Speaker 1: I want you to I want you to do something
for me right now. It sounds simple, but I actually
need you to physically do it.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, here we go.
Speaker 1: No, seriously, stop whatever you're doing. Yeah, and look down.
Speaker 2: Just look at the floor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look at the floor or the pavement or the
dirt wherever you happen to be standing or sitting right now.
Just look at it feels pretty solid, right.
Speaker 2: It's the literal definition of stability. I mean, we use
phrases like down to Earth, we're grounded for reason exactly.
Speaker 1: We build our mortgages on it, we park our cars
on it, we trust it implicitly to just stay there.
But here is the terrifying thought experiment I want to
start with today. Imagine that stability is just a complete.
Speaker 2: Lie, which geologically speaking, it kind of is.
Speaker 1: It really is. Imagine that, right now, without a single
second of warning, that solid ground just splits. It just
opens up.
Speaker 2: And not just a tiny crack in the sidewalk.
Speaker 1: Either, No, I mean a rupture so violent that it
swallows the present moment hole and in the process it
actually spits out the past.
Speaker 2: That is a very vivid and frankly slightly unsettling way.
Speaker 1: To put it. That's true, right, It is true.
Speaker 2: Scientifically, you're describing a phenomenon that geologists and archaeologists scrapple
with constantly. We tend to view earthquakes solely as agents.
Speaker 1: Of destruction, which they are obviously, of.
Speaker 2: Course they are. They are tragic, terrifying events that cause
immense human suffering. But if you zoom out and look
at the long arc of history, earthquakes also function as
something else. Entirely. They are violent historians.
Speaker 1: Violent historians. I absolutely love that phrase, and that is
exactly what we are talking about today on Thrilling Threads.
Welcome everyone, glad to be here for this one. We
are pulling on a very specific, very dusty, and honestly
very spooky thread today. We're looking at what happens when
the earth rips open time capsules that we didn't even
know were there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're really exploring this paradox of preservation through.
Speaker 1: Destruction because usually archaeology is so slow.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Usually, when we want to learn about the past,
we have to meticulously dig. We go layer by layer,
inch by inch with tiny trowels and brushes. It takes
decades decades, but sometimes the planet just gets impatient, it shakes,
it cracks, and suddenly a royal palace, or a Roman
theater or an entire city is just there, regurgitated, regurgitated,
exposed in an absolute instant.
Speaker 1: And we have a stack of fascinating reports to get
through today, from the jungles of me and Mar to
the basements of Croatia, all the way to the bottom
of lakes in Central Asia.
Speaker 2: It's a truly global phenomenon, it really is.
Speaker 1: We're going to look at specific moments where the Earth
essentially forced us to look at our history, whether we
want it to or not. And I had to say,
some of these stories are absolutely mind blowing.
Speaker 2: It definitely changes how you look at the landscape around you.
Speaker 1: For sure.
Speaker 2: It reminds us that we aren't living on a blank slate.
We're living on top of a very crowded graveyard of civilizations.
Speaker 1: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 2: We're just the current layer of paint on a very
very old canvas.
Speaker 1: Well, let's not wait any longer. Let's jump right into
the deep dive or I guess, into the fish, the fissure.
I like that. Okay, So let's unpack this first story.
We are traveling to Southeast Asia, specifically Central Me and Mar. Now, normally,
when I read about archaeology in this region, the sources
are talking about centuries of slow decay.
Speaker 2: The jungle reclaiming the stone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, tree roots, strangling temples, the slow rot of teakwood.
But this story starts with a bang, specifically a massive
seven point seven magnitude.
Speaker 2: Earthquake, And we really need to pause on that number.
A seven point seven is an immense release of energy.
Speaker 1: It's massive.
Speaker 2: To give you some context, the scale is logarithmic. This
isn't just a rattle that knocks a picture frame off
your wall. A seven point seven is the kind of
force that fundamentally reshapes the topography.
Speaker 1: And this event occurred back in March of twenty twenty five,
hitting Central me and Mar. And obviously an event like
that causes tragedy. Modern buildings toppled, robes are destroyed. It
so humanitary crisis, and we never want to lose sight
of that human cost.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not.
Speaker 1: But in the midst of all that chaos, something really
strange happened here a place called Inwa. Now in Wa
isn't just any irregular count, right.
Speaker 2: No, Inwa is a site of immense historical density. It
was known as Ava in older texts, and it was
the ancient imperial capital of Burmese kings for nearly four
hundred years.
Speaker 1: Four hundred years is a long time for a capital.
