavated

31:08

any layers of pilos or my senior where I've

31:10

excavated or elsewhere, and

31:12

I've never as far as I know, I could be wrong,

31:15

but I don't think there's anything like that on the mainland.

31:17

It doesn't mean that there's no impacts, but it's just we

31:19

don't know.

31:20

Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah, I just I would have assumed

31:22

it affected like crop growth

31:24

in some kind of way, but maybe in sort of if

31:27

it did, it was just undetectable or something. I don't

31:29

know.

31:29

I'm just and if enough for a

31:31

falling on creeps that you're getting a clear

31:33

layer of it, that could kill a lot of crops,

31:36

but it would only be for a season.

31:38

So as long as you have some stuff stored, you

31:40

recover the next season, you get trade and other

31:43

things, and probably some people die, of course,

31:45

you know, because that's what happens. Unfortunately,

31:48

that's what archaeologies how we find

31:51

stuff. But yeah, yeah,

31:53

but yeah, yeah.

31:54

No, interesting, okay, yeah,

31:56

yeah, so what like what do we you

31:59

you mentioned, you know, when we get into the getting

32:01

into the Bronze or to the Iron Age,

32:04

that there's a lot more of like this malnutrition and

32:06

stuff. So do we know do we know of

32:08

like what kind of I mean, I guess would be

32:10

hard to tell what kind of caused that, But

32:13

like other than just that, there's obviously different food

32:15

happening and things. But I just love to hear about what

32:17

we know about that transition

32:20

of like what changes that we know kind

32:22

of we're happening.

32:23

Yeah, so let's start with the traditional

32:25

picture or what was the picture from

32:27

the eighties until about I don't know, ten

32:29

years ago ish, because

32:32

that's what people still come across, mostly in most

32:34

of the literature, especially if it's not like

32:36

you're not up to date. So

32:39

basically it's pretty clear that

32:42

something happens. Palaces

32:44

disappear, monumental structures, art

32:47

trade still seems going strong. If you read

32:49

Sarah Murray's book on trade between the Bronze

32:51

and the Iron Age, there's still

32:54

a lot of trade going on, and she's her

32:56

surveys in Eastern Attica are showing that as

32:58

well. But what

33:00

you do see is this total shifting

33:02

towards more of a regional economy and

33:06

there is this evidence of somewhat

33:09

the people are living in a different kind of lifestyle.

33:11

There's not the same kind of hierarchy.

33:13

Whether that's good or bad is a different question. Like

33:15

I said, in the Bronze Age, the elites

33:17

were the ones benefiting from that hierarchy, right,

33:19

and they were the ones eating well while nobody else

33:22

was, including their wives and

33:24

their children. And so you

33:26

know, we can tell this from from isotope

33:29

tests of people from these from Tholos tombs

33:31

around Pilos and so

33:34

so. Yeah, so in

33:36

the Iron Age, for a long time people because

33:39

of Nikoia, the site that I mentioned, I restudied

33:41

these bones. This is one of the first

33:44

sites where animal bones were ever studied in the

33:46

Greek world, and it was one of the first scientific

33:48

expedition excavations out at the University

33:50

of Minnesota where

33:53

they had collaborated with Carl Blagen excavating

33:56

Pilos. And at Pilos,

33:58

by the way, some of the animal remains have been published

34:00

by Ballacy Ezekido and Paul Hall said. They

34:02

show large scale feasting an animal sacrifice

34:05

even then, right, and

34:07

in the linear the archive room

34:09

is actually where the big assemblage of sacrificial stuff

34:12

is just weird little point of

34:14

bones and texts together, you know. And

34:17

so it seems like it was a record of

34:19

the sacrifice because they deposited these

34:22

jawbones and leg bones from

34:24

cattle and red deer there like it's a record

34:26

of the sacrifice. Yeah,

34:29

so the bones as a record. And

34:34

so this

34:36

project in ne Korea happens in the seventies.

34:38

It's the first time people are studying seeds

34:41

and animal remains and doing soil

34:43

studies and this kind of stuff, and it's really cool.

34:46

And they got this paleontologist to

34:48

study dinosaurs to go study

34:51

these bones because he worked at Minnesota.

34:53

And he notices that there's a lot more

34:55

cattle in the Iron Age

34:58

than in the Bronze Age, and the Bronze Age is sheep.

35:01

Well, it's pick and sheep depends, like I said.

35:03

And he says, they all became

35:06

cowboys. They became so they went No,

35:08

seriously, it is autobiography,

35:11

he says this, and so and

35:13

and and this is what started this idea

35:15

that the change from the Palatial

35:18

Period to the Dark Age is

35:20

this shift from civilized

35:22

agriculture to sort of less

35:24

civilized pastoralism. Okay,

35:27

right, and so I don't

35:29

mean I shouldn't make it sound so pejortive because a

35:31

lot of smart people worked on this, but uh

35:34

but I think they're wrong.

35:36

And it's just still like it's it's time,

35:38

you know. It's just things change over time,

35:40

and the way we structure these things and understand

35:43

anything changes, So it makes sense it doesn't,

35:45

yeah, less than the original findings.

35:48

And so uh so Anthony Snagrast

35:50

sort of looked around. He was the guy who really

35:52

started earlier in age studies and

35:55

in Greece. He like coined a lot of the terminology

35:58

and periods and how to think about them, and

36:00

so he put together what he calls the pastoral hypothesis.

36:02

In a sense, people start living in more ephemeral

36:04

structures. We see this shift from wheel

36:07

may pottery to handmade potter. We

36:09

see this shift from sort of agriculture

36:12

to cattle. And the

36:15

reason behind all this stuff

36:17

is because they've shifted towards pastoralism.

36:20

And this is what dominated,

36:22

like I said, for a few decades the thinking

36:25

on this, and it only was about ten years

36:27

ago when the first book on archaeodiet

36:29

and isotopic studies. It

36:32

shows that actually people are even less animal

36:34

protein at that time. And so my

36:36

restudy of these bones at Nekorea,

36:39

they basically showed that the reason

36:41

why there's more cattle has nothing to do with humans.

36:43

It has to do with the fact that the soil is more acidic

36:46

in the higher levels of the site, and so smaller

36:48

animals their bones didn't survive as well,

36:50

while cattle survived. And I've mapped this all

36:53

out spatially, like you have some areas

36:55

where there's no Early Iron Age occupation,

36:57

so it's just late Bronze Age at the top and those

37:01

little areas, cattle are still the more dominant

37:03

animal even in the late Bronze Age because

37:05

they're worse preserved those bones, and

37:07

so yeah, yeah, so that's it. That's what my article

37:10

that Dan Filou is about is sort

37:12

of the myth of this beef ranching.

37:15

And no other site in the Iron Age

37:17

that's been published since then by me or others

37:20

shows cattle as the dominant animal.

37:23

There's no real evidence for a pastoral

37:25

economy. It looks like an agricultural

37:27

economy continues. It's just

37:30

more impoverished. We don't see this sort of

37:32

upcycling of stuff and h

37:34

yeah, so that's that's sort of what happens.

37:36

And if you think about Homeric Epic, now,

37:38

so how does how does this picture of

37:41

the early Iron Age animal and

37:44

animal husbandry and food stuffs and

37:46

food ways, how does it relate to what we see in homer

37:49

And it's I call it food porn food

37:51

pornography.

37:52

I remember you mentioned that when we when we talked about Atlantis.

37:54

And it's funny because you're you're saying this in

37:56

my head originally, like when you're before

37:58

you said that, actually it's the cattle because they bone

38:01

survived. But I'm thinking, well, you know,

38:03

Homeric epic.

38:04

Is all I should have mentioned that that was

38:06

a part of his thing too. He's like,

38:09

you know, and Anthony Snydgrass and others like

38:11

we read about it. This is what they're doing. They're stealing

38:13

cattle, their cattle rustling and their cowboys.

38:17

Everything they sacrifice is cattle.

38:19

And because I was already thinking when you're talking earlier

38:21

about how many sheep there were, I was like, well, there's

38:23

like no sheep in epic,

38:26

which is just interesting. So yeah, that's that's

38:29

really interesting because it does

38:31

seem like a very cattle heavy people

38:34

of course, you know, in terms of where where

38:36

we're really interacting with that stuff, it's over and you

38:38

know, quote unquote Troy. But like, yeah,

38:40

that's that's really interesting because it does feel

38:42

like that would fit, but then it sounds like it

38:44

doesn't. You know, they did have.

38:46

Not at all, and it's not only in Troy. At

38:48

Pilos's under cattle

38:51

and then they have that. That's the long scene, always

38:55

cattle, and that's where they describe in

38:57

detail and book three the sacrifice of

38:59

the cow. They gild the horns, all the

39:01

all the women chant as they bring the axe

39:03

down, and like you know, all this kind of stuff,

39:06

and so that's like the big

39:08

sacrificial scene actually mostly comes from the Odyssees,

39:12

and a lot of feasting does as well on Ehaica

39:14

and elsewhere, and so yeah, but they're always

39:16

eating cattle and it's and they're eating a lot

39:19

of meat. It's like just like meat on

39:21

meat on meat, which I love and

39:23

I study, but it's not what

39:26

you see. And I think that this is

39:28

what I call I got

39:30

to finish this article one day on this archaeology

39:32

of epic poetry where I think for the

39:35

for if we consider Homer a

39:37

real person. Or let's just say when

39:39

the story was heard by people

39:41

in the early Iron Age,

39:44

they were probably salivating.

