00:01.00 Alex And we are back with archaeo animals the show all about zoareology and today we are talking about the zooareology of amphibians your frogs your toads your what am I forgetting newts anyway. 00:16.67 Cpt Granarius Newts and everything in between. 00:19.49 Alex Yeah, we know of amphibians as you can clearly tell. But yeah, it's the best part of the show folks. It's the case studiess boop. But who and the first case study I realize well. Deciding on doing this case study have we talked about mesopotamia at all on this show. 00:46.40 Cpt Granarius Um, I think we probably like touched upon it. So when it came to domestication. Perhaps. 00:50.20 Alex Yeah, problem them? Yeah, of course they must have it just struck me as kind of funny. Especially I I've said this on the show before but I did my undergraduate in classical archeology. So I did egyptian mesopotamian Syrian well that's Mesopotamian I did all those anatolian Greek Roman all that fun stuff. Yeah I mean it was a bit you know loose and with the the phrase I guess but yeah, that was all I did um. 01:14.60 Cpt Granarius How But with with that for that fall under classical. 01:28.81 Alex Was very intense of my undergraduate. But I mean it was good for me because it realized that I hate our classical archeology and I find it kind of boring but it's handy I guess to have in general for like an intro and archeology type of thing. 01:42.99 Cpt Granarius That data suppose. 01:47.40 Alex So yeah, we I did don't do do a little bit of Mesopotamian archeology but just to kind of give ah a brief summary in case listeners don't know what mesopotamia is so it refers to a region in western asia between the tigris and the euphrates rivers and it includes. Various cultures that you may have heard of such as the sumerians the akkadians the assyrians and the babylonians in this kind of regions had activity and occupation occurring from 10000 bc to about the seventh Seventh Century a d now this. Area has also been referred to as the fertile crescent which was important to the development of agriculture in the early in the olyic. Obviously you had those 2 rivers rights and the area of the fertile crescent would be between these 2 rivers and that would obviously help. Our culture come to fruition how how world word play I'm very funny. Everyone loves it and that's probably why we did if we did talk about Mesopotamia. It was probably because of domestication a lot of things came from mesopotamia in that sense. 02:55.89 Cpt Granarius Guess also and I mean not zoo archeological related necessarily. But that's also where we have the first evidence of writing is that's the case. Yeah, there's Sumerian. 03:03.76 Alex Yes, is a lot of interesting stuff. The different cultures are very interesting. I was a big fan of the llama sioux sculptures which if. If you are live near a big national museum in the global north you know any country such as the United States or the united kingdom they probably have one of these there are these big kind of statues of like a dude with a beard and he's like a Griffin body they're they're really cool I used to love. Visiting the one at the metropolitan in Manhattan. So yeah, mesopotamia pretty cool, but more importantly, they're all about frogs too because what else did those very important rivers provide they provided frogs lots of them so much. So. They became culturally important, not just due to their commonality because they were literally everywhere but also due to their associations with kind of the life-giving power of the river. 04:13.42 Alex So yeah. 04:20.25 Alex Hello hello. 04:24.44 Cpt Granarius Hello sorry. 04:25.84 archpodnet You at simona high you're still recording the show. We're only 5 minutes in life lifegiving par of the riffer. 04:34.83 Alex I'll keep going. So yeah, it you go for it if you know where we are. 04:38.89 Cpt Granarius Yes, um, are you abye? Um, so in other words frogs of bisopotamia were likely associated with fertility healing cleansing and transformation. Further evidence of these associations can actually be found in the prevalence of frog and toad as well iconography and amulets as well as the use of frog remains in medicine. So these um this para gaululates that I just mentioned um, they're usually made of materials that were known known to be culturally significant like Lapis lasoly and the most often. Ah, these were found in grave goods but also in temples palaces and also like private. So. Domestic dwellings. 05:23.99 Alex And based on the translated text because as simona said Mesopotamia is where we have like the earliest evidence writing so it's one of those very rare occasions where we actually have a wolf of text that we can translate and kind of get a better idea of. Say rituals of medicinal approaches to things. So yeah, based on these translated texts. We know that frogs were actually used as scapegoats in ritual. So this actually was a great case study because it touched on a lot of my undergraduate because I also did a degree in anthropology and. You know they're all about talking about ritual and stuff like that fun fun times and you know we we learned a law about scapegoats so scapategoats and ritual usually means that it's a person or a thing an object something where you misdirect something else. From happening from a patient to that thing. So say you know you you don't want to get cursed by someone you use a scapegoat and kind of put that curse onto the