Speaker 2: It is, and it has a very long, very turbulent
history of kings and conquests and abandonments. It was actually
known as a wandering capital, a thundering Yeah. They often
built it, destroyed it, and moved it around. But for
a long time, huge chunks of its history were literally
just buried under the sediment of the Irrawady River valley.
Speaker 1: And this is where the story gets really interesting, because
the sources mentioned that back in two thousand and nine,
locals had reported seeing these weird bits of stone just
poking out.
Speaker 2: Of the ground, just little hints of something beneath.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the report describes it as bits of old stairways, right.
Speaker 2: Archaeology, That is so often how it starts, just a rumor,
a rumor, a protruding stone, a farmer hitting something with
a plow. Archaeologists suspected there might be something done there,
but excavation is incredibly expensive.
Speaker 1: And time consuming, very and.
Speaker 2: You need permits. You can't just go digging up a
living village based on a hunch about a staircase. You
need actual proof.
Speaker 1: Well, enter the earthquake. The quake hits and it doesn't
just shake the dirt off, It basically grabs the earth
by both hands and rips it apart.
Speaker 2: The description in the report is vivid. It says the
ground rupture, ruptured. It creates a literal cross section of
the soil. It's a violent stratification exactly.
Speaker 1: And suddenly where there was just dirt and maybe a
tip of a stone, there are now entire ruins sitting
in plain sight. Unbelievable, like the earth just shrugged and said, here,
take it. I'm done holding this for you.
Speaker 2: The reports from the Meandmar Department of Archaeology are fascinating
to read. They rushed in to investigate, obviously very cautiously
given the aftershocks, and what they found was positively identified
as a royal building. Based on the style and the
architectural layout. They believe it belongs to the Konbong dynasty.
Speaker 1: And that's the last royal family of Burma Rid correct.
Speaker 2: They ruled from seventeen fifty two up until the British
annexation in eighteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: Wow, so we're.
Speaker 2: Talking about a structure that was likely the center of
political and social life just a few centuries ago, but
had been completely swallowed by the landscape.
Speaker 1: What really blows my mind is the difference in speed here.
I mean, if humans had tried to excavate that, how
long would it have actually taken years?
Speaker 2: Easily maybe decades to fully uncover a royal complex of
that size without damaging.
Speaker 1: Anything because you have to be so careful.
Speaker 2: You have to use brushes, small picks. You have to
document every single layer to understand the timeline. The earthquake
did the heavy lifting in seconds.
Speaker 1: The lifting might be the wrong word.
Speaker 2: True, it tore the veil away, really.
Speaker 1: And now researchers can actually see the layout. They can
see how Burmese Royalty physically used their It's not just
a foundation, it's a snapshot of a lifestyle that had
been totally hidden.
Speaker 2: That is the key value here. Spatial usage tell me
more about that well. Texts can lie to you. Chronicles
written by kings will tell you how incredibly powerful they
were or how beloved they were. But architecture tells the
truth about human behavior.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: When you see the footprint of the palace, you learn
about hierarchy. You learn exactly where the kings stood versus
where the courtiers were allowed to stand. You learn about
the flow of power through physical space.
Speaker 1: That's something you just don't always get from written records.
Speaker 2: Never, the physical space is undeniable evidence.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate irony, isn't it. To see the ancient landscape,
the modern landscape had to be completely destroyed. Yes, you
have modern roads buckling, modern buildings falling down, and in
their place, the old world just rises right up.
Speaker 2: It's a stark reminder of the cycle of civilization. It's
highly recursive. We build over the past, Nature destroys the present,
and the past re emerges.
Speaker 1: We're constantly just shuffling layers exactly. Speaking of building over
the past down, let's move from the jungles of Myanmar
to a basement in Europe. This next thread takes us
to Croatia.
Speaker 2: Specifically the town of Sissak, or as the Romans called it,
Sisia Great Sisak.
Speaker 1: Now, this is a story that feels like it belongs
in a Hollywood movie. You know, the trope where someone
goes into their basement to fix a fuse and finds
a secret dungeon. Oh yeh, this is exactly that, but
on a municipal scale. Right.
Speaker 2: This was triggered by the twenty twenty earthquake that shook Croatia.
It caused significant damage to many structures, including the Sissak
town Hall.
Speaker 1: Now this town hall wasn't a new building either, No.
Speaker 2: It was already over one hundred years old, a historic
building in its own right.
Speaker 1: So the renovation crews go in. They're there to fix
the earthquake damage. They aren't looking for ancient treasure, They're
just looking for cracks in the foundation, right, And they
bring in archaeologists just as a precaution, right, just to
check the foundations before they pour com.
