Spooktober: Fear Itself - Ep 160

We explore the evolutionary roots of fear, and the science of how it works. Why do some people love thrills and chills, while others don't? Why does fear make us stinky? And how can we think about something as personal and ephemeral as fear in the archaeological record?

Links

• Why We Physically Feel Fear (University of West Alabama)

• The biology of fear- and anxiety-related behaviors (Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience)

• What Happens in the Brain When We Feel Fear (Smithsonian)

• Humans can smell fear - and it's contagious (NBC News)

• Humans Respond to Scent of Fear (LiveScience)

• The Powerful Smell of Fear Doesn’t Smell Like Anything At All (Inverse)

• Alexithymia and emotional reactions to odors (Nature: Scientific Reports)

• Instructed fear learning, extinction, and recall: additive effects of cognitive information on emotional learning of fear (Cognition & Emotion)

• Monsters on the Brain (Social Research)

• What we fear most: A developmental advantage for threat-relevant stimuli (Developmental Review)

• Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror (Psychological Science)

• Why is it fun to be frightened? (The Conversation)

• Why Do Some Brains Enjoy Fear? (The Atlantic)

• Our age of horror (Aeon) - cn image of human remains

• The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Materiality of Anxiousness, Worry and Fear (via Google Books)

• The Architecture of Fear: San Sabá’s Lasting Impact on Spanish Colonial Mission Construction as Exemplified at Mission San Lorenzo in Real County, Texas (The Digital Archaeological Record)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

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Spooktober: Monster Mash - Ep 159

This week, we lift our spirits (oooOOOooo) with a round-up of monsters. We explore their origins and effects on us, with examples ranging from memories of very real things in the past to a hypothesis that doesn't quite have legs (unlike griffins).

Links

• Why we'll always be obsessed with – and afraid of – monsters (The Conversation)

• Why the scariest monsters look almost human (Wellcome Collection)

• Why We Still Need Monsters (Nautilus)

• Why Are So Many Monsters Hybrids? (Nautilus)

• A History of Monsters (Aeon)

• Why do we want to feel sorry for monsters that scare us? (Gizmodo)

• Why Frankenstein is the story that defines our fears (BBC)

• Neanderthals, Scandinavian trolls, and troglodytes (Norwegian American)

• Ōnamazu (Yokai.com)

• Namazu-e: Earthquake catfish prints (Pink Tentacle)

• Namazu (World History Encyclopedia)

• Giant catfish and a legacy of disaster in one of the world's most seismically active regions (Phys.org)

• Folklore and earthquakes: Native American oral traditions from Cascadia compared with written traditions from Japan (Geological Society, London, Special Publications via ResearchGate)

• Why Protoceratops almost certainly wasn't the inspiration for the griffin legend (Mark Witton)

• Griffin Bones (American Museum of Natural History)

• Andrewsarchus, "Superb Skull of a Gigantic Beast" (American Museum of Natural History)

• Jumbies of the West Indies (The Brown Geeks)

• Rare Book Library Summons Tales of World’s Oldest Monsters (Smithsonian)

• The evolution of monsters in children’s literature (Nature)

• A Visual History of Society’s Monsters (Hyperallergic)

• The Nazi Werewolves Who Terrorized Allied Soldiers at the End of WWII (Smithsonian)

• Doin’ The Mash (Tedium)

• The strange tale of ‘Monster Mash’, the graveyard smash that will never die (NME)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

• APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet

• APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet

• APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet

• Tee Public Store

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Spooktober: Feral Children - Ep 157

SPOOKTOBER HAS BEGUN! This week, we discuss the trope in myth, legend, horror, and adjacent genres of feral children. We won't be directly discussing actual cases of trauma, neglect, or child abuse, but rather the place of the bestial feral child in the mythology of different ancient cultures all the way up to a more recent timeline. Why do these stories interest us, spook us, and who's the real monster here?

Links

• Register for our International Archaeology Day Live Show on October 16!

• Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians (Center for Hellenic Studies)

• How Young Children Learn Language (Scholastic)

• Flint Dibble on Wolf’s Milk and More

• Guide to the classics: the Epic of Gilgamesh (The Conversation)

• Between gods and animals: becoming human in the Gilgamesh epic (Aeon)

• The History of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, translated by Simon Ockley

• Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the "Wild Girl of Champagne" (Eighteenth-Century Studies)

• The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster (via WorldCat)

• Why Sasquatch and Other Crypto-Beasts Haunt Our Imaginations (Anthropology of Consciousness)

• Feral Disorders and Colonial Exclusions: Animal Reared Feral Children, Discourses of Animality, and the Treatment of Animals in Colonial India (via Academia.edu)

• Wild stories: why do we find feral children so fascinating? (The Guardian)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

ArchPodNet

• APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com

• APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet

• APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet

• APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet

• Tee Public Store

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Spooktober: Buried Alive?!?!?! - Ep 112

For the final spooky episode of 2020, Amber and Anna take on the extremely frightening topic of live burials. We discuss the forensic evidence that indicates that a person might have been buried alive, talk about some archaeological contexts for live burials, and cover some real and probably-not-so-real accounts from history. This one's got some real ups and downs, so buckle up.

Links

• The Live Burial: A multidisciplinary approach to the identification and exploration of live burials (via Academia.edu) (CN: graphic images of human remains)

• The Bride escaping live burial in Kill Bill Vol 2 (YouTube)

• Casts of Pompeii (Archaeology)

• Plaster Citizens of Pompeii (Atlas Obscura)

• Volcanic Ash (National Geographic)

• EarthWord – Nuée Ardente (USGS)

• Mount Vesuvius Boiled Its Victims’ Blood and Caused Their Skulls to Explode (Smithsonian) (CN: images of human remains)

• Frozen Mummies from Andean Mountaintop Shrines:Bioarchaeology and Ethnohistory of Inca Human Sacrifice (BioMed Research International, via ResearchGate) (CN: images of human remains)

• Violence in pre-Columbian Panama exaggerated, new study shows (Phys.org) (CN: images of human remains)

• The History of Ancient Nubia (Oriental Institute)

• Retainer Sacrifice in Egypt and in Nubia (The Strange World of Human Sacrifice)

• Buried but Alive? Interpreting Post-depositional Bone Movement, Anxieties over Death and Premature Burial (Lund Archaeological Review)

• Four People Who Were Buried Alive and How They Got Out (MentalFloss)

• PICS: Remember the Mansfield man buried alive for five months (Chad.co.uk)

• Esmeralda Lundius Staff Bio (Durham University)

• The 'Pompeii' of the Western Front: Archaeologists find the bodies of 21 tragic World War One German soldiers in perfectly preserved trenches where they were buried alive by an Allied shell (Daily Mail)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

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Find this show on the educational podcast app, Lyceum.fm!

Spooktober: It's A Whole Ordeal - Ep 111

Sure, maybe you've heard of the River Ordeal, or trial by fire, but have you heard of Trial by Bean? How about the Ordeal of the Turf? In this Spooktober installment, Amber walks Anna through the ways that those accused of crimes have proven their innocence (or not!) throughout history and all over the world.

Links

• Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guilt (Aeon.com)

• The Laws of King Athelstan 924-939 A.D. (Internet History Sourcebooks)

• Trial by ordeal: When fire and water determined guilt (BBC News)

• River Ordeal—Trial by Water—Swimming of Witches: Procedures of Ordeal in Witch Trials (Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, via Academia.edu)

• The Law of Hammurabi and Its Audience (Yale Journal of Law & The Humanities)

• The Code of Hammurabi (Yale University Avalon Project)

• Poisonous plants: Calabar beans were used to determine guilt in prehistoric trials. (Slate.com)

• The State and Pre-Colonial Demographic History: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Madagascar (The Journal of African History)

• Cerbera manghas (Wikipedia)

• Ātash (Encyclopedia Iranica)

• Ordeal in Iceland (Scandinavian Studies)

• Common superstition, swearing of oath and ordeal of Koren (The Sangai Express)

• Sassywood (Journal of Comparative Economics)

• Historical Techniques of Lie Detection (European Journal of Psychology)

• Bisha’a (Wikipedia)

• Ordeal of the bitter water (Wikipedia)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

Find this show on the educational podcast app, Lyceum.fm!