scapegoat rather than the the patient now in the case of the mesopotamia. It seems like frogs were used as scapegoats. In that disease was transmitted from a patient to the frog which makes me kind of feel bad for the frog because you know what they do to deserve that the other interesting thing with Mesopotamia is that they. 06:58.17 Alex Researchers who worked on the the frogs in general kind of working on the cultural importance of frogs. They actually utilize herpetological information with textual evidence because there was a bit of an issue in that they. They were getting frog remains but they weren't getting a lot of frog remains and they were having trouble identifying them. So What they ended up doing was actually getting using modern day herpeological information and comparing it to textual evidence to kind of get a feel for what the. Species were were most predominant in these rituals and these medicinal uses and obviously there's a bit problematic aspects as to that because you know things change over time. But it seems like that the frogs that were most referred to in these texts were probably the marsh Frog. So It's ah it's a weird interesting workaround to zooareological interventions I guess. 07:52.29 Cpt Granarius Telelophila Cerriibundus 08:03.83 Alex I mean it's not necessarily that different from what we do in that a lot of times when we use comparative material. It's modern day. But yeah, they like looked up you know because these texts are like so specific they would talk about like where they would get them when they would get the frogs. What they looked like and they were able to kind of narrow down the species based on that which is kind of cool. So our second case study is a bit. 08:36.15 Cpt Granarius Right? So for our second case studies were study. We're bringing it back home to Britain um and would be this cussing pinhole cave for pino cave is what a cave that is located within the crestwa crags. Ah, england so that's on the nottinghamshire Derbyshire border and it's actually a series of caves. Um that I it's a all together are a hugely important prehistoric sighting. We have evidence of animals spanning like. Tens of thousands of years. We have evidence of human occupation. We have evidence of neanderthal occupation like you name it. They've got it. There are creswell crags um, and it is also important because we have one of the few if not the only evidence of ah cave art in Britain pretty. Cool, um and the site of a role as you'd expect is ah ah has been hugely important to understand past environment ah through zoo archaeology and environmental archeology because um, one of the big big issues has ah been sort of the identification of small vertebrates. Including amphibians as such very little analysis has been done on the amphibian remains from pinhole cave. However, thats changed recently because ah some written work using zooms um may have helped to resolve some of these issues. Ah right. 10:06.81 Cpt Granarius Quick Reminder Um what I'm ah talking about when I say you Zooms is actually zoo archelogy by Mass Spectometry which is also known as Collagen fingerprinting this process uses the dominant protein found in bones so type one collagen. 10:10.93 Alex Zooms. 10:24.53 Cpt Granarius To identify remains to species and now this is mostly to been used on larger fauners of both domesticate and wild. But more recently this has been applied on Marine mammals rodents and fish. So gotta be done. Um, so this recent work on Amphibians was not only. 10:36.89 Alex Boo. 10:44.40 Cpt Granarius To see if the results could be useful identifying remains from Pin Oll Cap specifically but also ah to become a bit more of a rule so to identify amphibian remains in general. Fortunately, the results were so far promising ah which is great news I mean for a variety of reasons. Um. I mean first of all, it's important to identify amphibian remains as as we've discussed ah plenty of times already earlier in the episode I mean they can tell us a lot about past environments particularly with regards to climate as. Again, many amphibian species are very different tolerances for temperatures you know and they have very sort of specific environments that they thrive in um and also to as a result to give us an idea of what the landscape nearby was like. So for example, 1 of the species identified in. Pinol cave was the Natagja toad which is mostly associated with Salt Marsh environments other species identified included your humble common frog you know Ramat teorraria common toad buffa boo pin through it and the Mo Frog Rana Avalis which has actually since become extinct in the u in the us in the Uk. Um, um, secondly this is also very important for Alex and all the zoo archeologists that are very scared of small bones. 