39:46

This is like descriptions of amazing

39:49

food that they don't have access to.

39:52

On the other hand, when this story is told

39:54

in classical Athens and they're having

39:56

huge sacrifices, they're saying,

39:58

we're arranging our sacrifices to honor

40:02

how Homer said that our ancestors made sacrifices.

40:05

So it informs how they do things later

40:07

on. And so you can think about how

40:09

Homeric poetry is, the reception

40:12

of it by ancient people, and especially because

40:14

so much of it is food, how their

40:16

diet is going to impact how they're going to sort

40:18

of hear and understand and interpret

40:20

the poem and these stories. Right. So,

40:25

yeah, so that's one way

40:27

that it relates is the cattle. You

40:30

can also look at how sacrificial rituals

40:33

arrange themselves, where in a sense,

40:35

if you I have mentioned it at the Palace of Nester,

40:38

it's sort of this jawbone and then the

40:40

femur and the humorous so the upper fore

40:42

limb and hind limb, front leg and back

40:44

leg of the animal, and over

40:48

time it becomes much more

40:50

orthodox in what you burn for the

40:52

gods. So you've read some Homer, what

40:54

body part do you burn for the gods?

40:57

Well, I know it's always you know the well,

40:59

I guess Homer. I'll have trouble defining

41:02

what's in Homer versus what's just sort of the doesn't

41:04

matter those but yeah, it's the idea that,

41:06

like, you know, because of Prometheus, you burn

41:09

like the fatty stuff for the

41:11

gods, basically the stuff you don't want to eat

41:14

and then then you eat.

41:16

So he see it, describes it as he

41:20

see it, describes it as the it's a trick.

41:22

So it's a big trick where you know, they

41:24

kill the cow and then they make

41:27

two portions, the meat wrapped in the hides

41:29

and then the bones wrapped in the fat.

41:31

And then Zeus comes down and he's

41:34

like, I want that one, even though he knows it's

41:36

a lie. And so that's why we

41:38

he see it the way it ends it is like that's why we

41:40

burn fat wrapped bones on

41:43

the altars of the gods. Okay,

41:45

but Homer's more specific, and the in the

41:47

Odyssey dozens of times think about

41:49

it. There's a specific bone

41:51

that he burns. Oh,

41:54

very specific, and don't worry,

41:56

it's accurately translated almost all the time.

41:58

Yeah, no, I would never, I've not.

42:00

Next time, next time you read some home

42:02

or pay attention to the thigh bones. It's

42:04

always the thigh bone that's burned the

42:06

myria in ancient Greek, and that's

42:09

the port and it's always fat wraps, so that connects

42:11

to he see it. And then but

42:14

what we have archaeologically, I said, in the Bronze Age

42:16

is more complicated. We have burning

42:18

of bones. In

42:21

fact, at this at the

42:23

Mount Lecheon, the ash altar there in the

42:25

Bronze Age layers, and all the way down it's

42:27

burnt thigh bones, mostly a sheep. At

42:29

Hallasmenos on Crete where

42:31

I published it in the late Monoan

42:33

period, it's the lower legs and

42:36

heads of sheep

42:39

and cattle, and the same at iron

42:41

Age and Ecorea, and then at

42:43

Pilos, like I mentioned, it's the jawbone,

42:46

the forelimb, and the and the thigh bone.

42:49

And then I do need to remember the name of that site.

42:52

And iOS Constantinos on

42:54

Mathena on the peninsula Mathana,

42:56

and at these Bronze Age layers, at a Leucis,

42:59

it's the also the feet and the heads,

43:01

but of pigs, and so we have all

43:03

this diversity of bones being burned,

43:06

and slowly over time, it takes

43:08

not a millennium, but by about

43:10

five hundred BC or so, it's

43:13

pretty much only the thigh bones that

43:16

are burned. And so that goes

43:18

back to again, I think it has to do with the reception

43:20

of Homer as Homer. Yeah,

43:23

as Homer it becomes more popular, the people

43:25

see that as the orthodox of how we do

43:27

our religious rituals and refer to

43:29

it. They become more orthodox

43:31

in what they burn on their alters, and it's just thigh

43:34

bones eventually. Yeah, and so yeah.

43:37

It's so interesting. I mean, see, this is why

43:39

I'm thrilled to have, you know, have Joel come

43:42

on to talk about the Homeric interactions,

43:44

because like I mean, it's really

43:46

it's really fascinating the way that they would

43:49

mirror so many things off of Homer with

43:51

the understanding that like it was you know,

43:53

the Bronze age kind of thing, like what we now think

43:55

of as a Bronze Age, Like yeah,

43:57

oh, it's just faating.

43:59

And that's why it's silly to think of homer

44:01

as describing the Bronze Age or the Iron Age.

44:03

It's a weirdnish mash of both. And

44:05

you know, people like Susan Sharritts who share I

44:09

forget, she's Ameritis, not a Sheffield. She's

44:12

published on this, the direct relationship

44:14

between archaeology and Homeric

44:16

epic and how do you can find chronological

44:18

markers in there? And so you

44:21

know, so what they have is like the type of spear

44:23

that they use or the type of shield they use. We

44:25

can compare that to spears and shields that we

44:27

have for iconography and in graves

44:30

and stuff like that. And so homer

44:33

uses both the shields and the spears

44:35

from both the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. And

44:37

there's one scene that she describes I forget where

44:39

where a hero grabs it first the

44:42

Bronze Age style sphere, and then the very

44:44

next line is it's an Iron Age style

44:46

sphere. And so just from the description

44:49

of the spear, it's not like there's a different word, it's

44:51

the way the spear is being used

44:53

and described matches one

44:55

or the other, like the physical nature

44:58

of it and so so yeah,

45:00

so Homeric epic poetry

45:03

does not pay very clear attention.

45:05

It just takes a bit from both if you

45:07

see it.

45:08

Yeah, yeah, well yeah, because I mean because

45:10

the thing about it, you know, and Joel was on my show

45:12

a couple of years ago to talk about this, but you know,

45:15

the whole I mean, obviously there's so much complexity

45:17

to oral storytelling. But like, ultimately, what

45:19

we have that survives was just written

45:22

down at some point and that's the

45:24

version that we have, but there would have been so many

45:26

other versions, and you know, it was probably written down

45:28

in the archaic period in Athens, and so it's

45:30

so completely like tied

45:33

to that time period in addition to everything else,

45:35

because you're dealing with like five or six hundred

45:37

years of storytelling then being written down

45:39

into the only thing that we have, like exactly.

45:41

Yeah.

45:42

Yeah, it's so interesting to look

45:44

at it all that way. And I mean

45:46

I love the idea of just how many other versions could

45:48

have existed or like, you know, what how

45:50

different they were when they were actually being

45:53

you know, sung to people five hundred

45:55

years earlier. Things

45:58

will never know. I want a time machine.

46:01

Okay. So what we have left to do though, is

46:03

we I've explained the older

46:06

hypothesis this kind of yeah, pastoralism.

46:08

There's like a whole new thing that I've been putting forth and

46:10

other people have been putting forth, which is that a

46:12

lot of it has to do with climate change. So

46:15

this is not me being woke.

46:19

Or something like that, right, show it's fine.

46:21

We do not deny even a single thing about

46:23

climate change on this show.

46:25

No, no, I know, but I mean, but I guess

46:28

the point is a lot of this just has to do with the

46:30

fact that there's more evidence out there for

46:32

things climate change. So with the fact

46:34

that climate is changing today

46:38

due to human causes, there's

46:40

been a lot more research funds that have going

46:43

gone towards understanding past climate

46:46

change. And so you know that we've

46:48

reached a critical mass in the Eastern Mediterranean,

46:51

in the Aegean and the

46:53

Greek world specifically, that we now

46:55

understand that the climate does get drier

46:58

between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. This drying

47:01

of the climate starts not right

47:03

at the collapse point though, so it's not some

47:06

sort of inflection all

47:08

this sudden. There's a megage route some some

47:10

scholars have called it that because

47:13

originally it was identified as the three point two

47:15

Ka event. So from thirty

47:17

two hundred years ago or twelve hundred, right,

47:21

and so, uh and it's still called that.

47:23

And there is it does worthy.

47:25

Yeah, well it makes sense though, because

47:27

you have to date everything with from before

47:30

present if you're doing scientific dating. And

47:32

the other reason for it is because there's also

47:34

a fourteen point or four point two K

47:36

event and an eight

47:38

point two K event for some reason, there's a lot

47:41

of periods of sharp climate change at

47:43

the point two periods years ago.