Speaker 2: Which is standard procedure in many historic European cities. If
you dig a hole in Italy or Greece or Croatia,
you bring.
Speaker 1: A historian because you never know what you might hit.
Speaker 2: You really never know. But I don't think anyone expected
what they found here.
Speaker 1: So they're digging in the basement under a street that
is coincidentally called Roman Street.
Speaker 2: I love that detail.
Speaker 1: Talk about foreshadowing.
Speaker 2: It was hiding in plain sight, literally in the mailing.
Speaker 1: Address exactly, and they hit stone. Yeah, but not just
foundation stones for the town hall. They find a Roman odium. Yes,
now I have to admit I had to look this up.
I know what a colosseum is, I know what an
amphitheater is. What exactly is an odium?
Speaker 2: Think of it as the difference between a massive football
stadium and a small, intimate concert hall. Okay, an amphitheater,
like the colisseum, was for mass spectacles, gladiators, beasts, blood noise,
screaming crowds. An odeon or odium was much smaller and
more intimate, so for a different kind of crowd, very different.
It was usually roofed, which is a key distinction for acoustics.
It was used for musical performances, poetry recitals, rhetoric, political speeches,
artsy stuff. Exactly. It was the high culture venue of
the Roman world.
Speaker 1: And it was just sitting right there under the town hall.
Speaker 2: Directly underneath they found a semi circular layout with three
rows of stone blocks forming the orchestra area. This wasn't
just the scattered pile of rubble. It was a clearly
defined performance space.
Speaker 1: I just love the mental image of the Mayor of
Sussek sitting in his office, you know, signing paperwork, worrying
about municipal budgets, completely unaware that directly beneath his feet
two thousand years ago, someone was reciting epic poetry or
playing a liar.
Speaker 2: It really speaks to the sheer density of history in Europe.
The town hall renovation plans had to be completely scrapped,
of course, I.
Speaker 1: Would certainly hope, so you can't just pour modern concrete
over a perfectly preserved Roman theater.
Speaker 2: Now they did something very clever instead. They actually installed
glass floors.
Speaker 1: That's brilliant.
Speaker 2: So now visitors to the town hall can walk across
the room and just look down through the floor to
see the Roman stage directly beneath them.
Speaker 1: That is such a powerful metaphor the glass floor into
the past. It literally visualizes the layers of history you
were talking about. We are walking on their roofs, and.
Speaker 2: It forces a real connection. When you look through that glass,
you realize that that space that specific coordinate on the
globe has been a center of community gathering for millennia,
whether it's a Roman odeon where people listen to music
or a Croatian town hall where people debate modern policy
humans have been gathering right there, to discuss, to listen,
to govern.
Speaker 1: The function really hasn't changed at all, Only.
Speaker 2: The architecture has changed. The human need to gather remains
exactly the same.
Speaker 1: That honestly gives me chills. It's like the land itself
has a memory of its purpose.
Speaker 2: Or perhaps humans are just creatures of habit. We tend
to build on the best spots over and over again.
Good drainage, central location, near water.
Speaker 1: True, we are pretty predictable. Sometimes those prime spots are
incredibly dangerous, which leads us to probably the most famous
frozen in time city in human history, Pompeii.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, the gold standard by which all other archaeological
disasters are measured.
Speaker 1: Now, everyone knows the Pompeii story. Seventy nine CE. Mount
Lisuvius blows its top, lava ash pyroclastic flow, everyone dies
from the volcano. End of story, right, That is.
Speaker 2: The popular narrative. Yes, and for most of the victims
it is entirely true. But recent forensic archaeology has added
a terrifying new layer to that story.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just a volcano, No, it was not. This
is the thread that really got me. We're looking at
a specific site in Pompei called Casti Amanti or the
House of the Chaste Lovers.
Speaker 2: A very beautiful name for a deeply tragic site.
Speaker 1: Archaeologists found two skeletons there, but when they analyzed them,
something just didn't add up with the volcano theory.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: They didn't show signs of suffocation from the ash. Right,
And they weren't burned by the heat surge that typically
cooks the organic matter in these eruptions.
Speaker 2: No, they weren't. These two individuals, both men were found
pin under a collapsed wall. The forensic analysis of the
bone fractures and the position of the bodies strongly indicated they.
Speaker 1: Were crushed crushed by the wall.
Speaker 2: Yes, they died from blunt force trauma caused by complete
structural failure of the building.
Speaker 1: Meaning what exactly?
Speaker 2: Meaning they died from an earthquake.
