Digesta, Roman Burials in Barcelona, and Standing Stones in France - Ep 221

America's favorite place to watch football is Stadium swim located at the circuit Resort of casino in Las Vegas catch all the biggest games at a viewing experience built for sports fans chill in one of our six pools on three different levels for a perfect view of our massive screen touchdown plenty of seating options from cozy day beds to private temperature controlled Cabanas Stadium swim book your spot today at circal Las vegas.com you're listening to the archaeology podcast Network you're listening to the archaeology show T goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us welcome to the [Music] podcast hello and welcome to the archaeology Show episode 221 on today's show we talk about digesta again burials in Barcelona and standing stones in France let's dig a Little Deeper but stop when you get to the Roman layer that's where all the cool stuff [Music] off all right welcome to the show everyone how's it going pretty good so you may have noticed we missed an episode for for our regular listeners for those people listening to this several years from now that have no idea when we release episodes and you hate it when podcasters talk about that so do I and I'm sorry about this but either way lovely American Airlines lost our luggage including our recording equipment for 6 days yes yeah was very frustrating there was a lot of phone calls and a lot of chats and the wrong thing still kept happening yes like we just could not get them to listen to us they sent it to the wrong City even after telling them several times yeah and they sent it to the wrong City like 5 days after we they did they lost the luggage to I we were about to drive like round trip eight hours just to get our bags because we didn't see another option but then we finally talked to somebody who finally sorted it out sent it to the right place and we got our bags yesterday so here we are back to recording I know we didn't have to buy anything we didn't have to resort to eating our own stomach intestins for nutrition much like paleo man did and hun old Hunters yeah right and and that might be a familiar topic cuz we recently just talked about this I guess it's like a it's just a thing that's coming up a lot yeah in the research these days people are really starting to to get into this idea yeah they are so the article we talked about a few episodes ago was referring to to something called digesta which is basically the The partially digested and partially I guess partially undigested or partially digested however you want to look at it like animal and plant matter mostly plant matter usually that is inside the intestines of well I guess it would be plant matter it is plant yeah yeah I was thinking humans we're not eating humans we're eating no we're eating large herbivores yeah and these large animals they just eat all day long and their their intestines take a long time for that stuff to just go through and it's just I feel like it's like a constant like like semi-processed like log of grass that just keeps moving through moving through moving through I'm just calling it herbivore Sushi oh God that's so gross you just like cut it up pull a Wasabi on it and it's good to go oh my God anyway so we talked about that as being kind of a new thing that people are talking about or at least new in the news and research cycles and I only pulled this article out because I didn't really know what they were talking about until I read the article and then I started looking around and it seems like this is starting to gain a lot of traction with theories around what people are having yeah like how they were getting the vegetable component of their diet and it wasn't necessarily just straightforward man go hunt women go forage and like that was that it it this this bit of hunting could have actually contributed quite a bit of the vegetable or grass or whatever component of the diet yeah of prehistoric people yeah this particular article is from the conversation called man the hunter question Mark archaeologist's assumptions about gender roles in past humans ignore an icky but potentially crucial part of original paleo so go listen to the digesta episode hopefully we can link to that yeah we will link to it and so we're not going to really go over that again um I mean you're eating the intestines of animals that have vegetable food matter in them whether or not they were doing that on purpose or they just thought you know what I'm hungry and I'm going to eat that I don't care what's going on but anyway the the big thing about this is that that I'm taking from this is were really really really CH challenging some long-held beliefs that are even partially from ethnographic evidence yeah you know which means people we can observe in the last couple hundred years that have been you know written down but those people weren't necessarily like full-time hunter gatherers right U and some of them are but but a lot of them you know it's just it's slightly different they have some European contact you know things are a little bit different but when you go back into the past this idea like you said that women are strictly doing this and men are strictly and that should have been stupid anyway because nobody strictly does anything yeah right and I really really liked one thing that this article author did their name is Raven Garvey and they basically put a a disclaimer at the beginning of the article which I really liked which is I'll just actually I'll just read it first I want to note that this article uses women to describe people biologically