47:45

It's really weird. It's the type of thing

47:47

I'm surprised conspiracy theorists have not jumped

47:50

on because it's like a totally weird not.

47:52

That it's not as exciting they needed to.

47:54

Yeah, you know, they've got climate

47:58

change everything.

47:59

What you're saying is that at the point two years the

48:01

aliens have come down and they you

48:04

know, made these major changes to Earth's

48:06

climate.

48:08

No, I'm not saying that at all, but

48:11

no, and it's not every point too either, it's just

48:14

now. Yeah, so about

48:16

twelve hundred years ago it gets more rapid

48:18

the driver. But this drying transition years

48:21

ago started yeah, thirty two hundred years ago, sorry,

48:24

started actually

48:26

before that, so somewhere around fifteen hundred

48:28

BC, I think. So there's a team

48:30

out of Uppsala University, Erica Wiberg

48:33

and Martin Fine and Antonine Bonier

48:35

who have been working on this in the Peloponnese and detail

48:38

and I published a few things with them, and they've

48:40

been putting together all these climate records and then comparing

48:43

them to regional surveys and stuff, and so

48:45

what they seem to show is that when the climate

48:48

first starts getting dryer about

48:50

fifteen hundred BC, the first response

48:52

that humans make is to So

48:54

there's different ways you can adapt to climate

48:56

change if you think about it like agriculturally speaking,

48:59

and one of it is to intensify, so

49:01

start growing more in more areas.

49:04

So this is where you start seeing from regional

49:06

surveys more dots on the map and in

49:08

more marginal landscapes. So they're

49:10

trying to intensify their production

49:13

even areas that we don't farm today, you know,

49:15

sort of on steeper slopes. They've measured this in

49:18

terms of slope steepness

49:21

and so yeah, so that's

49:23

the first attempt. And we see this as a

49:25

period though of cultural flourishing.

49:28

You know, this is the waxing

49:31

of the falacial Bronze Age. Sorry I

49:33

never talked like this, but

49:36

this is what you think of, is like the Bronze

49:38

Age with with palaces and when your

49:40

bat This is a period where it's starting to get dryer though, and

49:42

so they're they're trying to adapt by intensifying.

49:45

And then it's really

49:47

tough to tell what kind of impact this climate

49:50

change has had on sort of the

49:53

palace structure itself. It

49:55

clearly would not have been, you know, a direct

49:57

impact that would have impacted food, which

50:00

then would have impacted economic stuff, which

50:02

then would have had other impacts on society.

50:04

And eventually we see this you know,

50:06

inflection point around what Eric Client

50:09

would say, eleven seventy a BC. Right, obviously

50:12

that's way too precisely dated, but whatever, it's eleven

50:14

seventy seven, what am I saying? And so uh

50:18

yeah, so

50:20

so you know, but around the twelfth century BC

50:23

we start seeing more of these palaces burning.

50:26

However they do stay, those sites

50:28

stay in occupation a little longer. More recent

50:30

excavations at Pilo's, Massini, Tians

50:32

and elsewhere. Kenosos of course never has

50:34

an abandonment, and so clearly

50:38

people are not just disappearing, and

50:40

it's a slower transition into what you'd

50:42

think of as an early Iron Age economy and

50:45

what we're seeing. So Martin Fine,

50:47

he's a paleoclimatologist at Upsala,

50:50

and he does sort of so you you

50:52

piece together the climate through looking

50:54

at pollen. You can drill cores into

50:56

lake beds where pollen survives.

50:58

The scientific I love it those.

51:00

Sediments, you know, they they accumulate

51:03

in layers, and each of those layers

51:06

is essentially a year or something like that. And all

51:08

these cores down you look at the landscape

51:10

from the pollen that's in there, and so you can see

51:13

changes in sort of dryness

51:15

or humidity or temperature based on

51:17

which types of natural you know, wild

51:20

plants show up in there. But Martin

51:22

he studies speliothems, which

51:24

are stalactites or stalagmites

51:27

in caves, and so you cut a cross

51:29

section of them. Their form from dripping of water, so

51:31

you know, the water dissolves the calcium

51:34

in the bedrock and then as

51:36

it drips it sort of accumulates

51:38

and solidifies, and since it's formed in these

51:40

kind of layers again through the dripping,

51:43

and that's why you have that sort of conical shape

51:45

to these stalactites and stalagmites.

51:47

You can sort of take a cross section of them, and

51:49

then you can test them with oxygen isotopes

51:52

and other isotopes that will tell you that tell

51:54

you about precipitation. And so that's

51:57

actually a more direct understanding

51:59

of what's going on with precipitation specifically. And

52:03

while of course pollen looks at the wild

52:05

plants, which gives you a sense of how

52:07

plants are, and so it's

52:10

tough to understand though, if what

52:12

the change in precipitation is right, you

52:14

know, is this like five millimeters of rainfall, in which

52:17

case maybe humans can shrug it off, or is it twenty

52:19

And how is that different in different regions

52:22

and things like that, right, And so that's

52:24

where what I wanted to do is I wanted to see if

52:27

humans adapted to this climate change and

52:30

can we find any evidence that the people living

52:32

there they wanted to adapt their sort

52:34

of animal economy

52:37

to it. And so what I found is, yes,

52:39

very clearly they do. There's this

52:42

shift from sheep to

52:44

ghats, but only in

52:47

eastern areas of the mainland and crete.

52:50

And the reason for that is

52:52

because if you look at a topographic

52:54

map of Greece, there's a mountain range that runs

52:57

right down the middle and the western

52:59

half of Greece, and crete gets twice as much

53:01

rainfall as the eastern half. So

53:04

in the areas where they were more

53:07

at risk from a drier climate, the eastern

53:10

half, that's when they had to adapt by

53:12

shifting from sheep to ghosts. And

53:15

so I published that with about fifteen

53:17

sites, or well fifteen sites in each period.

53:19

And now I've just zoomed in on create my big

53:22

research projective project is called Zoa Crete,

53:24

and that picked out, like I don't

53:26

know, forty five different sites in crete, and you can

53:28

see this shift over time, and it's

53:30

really clearly eastern versus western,

53:33

and it's very very clearly therefore correlated

53:35

with rainfall. And so that

53:38

tells me that and I hope others

53:41

that this climate change was not just

53:43

something that's showing up in a really you

53:46

know I am I trying to say,

53:48

in a really sensitive scientific study, this

53:50

would have been enough that people felt the need to adapt

53:53

to it, and so it was

53:55

very much impacting their their their

53:57

what what what kind of what their crop outputs

54:00

and animal outputs were not

54:03

enough archaeobotanical studies have been done from

54:05

the Iron Age and Bronze Age to really put

54:08

together a global picture, like the global a

54:10

complete picture of these periods and

54:13

contrast them. Only a few Iron Age sites

54:15

have been studied. More on

54:17

that, I hope eventually from colleagues. But so,

54:48

yeah, but what's happening also is it's

54:51

a very slow change, so it

54:53

doesn't happen immediately

54:55

almost anywhere. It

54:59

takes several hundred years for people to

55:01

adapt, and so that also suggests

55:03

they struggled with it. So like at Nikorea, they

55:05

never really do it goes you know, like if

55:07

you ignore that shift cattle, they're

55:10

still very sheep heavy. They are also

55:12

in the west, so you know that that might be part

55:14

of it. So they're getting it there, maybe not as impacted,

55:17

but yeah, most areas, it

55:19

seems like it takes several centuries for

55:21

this shift towards goats. And one

55:23

of the things that I'm trying to think about is how

55:26

that impacts then developments to the

55:28

next period, because the next period, of course

55:30

is archaic crease, and you think about it. I described this

55:32

as it's adaptive, but it's

55:34

also shows that every area is responding differently

55:37

in a unique sort of heterogeneous

55:39

way, and that sort of mimics

55:41

this next period of established from the city states

55:44

right where it's a very heterogeneous, regional

55:47

sort of cultural and economic

55:50

way of people managing themselves.

55:52

But they're all in these Greek city states. And so

55:54

I'm wondering if this kind of regionality

55:56

that we see in ceramics it also has

55:59

to do with agriculture and food production, and

56:01

if it's this shift in economic

56:03

production that helps lead to these

56:05

cultural changes that we call, you know, the

56:07

developed in a city state and things like that in

56:09

these different political economies. So that's

56:12

what I would say is sort of happening

56:14

now or what we think, what a lot of us

56:16

think is happening now.

56:19

So yeah, yeah, that's really

56:21

interesting. I it's

56:23

so funny. I mean, I'm I just associate

56:26

Greace with goats so much that

56:28

I'm interested in hearing that transition exactly.

56:30

Like I mean, I've been to Samothrak and I've been to Crete, and it's

56:32

like those are my two those are my goat islands in my head.