Speaker 1: So wait, let me get this straight. Yeah, the volcano
is actively erupting, the sky is completely dark, ash and
pumus are falling, and simultaneously the ground is shaking violently
enough to knock down massive stone walls.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We often forget that volcanic eruptions are almost always
accompanied by intense seismic.
Speaker 1: Activity because of the magma.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the magma pushing up physically breaks the bedrock. So
imagine the terror of that moment. You are hiding inside
a house to escape the falling rocks from the sky.
Speaker 1: You think you're safe indoors, you think the.
Speaker 2: Roof will protect you, and then the earthquake hits and
brings the entire structure down on top of you.
Speaker 1: It's a multi hazard event. I think that's the technical
term used in the Source right now.
Speaker 2: Yes, multi hazard, and it fundamentally changes our understanding of
Pompey's final moments. It wasn't just fire from the sky.
It was total sensory overload.
Speaker 1: Nowhere to run, nowhere.
Speaker 2: The earth was attacking them from below, while the mountain
attacked from above.
Speaker 1: And the Source mentions a detail that is just heartbreaking.
It says this building was actually under repair when they died.
Speaker 2: That is a crucial detail. Pompei had actually been hit
by a massive earthquake in sixty two CE, which was
seventeen years before the famous eruption.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the city was still fixing itself up. So these
men were likely in a building that was already weakened
or being actively patched up from previous tremors.
Speaker 1: They were caught in a construction zone during the apocalypse.
Speaker 2: Talk about incredibly bad timing.
Speaker 1: It really paints a much more chaotic, frantic picture than
just the idea that everyone went to sleep and got
peacefully covered in a bl blanket of ash.
Speaker 2: It adds a kinetic violence to the scene. It wasn't
a peaceful sleep at all. It was a desperate struggle
against the very structure of their world failing them.
Speaker 1: Now, if Pompeii is the gold standard for these disastrous snapshots,
there's a site in China that actively challenges it for
the title. They even call it the Eastern Pompeii.
Speaker 2: The Lagaio Ruins located in northwest China, and.
Speaker 1: This site is much older than.
Speaker 2: Pompeii, significantly older. We are talking Late Neolithic to early
Bronze Age, so roughly four thousand years.
Speaker 1: Ago, But the preservation style is eerily similar to Pompeii.
Speaker 2: It is remarkably similar. Archaeologists have been digging there since
the nineteen eighties and they have found entire houses perfectly preserved,
and inside them the actual skeletons of the people who
live there.
Speaker 1: There's one detail from the report on the Jaya that
is just gut wrenching. They found a woman and a
child huddled.
Speaker 2: Together, yes, in a corner of one of the houses.
It captures that totally universal human instinct to protect in
the face of absolutely insurmountable power. You protect the child,
you huddle, you try to shield them with your own
physical body, And sadly, that is exactly how they died.
Speaker 1: And it was an earthquake that wiped them out right, a.
Speaker 2: Massive earthquake that likely triggered sudden mudslides or massive floods
that sealed the site instantly.
Speaker 1: So no oxygen could get in exactly.
Speaker 2: That's why it's called the Eastern Pompeii. It wasn't a
slow abandonment where people packed their bags and migrated. It
was a sudden, terrifying freeze frame of daily life.
Speaker 1: But here is where the story gets incredibly ironic. Yeah,
and honestly kind of philosophical.
Speaker 2: I think I know exactly where you're going with this.
Speaker 1: The museum.
Speaker 2: Yes, the museum.
Speaker 1: So we built a museum right there at the Ligia
site to honor these people and intelligently display the artifacts
to say look, we remember, we have conquered this history
and learned from it. Right. And then in December of
twenty twenty three, what happens.
Speaker 2: A six point two magnitude earthquake hits the exact same.
Speaker 1: Region, and it damages the museum, the very building designed
to protect the artifacts from the first earthquake.
Speaker 2: It is a stark, sobering reminder of the recursive nature
of geology. The very same geological fault lines that killed
those people four thousand years ago are still there and
still active.
Speaker 1: They had moved.
Speaker 2: The force that created the archaeological site returned to damage
the building we built to study it.
Speaker 1: It feels like the earth is mocking us a little bit,
like you think you could put this tragedy in a
glass case. I can still shake you. I'm still right here.
Speaker 2: It really highlights the extreme fragility of human memory versus
the stubborn persistence of geological forces.
Speaker 1: We want history to stay in the past.
Speaker 2: We build museums to make history feel static and safe
and conquered. But the forces that make history are dynamic
and dangerous. They haven't gone away at all. Wow, we
are essentially just living in the pause between the shakes.
