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- [00:00]
Ann
I was never really a runner. The way I see running is a gift, especially when you have stage four cancer. I'm Ann. I'm running the Boston Marathon presented by bank of America. I run for Dana Farber Cancer Institute to give people like me a chance to thrive in life even with cancer. Join bank of America in helping Anne's cause. Give if you can@b of a.com supportann what would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not endorsement by bank of America Corporation Copyright 2025.
- [00:32]
Lowes Advertiser
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- [01:00]
McDonald's Advertiser
McDonald's meets the Minecraft universe with one.
- [01:03]
Ann
Of six collectibles and your choice of a Big Mac or 10 piece McNuggets.
- [01:07]
McDonald's Advertiser
With spicy nether Flame sauce. Now available with a Minecraft movie meal.
- [01:12]
Ruth Goodman
And participate in McDonald's for a limited time.
- [01:14]
McDonald's Advertiser
A Minecraft movie only in theaters it's approximately 3,000 years BC and we're in the land known today as Japan. In the far distant future, this spot will lie within the vast urban sprawl that surrounds Tokyo. For now, there's just a small settlement arranged around a central space. Each house has a conical thatch roof made from Japanese silver grass. The roof comes right down to the ground, making it seem as if the house is growing out of the earth like a giant mushroom. Future archaeologists will call these dwellings pit houses. As you can hear from the crashing surf, we're on the coast, looking out over a glistening bay. A woman sits cross legged in front of one of the houses. She's wearing clothing made from strips of mulberry bark, pounded until they are supple enough to be woven into fabric. It's the typical clothing of the Neolithic people who inhabit Japan at this period. In front of her there's a flat stone which she's using as a work surface for an outdoor pottery studio. She rolls out a long, fine snake of clay about 6 to 8 millimeters in diameter. She coils the clay around a circular base, patiently building it until she has a tall cylindrical vessel. She smooths the surface with a bamboo tool before carefully wrapping a length of rope around the wet clay. As she's Doing this, the woman places her thumbs inside the cylinder to press the rope firmly in place. When she takes the rope away, it leaves an impression of its fibers on the pot. It's this distinctive effect that gives her civilization its modern name. Jomon. Japanese for cord pattern. The woman leaves the pot to dry in the sun. A few days later, she places it in an outdoor bonfire. Once the embers have cooled, our potter retrieves the fired pot and admires her handiwork. She notices one of her thumbprints preserved just inside the rim and smiles. It feels like she has planted part of herself in the object that she has made. She trades the pot with one of her neighbours, who uses it to store nuts. Time passes. Then one day, the owner of the pot accidentally drops it. The broken pot is thrown into a vast dumping ground filled with discarded shells. More time passes. Centuries merge into millennia. Then, one day in 1877, American archaeologist Edward Sylvester Morse is excavating a site now known as the Omori shell midden. Midden being the term archaeologists used for a domestic waste dump. As he is sorting through the finds his team made that day, Morse notices a pot fragment that bears a distinctive chord pattern. It's a design that he's seen on much of the pottery he has retrieved. He hands the fragment to a friend, a Scottish surgeon and missionary by the name of Henry Foulds. Foulds turns the fragment over and sees a thumbprint on the back. He feels a connection with the ancient potter who left their impression in the clay. An idea grips him. He takes the fingerprints of everyone he knows and becomes convinced that no two are the same. He theorizes that fingerprints can be lifted from crime scenes and used as a way of identifying perpetrators. In fact, after a break in at the hospital where he works, he retrieves fingerprints and uses them to prove that the man suspected of the crime is innocent. Foulds writes a letter explaining his theory about the skin furrows of the hand, which is published in the scientific journal Nature in 1880. It's the first ever academic article about fingerprinting. But in a later edition of the journal, there's a letter from an English colonial official in India, Sir William Herschel. He claims that he has been using fingerprints as a form of identification on contracts since 1860. Whoever originated the idea, it's clear that Foulds was the first to think about the forensic use of fingerprinting. And it all started with a discarded pot. I'm Ruth Goodman. I've spent my life exploring the extraordinary history of everyday items, the little things that we often Take for granted. You see, every object in your home has a fascinating hidden history, a story that's just waiting to be told. This week, we're looking through the rubbish bins of the past. So come with me and together we'll explore the curious history of your home. Rubbish, trash, garbage, refuse, waste, whatever you call it, the stuff we throw away can tell us a lot about who we are and who we were. We can discover so many intimate details about our ancestors lives by going through their rubbish. We find clues to their diet and cooking methods, their genetic makeup, the diseases they suffered from the arts they made, even their religious beliefs. In many ways, archaeology is the study of discarded objects. Though in this episode, it's the things that were deliberately thrown