56:35

Like I mean, I've definitely seen them, you know,

56:37

on another a lot of other like cyclic cycladic

56:39

islands. But I just in

56:42

my head, it's just like they're so tied

56:44

together, like goats. Goats are just

56:46

so Greek to me. But I

56:48

love hearing about the rainfall. It's so this

56:51

is like very niche

56:54

connection. But like so I live

56:56

on the west coast of Canada. I

56:59

live in the Pacific Northwest. I live in this general

57:02

realm where everyone assumes that the

57:04

whole thing we have all the time, all day, every day

57:06

is rain, right, like Seattle and Vancouver, that rainiest

57:09

places imaginable, and they

57:12

like like our sort

57:14

of sort of surround where

57:16

I live, Victoria, the Island, Vancouver Island,

57:18

But Vancouver Island has this big mountain called

57:21

the Malahat, and everything

57:23

south of the Malahat, which is like only

57:25

a short ways up our very very large island,

57:28

everything south of the Malahat gets

57:31

about I mean, I don't know the scientific number,

57:33

but like just anecdotally having lived

57:35

in Vancouver and Victoria, like

57:38

Victoria and the South Island gets

57:40

probably sixty to seventy percent less

57:42

rain than Vancouver and Seattle and even north

57:45

of that mountain because we like we call it our

57:47

rain shadow. I don't know if it's like a thing broadly,

57:49

but like we live in this little rain shadow where like everyone

57:51

assumes it's raining all the time, but really, especially

57:54

as climate change progresses, like Victoria

57:56

gets very little rain compared to the other places,

57:58

and we just live in this nice little bubble. So I'm like, oh,

58:00

I like I have this kind of like I

58:03

know how that can happen and how

58:05

it like affects the difference, and like it can

58:07

really just be like such a just that little

58:10

shift of there's a mountain there and the amount

58:12

of like rainfall is so affected.

58:15

And I'm deeply unscientific, so but I

58:17

love the idea that I could just like connect that. I'm like, oh, yeah,

58:19

I know that just from

58:21

living here.

58:24

That's really important because I mean, you know, when

58:26

you you've been to Greece, right, and it's such a heterogeneous

58:29

landscape. You have some mountains,

58:31

upland plateaus and coastal plains, you have you

58:33

know, a whole set of kind of different

58:35

biomes and so you know,

58:37

yeah, we need to understand this on a very

58:40

precise regional and microregional

58:43

scale, right.

58:44

Well, yeah, it's it's so diverse

58:46

there, Like I just have to say, like

58:49

one of the things that stood out to me most

58:51

like I've been I've been to a lot of great islands now and not

58:53

as much on the mainland, but like I went

58:55

to Samothraki a couple of years ago, and

58:58

that island to me is like from

59:00

my experience, it is the most diverse.

59:04

Like have you been there at all?

59:05

No, I've never been to. No, I wish.

59:07

I mean it's wild. Wild is the only

59:10

word to use to describe it. I mean the goats

59:12

alone. But like there most of

59:14

the island is like very typical Greek, you

59:17

know, it's it's very dry and arid, and

59:19

there's this big mountain like the island like

59:21

is Mount Pangari. And and then

59:24

but there's this one little spot

59:26

of this very small island where

59:29

just one face of the mountain is

59:32

like a rainforest and

59:34

there's like you know, waterfalls and rivers

59:37

and the plants that you go Like there's

59:39

this town called Therma, and then the river

59:41

is Fonias and you can go to this like gorge area

59:43

and it's like a different world. It's

59:46

like the trees are completely

59:48

different. Everything is so green and wet

59:51

and luscious. And then you leave this like

59:54

tiny little square of the island,

59:56

and you were on typical Greek where everything

59:58

is so dry and mountainous and and it's

1:00:00

like brown, and there's just goats

1:00:03

everywhere. And it's fascinating to me because Samotharky's

1:00:05

one of the smallest islands, like and it just like

1:00:07

this, this complete difference, just on this

1:00:10

one place. So I can only imagine, you

1:00:12

know, what exists in the wider Greek

1:00:14

world that I haven't seen yet. But I'm also just obsessed

1:00:16

with sam with Reki, so I can talk about but.

1:00:19

I want to pop your bubble, or pop your

1:00:21

myth bubble for a second about these

1:00:23

goats. So this is a

1:00:26

myth. This is like cattle's in Homer.

1:00:29

What do you mean a myth?

1:00:29

What I mean that this is a myth?

1:00:32

Your association of Greece with goats.

1:00:34

So let me tell you a story.

1:00:36

Well, I mean, I okay, I mean

1:00:38

how many I've seen that?

1:00:39

I know, I know, I know, but I'm going to prove it to you. I'm

1:00:42

going to prove it to you. Wait, do you do you eat

1:00:44

meat? I forget? Yeah? Yeah, okay, good, that

1:00:46

that's important. So all right, I

1:00:48

gave a lecture. I studied all these goats from

1:00:50

Azori on Cretan. I was called goats

1:00:52

and other animals in there, and

1:00:55

I went to the Internet and I asked for pictures of goats

1:00:57

to illustrate my point, and

1:00:59

I got so many amazing goat

1:01:01

pictures, mostly from Greek archaeologists,

1:01:04

but really people all over the world, because goats are so

1:01:06

photogenic.

1:01:07

It's why I sort of got I have from Samothraki

1:01:10

in correct, the horns on some of them,

1:01:12

because they're all wild and they're like, yeah.

1:01:17

Far they're they're

1:01:19

they were domesticated and they went feral. Yeah

1:01:22

so uh but yes, and you need to

1:01:24

send me some of those so I can integrate them into my lectures.

1:01:27

But it was only after I did this and asked

1:01:29

for sheep and cattle for my Twitter followers and nobody

1:01:31

could send me any good photos that I realized

1:01:34

that these goats and from all over the world.

1:01:36

They're highly visible because people let them roam

1:01:39

right, so they're very visible, and people

1:01:41

like them, so they notice them and see them and photograph

1:01:43

them. They end up going viral online

1:01:46

and that's why you see all these articles every year, like

1:01:48

the Year of the Goat. Everybody's going crazy

1:01:50

about baby goats. Online, you know, and

1:01:54

whatnot. They are, but they

1:01:57

don't represent the actual animal

1:01:59

economy in modern Greece. It's

1:02:01

still mostly sheep. So if you go into a taverna,

1:02:04

what do you order? You order lamb or do you order

1:02:06

goat? And so you m

1:02:09

yeah, yeah, yeah, And so this is just

1:02:11

what you're seeing because the sheep are being

1:02:13

raised in a more sort of constricted way. They

1:02:16

are what's you know, on agricultural

1:02:18

fields that you don't go and visit. You know, you're

1:02:21

not going to the farms of Greece where

1:02:23

most of those sheep are. Instead, you're up at the archaeological

1:02:26

sites and in the forest or at the beach where goats

1:02:28

might sometimes roam by because they just

1:02:30

sort of roam around.

1:02:32

Now I have to tell you a bit more about the Samothration that's

1:02:35

a.

1:02:35

Different story because of the're feral goats.

1:02:37

Yeah, well exactly, and Sanmo Three's feral goats,

1:02:39

Like I think I read this number somewhere

1:02:42

once, but they outnumber people tend to one on

1:02:44

Samothraci, like the

1:02:47

goats are while you literally cannot exist

1:02:49

in the outdoors on Samothraki unless

1:02:51

you're in like the town without hearing

1:02:54

goats everywhere around you all the time.

1:02:56

It's incredible. But Samothraki

1:02:58

is also the only place I've ever seen sheep, and

1:03:01

so, like I was staying in this hotel.

1:03:04

Except for a butcher shop.

1:03:05

Well yes, exactly, live

1:03:09

no, I was staying in this hotel and like all of Samothraki,

1:03:12

like there's just a road all the way around the island because it's

1:03:14

a mountain in the middle, and so everything is basically

1:03:16

on the coast, and so from my hotel,

1:03:19

I can see the coast and you can like I walked

1:03:21

this long street that

1:03:24

goes around the island to like get to the closest restaurant.

1:03:26

So I like walked this strip along

1:03:28

the water like so many times.

1:03:31

And one time I was coming back to

1:03:34

my hotel and I'm walking along and there

1:03:37

is just an entire like herd of sheep

1:03:39

and this shepherd guy who's there with a

1:03:41

truck and his shepherd crook, and I was like, this

1:03:43

is the most iconic thing I've ever seen,

1:03:46

Like so and but he'd brought his herd

1:03:48

of sheep to the beach

1:03:51

and they were like just grazing somewhere, and I

1:03:53

was really obsessed with like okay, but he had his

1:03:55

so many of them, like how does he get them back? And I

1:03:57

was like so interested in this farmer

1:03:59

and his sheep and they're on the beach and it's

1:04:02

so cool. And then so I like

1:04:04

go back to my hotel room to decide.

1:04:06

I'm like, I'm gonna watch. I want to see like what this guy

1:04:08

does. But I get distracted because

1:04:10

the sheep are on this beach and then

1:04:12

directly behind the sheep dolphins,

1:04:16

huh start cool breaching

1:04:18

like literally probably ten to twenty feet

1:04:20

off the coast, directly behind this herd of sheep,

1:04:23

and I'm just staring at this thing, like what am I

1:04:25

even watching right now? I've got dolphins

1:04:27

behind a herd of sheep in front of me, and I

1:04:29

got so distracted by the dolphins I didn't catch how the

1:04:31

guy heard it all his sheep at wherever

1:04:33

the heck he was, because I had been like there for

1:04:35

a week and never seen a single sheep because

1:04:38

of the goats, except when he brought them in.