Speaker 1: We're just living between the shakes. That is a deeply.
Speaker 2: Sobering thought, precisely what it is.
Speaker 1: All right, let's shift gears a little bit. We've looked
at the ground opening up, We've looked at wall falling
down on people. Now I want to look at what
happens when the earth shakes and things just sink. Yes,
we are going underwater.
Speaker 2: This is a truly fascinating subgenre of disaster archaeology, submerged cities,
because water acts as a completely different kind of preservative
than doot or ash.
Speaker 1: We have three specific cases here that are just incredible
to think about. Let's start with Grease. The lost city
of he Like, he Like.
Speaker 2: Is legendary for centuries. It was almost treated like a
mini Atlantis story in the classical world.
Speaker 1: But it was a real place.
Speaker 2: It was a very real, very wealthy city in the
northern Peloponnese, and then in three seventy three BCE, it just.
Speaker 1: Vanished, vanished in a single night. That's the quote from
the source material.
Speaker 2: Ancient writers claimed it was a devastating double blow, a
massive earthquake hit, liquefying the ground underneath the.
Speaker 1: City, liquefying. That sounds awful.
Speaker 2: It's a process called liquefaction. It's where solid soil shaped
so hard and so fast that it temperly behaves like
a liquid.
Speaker 1: So city just sank into the mud.
Speaker 2: It subsided, and immediately following that, a tsunami triggered by
the quake rushed in the entire city, slipped into a
coastal lagoon, and was just gone.
Speaker 1: The sources mentioned that ancient tourists actually used to take
boats out to look at the ruins underwater, didn't they
They did.
Speaker 2: It was an early form of dark tourism. For a
few centuries after the disaster, you could apparently look over
the side of a boat and see statues and walls
just resting under the surface.
Speaker 1: That is so creepy.
Speaker 2: But over time the lagoon silted up naturally, the coastline changed,
and he like was totally lost. People eventually started to
think it.
Speaker 1: Was just a myth until two thousand and one.
Speaker 2: Yes, thanks to the sheer persistence of Dori qetz and
Opolou and Steven Soder, they spent years looking for this place, but.
Speaker 1: They didn't find it where they thought they would.
Speaker 2: Rite Now, No, they didn't find it underwater in the
ocean at all. They found it inland, buried under two
to four meters of.
Speaker 1: Sediment because the lagoon had dried up.
Speaker 2: The lagoon had completely dried up over the millennia and
become solid land.
Speaker 1: So the legendary underwater city was actually an underground.
Speaker 2: City exactly, and that ancient lagoon mud played a crucial role.
Just like the ash of Pompeii. The thick mud sealed everything.
Speaker 1: In the source says walls and pottery were preserved almost
perfectly for two thousand years.
Speaker 2: Anaerobic conditions are incredible for.
Speaker 1: Preservation, meaning no oxygen right right.
Speaker 2: No oxygen in the thick mud means no decay for
organic materials, or at least very very slow decay. So
when they finally dug it up, it matched the ancient
classical descriptions perfectly.
Speaker 1: A city literally frozen in the exact moment of drowning. Yes,
from a Greek lagoon. Let's travel to a mountain lake.
Let's go to Kyrgyzstan.
Speaker 2: Lake isak Cool, one of the deepest saltwater lakes in
the entire world. Visually stunning location and apparently.
Speaker 1: A very good hiding place for a medieval city.
Speaker 2: This discovery is remarkable mainly because of its location right
on the ancient Silk Road in the shallow waters of
the Northwest Shore. Archaeology just found brick buildings, wooden beams,
and incredibly, even a giant millstone.
Speaker 1: Finding a giant millstone underwater is such a haunting image.
Speaker 2: To me, it really is.
Speaker 1: It implies industry, you know, bread, daily life just suddenly stopped.
It's so heavy and permanent, and yet it's totally out
of place, sitting at the bottom of a lake.
Speaker 2: And there is a very specific detail they found that
dates the site and identifies the culture.
Speaker 1: They found a graveyard, and the graves were all facing Mecca,
which tells.
Speaker 2: Us definitively that it was an Islamic city. This dates
the sudden collapse to somewhere around the fifteenth century.
Speaker 1: So what happened here? Was it the same story as Greece.
Speaker 2: A very similar mechanism to he like, Yes, a massive
earthquake caused the ground along the shore to subside again
that liquefaction we talked about, and the lake water simply
rushed in to fill the newly created void.
Speaker 1: The city didn't burn, it just drowned.