equipped to experience pregnancy while recognizing that not all people who identify as women are so equipped and not all people so equipped identify as women right so we have no way of knowing how people identified as far as male female or not or something other back in the day so we can purely look at what they were biologically capable of doing and so that's what this person is doing in their article too and I think it's really good to include that disclaimer because we know that gender is very fluid today and there's no reason to think that it wasn't fluid you know thousands of years ago especially before we had like preconceived cultural Notions that didn't really allow for gender fluidity so that being said we'll move on and talk about biological men and women and their roles but I like that little disclaimer in the article and so we're going to put it in our podcast too well there you go yeah yeah and one of the other things I took out of this too is that they they wrote was the idea of hunter gatherers in the way that they operate came from the idea that 10,000 years ago people were exclusively reliant on wild Foods before domestication and agriculture but I do want to point out that just because agriculture was quote invented by you know several people around the world in different places independently invented first in what was called the Fertile Crescent Iran Iraq that area the Middle East what we call that now that's where we think agriculture first developed but it didn't necessarily spread out into other parts of the world it did locally for sure but it didn't necessarily spread to like China or the Americas they independently developed yeah but either way just because somebody discovers agriculture doesn't mean everybody's now farming yeah and it doesn't mean that they wanted to I I think even if they saw somebody doing agriculture if if a group was happy and living the way they wanted to live then there was no reason to change that you know so I I expect there's probably some mixing going on yeah there could have been anyway I I don't think we need to talk really too much about this article the author really brings some good points about the again the difference between biologically male and females I do kind of want to mention that too you read that quote from the art of author about how they're basically identifying male and female and what that means in the context of the article yeah however I will say that while we do not know how prehistoric people's identified you know from that standpoint I'm not sure just in that time frame they like really would have comprehended or could have identified as something else you know what I mean like we have a lot of I guess cultural references nowadays even for younger kids to see that hey you know maybe these things that I'm feeling inside me make me want to identify as something else right make me think that that's more my personality than this is you know what what people think I should have but up back then you were really like part of a small group and you had very defined T tasks and activities that your group was doing throughout the day they were almost always related to survival until they started Living in bigger bigger groups where they could start relaxing the survival ethic and just going into you know okay well I'm going to trade for what I need and now I can start thinking about other stuff which is where that more than likely would have been a bigger thing like I have no doubt if you were to go back to like ancient Rome there's definitely some people with some gender fluidity back in that time just from the writing for sure for sure I do wonder if our strict view of biological male biological female in today's society if that was maybe a little bit more fluid in prehistoric times because it seems like they were societies where you just had to prove that you could be a contributing member of the group right and maybe you were biologically female but you didn't contribute to the group by having babies maybe you contributed by doing some other task and that was okay and you were accepted and part of the group and that was fine you know we don't know if they were accepted we don't know I just I think it what it is is in my head I like to think that that was a possibility because they didn't have all this cultural and religious and other stuff dragging them down the way that people do today why it's such a fight for a trans person to be trans you know so well it it could have been a possibility but I guess my point is back then is while women can hunt and do anything a man can there's one thing a woman can do that a man just will never be able to do no matter what gender they think they are yeah right I can identify as women but I'm not having a baby anytime soon yeah you know what I mean like women have babies yeah and women while they weren't pregnant all the time that's been blown out of the water but they I mean one of their responsibilities was having babies nobody else could do that so if you're like I don't want to have babies ever again or maybe you couldn't have babies that would be a thing but either it would be the scene as the same thing right in that Society I'm just saying I I could see it I could see your value to the society or the group being in some other way than just what you're biologically capable of doing and that would be I like to I like to think it was that way we have no way of knowing this is all pure speculation and actually we're I feel like we're like really getting away from what the article was even talking about I mean maybe not though because having