away and how they are dealt with that that particularly interest us. It was Danish researchers in the mid-19th century who first realized that the giant heaps of shells they found along their Atlantic seaboard had not been washed up by the tide, but were evidence of human settlements, in that case, by the funnel beaker culture of northern Europe. In fact, shell middens are found all around the world, from Scandinavia to to north and South America, as well as Australia, Taiwan and, as we heard in the opening scene, Japan. Despite their geographic diversity, shell middens share many common features. They are always sighted near the coast or on the banks of a lake. As the name suggests, the main component is shells, the discarded food packaging of the prehistoric world. Mixed in are often other waste items, including bone, charcoal and broken pottery. Shell middens vary enormously in size. At one end of the scale, we might find a few scraps piled up after a nomadic group has moved on from an area. Then there are the monster middens, such as Turtle Mound in Florida. Built up over centuries by Timucua Native Americans, it is so big it can be seen seven miles out to sea. Even bigger, at 500 metres by 800 metres, are the Kasore shell mounds on the west bank of the Sakatsuki river near Tokyo. This ancient site was begun around 7,000 years ago. Today, there's an underground viewing tunnel where you can take a stroll through the distant past and observe the different strata built up over time. At around the same time that the Cosori shell mounds were starting to pile up, the inhabitants of the Neolithic city of Catalhuic in modern day Turkey developed a novel way of dealing with rubbish. To begin with, they simply dumped it in the spaces between their houses. Over time, the piles of waste grew and grew and grew until they were higher than the houses the people lived in. And so the residents came up with an ingenious solution. They simply built new houses on top of the old ones. Gradually, in a process that took nearly 2,000 years, a constantly renewed city emerged, built on the foundations of its own past, a city literally made of waste. This practice of using waste as a construction material was not unique to Catalho. Piles of rubble left outside the walls of Pompeii were at first thought to be caused by the volcanic eruption that destroyed the city in 79 AD. Archaeologists now believe they are evidence of a Roman era recycling center.
- [11:58]
Shopify Advertiser
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- [12:31]
Indeed Advertiser
Shopify.com promo this episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast and even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply.
- [13:04]
Ann
Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EBGLIS. After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks, about 4 in 10 people taking EVGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin. And most of those people maintained skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [13:23]
Eglis Advertiser
Eglis Librekizumab LBKZ, a 250mg 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema on also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief.
- [13:57]
Ann
Ask your doctor about eglis and visit ebgliss.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.
- [14:05]
TurboTax Advertiser
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- [14:36]
Ruth Goodman
Dreams the new podcast from the award winning Noiser Network. Join me, Paul McGann, as we explore life and death on Titanic. I'll delve into my own family story following my great Uncle Jimmy as he tries to escape the engine room. We'll hear the harrowing tales of the victims and the testimonies of the lucky survivors.
- [14:56]
McDonald's Advertiser
I saw that ship sink and I saw that ship break in half.
- [15:01]
Ruth Goodman
Titanic Ship of Dreams. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [15:07]
McDonald's Advertiser
Central America around 500 AD, the middle of the Classic Maya period. We're in the city of Calakmul in the Yucatan Peninsula, population 50,000 today in the 21st century. It's deep in a dense forest close to the Mexican border with Guatemala. The sun beats down from a clear, intensely blue sky. It's July, though in the Mayan calendar, it's the first day of the month of Pop, the beginning of a new year. Time plays a central part in Maya culture. Important days are marked with rituals, and New Year's Day is one of the most significant. That sound you can hear? That's the ceremony for today, because to celebrate the new year, the Maya of Yucateca throw out everything associated with the old year. To prepare for this day, the men of the city fast and cover themselves in soot. They then ritually cleanse their bodies in a purification ceremony held in a sweat lodge. At the same time, houses are swept clean. Household items such as plates, pots, furniture, clothes and floor coverings are gathered together and taken to a dump outside town, where, as you can hear, they are ceremoniously thrown away. It's like a spring clean on steroids. The ancient Maya didn't just use waste to mark the passage of time. They also used it to reinforce physical boundaries. In the settlement of Motel de San Jose in the southern Maia lowlands, waste was often dumped in the gaps between houses. These smelly barricades would certainly have been off putting to trespassers and burglars. But they probably also had a symbolic significance. The content of your rubbish was a good guide to your social standing. Judging from the density of their waste heaps, rich Maya threw away more stuff than their poorer neighbours. You might say they had more disposable