Speaker 2: The source compares it to POMPEII not because of fire
or ash, but because it's completely frozen.
Speaker 1: Yes, the water acts almost like amber.
Speaker 2: The necropolis, the homes, they're all still there, just suspended
in the blue water. It's a ghost town in the
truest physical sense.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's look at KC in our underwater tour. Now.
This one is a bit different because it's not about
finding a city while it's underwater. It's about the water
actually going away to reveal the city.
Speaker 2: The ancient city of Commune in modern day Iraq, thought
to be the ancient city of Zekiku.
Speaker 1: This one sounds straight out of a climate change thriller novel.
Speaker 2: It is inextricably linked to our modern climate realities. This
city was originally flattened by a massive quake way back
in thirteen fifty.
Speaker 1: BCE, a long time ago, very long.
Speaker 2: Then in modern times, the entire area was flooded by
a reservoir created by the Mosel Dam, so the ruins
were essentially double buried, first by the rubble in the
Bronze Age and then by the water in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: But then in twenty eighteen there was a massive.
Speaker 2: Drought, a severe punishing drought. The water levels in the
reservoir dropped drastically and suddenly, for a brief fleeting window,
the ancient ruins just pop back up.
Speaker 1: Popped back up. Sounds so casual when you say it
like that. But they found a palace with walls standing
seven meters high.
Speaker 2: Seven meters that is huge. Seven meters is highly significant.
That is a multi story structure right there. But the
real treasure wasn't the walls. It was the original city.
Speaker 1: Paperwork, the clay tablets, dozens of.
Speaker 2: Clay tablets with letters and records. This is the literal
voice of the city speaking to us.
Speaker 1: What kind of things were on them.
Speaker 2: Trade logs, diplomatic letters. We found out exactly who they
were trading with, what commodities they were worried about. It
transforms the site from just a pile of wet bricks
into a living, breathing society.
Speaker 1: But the clock was seriously ticking right because the drought
wouldn't last forever and the water would come back.
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate stress of this kind of rescue archaeology.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine.
Speaker 2: You have a tiny window of opportunity provided by a
modern disaster, the drought, to study an ancient disaster. The
earthquake before the water inevitably returns and swallows it again.
Speaker 1: It really highlights how fleeting our access to the past
can be.
Speaker 2: It's amazing the earth reveals and the water conceals. It's
this constant geological dance.
Speaker 1: And we just have to be there with our notebooks
ready when the curtain briefly lifts this sis. Let's move
over to Turkey, now southern Turkey, and we have to
talk about the massive earthquake of February sixth, twenty twenty three, a.
Speaker 2: Truly devastating, catastrophic event. The sheer destruction in Hate Province
and the city of Antakia, which is ancient Antioch, was overwhelming.
Speaker 1: And we are still feeling the human aftershocks of that tragedy.
Speaker 2: Today, absolutely are.
Speaker 1: It feels almost wrong to talk about archaeological finds in
the midst of such recent human suffering, but the force
points out something truly remarkable that happened right during the
rubble cleanup.
Speaker 2: Well, it is the inherent nature of living in a
place like Antioch. It is one of the oldest continuously
inhabited cities in the entire world. You literally cannot move
Ruble without hitting history.
Speaker 1: It's just unavoidable, completely unavoidable. Workers were clearing modern debris
from a collapsed house and they just found an underground.
Speaker 2: Room, a room with a beautiful curved ceiling dating back
to the late Antique period, so roughly the fifth or
sixth century. And the source said it was totally intact,
completely structurally intact. It had been sitting there under a
modern street for fifteen hundred years.
Speaker 1: That's wild.
Speaker 2: Modern cars, heavy delivery trucks, daily pedestrians had been passing
directly over it every single day, completely oblivious to what
was a few feet down.
Speaker 1: I think it was a chapel, right yeah, or a tomb.
Speaker 2: The curved ceiling heavily suggests a sacred or reverence space,
possibly a small hidden chapel or a family tomb. They
also found stunning mosaics with Greek inscriptions nearby during some
foundation repair work right after the quakes.
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder what else is hiding down Yeah,
I mean if an entire chapel can hide under a
busy street for a millennium and a half.
Speaker 2: In Takio is the ultimate layer cake of civilizations. You
have Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman layers and the modern city.
The modern city is just a very thin crust resting
on top of all that. When that crust violently breaks,
the ancient filling shows through.
Speaker 1: The filling shows through. You're making me hungry, but you're
also deeply terrifying me.