1:04:40

So it definitely proves your point. But also

1:04:43

it's just one of my favorite eends from Semukreki.

1:04:46

It's the craziest island, Like it's another

1:04:48

world entirely. But yeah, I did

1:04:50

see domesticated sheep and

1:04:52

a lot of feral goats.

1:04:54

Far goats are on and it's yeah,

1:04:57

yeah, I mean but even the even the ones that are

1:04:59

domesticated are problems. Like we had a lot of

1:05:01

problems with them climbing our fences and getting

1:05:03

onto the site. So that are those the

1:05:05

students excavating. They'd enter the trench every

1:05:08

morning to go turts, and so

1:05:10

you know, it creates problems with scientific

1:05:13

sampling. It creates all kinds of issues. But you

1:05:15

can't really control goats because they're able

1:05:17

to climb pretty much anything, and so.

1:05:20

You know why they work so well, yeah, mountainous

1:05:22

grease.

1:05:23

But yeah, and it also means when

1:05:25

you start hitting a recession and stop doing

1:05:27

as much investment into agricultural wild

1:05:29

spaces, goats can just take over,

1:05:32

like on samitharchy, and it's a

1:05:34

real problem there. Yeah,

1:05:36

yeah, but yeah, they are a myth in that

1:05:38

sense. They mostly raise them for feta. So

1:05:41

most of the feta you eat his goats cheese. And

1:05:43

then most of the animal

1:05:45

that you eat is often lamb, unless

1:05:48

it's adult, in which case some butchers or restaurants

1:05:50

that might occasionally give you goat when they say it's

1:05:52

cheap, that can happen to Yeah.

1:05:55

I've definitely seeing goat on the menu. I have

1:05:58

chosen to eat it, but I

1:06:00

mean I'm not like a big adventurous meat person.

1:06:02

I'll admit though in grease i am more so, so I probably

1:06:05

should, but no, it's I mean,

1:06:07

it's interesting because, yeah, I associate when it

1:06:09

comes to at least grease and Greek food, I associate

1:06:12

goat with the milk, with feta

1:06:14

and cheese. Broadly, it's a lot of

1:06:16

a lot of goat cheese over there.

1:06:18

Yeah, yeah, but you should if you're

1:06:20

ever in Greece for something like smoky Tuesdays,

1:06:23

Seek No Pempty or Easter or

1:06:25

something like that. I mean, it's just lamb everywhere,

1:06:28

all over, and so I mean, you know, they

1:06:30

really are a lamb

1:06:33

eating culture rather

1:06:35

than a goat eating culture. Definitely.

1:06:38

The only place I've really seen goat on the menu is like in crete,

1:06:40

which I know, yeah, it's.

1:06:41

All over, it's all over, but it's it's it's

1:06:44

good. It's a goat is great. They sometimes do it with old

1:06:46

goat, but you can also get young goat, and I've

1:06:48

never had bad goat. It's it's good, and it's

1:06:51

it's you have to it's a little game

1:06:53

here, but it's it's

1:06:55

when they when they know if you if they know how to cook

1:06:58

it, they'll make it really delicious.

1:06:59

I mean Greek food. They know how to cook

1:07:01

it.

1:07:03

But maybe you don't want to go out and cook a goat.

1:07:06

No, No, they're going to do it for me. I don't cook a lot of animal mad

1:07:08

I just get people to do it for you. It's

1:07:13

just I mean, this is so fascinating because I just never

1:07:16

think about this side of it, the interactions

1:07:18

with animals, let alone the study of bones to figure

1:07:20

out this kind of thing. Is

1:07:23

there is there more? I mean, obviously there's so much

1:07:25

more, but like, is there more particularly that you want to

1:07:27

share when it comes to this, like the

1:07:29

Bronze Age associations and you know that transition

1:07:32

or really anything fond about how about bronz

1:07:34

Age and food?

1:07:35

This ain't Bronze Age per se. It's

1:07:38

more like what we can think about coming next.

1:07:41

So in a sense I've mentioned

1:07:43

at a few points things like isotopes studies,

1:07:46

right, So you can take isotopes

1:07:48

from people's teeth and bones, and it tells you about

1:07:51

diet and stuff like that.

1:07:53

So you can look at how much animal consumption or

1:07:55

different kinds of plants people are eating, stuff

1:07:57

like that. But you can also do that with animals. And

1:08:00

so this is what I'm doing right now,

1:08:03

is you can actually take samples

1:08:05

from the teeth of the bones of animals and

1:08:07

you can see understand their diet and

1:08:10

even better if you if

1:08:12

anyone was paying a lot of attention, I

1:08:14

mentioned that at some point those those

1:08:17

spieliothems, those stalactites and stalagmites,

1:08:19

uh, they use sometimes

1:08:22

oxygen isotope can tell

1:08:24

you about seasonal or precipitation,

1:08:27

or weather patterns, climate pans. So

1:08:30

you can do this on the tooth of a sheeper goat. Unlike

1:08:33

most human teeth, sheep and goat teeth

1:08:35

or cattle teeth, they grow up and the

1:08:37

way they I'm making

1:08:39

signs with you too with my hand. Nobody can

1:08:42

see them, but.

1:08:43

They normally I remember, but now I'm like, does the shape.

1:08:47

So the way that these teeth grow

1:08:49

is it's it's one layer of enamel at

1:08:51

a time, right, And so

1:08:53

if we sample a tooth horizontally,

1:08:56

and we take several samples up

1:08:58

a tooth. What we end up with

1:09:01

is a signature of what this animal

1:09:03

is eating during different seasons of the year. Yeah,

1:09:06

right, And so we can correlate that using

1:09:08

oxygen, and then the carbon signature,

1:09:11

which we get at the same time from the mass spectrometer from

1:09:13

the same sample, tells us about the type of

1:09:15

plants that the animal is eating. And

1:09:18

so what that tells us is how

1:09:21

these animals are managed seasonally.

1:09:23

So when you think about modern day

1:09:27

agriculture, you see all these goats, do

1:09:29

you have a sense of how they're herded between

1:09:32

uplands and lowland seasonally?

1:09:35

I only associate it with samilthraki, where they're

1:09:37

just fucking everywhere. They're doing their own

1:09:39

things. They don't give a shit.

1:09:41

Fucking feral goats everywhere everywhere.

1:09:44

Okay, So traditionally these

1:09:47

sheep and goat and other animals there are oftentimes,

1:09:49

so if you think about it, they're in the uplands

1:09:53

in the summer when it's cooler

1:09:55

and the uplands are more lush, and

1:09:57

they're in the lowlands in the winter. That's sort

1:09:59

of modern animal husbandry.

1:10:02

And there's been this debate that's been raging

1:10:05

between ancient historians and archaeologists

1:10:07

for about one hundred y and it's called the agro

1:10:10

pastoral debate, and it's about a

1:10:12

big chunk of it is about whether they move their animals

1:10:15

up and down seasonally. And

1:10:17

so now we can start to answer this kind of

1:10:19

question by doing this isotope study up

1:10:22

a tooth to see what they're eating and where

1:10:24

they're going from the geological signature

1:10:27

seasonally, and so that's going to be able

1:10:29

to tell us a lot more. I've started getting results

1:10:32

from Zorea, so that's iron

1:10:34

Age and archaic, but there's no Bronze

1:10:37

Age animals there. And

1:10:39

then collaborator of my Ballacia

1:10:42

Izikivu, has published some from Bronze

1:10:44

Age Kumosos, and I am

1:10:47

going to Greece next week. I'm working with her

1:10:49

and I'm grabbing material with

1:10:51

a permit from the Ministry of Culture and everything like that.

1:10:54

I'm not just taking it with me.

1:10:55

I appreciate it, and

1:10:57

I you.

1:10:58

Know, I have a conservator that's gonna inspect what I

1:11:00

do and I'll be discussing how I sample it, and I have an

1:11:02

official permit and everything, and I'll be

1:11:04

taking material back here in Cardiff in

1:11:06

order to do this analysis on material from Iron

1:11:08

Age and then Classical

1:11:11

period and Roman period sheep and goat

1:11:13

from Kenosos. So we'll have a record

1:11:15

from the Bronze Age to the Roman period soon

1:11:18

at Kenosos that could maybe

1:11:20

be talking about in more detail how

1:11:23

this animal management adapts

1:11:26

and responds and drives cultural changes

1:11:29

and relates to climate change and things

1:11:31

like that. And so we'll really

1:11:33

have a clearer understanding of that between

1:11:36

those periods at a few of these sites,

1:11:38

and if I get more funding, I'll do it at more sites,

1:11:41

places like Cathens and elsewhere, because I

1:11:43

think it's important to reach this level

1:11:45

of resolution. If you will, you know, if

1:11:48

we want to really understand how humans

1:11:50

adapt to sort of climate change, one

1:11:52

thing I can say is they take way too long. That

1:11:56

that clearly now,

1:11:58

yeah, we can tell that right now. I mean, this is this

1:12:01

is an article I want to write for some magazine.