wealth. Their rubbish also contained imported goods which were lacking in less well off middens. When it comes to medieval waste disposal in Europe, the stereotypical image is of people dumping waste in the streets or just throwing it out of the windows. Well, I have to tell you, that doesn't reflect the true picture. Yes, there is some written evidence of rubbish piling up in the streets of medieval and early modern periods. In fact, Shakespeare's father John was fined one shilling for letting dung pile up in Henley Street, Stratford Upon Avon, where he owned a property. Not very neighbourly, but as you can imagine, medieval people disliked the smells and the swarms of flies caused by unwarranted fly tipping just as much as we would today, which is why they generally try to put a stop to it. The proud burghers of Prague, for example, hired workers to clean up after markets and other events. Specially constructed pits were dug outside of towns where street waste was taken before it became a problem. In Venice, an island was set aside for waste which was carried there by boat every day. Bear in mind that in the medieval age there was just less waste to begin with. There were fewer people, you see. Also, there were almost no consumer goods that got worn out and had to be thrown away. People used to make do and mend far more than we do today. And back then, food waste was not a problem either. For example, it's been estimated that the medieval butcher supplied as many as 25 other trades with various animal byproducts that were used to make everything from soap to saddles. The bones were boiled for glue, the fat was turned into tallow. Candles and horns were carved into drinking vessels, combs and many other objects. Using the whole animal like this definitely reduced household waste. And the same spirit of frugality was evident in other trades too. There was even a thriving second hand clothing market, although medieval people didn't have charity shops, instead they had botchers who made new garments out of old. Another example of medieval recycling which we covered in our episode on washing up was the use of ash as a cleaning product. As you can see, the medieval period was not as filthy as some people believe. In fact, something we think of as dirty was actually used to make things clean. It's the 1820s. We're in the King's Cross area of North London. The skyline is dominated by a huge black mound that looms over the allotments and slum dwelling. So surrounding it on the left you can see Battle Bridge which spans the Fleet River. On the right, a long two story building, the smallpox hospital. Plumes of dirty black smoke rise from fires that have been lit on the side of the hill. Dust clouds drift in the breeze. An acrid smell hangs in the air. The atmosphere is unhealthy, toxic even. This is the great dust heap of King's Cross, a man made eyesore composed mainly of cinders and coal ash. Together with other waste, including animal bones, broken crockery, discarded bottles and scrap metal, the various bits and pieces have one thing in in common. They've all been thrown away by someone. But here nothing goes to waste. A whole army of scavengers and sorters scale a heap. Men, women and children sift through the discarded objects looking for things they can sell. Their horse drawn carts are are piled high with debris. Crows take to the air as they pass reluctantly leaving their pickings to the humans. Everything has a value. The dung of dogs is sold to the tanners. Most organic matter will make good fertilizer. Bones can be boiled for soap, while the main component of the heap, the cinders. And cinder dust of coal, is a vital ingredient in brick making. There's an old saying, where there's muck, there's brass, meaning there's money to be made from waste. But it's also literally true. And sharp eyed salvagers were always on the lookout for carelessly discarded metal objects like candlesticks, which can be melted down and recycled. Less promising material such as linen rags can also be converted to cash. In this case, sold to the paper making industry. Pigs roam at the foot of the hill, rooting for food scraps. Here's where the traders gather, waiting to buy whatever the sifters have turned up. Even dead cats will find a buyer. The pelts fetch sixpence for a white one, fourpence for a tabby. Fast forward to 1848 and the great dust heap has vanished in a cloud of, well, dust. So where did it go? Apparently it was sold to the Russian Empire to Make bricks for the ongoing reconstruction of Moscow following Napoleon's siege. Earlier in the century, when much of the city was burnt to the ground and on the land where the dust heap once stood, King's Cross railway terminus was built. What we throw away changes over time. In the Victorian era, the majority of household waste consisted of ashes and cinders from coal fires. Hardly surprising when you consider that in the 1850s, each London household burnt an average of 11 tons of coal a year. The dust was collected by dustmen known for their distinctive cry of dust. Oh, yay. As they emptied out each house's dust pit. What the dustmen didn't take the rag and bone men collected in Paris. Nocturnal rag pickers used hooks to fish for hidden treasures amongst the refuse left by citizens forbidden by law from carrying out their business. During daylight hours, they would light their way with swinging lanterns. The ragpickers lived in shanty towns at the edges of the city, sleeping on straw they rescued from the streets and decorating their tumbledown hovels with found objects such as cracked mirrors, attractive stones. It was a tightly knit community where a spirit of self help and mutual aid prevailed. For