Speaker 2: It's a messy kick, for sure, but it proves that
our modern infrastructure are asphalt, are sewer lines. It's all
just a thin, fragile veneer over deep deep time.
Speaker 1: Let's go to Israel for our next thread. Tell Cabri. Now,
this one reads like a mystery story, like a CSI
ancient Canaan episode.
Speaker 2: Tell Cabrey is a fascinating site because it significantly predates
the Kingdom of Israel. We are talking about a massive
Canaanite palace from around seventeen hundred BCE.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just a local shack. This was a
sprawling manage.
Speaker 2: And massive, one of the absolute biggest buildings in the
entire region at that specific time. It was a major
center of political.
Speaker 1: Power, and we know they really liked to party.
Speaker 2: Well, the archaeological evidence certainly supports that theory. They found huge,
dedicated storage rooms containing more than one hundred large wine jars.
Speaker 1: One hundred large jars. That is a serious wine cellar
for the ancient world.
Speaker 2: It heavily indicates wealth power and a very centralized authority
that could command and store those kinds of agricultural resources.
This was a palace that was visibly thriving.
Speaker 1: They were connected to the big trade networks.
Speaker 2: Very connected to the broader Mediterranean trade networks.
Speaker 1: But then it just abruptly stops, and this is where
the friends of archaeology really comes in. Archaeologists find the
palace completely destroyed, but they naturally look for the usual
historical suspects, right, war, fire, disease.
Speaker 2: Right. Usually, if a major palace is destroyed in the
ancient world, you find very specific clues like what you
find bronze arrowheads or spear tips embedded in the stone walls.
You find a thick, distinct layer of ash from a
mass of fire because torching the place was standard practice
in ancient warfare. Or you find mass irregular graves indicating
a sudden play cabri.
Speaker 1: They found none of that, none of.
Speaker 2: That at all, No weapons, no burn marks anywhere, no
evidence of famine or a prolonged siege. Just a crack,
a very long deep crack, cutting right through the foundation
of the palace, walls leaning at unnatural angles, buckled stone floors,
collapsed heavy brick ceilings.
Speaker 1: It's the smoking gun, or I guess the shaking gun,
the seismic gun.
Speaker 2: The geological diagnosis is extremely clear. A massive earthquake knocked
the palace down in a matter of seconds. And here
is the truly interesting part. No one ever rebuilt it.
Speaker 1: That is the spooky part to me. Why not rebuild? Usually,
if you have a great strategic spot for a palace,
you just clear the rubble away and build a new
one right on top.
Speaker 2: You do. Perhaps the devastation was just too total, too
overwhelming to clean up, or perhaps it was seen as
a profound bad omen a curse. Yeah, if the gods
shake your grand palace to the ground, maybe you don't
arrogantly build another one in the exact same spot. It
was just left desolate forever.
Speaker 1: From a massive palace us full of wine to a
pile of rubble in a matter of minutes. It really
emphasizes the extreme fragility of that kind of power.
Speaker 2: It does. Nature really doesn't care how much expensive wine
you have stored up. It doesn't care about your diplomatic
trade deals. When the earth moves, the palace falls.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to our final and perhaps our most
emotional thread. Today, we are going to Bulgaria a site
called Heraclea Sinica.
Speaker 2: This site brings us right back to the human cost
of these events. We've talked a lot about buildings, wine jars,
mosaic city plans, but at Heraclea Senica we find the
actual people.
Speaker 1: Archaeologists were digging in the city's ancient forum, specifically under
an old wire sword room, and the heavy roof of
that room had collapsed.
Speaker 2: And under that collapse roof they found six human.
Speaker 1: Skeletons frozen in place.
Speaker 2: Yes, the heavy walls fell and they were buried instantly,
right where they stood or right where they tried to shelter.
Speaker 1: But there is one specific skeleton that really stood out
to the researchers. It wasn't just labeled as skeleton number four.
It was a person with a very clear story.
Speaker 2: They carefully identified a man with a rare congenital condition.
His skeletons showed unmistakable signs of a significant physical disability
present from.
Speaker 1: Birth, so his life would have been hard, his.
Speaker 2: Mobility would have been severely limited his entire.
Speaker 1: Life, and yet he lived to adulthood.
Speaker 2: He reached early adulthood. Now, we so often think of
the ancient world as brutal and totally unforgiving, a harsh
survival of the fittest scenario.
Speaker 1: But this man survived for years.
Speaker 2: Which means the community actively cared for him. He was fed,
he was supported physically. He was clearly a valued, integrated
member of that specific society.