this other source of nutrition did free them up it did yeah you yeah to get back to what they're talking about is having this digesta be part of your nutritional intake that you need in order to survive meant that maybe there weren't as many people foraging and they could do other things so because they they say that you know one of these big animals could you know help have like what something like 20 a group of like 20 people survive on for like four or five days if that's all you ate yeah right which what else are you going to do yeah what you do what are you doing the rest of that time if you don't need to hunt or gather yeah and didn't you say you there's a book you read where a hunter gatherer group would get some kind of big game and then they would just Gorge themselves essentially and like and lays around for a few days right yeah the whole village would basically eat the whole thing they had no real way to store it yeah and it it didn't matter if it was 3:00 in the morning like they were doing it and then you know they didn't subscribe to your your usual you know I'm going to be awake during the day and sleep at night kind of thing they just did what they needed to do when they needed to do it I mean in general people slept at night just cuz it's you know you can't see and it's EAS to do right but either way yeah um that was the book I've talked about lots of times called don't sleep there are snakes yeah yeah that's right so anyway like I said we don't need to really go into this take a look at the article there's a lot of other stuff coming out if you see any articles that are discussing the challenging stereotypes between biologically male and females and the hunter gatherer notion it's more than likely related to this yeah it's this is definitely a big part of the the conversation and you and I have talked about this a lot because it's really in a transition point right now because in the last like few years there's a lot of research coming out showing that the traditional roles for men and women biological men and women are not necessarily what we previously thought and they're they're really rewriting that history it's kind of cool to like watch it happening right in front of your eyes you know yeah I I love that and I think that's why it's so interesting to me and why we have talked about it so much on this podcast too yeah well I mentioned the Romans hopefully people in the ancient Roman societies were more accepting of this and they didn't just bury them under a street like the people we're going to talk about in the next article back in a minute that was terrible America's favorite place to watch football is Stadium swim located at Circa Resort and Casino in Las Vegas catch all the biggest games and a viewing experience built for sports fans chill in one of their six pools on three different levels for a perfect view of their massive screen plenty of seating options from cozy day beds to private temperature controlled Cabanas Stadium swim book your spot today at Circas vegas.com is your vehicle stopping like it should does it squeal or grind when you break don't miss out on summer break deals at O'Reilly Auto Parts oil Auto Parts save big on new appliances at Menards you need reliable and energy efficient appliances to conquer the day Menards is your One-Stop shop with the largest instock appliances selection ready to take home today check out our top Appliance Brands including KitchenAid mayag Whirlpool am mana and Criterion St big on world poool appliances at Menards and check out our weekly flyer on Menards.com for more great [Music] deals welcome back to episode 221 of the archaeology show I'm enjoying a fine breakfast me as we're recording this it's from a place called the meeting room in Arizona and it is I'll just I'm just going to read this because it's very interesting made with coffee Blossom honey plus and that says single origin locally roasted cold bro says make breakfast better with this sweet little local collab sincerely yours The Breakfast Club I mean I wouldn't say it's breakfast time for us right now it is probably earlier in the day than we would normally drink Mead but me historically it's brunch right yeah it's brunch yeah me historically you know we should do an article on that because I mean people have drank meat at many times of the day all throughout history and it's been a a pretty significant I guess uh I don't know about source of what it is but U just a significant component of people's again I don't diet's even the right word but something that they partake of yeah definitely it's an old old drink it is indeed all right also old is this article not the article itself but what it's talking about this is from Newsweek and it's I saw a number of these so you know find what you want but the one we're linking to is from Newsweek and it's called ancient Graves with 1500 year old human remains found below city streets mhm this is another CRM project but it's in Barcelona Spain it's Barcelona Barcelona yeah that's so dumb I just uh you know been learning Spanish and it's Mexican Spanish and I just don't think they have that sort of pron no that's very specific Barcelona barcela it's Barcelona specific from what I understand yeah okay well the original name of that city was barcino barcino yeah from the Romans they named it that I don't it's b a r c i n o so maybe it's bareno I don't really know I doubt it I think that accent developed later on but yeah oh anyway H human remains found during the refurbishment of the street called via Lana one of the busiest streets in the city have been found they found the remains of