example, not all the ragpickers children went to school, but those who did would share what they learned with other children, sticking letters and numbers on their doors to give improvised lessons. As the Guadalupian authority Alexandre Privas d'anglemont put it, when he grows aged and infirm, a rag picker does not go to the hospital. His neighbors will not allow him to suffer. Rather, they help him and take up collections to satisfy his needs, enduring deprivation to offer him small comforts. It seems the ragpickers of Paris looked out for each other as well as for anything they could recycle. The year is 1988. We're in Paris, on the upmarket Rue de Vernoy. In the early hours of the morning. That sound you can hear is two men going through rubbish. Only this isn't any old rubbish. It's celebrity rubbish. It belongs to the French singing star Serge Gansbourg. The beam of a torch dances over a carpet of litter, picking out individual items as the men stoop to sort through the discarded objects. There are empty bottles, crumpled beer cans, yoghurt pots, newspapers, magazines, food packaging, letters, postcards and what appears to be a film script. The men freeze at the sound of someone approaching. But it's only a couple of revelers. On their way home after a night on the town, they barely glance at the two men ankle deep in Serge Gber's rubbish. Our 20th century rack pickers breathe a sigh of relief and go back to work. Finally, they gather up all the rubbish and bundle it into the boot of a car. The next day, the two men, photographers Bruno Muron and Pascal Rostat, lay the object out on a black velvet cloth in a photographic studio. Former paparazzi with Paris Match magazine, they are now embarking on a fresh project. Their aim is to capture celebrity culture in a new way, based on what the rich and famous throw away. They will go on to rifle through the bins of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Kate Moss, Clint Eastwood, Nicolas Cage, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Damien Hirst, Tom Hanks, Mick Jagger, Steven Spielberg, President Ronald Reagan and more. The large format images they produce will be exhibited in galleries all over the world. Is it art, anthropology, journalism, voyeurism, or even a form of archaeology? Maybe all of the above. As Rostand and Mouron are quoted as saying, Tell me what you discard, I'll tell you who you are. And so, finally, it's time for a few words about the actual receptacle. We put our rubbish in the bin, as we call it in Britain. As you might expect, this has evolved over the years, from the dust pit of the Victorian era to today's wheelie bin. Along the way, we've had the metal dustbin, AKA trash can, immortalised as the home of top cat. Today, we have to separate our waste into different types for recycling, which I'm all in favour of, obviously. Although do admit to the occasional panic the night before collection day. Which bin is it this time? Luckily, there's always someone on the street who knows the binfluenza, I call them. Or of course, the City Local authority app. According to government figures in the UK, we now recycle around 45% of all the waste we produce. The rest goes into landfills. In America, some landfills, known as sanitary landfills, are sealed off and become part of the landscape, with grass growing over the top. Their contents are environmentally neutral, though they can't be built on or have trees planted on them because that will break the seal once the landfill has been closed off. In this way, you start a new one somewhere else. Obviously, you need a lot of land to be able to do this. In a country where land is at a premium, such as Great Britain, it's just not viable. Ever since humans started living together in settled communities, we've had to find ways of dealing with the waste we produce. Over the centuries, historical factors and technological inventions have influenced what we throw away and how we dispose of it. For example, the Industrial revolution led to mass production and the rise of the consumer society. People always wanted the latest thing. Eventually these items would either fall apart, probably as a result of built in obsolescence, or fall out of fashion. Either way, they ended up in the bin. The changing nature of our waste has led to new problems as well as innovative new solutions. Take discarded plastic, which unlike organic waste, doesn't break down over time. The good news is that scientists may have come up with the answer. Self digesting plastic. This contains spores of a plastic eating bacteria which is activated by compost and causes the plastic to slowly self destruct. Waste has been used to build cities, mark time and reinforce boundaries. It has even been placed in art galleries. In 2004, the German artist Gustav Metzger created a work of art that was, how can I put this? A load of old rubbish. His Bin Bag Full of Waste was exhibited in Tate Britain. Unfortunately, a cleaner failed to appreciate its artistic merit and took it away thinking it was actual rubbish. It's almost the exact reverse of the story of the shell midden in Tokyo where archaeologists found exquisite vases which are now in museums instead of art. Amongst the rubbish, we now have rubbish. As in the next episode, we iron out the history of Laundry. An American inventor constructs an unusual birthday present for his wife. An English king's laundry risks causing a scandal. And the ancient Romans use questionable substances to clean their clothes. That's next time on the Curious History of your Home. Listen to the next episode today without waiting a week by subscribing to Noiser plus, head to www.noiza.comscriptions for more information.