12:10.26 Cpt Granarius As we know the means of confirming species identification and thus getting a lot more information to compile a zo archeological record with that is if you get the funding to do that to big big caveat now. 12:20.49 Alex Yeah, of course yes, but I mean yeah, of course but I will say Zoom's is really exciting and it's going to be It'll be useful because you know that's the the. Funny thing about zoo archeology and the difficult thing about zooareology is unless you're someone who very specifically spends their whole life basically researching a specific species or a specific type of animal if you're a zo archeologist for the most part you're kind of expected to know all the species. You know and that can be difficult I mean as you do it over time. You can get a feel for species and it's not as bad but you know every time every so often you get thrown a curveball and having something like Zoom's to be there to help identify to support a intervention. Yeah to support an identification. Really important, especially for species that could make or break an interpretation. So the fact that amphibians seem to work well with Zoom's because I also know from prior experience that Zoom's can be very finicky depending on. The preservation of bone that you've got and you know all these other kind of elements. It can be tricky but the fact that amphibian works on. It is pretty good again for people like me who are scared of small bones and don't like identifying them by eye. 13:50.96 Alex So you know they just need to do it on more fish. Really. 13:54.70 Cpt Granarius So ah, there get yourself some nice trusty hand lengths and there's nothing. You can't achieve. 14:01.63 Alex Says the person who's been working on fish all day and is clearly deteriorating before our eyes. 14:11.76 Cpt Granarius Um, but I know Amphibians I think I said this before I'll say it again. Ah Amphibians are as difficult as they are rewarding because they can't tell us a lot about past environment. So it's It's a bit of a challenge. Um, at least I Guess Ah, we're lucky enough sort of in in British Zoo archaeology where like there aren't a lot of species to choose from So you it's kind of a bit more restricted. Um, yeah. 14:41.54 Alex But but you have you can you can have the irrational slightly irrational fear that I have which is you'll be working on a huge like changes everything site that you don't know about and you've got a species. That either doesn't exist right now in the country or like did exist and like hasn't been seen in ages and you just can't identify it. That's my like biggest fear you know. 15:15.24 Cpt Granarius Yeah, but like that that had yes that a lot of things would have to align for that's what happened. 15:23.68 Alex Listen what if you are working on a site where you have the 1 bit of axolotl in all of british prehistory and you just don't know what it looks like so you can't even identify it that keeps me up at night you know. 15:42.12 Cpt Granarius Oh you imagine that be like a oh like ah known and archaeology circles for have having identified the only huxalotal the U k. 15:49.21 Alex Listen when you work on British Iron age sites and you're desperately trying to find an earlier chicken than the one that they just identified it really haunts you this these kind of hypotheticals. 16:02.74 Cpt Granarius I Guess isn yeah or imagine just find like an oxalotto in an iron age ditch. So. 16:10.50 Alex I have so many questions if that doesn't get me on in nature then I don't know what will let me tell you anyway as we kind of drift into fantasy at or nightmares in my case. Think it's probably time to end this episode and let and put simonea arrests after a very tough date with small bone. Um, so yeah, you know the drill as we record this Twitter seems to be deteriorating before our eyes as well. So. 16:34.47 Cpt Granarius Just that this stuff. 16:45.67 Alex Time being you can find us on Twitter at archaeo animals. Maybe not so the future but hey well, we'll let you know on the archaeology podcast network website if we do end up having a new social media form. We'll see ah. But for now we will go down on the Twitter ship I think we are wherever you get your podcasts of course. So if you are downloading your podcasts at a certain site feel for you to not only subscribe to us to begin with but also give us a like or a review I don't know what they do on the websites these days. And you know tell your friends about us and let us know what else we should talk about because again we will yeah and that too all hey mail to Tristan that's never going to change. It will always be that way regardless of. 17:27.70 Cpt Granarius Most importantly, most importantly or hate mail to Tristan. 17:40.58 Alex The different social media platforms that exist in the future. But yeah, otherwise though Tristan. 17:44.75 archpodnet Re bit or bit. 17:50.00 Alex Still not doing the right thing the buffa buffo still not doing it. 17:54.10 archpodnet Boo or boo for Han Solo 18:02.41 archpodnet I had we? Ah yeah, definitely definitely to do that because this is this We're trying to tell everybody This is a zoo archeology podcast not a gaming podcast or Star Wars podcast. 18:03.80 Alex They're gonna do part 2 their star wars episode. Yeah. 18:17.11 Cpt Granarius Ah, but. 18:18.15 archpodnet Ah, ah, right? Ah, ah well, that's what keeps people coming back for a pop culture archeology with the tro. It's the Trojan horse of pop culture delivering the. 18:19.37 Alex What do you talk about? We haven't done pop culture at ages. We did just did Amphibians you fools. 18:35.45 Alex M. 18:37.46 archpodnet Armored troops of our zoo archeology. Ah, ah yes, please keep listening to us. 18:42.65 Cpt Granarius So. 18:44.72 Alex Please please, we're backing again. We have. We have no other outlet for this. But yeah, other than that that plead we will see you next episode where we will talk about even more annoying bones to work with as always It's been Alex was Patrick we're gonna go take a nap now they really lost. 19:04.34 Cpt Granarius Um, Anmana fallanga. 19:07.71 Cpt Granarius Just bye.