seven people from the Roman era and two from the late Antiquity period yes so nine total right nine total yeah yeah so the Roman tombs are from the fourth and fifth centuries they say MH so 300s and 400s yeah yeah and then those other two uh what they call late Antiquity and you know these these time periods are usually local MH you know but late Antiquity in this context means the sixth and seventh centuries gotcha so that would be after the Romans yeah in that sort of middle period before whoever moved in after that yeah now the Romans have been there quite some time by that point they took over the area that is now known as Barcelona as early as about 2,000 years ago at least officially as far as the records are concerned yep and they're constantly doing stuff like any big city would they're constantly like ripping up streets and rebuilding them and doing buildings and like any European city there's a lot of old stuff there so every time they start disturbing the ground much like in you know England you know every time you hear some some story they're in London or something ripping something up and oh look at this an old tomb you know an old church or something they're doing the same thing in Barcelona yeah I mean in cities they they do tend to just like build right on top of whatever was there previously and in particular burials because they're probably in the ground right that's where you put burials and you just put your structures right on top of it and there they are preserved for 1500 years in this case so it's actually kind of nice that they get preserved that way rather than sort of uned up into the construction yeah or in this case they were going to be but they excavated so yeah yeah and when the Romans came in I mean I have I have a feeling it probably wasn't all that bad ultimately because the Romans came in sure they might have come in violently but they're like we're here now yeah and there's not a whole lot you can do about it you're probably going to have to learn our language uh if you want to communicate but we're going to bring you roads we're going to bring you Water Sanitation we're going to do all those things and because that's what we want well the Romans were so successful cuz they were often moving into areas that just didn't have like a really strong government or structure or whatever so it was pretty easy to just sort of bring them into the fold and and that's another reason why the Romans were so successful is they they weren't necessarily violent about it they just sort of like came in and were like hey here's like all this good stuff you're part of our Empire now and I think a lot of people just went along with it yeah now despite the Romans coming in and bringing all these advancements Barcelona didn't actually become an advanced city until about 60 years ago when the Formula 1 track was developed what really right outside Town seriously what that's when Barcelona be became an advanced City yes oh you're making that up completely you are the worst really yes the modern metric in archaeology terms I was thinking like Vegas if you have a Formula One Track like Las Vegas is not officially a big city until that Formula One Track gets finished this year my gosh so well yeah okay yeah anyway there were people there when the Romans got there obviously right in the late first century and probably well before that too prehistorically but like I said the Romans came in and just took control so the graves found during this last CRM effort and they don't think they call it CRM but either way were from the side of the Via Lana uh in a plaza called pla an Tony MAA I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right um this is just beyond the line of the old Roman city wall so they were kind of outside the city wall hm but they probably weren't surprised at all to find Roman era remains there though right they weren't and that's because there was actually a tomb a big tomb of a really important person near there already and I guess what was expected in for this time frame and maybe just the culture at the time is you could expect to be tombs to be found around that right so you got this big tomb where somebody important was buried and then around that I don't know maybe other family members or people I don't think they were in Egyptian style like killed as sacrifices and then buried with them but it was probably just you know buried around them so you've got the one Central one and then the ones around that and to be outside the city yeah and and people like to be buried near important figures I guess especially back in that time if they can yeah so that makes sense you can't just bury anybody there right this excavation is in advance of what they call a refurbishment that will see the installation of flower beds and trees and I'm like oh that's Lely yeah I mean you're disturbing all these grapes for that that would never happen in this country but did they say are they are they pulling the graves out and relocating oh yeah everything's being pulled out it's a CRM project yeah yeah but are they relocating them to like a churchyard or something well I don't think they're just going to dump them in the trash so they're probably being relocated to somewhere my guess would be a museum in this case because nobody you know unlike the United States there isn't a current population of people that claims this ancestry to Graves that are that old they may actually be ancestral remains to some people people that currently live in Barcelona why not you know but it's a different cultural attitude towards that kind of stuff and there's usually