1:12:03

Is like, you know, when you look at these shifts

1:12:05

in the Greek world, they tell us that people took

1:12:07

too long. They clearly recognize

1:12:10

that the climate was changing.

1:12:12

And it's funny how we're mimicking this intensification.

1:12:14

We're just growing our economy.

1:12:17

But you know, at some point we're gonna have to start thinking

1:12:19

about changing our diversity. So that's

1:12:21

this guy Mac Marston who teaches it. Bu We wrote

1:12:24

this article on different ways people

1:12:26

can adapt to climate change, and one is intensification,

1:12:29

the other one is diversity, biodiversity

1:12:31

and diversify strategies. Even so

1:12:34

you don't just do the same strategy. You do different

1:12:36

kinds of strategies in different places. And

1:12:39

so you know, we're gonna have to start thinking about that today

1:12:41

and we need to act faster because

1:12:44

you know, we look at the Iron Age

1:12:46

of Greece and even though I

1:12:49

agree calling it a dark age is silly, doesn't

1:12:51

make sense. But at the same time people

1:12:54

there were more people that were malnourished, there

1:12:56

were people that were not eating as well, and

1:12:58

there are no elites at all,

1:13:01

you know, Like you get these stories of elites

1:13:03

that want to build a bunker and survive,

1:13:05

and then they ask what can I do when my

1:13:07

guards have guns and I don't, And

1:13:10

it's like, well, dude, if you want to

1:13:12

look at some history so you can inform yourself

1:13:14

when you look at collapse, collapse is a

1:13:16

stupid term. Collapse literally just

1:13:19

means the collapse of the elites. When

1:13:21

we think of cultural collapses and civilizational

1:13:24

collapses, it's the elites who

1:13:26

get fucked yep, just

1:13:28

as much as everyone else. And the elites

1:13:32

disappear, right, they

1:13:35

get they get eaten and become.

1:13:37

The poor as well, and so

1:13:39

you know, the angry left.

1:13:41

Yeah, that's fine.

1:13:43

Like, if there's some billionaire listening

1:13:46

who wants to build a bunker, screw

1:13:49

that. Fuck that work

1:13:51

to help society as a whole mitigate

1:13:55

and adapt to climate change, because we're all

1:13:57

going down together.

1:13:59

And your billions aren't gonna matter then,

1:14:02

so nothing, they don't matter now,

1:14:04

So maybe just fucking use them correctly instead

1:14:07

of Yeah, yeah, Zucker, and we're

1:14:09

talking to you. Yeah,

1:14:13

I just I mean, that's yeah, that's

1:14:16

a pretty interesting. I'm glad we have that connection to modern

1:14:18

climate change because, like I mean, if you think like

1:14:20

they took too long back then and they did not

1:14:22

have the human made impacts of climate

1:14:25

change that we have now, and we are like

1:14:27

the evidence is there, we're fucked.

1:14:29

Yeah, I mean like well, I mean, look,

1:14:32

I refuse to be a dumer about it. I mean, the

1:14:34

reality is people have adapted,

1:14:37

and we can adapt if we

1:14:39

can somehow get the will

1:14:41

to do it.

1:14:42

You know, Well, that's the thing. It's not about the people. It's

1:14:44

about the elite wanting to do it right.

1:14:47

And I mean I would love to, but I have no

1:14:49

control over that.

1:14:51

Some notes of optimism is that the

1:14:53

lots of countries are decarbonizing

1:14:56

at you know, not

1:14:58

as fast as we need, but they it's

1:15:00

moving along, and that's important to acknowledge

1:15:03

because that builds up economies of scale, makes

1:15:05

it cheaper to decarbonize for other people. And

1:15:08

to be honest, if you think about it long term, it's

1:15:10

a capitalists should want to decarbonize. It's

1:15:12

a lot cheaper to use renewable energy sources

1:15:14

than they have to mine into the ground

1:15:17

and transport them all over the world, like

1:15:19

that costs money. So you know, like

1:15:22

I think we will decarbonize. And

1:15:24

there's lots of efforts to adapt

1:15:26

things like our some mostly

1:15:28

in wealthier countries of course, agricultural systems

1:15:31

and to build flood barriers and to adapt

1:15:34

to rising sea levels.

1:15:36

But I definitely think we need to think more about food

1:15:38

as well, because, to be honest, we talk

1:15:40

about like more intense

1:15:43

storms and we talk about rising

1:15:45

sea level, but what's

1:15:48

really impacting people today from climate

1:15:51

change that is already happening is food.

1:15:53

That's why we see famines, That's why we see

1:15:55

refugee crises, that's why we see

1:15:57

there's people that have speculated with good evidence,

1:16:00

not just crappy speculation that you know,

1:16:02

the wars in Syria, for example, started

1:16:04

with famines which were caused

1:16:06

basically by climate change, or at least made a lot worse.

1:16:09

And so you know already today,

1:16:11

if we want to be thinking about what's really impacting

1:16:14

most people, it's food. It's

1:16:16

the price of food that it's the availability

1:16:19

of food. It's our ability to grow and distribute

1:16:21

food. That is what underpins our

1:16:24

society and our ability to live. So

1:16:26

we got to fix that up and make it work better.

1:16:29

It also contributes to to to carbon

1:16:32

as well. You know, all the fertilizers we use, the

1:16:34

ways in which we produce animals,

1:16:37

factory.

1:16:37

Farming in North America specifically, yeah,

1:16:39

yeah, yeah, And so we're talking to you a

1:16:42

lot today between

1:16:44

the oil and the factory farming province.

1:16:48

It is reassuring, it is there's some

1:16:50

positive I mean, hopefully, I have trouble

1:16:53

with trusting any capitalist government,

1:16:55

but I'd like to think that maybe things

1:16:57

will change, yeah, you know for us today,

1:17:00

but it's so interesting to look at these past

1:17:03

examples of what was happening.

1:17:05

Like I think we often don't don't think about that because

1:17:07

because you know, human made climate change now is

1:17:10

so much faster, and it like

1:17:12

we are dealing with so much of that now that it's

1:17:15

interesting to look back on the stuff that did happen

1:17:18

naturally.

1:17:18

And we have to, I mean, like it's silly

1:17:21

not to look to the past to understand how

1:17:23

we can respond. I mean, I

1:17:26

know that some archaeology has some relevance

1:17:28

with something called lithic mulching. So for

1:17:31

a long time in Southwest America you

1:17:34

see sort of Southwest indigenous

1:17:36

farms archaeologically, I mean,

1:17:39

and there's sort of terraces, and it's like, how are people

1:17:42

growing in the middle of the desert, right, And

1:17:44

what you see oftentimes is this scattering

1:17:46

of stones in the soil. And we know they're growing there because

1:17:48

we have pollen and archaeopotanical stuff. We have

1:17:51

terraces and like you know, houses

1:17:53

and other structures there. And the way

1:17:55

they're able to do that is through something called

1:17:57

lithic mulching, where when you put stones

1:17:59

in the soil the stones help

1:18:02

retain moisture. You can

1:18:04

think about this if you go outside today and do after

1:18:06

on a drier day, and you pick up

1:18:09

a rock, the soil right under

1:18:11

the rock is wetter than

1:18:13

the soil that's right next to it, and so

1:18:16

the and lithic multi The more archaeologists

1:18:18

look at it, we find it in indigenous

1:18:21

cultures all over the world, right and

1:18:23

so so now people are starting

1:18:26

to adapt that to modern farming

1:18:28

in areas that are getting drier, and

1:18:31

so we should definitely be looking to

1:18:33

the past to start thinking about

1:18:35

how to I mean, look, how often

1:18:38

have humans had to deal with climate change? Obviously

1:18:40

a lot over the span of thousands and thousands

1:18:42

of years, but not that it's only this one event

1:18:44

in our own lifetime. So you know, if

1:18:46

we want to understand different ways that human societies

1:18:49

have adapted, I mean, I think we have to look

1:18:51

to the past. And it's so silly

1:18:53

that we see things like all these cuts

1:18:56

to things like archaeology and humanities and

1:18:58

stuff like that, because how do we how

1:19:00

do we contextualize major changes?

1:19:03

There's no way to do that. We always economists

1:19:06

look to the past with stock performance, people

1:19:09

who comment on sports look to the past with

1:19:11

statistics. You know what they're doing. We

1:19:13

got to do the same thing with humans. You know, we look

1:19:15

to the past to inform our own decisions, to

1:19:18

provide context to why we make

1:19:20

decisions. And so, you

1:19:22

know, just because ours is anthropogenic

1:19:24

climate change does not make it. You know,

1:19:27

the end point could be drastically different as

1:19:30

climate change goes faster and more

1:19:32

severe than ever before. But

1:19:34

obviously we want to work to

1:19:36

mitigate that, you know, that's the goal

1:19:39

is to decarbonize and mitigate that and

1:19:41

so, but at the same time, there's some amount of

1:19:43

climate change that's cooked in, let's

1:19:45

say, and so we should be looking

1:19:48

in the past or ways that we can mitigate that or

1:19:50

adapt to it, is what I mean. Sorry, Yeah, and

1:19:53

obviously things like elithic mulching, but also

1:19:55

the evidence for biodiversity from past

1:19:58

food production. If you go to POMPEII,

1:20:00

for example, and you walk around,

1:20:02

you might notice there's these weird concrete

1:20:05

things that kind of look like a

1:20:08

platform form with like spider legs

1:20:10

underneath it. Oh.