Speaker 1: That detail hits heart. You see the deep humanity of
the past, you see the care, and then you see
the sheer randomness of the disaster that took them.
Speaker 2: It creates a very poignant, very sharp contrast. You have
the civilization side, the care, the medical support, the bonds
of community, and then you have the chaos side, the
blind earthquake that ends it all in a single second.
Speaker 1: It's not just finding a ruined building, it's finding a
specific moment in time. You feel like you are right
there with them in the dark.
Speaker 2: That is the unique power of earthquake archaeology. It is
incredibly intimate.
Speaker 1: Because war is different.
Speaker 2: A war destroys and loots and changes things. People flee
and take their belongings, and earthquake catches you.
Speaker 1: Mid sentence, mid sentence that is a really great way
to put it.
Speaker 2: It brutally interrupts the narrative of daily life, and then we,
thousands of years later, try to painstakingly finish the sentence
they started.
Speaker 1: So let's try to synthesize all of this. We've been
all around the world today, MEANOHI, Croatia, Pompeii, China, Greece, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Bulgaria.
Speaker 2: It is a truly global phenomenon. Wherever tectonic plates meet,
human history is constantly being hidden and revealed.
Speaker 1: So what is the main thread that ties all these
diverse sites together aside from the tectonic plates.
Speaker 2: Obviously the thread is that core paradox We started with
destruction as a bizarre form of preservation. If these cities
had not been violently destroyed, they would have been slowly
dismantled by humans, right hey, Recycled stones would have been
stolen to build new, younger houses. Wood would have rotted away.
The slow decay of normal history usually erases all the
fine details.
Speaker 1: Right. If you abandon a house slowly over time, you
take your good stuff with you. You pack up the
wine jars, you carefully box up the clay tablet.
Speaker 2: Exactly. You don't leave your valuables, but the disaster completely
freezes the context. It leaves the stuff perfectly in.
Speaker 1: Situ, in its original place.
Speaker 2: Yes, it allows us to clearly see the arrangement of
ancient life, not just the discarded debris of it.
Speaker 1: It's basically like the difference between a carefully staged family
photo and a candid, messy snapshot.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. These earthquake sites are the
candid snapshots of history. They are messy, they are tragic,
but they are undeniably true.
Speaker 1: And they loudly remind us that we are literally walking
on history everywhere we go. Sometimes it just takes the
earth violently shaking to remind us, Hey, someone lived here
long before.
Speaker 2: You did, and someone will likely live here long after
we are gone. We are just the current temporary tenants
of the surface.
Speaker 1: That is profound, and that leads me directly to the
big question. I want to leave our listeners with today,
the ask.
Speaker 2: Oh right, I'm ready for the ask?
Speaker 1: Okay, listener, I want you to go right back to
that thought experiment from the intro. The ground opens up,
you sit at your specific house is buried today, right,
now okay, and it stays securely buried in the mud
for two thousand years. Future archaeologists dig you up in
the year forty twenty six. What is the one single
object they would find in your home, right next to
your skeleton that would totally confuse them about who you were?
Speaker 2: Oh, that is a really good question.
Speaker 1: Would it be some weird single use kitchen gadget, a
random collection of plastic action figures, a wooden't live laugh
love sign? What is the art fact that would make
academic panels argue for decades about your identity?
Speaker 2: I think for a lot of modern people it might
be their Internet router.
Speaker 1: The router.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they'd look at it and say, why did this
culture worship this small, blinking plastic box with antenna the.
Speaker 1: Alter of connectivity? Yeah, they offered it their daily attention exactly.
But seriously, does knowing that entire ancient cities are peacefully
sleeping directly beneath our feet make you feel more deeply
connected to the human story or does it just make
you terrified of the ground you walk on.
Speaker 2: It is a bit of both, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Awe and terror very often go hand in hand when
looking at history.
Speaker 1: We really want to hear your answers to this. Leave
a comment below, let us know what your confusing artifact
would be, and let us know which of these specific
threads surprised you the absolute most today.
Speaker 2: Was it the underwater millstone in Kurstan, or the.
Speaker 1: Roman theater hiding under the modern basement.
Speaker 2: In Croatia, or perhaps the massive ancient wine cellar in Israel.
Speaker 1: The wine cellar is a very strong contender. I think
about that one a lot.
Speaker 2: Indeed, it is hard to forget.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much much for joining us on this
deep dive today. It's been an absolutely wild ride through
the cracks of the earth.
Speaker 2: It really has stay curious and honestly watch your step
out there.
Speaker 1: This has been thrilling threads. We will see you in
the next one. Bye bye bye