not somebody voicing an opinion and saying something about that yeah I was just thinking I know Native American Graves have a very different direction that things go when they're Excavating them in this country but I was on a a cemetery excavation in New Jersey which was just like a Baptist Church or something like that and the church was still there and still standing and still had a congregation and so when we were Excavating or when they when this excavation began the church and the cram company and also the construction firm all got together and negotiated that any remains we found would be reentered in a graveyard area associated with that church I don't know if it was actually on those grounds or if it was somewhere nearby so that's why I was curious because they the church really got involved and was like look if you're going to dig up this property that has Graves that we know belong to our past you know congregation ISS then you're going to reenter them some that we choose and they managed to negotiate that and again that's literally the exact same reason that Native Americans in this country basically have created laws and control the process where their ancestral remains are controlled the different the big difference being you know with a lot of historic remains I would say the non-native American cultures of this country with the historic remains unless there's somebody that's literally there of of ancestral descent like it's a great great great grandkid that knows that grave is there they know something's coming in their ancestral remains or if the church is still there you know they're like well this is ourg we want done with this but if the church had been long gone and nobody knew going on speak for the remains a good example of that is an old Cemetery in the University of Georgia at Athens campus and for several years and I don't know what's going on now because this was 20 years ago well 15 years ago yeah but for several years the shallow geophysics class of which I took was the last last class I took in grad school is over the summer and they were using different subsurface well different non-invasive subsurface analytical techniques like ground penetrating radar magnetometry other stuff to basically map out this Cemetery because it was so old that part of it that was on kind of a little Hill that didn't used to be a hill they cut in a road decades and decades ago and the cemetery is up to several hundred years old right because the campus is the oldest public university campus I believe in the country that is not accurate I think with gred to the university car Hill listen just because you applied for your license early doesn't mean you build a building we can have that argument another time all my Chapel Hill people please speak up now send your notes to Chris and tell him he's wrong anyway go on anyway the church is not there anymore it's surrounded by University buildings it's incredibly valuable property because they just want to put another building on it and I'd imagine at some point if it hasn't been done already that cemetery is going to be gone but there's nobody to fight it yeah there's no church left that it's associated with or anything it's allware all just gone yeah yeah we we were just looking at it cuz a lot of the graves don't have headstones anymore but there's clear depressions oh okay yeah like you know where the graves are when you look at them some in some cases do like the students just like walking around campus know that that's what that is there is it laed in any way there's upright headstones too oh there are some okay so you know it's a it's a graveyard when you walk by it's in it's in kind of an area where I don't get I I get the impression not a lot of people actually walk it's kind of behind some other buildings it's not like in a central area I didn't know it was there until I took the class and I'd been on campus for a year so but you know like most campuses I mean you go to the three buildings you go to yeah and you don't go anywhere else right totally you so anyway they found a lot of other stuff associated with this including walls from the Roman medieval and modern periods and they also found a well from the 18th and 19th centuries and some food preserved in silos from the 9th and 10th centuries okay so there's a range of stuff going on they really truly just like piled on as they built the city right yeah that's how it's going on it's just yeah that's how those ancient cities are I always wonder though like you see these layers and you see that things are under these like we discussed but how does that happen when something is continuously inhabited you really just put a bunch of dirt on top of it like that seems weird maybe we don't do that now no we Mo well because we need foundations to go all the way down below the surface we build big buildings yeah so you have to sort of dig out but they were mostly just putting like well up into a certain point you know they just would build right on the surface so yeah you could just like mow it down but how does something like that just get buried like I'm wondering about this tomb and the other tombs around it that they found like people lived there how did these things just get into such either disrepair that it was just covered and eventually nobody knew it was there or they intentionally covered it not wanting to deal with it which is a possibility but I just don't know if we have records about that kind of thing so always strange to me it is it I know I wish I could like see sort of the linear development of the layers of a city you know because how How