1:20:11

Sorry, I was just there, but now I'm like, oh, what are this? Okay,

1:20:14

sorry, keep going, It's okay.

1:20:15

You can you see them in a more wide

1:20:17

open spaces at Pompeii. What they

1:20:19

are is so all right, so you probably

1:20:22

saw the bodies when you went to Pompeii.

1:20:24

Right, yeah, not enough, I

1:20:26

was. We spent too much time walking around, but I did I thought

1:20:28

saw some.

1:20:29

Yeah. So what happens with that is

1:20:31

when the volcanic material

1:20:34

rains down, organic life

1:20:36

forms like people got trapped

1:20:38

in this lapili

1:20:41

is what they're called there, and eventually

1:20:44

the bodies decayed away and left a void.

1:20:47

And early excavators saw these voids.

1:20:49

There were people, and they poured in plaster.

1:20:52

And that's what those bodies are that you see

1:20:54

on display, those spider leg

1:20:57

things with a platform. That's

1:20:59

actually the same thing but for

1:21:02

a tree trunk and roots. Oh

1:21:04

cool. Yeah, they're all over Pompeii. None

1:21:06

of them have signs. You have to know what you're looking for or

1:21:08

to see them. But they're all over right

1:21:10

by the Amphitheater And like you know, well,

1:21:13

I wish I talked to you two minutes ago.

1:21:15

I was there for the first time in January.

1:21:18

But what this lets us do at Pompeii,

1:21:20

because especially these days, experts

1:21:23

are really they're they're keen to identify

1:21:25

this kind of stuff, and like Barbara Burrell's doing excavations

1:21:29

at a villa nearby, I think is

1:21:31

that a plontis I'm blanking on which

1:21:33

villa it is, and different

1:21:37

teams they're able to see these, and they're able to now

1:21:39

pour in the plaster in about different kind of

1:21:41

plaster, which gets you more specific

1:21:43

root cast. It was wil Helmina Zruzhzemsky, by

1:21:45

the way, she was the first one to develop

1:21:47

this technique in the seventies. But now we're

1:21:49

down to like this micro level of roots, which

1:21:52

lets biologists then identify

1:21:54

very closely to species and much

1:21:57

smaller plants as well, which means we can say

1:22:00

this tree was here, that tree was

1:22:02

there, that's stake in the ground

1:22:05

that had a vine on it was right there,

1:22:09

right, And then from other types

1:22:11

of things like archaeobotanical stuff and

1:22:14

pollen samples, we can really put together

1:22:16

a farmstead right in real

1:22:19

place, what's growing where at the time

1:22:21

of the eruption, And what we

1:22:23

see is it looks nothing like our

1:22:25

farms today, nothing at all.

1:22:27

When you go to like the Midwest or in

1:22:30

Midwest, it's corn as far as you can see. And

1:22:33

I don't know In France it's corn or sunflowers

1:22:35

as far as you can see. In Greece it's olive trees

1:22:38

as far as you can see, you know, And so we

1:22:40

have this monoculture. This is the

1:22:42

epitome of polyculture. It's one

1:22:45

row of olives next to another row of a different

1:22:47

kind of fruit tree in between them as a row

1:22:49

of vines. Right over there is a small

1:22:51

little field for wheat and legumes. It's

1:22:54

all in one farmstead and

1:22:56

that is extremely productive, if

1:22:59

you you know, the more different.

1:23:01

There's a lot of studies done by Big Agriculture

1:23:04

as well, even funded by the

1:23:06

show that the more biodiversity there is

1:23:08

a plot of land, the more you can produce.

1:23:10

The amount that we think of of ancient

1:23:13

people getting out of a plot of land has

1:23:15

been kind of the

1:23:18

scholars until recently have underestimated

1:23:20

it. In fact, ancient agriculture,

1:23:23

probably a lot of it produced more per

1:23:25

unit of land than modern industry of agriculture

1:23:27

because it was so biodiverse. We

1:23:30

don't like it for our economy today because it takes

1:23:32

a lot more work, right, so it's

1:23:34

an efficiency of labor issue, But

1:23:37

in terms of maximizing

1:23:39

your production out of the landscape in

1:23:42

the face of something like climate change. We

1:23:44

need to be thinking about polyculture systems.

1:23:47

And you know, that's what most indigenous agriculture

1:23:49

around the world is, that's what most ancient Greek

1:23:51

and Roman agriculture around the world is, so

1:23:55

on and so forth. That's actually how

1:23:57

to be more productive

1:24:00

and efficient and stable and resilient,

1:24:03

sustainable and resilient with your sort of

1:24:05

food production systems. And so we should

1:24:07

be looking to these food productions resistance in the past

1:24:09

to get some ideas on how to rejigger

1:24:11

our own in the face of this. One

1:24:14

of my arguments, well.

1:24:16

I imagine that looking back to what indigenous

1:24:19

people did, you know in so

1:24:22

many places, I think of North America so specifically,

1:24:25

but you know, like they knew how

1:24:27

to use the land without harming

1:24:29

the land in a lot of ways. Like they really

1:24:32

really had this like actual real connection

1:24:35

with with the land and were able to

1:24:37

do all of these things that we just you

1:24:39

know, capitalism has just made it so that like it just doesn't

1:24:42

occur in the same ways. And and it's all about

1:24:44

you know, power and power structures versus you

1:24:46

know, particularly those indigenous groups that were

1:24:49

less concerned with that and more concerned

1:24:51

with with just living happily

1:24:53

on the land and honoring it and all

1:24:55

of that. It's you know, it's a it's a really

1:24:58

interesting thing. And I think particularly in North

1:25:00

America, Like I know that you know, indigenous archaeology

1:25:02

and stuff is studied, but obviously the

1:25:04

you know, the the colonial impacts

1:25:07

that are still so long lasting. I mean that they're

1:25:09

not you know, we're not looking as much as I think that we

1:25:11

should. But it

1:25:13

is so interesting to look at, you know, the way that a lot

1:25:15

of indigenous people really cared for their

1:25:18

land in ways that is so different

1:25:20

from us today. Like yeah, just a much

1:25:22

more like holistic approach to that, and.

1:25:24

It's much smarter. I mean, like

1:25:26

think about it evolutionarily, like how

1:25:29

long did people survive in the land doing

1:25:31

these kind of traditional agricultural ways

1:25:34

of life. They supported many many, many

1:25:36

thousands of years, many thousands of years

1:25:39

of generations of people. Industrialization,

1:25:42

it looks like we're about to go out like a flash

1:25:44

in a pan where you know, it's

1:25:46

like if you think about it, like

1:25:48

what we think of as smart, no,

1:25:51

that way of life is the smart way that's

1:25:53

evolutionarily beneficial, you

1:25:55

know, is to actually honor the

1:25:58

land around you, and too to

1:26:00

understand how to live off

1:26:02

of it in a sustainable way, not to

1:26:04

just exploit it and accumulate wealth

1:26:07

for no reason, you know, other than

1:26:09

a pissing contest.

1:26:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean,

1:26:13

yeah, I I could go on forever, but

1:26:16

yeah, I just I love that we were, that

1:26:19

you made these connections because I think, yeah,

1:26:21

the connection to modern the modern day is so

1:26:23

important and just generally

1:26:26

interesting to look at this comparison, because I

1:26:28

think it is it's sometimes hard or easy

1:26:30

to forget how many thousands

1:26:32

of years ancient indigenous peoples

1:26:35

lived on their lands without damaging

1:26:37

a damn thing about it. And then yeah, in the last few

1:26:40

hundred years, we've just come in and torn

1:26:43

it all up, and we're about to just like leave

1:26:45

this planet in the dust because we don't

1:26:47

know how to to actually

1:26:50

work with the land in the ways that you

1:26:52

know, are sustainable and lasting

1:26:54

and actually benefit both the earth

1:26:56

and the people.

1:26:57

Yeah, yeah, and make it work

1:27:00

together, you know. And it's amazing because we live in a period

1:27:02

where we have all this knowledge and

1:27:04

it's just like where we have

1:27:07

the ability to like, like it's not like

1:27:09

the people in the early Iron age had

1:27:11

the ability to really track precipitation

1:27:14

in the same way, and so they figured

1:27:16

it out. Yeah, they figured it out. I mean it took a

1:27:18

while, but we know how to figure

1:27:21

it out right now. We have the understanding

1:27:23

of why indigenous agriculture

1:27:26

was ecological for example, and sustainable.

