Sorry to Barge In - Ep 133

This week, Anna and Amber are playing catch-up after attending the SAA conference, recovering from vaccine shots, and life in general. We'll be taking the rest of April off for a short break. In the meantime, please enjoy a cleaned-up version of a Dirt After Dark episode where Anna treats Amber to the story of the Roman emperor Caligula's absurd pleasure boats on a tiny, tiny lake.

Links

• Nemi Ships: How Caligula's Floating Pleasure Palaces Were Found and Lost Again (Discover)

• Divers to scour lake for Emperor Caligula’s 2,000-year-old pleasure ship (Washington Post)

• A missing mosaic from Caligula’s ship served as a coffee table in NYC home for 45 years (The Vintage News)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

Other People of Size - Ep 132

A follow-up and expansion to episode 99, People of Size, Anna and Amber explore other categories of largeness and how they’re represented in the archaeological record. We discuss fat bodies that are coded male, the strength and bulk of sumo wrestlers, and cultural and historical shifts in the aesthetic of the male body.

Links

• Professor Chris Forth on fatness (University of Kansas)

• Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy (Herman Pontzer)

• Japanese Sumo Wrestling (The Independent)

• Shinto origins of sumo (Wikipedia)

• The sumo diet (sumo.usa)

• Average body fat percentage (Wikipedia)

• How Strong Were Ancient People? (Discover Magazine)

• Late Pleistocene swimmers compared to modern athletes (Journal of Human Evolution)

• The male image in art history (Artsy.com)

• The forgotten history of fat men’s clubs (NPR)

• Anatomy of The Incredible Hulk (Scientific American)

• Using X Men to teach about hominin speciation (Great Lakes Ethnohistorian)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

Race and Biological Anthropology with Dr. Rachel Watkins - Ep 131

Recently, Anna and Amber sat down with Rachel Watkins, a biological anthropologist and scholar-activist whose research centers on social and biological histories of Black Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Learn about the social history of biological anthropology, the exemplary case studies with which Dr. Watkins has worked, why you shouldn't discount the creepy things small children sometimes do, and so much more!

Links

• Rachel Watkins Faculty Profile (American University)

• Rachel J. Watkins on ResearchGate

• The Mismeasure of Man (WW Norton)

• The Cobb Collection (W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory)

• Watch Now! African Diasporic Activist Scholarship: Beyond the Enlightenment, Toward the Democratization of Science (Wenner-Gren Blog)

• Science and Freedom (Washington History)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

April Fool's: Cursèd Objects - Bonus Episode

Anna and Amber bring you some bonus April foolery in the form of spooky cursed objects and haunted places. What's up with the Victorians and their creepy parlor displays? Can physics explain a haunted statue? Who asked Alexander Graham Bell about any of this? Apologies if the sound quality is different for this one, friends--Anna's laptop might've had an April Fools' curse of its own going on!

Links

• Spinning statue at Manchester museum (Manchester Evening News)

• 10 Haunted Museums (ArtNet)

• Are Ghosts Haunting the British Museum? (The Economist)

• Creepy Museum Object Challenge (Smithsonian Magazine)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular

It's A Pod Mitzvah - Ep 130

Amber and Anna discuss some of the different rituals, ceremonies, and traditions associated with coming of age in cultures around the world and throughout time. From tossing baby teeth up to the roof to tying a vine to your ankles and jumping off a wooden tower, it's all fascinating.

Links

• Young People's Conceptions of the Transition to Adulthood (Youth & Society)

• Voice Changes for Boys During Puberty (Very Well Family)

• Right–left and the scrotum in Greek sculpture (Laterality, via ResearchGate)

• 13 Amazing Coming of Age Traditions From Around the World (Global Citizen)

• Rite of Passage (Cultural Anthropology)

• The Excruciating Bullet Ant Glove Test Of The Mawé People (All That’s Interesting)

• What It's Like to Get Stung by the World's Most Painful Insect (Esquire)

• Seijin No Hi: Celebrating Japanese Youth’s Rite of Passage (Savvy Tokyo)

• Meet Vanuatu's land-diving daredevils, who inspired bungee jumping (CNN Travel)

• Coming of Age Rituals (Hudson County Community Colleges Libraries)

• Girling the girl and boying the boy: the production of adulthood in ancient Mesoamerica (World Archaeology)

Contact

• Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com

Affiliates

• Wildnote

• TeePublic

• Timeular