does it go from having a graveyard to a structure to a different structure to maybe the structure is gone you know like what does that path look like yeah cuz how does it happen it's interesting either way while Europeans might not get get all up in arms about burials being found try to put a hardware store where a bunch of stones were and they're going to have your head we'll talk about that in a minute America's favorite place to watch football is Stadium swim located at Circa Resort and Casino in Las Vegas catch all the biggest games and a viewing experience built for sports fans chill in one of their six pools on three different levels for a perfect view of their massive screen plenty of seating options from cozy day beds to private temperature controlled Cabanas Stadium swim book your spot today at Circas vegas.com what's the easiest choice you can make window instead of middle seat picking a vendor who sends a great gift basket Outsourcing business tasks you hate what about selling with Shopify whether you're selling a little or a lot Shopify helps you do your thing however you chaing Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage shop Shopify is there to help you grow whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits Shopify helps you sell wherever and whatever you're selling shopify's got you covered sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com trry go to shopify.com trry now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com TR welcome back to episode 221 of the archaeology show wow that was like the most arrogant the in the entire world there was a lot wrapped up in that there was a lot all right so there was a couple articles floating around but it's about this thing we're going to talk about here but it seemed like the original like press release on this was from an outfit called France 24 so the headline on that one is anger as prehistoric Stones destroyed for French DIY store and by the way Di store I had to kind of like what the hell is a DIY store I thought it was like a Hobby Lobby or something but it sounds like it's more like a Home Depot it's like a hardware store that makes it's called Mr brioles that's a really fun name it's cute what makes me think of what was that uh Selfridge oh yeah that was a department store but it was a real thing wasn't it like it was an HBO show but I think it was based on reality that I can't say for sure yeah I can't remember either but anyway the meat of this is there were 7,000 year-old Standing Stones we'll talk about that destroyed to make way for this hardware store mhm there were 37 stones in total uh all about 2 feet and 3et in height it said about a half a meter to a meter so don't take me to task on that I know two feet is more than half a meter but it's close yeah so anyway 3 feet is about a meter it's uh it's just under yep so anyway they were destroyed for construction of this Outlet um now a lot of the information in some of these are coming from an amateur archaeologist who has a Blog oh that word amateur I know he can't ever trust it but okay go on his name is Christian obletz uhhuh and he said the site was on the French national archaeological map since 2015 and it was also listed on the town's official list of local megaliths first off I want to live in a town that even has an official list of local how many do they have that's crazy yeah the town is called Carnac and it's in Britney a region of Northwestern France okay okay we'll get to that a little bit later yeah the gentleman says that they I don't know who they is but somebody was planning to submit the site to France's Ministry of culture in order to list it as a UNESCO world heritage site this one in particular okay which that's the only thing if true kind of brings this into a little bit sharper Focus because it does yeah because here's the thing this area well carac in particular is famous for what they call men here and that's what these standing stones are that's like the name for like the single local name like aen here yeah m n h i r and there are three General alignments and when anytime you talk about stones or things like that that aren't like a building yeah it's generally an alignment it doesn't even like in this country it doesn't even have to be upright right cuz we've seen Stone alignments that were just like a couple of alignments that might might point to a distant Hill where there's a car or something good point so anyway they call them and I don't know there was no definition of what these mean but men car Kario and kesin those are the three General alignments of these yeah and that is the almost 40 stones that were destroyed created those three alignments or there's many many more Stones than those were just part of in general the types of alignments that these could have in this entire area of France are called these three things oh I see so there's patterns that are common okay yeah this one had its own particular alignment which was one of those in fact I don't think they mention it okay okay and that's just that's just a general piece of information for this area okay got it so understood and I guess according to to again this guy who drives by there all the time cuz he lives in the area he went by one day and they were there cuz he was concerned about it cuz they knew they were putting a department store there uhhuh and he went by the next day and they were gone yeah so the way he wrote it a bulldozer came in in the middle of the night and covered and cleared everything out yeah whether or not that's actually true it doesn't say in the article and the other thing too is that