1:27:29

We have the ability to understand that the

1:27:31

climate is changing and that it's

1:27:34

not about to stop, so we need

1:27:36

to do something about it. And so it's

1:27:39

just so silly to think about I don't know,

1:27:41

like as if this should be some debate

1:27:43

between science and and and and

1:27:46

humanities or something like that, or scientific

1:27:48

knowledge and indigenous knowledge. Indigenous

1:27:50

knowledge is scientific and scientific knowledge

1:27:53

helps us understand how to tackle these problems,

1:27:56

and so we should be taking that and using

1:27:59

you know, figuring out how to survive and

1:28:01

thrive.

1:28:02

Yeah, well yeah, I mean theeah, the big difference

1:28:04

is we we know we need to do this, we know we need

1:28:06

to adapt, whereas you know, certainly in their early Iron

1:28:09

Age they're looking at it, they're like they're not certain

1:28:11

yet, Like it probably took a while for them to realize

1:28:13

they had to adapt because you don't,

1:28:16

I mean, you don't notice things are changing until they've been

1:28:18

changing for a while exactly because

1:28:20

it feels like a blip until you're like, well,

1:28:22

actually, I guess it's been ten years

1:28:24

of this. Now we have to look at starting to adapt

1:28:27

and then you have more of like that transition that figuring

1:28:29

it out, and even.

1:28:30

Then, what is this called the baseline effect?

1:28:34

Yeah, the shifting baseline effect is

1:28:36

another big thing which prevents us from

1:28:39

realizing this where you know, you

1:28:43

don't always realize that things have changed

1:28:45

because your own ground

1:28:47

zero is shifting alongside

1:28:49

it, right, right, And so this is a well

1:28:52

known human phenomenon. It's why it's really difficult

1:28:54

to detect something like climate change,

1:28:56

because it happened so gradually that

1:28:59

even by the time it has changed to the point where things

1:29:01

should be observable, your memory

1:29:04

has sort of changed about what things were like.

1:29:06

And you know, we're all and so clever

1:29:09

unless we measure things.

1:29:11

Yeah, oh,

1:29:13

that's really interesting. I'm utterly thrilled

1:29:16

with the turn that this took to modern climate change. I mean,

1:29:18

I suppose I saw it coming too, but I told

1:29:21

you clim I mean yeah,

1:29:23

and I even if you hadn't been going

1:29:25

to talk about it in the modern world, I certainly would

1:29:28

have brought it up. So yeah, no, I I

1:29:30

this is absolutely fascinating. Good, yeah,

1:29:34

absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for doing

1:29:36

this. Of course I kept you for a while, so

1:29:40

it's fine. Yeah, yeah, great, perfected.

1:29:42

This has been an incredible episode. Do you want

1:29:44

to tell my listeners where they can read more from

1:29:46

you, hear more from you, whatever you want to share.

1:29:49

Yeah. So my name is Flint Devil

1:29:51

and you can find me. Most of what I'm

1:29:53

going to try to produce for the public will be on YouTube, but

1:29:56

if I write or do other things, you can find me on

1:29:58

other social media like x or blue Sky

1:30:00

or threads or whatever. Masks done

1:30:03

yeah under my name.

1:30:04

That one still exists too.

1:30:06

Yeah, I mean I mostly just go on there to post.

1:30:08

But you know, I don't know it's it's

1:30:11

I used to really like writing Twitter threads.

1:30:13

I really like the medium let

1:30:16

me express myself about archaeology

1:30:18

in a nice way, and this takeover

1:30:20

of it by Elon Musk is just really I

1:30:23

don't know.

1:30:23

I know it, Yeah, it changed it all.

1:30:25

I really missed the old Twitter too.

1:30:27

Yeah, I mean I'm debating just trying

1:30:29

to ignore that and just try to recreate

1:30:31

what I was doing, and it's

1:30:34

it's sort of like the idea of going on Joe Rogan.

1:30:37

You have to appeal to where people

1:30:39

are and if we have

1:30:41

as scholars, I think we have to stop just talking to ourselves

1:30:43

but talk to you know, the public at large

1:30:45

about what we know and why it matters. And yeah,

1:30:48

it's not easy, but it's something like Twitter

1:30:52

x of whatever the hell you want to

1:30:54

call it. I still call it Twitter most of the time.

1:30:57

And it's it's sort of like,

1:30:59

you know, the look that's still a very effective

1:31:01

platform for sharing this kind of stuff because it

1:31:04

is. And so I don't like

1:31:06

that he's taking it over, but what can I do. It's

1:31:08

just I have to live my life. We all

1:31:10

have to live our lives in this shitty situation where

1:31:12

the oligarchs own everything and don't

1:31:15

think about anything other than their own wealth and

1:31:17

see, yeah, just

1:31:20

sucks.

1:31:21

Don't bring themselves down with us if they will.

1:31:24

That's actually an article I really want to write. It's like,

1:31:26

how like, you know, they need to recognize

1:31:29

that there's no escaping this. If

1:31:31

you look back to history, they're totally

1:31:34

fucked, all of them. Elon Musk, Bill

1:31:36

Gates, whatever it doesn't

1:31:38

matter who they are. They're all fucked, just

1:31:41

like we all are going to

1:31:43

burn along Sideah, it's fine.

1:31:45

Yeah, oh

1:31:48

jeez, and your your YouTube

1:31:50

is it?

1:31:51

Yeah? YouTube? It's archaeology with Flint Divil is

1:31:53

what it's called.

1:31:53

But yeah, wonderful.

1:31:54

It's my name, and find me. I have some fun

1:31:56

stuff coming out at a big video about

1:31:59

Atlantis and another one called Disproving

1:32:02

Lost Civilizations.

1:32:03

Amazing. Yeah, well, I I will link

1:32:06

to everything in that episode of description too so everyone can

1:32:08

find it cool. But yeah, that

1:32:10

sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much for doing this fun

1:32:14

good uh

1:32:30

nerds, thank you so much for listening.

1:32:33

Oh my gosh, that was It was such a fun episode.

1:32:36

And as you heard at the end, you can find more from

1:32:38

Flint about all of this very real and

1:32:40

fascinating archaeology on YouTube. I've linked

1:32:42

to that in the episode's description as

1:32:44

well. Since we recorded this, though I

1:32:46

was told off Mike before we recorded,

1:32:49

but since we recorded this, Flint

1:32:51

has gone on a podcast.

1:32:55

I think the intention is good. I'm having trouble

1:32:57

saying it because it is the Joe Rogan podcast and

1:32:59

I have thoughts and feelings, but

1:33:02

it was to debate Graham

1:33:04

Hancock, who talks

1:33:06

a lot about pseudo archaeology and stu to history

1:33:09

and things like that. And so if you enjoyed

1:33:11

my Atlantis episodes, or

1:33:14

you know the time I returned to this type

1:33:16

of stuff when that quote unquote

1:33:18

documentary Ancient Apocalypse

1:33:20

came out. If you're interested in that, you

1:33:22

might want to check out this episode of

1:33:26

just look for Flint's name in your podcast

1:33:29

app. I feel like that's better. And

1:33:31

next week, on Tuesday, instead

1:33:33

of a standard narrative episode,

1:33:36

I will be bringing you the last episode

1:33:38

of this Bronze Age series, another

1:33:40

conversation and one with Well.

1:33:43

I mean, I think he's probably considered to be

1:33:45

the top name in the Bronze Age collapse.

1:33:48

And if he's not the top one, then he's certainly

1:33:50

among them. I'll be speaking with doctor Eric

1:33:52

Klein, who's the author of eleven

1:33:55

seventy seven BCE, The Year

1:33:57

Civilization Collapsed, about

1:34:00

well exactly that and so so

1:34:03

much more. So stay tuned. That's coming

1:34:05

on Tuesday. Thank you all so

1:34:07

much for listening. Let's talk about it. Baby

1:34:09

is written and produced by me Live Albert, but of

1:34:12

course this series would not exist without

1:34:14

the brain of MICHAELA. Smith the assistant

1:34:16

producer, and of course Laura Smith

1:34:18

is the audio engineer and a production assistant

1:34:20

working on the audio of all of these conversations.

1:34:23

The podcast is part of the iHeartMedia Network.

1:34:27

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1:34:29

of the time. Listen on Spotify

1:34:32

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1:34:34

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1:34:36

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1:34:38

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1:34:40

of past bonus episodes from these seven

1:34:43

almost seven years that I've

1:34:45

been doing this thing. Holy

1:34:47

crap, it's been a while. Thank

1:34:51

you all so much for listening these

1:34:54

dives into history. I have such a love

1:34:57

a love with like a little bit of hate relationship with them.

1:35:00

They just require such different

1:35:02

brain space for me, and I

1:35:04

just, oh my gosh. But speaking to these experts

1:35:07

that is the best part because I just get to sit

1:35:09

back and like be in utter awe

1:35:12

of some of the stuff, and it's

1:35:14

just incredible. I hope you learned a lot. I sure

1:35:16

did. I am live and I love

1:35:19

this shit.