according to him the stones that they took down wouldn't even have been under the building they would have been behind it and with a little bit of effort they probably could have been preserved according to him again why would he have that information first off um and second yeah well they might have to publicly post like the yeah you might have to but you know the other thing is too like I mean there's a lot wrapped up in a building depending on how big it is they need to have drain off areas they need to have storage they have a parking lot dumpsters all that kind of stuff all this kind of stuff and it just because it wasn't under the footprint of the building doesn't mean it wouldn't have been in danger and and also doesn't mean they couldn't have avoided it and put up a fence it is kind of shocking that we're going to be that close to an ancient site in this country most construction will just avoid that stuff they'll just move it a little bit this way or that way to not even have to involve themselves with it you know but just like in segment two I don't think that's easy in Europe maybe like lack of space or whatever I think this stuff's all over the place yeah true yeah either there's so much of it you can't avoid it or it's such a crowded area there's not a lot of space to move both those things I get now the reason this might have been in the way is because of the size of it the site itself was actually known as Chim de montabon mhm chm de multiun and it included and again it doesn't say which one of those three alignment names this is but it included two intersecting rows of small Granite Stela and that's just a granite standing Stone another word for standing Stone yeah U spread over 50 m in Lake that's over 150 feet uhhuh one had been in the same place one of the stones they said and not moved by somebody prehistoric historically uhhuh and I again I'm not sure exactly how they know this there are ways through I want to say not x-ray floressence there's some other Technique we talked about a while back we did with the soil right under it you look under it and you can tell how long it's been since that soil was exposed to light yep yeah but either way I don't know if they did this but apparently one of them for through whatever means had been in place for 7,000 years which is how they dated this MH so which means that I mean some of them could have been in place longer who knows yeah I don't know if these were I don't know if it was routine for these to be set up and then maybe reconfigured by people a couple hundred years later that are like you know what we don't like V's anymore we're going to make an X totally I mean I can see people doing that that makes sense we don't support the V Gods we now support the Q gods and that's what we're going to make so yeah definitely this site is one of the oldest sets of stones in Carnac that's another thing that made it important to the local area M so there's about 3,000 prehistoric standing stones in Britney yeah that were erected by pre Celtic people that's a lot yeah that's not sites that's total Stones the way they wrote the article okay so yeah you know this one had 37 of them some some may had a lot more some may have had fewer who knows that's still a lot though it's still a lot yeah yeah there's also in this area Stone tombs and burial mounds and with those and then the Standing Stones it's thought to be the largest collection of these type of things in the entire world like found together and probably associated in highest in the highest density yeah so for these types of things in Britany in France I'm just very surprised about this again and and our experience comes from CRM in this country where you you can't really destroy a site without doing the proper excavation or whatever and it makes me wonder if this person who this guy Christian oblets if he didn't know what was happening in the background maybe maybe they already did the excavation that they needed to do for this site and they had the permission to move forward with clearing it cuz that is something that happens like you excavate and and then the site has been documented but it sounds like the site is the standing stones you can't excavate those they're on the ground they're on the surface no but you can you can document it and say this has been documented fully and now it does not need to be preserved anymore which I don't think has happened and the reason for that is well it it may it was documented in the fact that it's listed on their their historic registers or their megalithic registers right so it has been documented in some way we do know that yeah whether or not this company that came in with the bulldozer was doing further documentation or was satisfied with that I don't know but the real thing to lead to your point that uh the end of this press release talks about is a complaint has been lodged with the public prosecutor for willful destruction of sites that relate to archaeological Heritage that's what they called it and they said that the in the complaint itself they're not they're not so much looking for punishment because it's been done already like they might find them of course but you know what do you do but the complaint is more to find out where the loopholes are that allowed this to happen did thisen they're like we've got laws or so again I go to I go to my knowledge of CRM in this country and I'm like is this one of those scenarios where they knew they weren't supposed to do it but they took a look at the how much the fine would be yeah like what's the fine not enough to stop them and they were like whatever we need this space we're going to just bulldoze it and the fine isn't enough to stop us we'll take the fine and move on the development firm is like we're losing 50,000 a day not doing this and the f is $40,000 yeah exactly that that is defitely possibility and we've seen that in this country too it for sure happens yeah I mean what could happen is if you do that too many times you lose permits to work at all yeah but like a one-off they're not going to do it you know unless there's really really strict laws and you just don't see that even if they do it often like you know there's there's a lot of stuff in politics that goes into those kind of things so you grease the right Wheels you know y anyway that's that's crazy but it is it it the one last thing I'll say about that is yes they were just a pile of stones right M and 50 years ago we would have looked at a pile of standing stones and been like that's great they've probably been there for a while but we don't have any way of dating it or knowing anything about it but today we have all these technologies that can tell us more about those Standing Stones like you said the one that looks through the soil and sees how when the last time it was exposed to light was and there could be future Technologies coming that we don't know about yet that might tell us even more about these ancient sites so just destroying them really does like hurt my archaeology heart a little bit because you just don't know what is going to come in the future that might really Enlighten the the archaeology World about what those things meant so I hate to see things destroyed like that I also understand progress and you have to be able to build in places I just wish there could be a happy medium and sounds like that's what this guy who is reporting the complaint also wishes to yeah and that brings up the age-old question that we don't have a lot of time to talk about here is does everything need to be preserved that's true or is there a way to preserve it digitally you know in a way that we just we can we can get rid of it it's so hard because we just don't know what we don't know you know so like if we yeah so many more examples in this area you know it's like decide what you want to do you know and you know figure out how that's going to work so yeah I don't know that's hard that's a hard question for sure all right well to make up for the fact that we skipped an episode because we didn't have our recording equipment thanks American Airlines for that uh we're going to do a bonus segment yes and it's going to be about an Armenian bakery with 3,000-year old flower so if you're a member of the archology podcast Network head over to arod net.com click on members and then click on uh well click on early downloads because bonus content associated with episodes are on that episode's page they're not in the bonus content page which is something I might change the name of later on yeah that's bonus content page is like a full extra episode that doesn't have a place to live these ones have a place to live with the rest of the episode yeah this is in the early downloads area so you see the file for the full episode and then you'll see the player down there for the bonus segment as well if you're not a member of the archaeology podcast Network and you've got an extra six or seven bucks a month to spend if you buy annually that's what it costs then head over to arod net.com members and you can join us and get all of our past bonus content our past extra content in in episodes and our past Live Events and videos that we've done like for example we just did a curo share event on the archaeology of motherhood M and really parenting in general too that was really cool had some really good speakers and presenters on that and that is available to watch anytime you want on your member pages so and we have another one coming up that I think is shaping up to be underwater archaeology oo exciting so and I think that's going to be in August so we haven't quite nailed that one down yet but y anyway that's coming up in the future so check that out arod net.com members and one more thing if you want to keep these podcast coming and keep the network going take a look down at your device that you're listening to this on and take a look at our sponsors and Affiliates at the bottom of the page I'm incredibly excited about motion which is the first one listed but we have three others listed down there as well that are also providing some good things that we've looked at so uh all of it if you purchase stuff helps us keep the network going Y and keep everything free for sure so all right with that we're going to go record the bonus segment so thanks again for the members that are allowing us to do that and again arknet.com members if you're not a member we'll see you next week [Music] bye thanks for listening to the archaeology show feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www. ARP pod.com find us on Facebook Instagram and Twitter at arp podet music for this show is called I wish you would look from the band SE hero again thanks for listening and have an awesome [Music] day this episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States Tristan Bole in Scotland dig Tech LLC cultural media and the archaeology podcast Network and was edited by Chris Webster this has been a presentation of the archaeology podcast Network visit us on the web for for show notes and other podcasts at [Music] www.arp.org do save on O'Reilly brake parts cleaner get two cans of O'Reilly brake parts cleaner for just $8 valid in store only at O'Reilly Auto Parts oil Auto Parts come