It’s only very, very rarely that one person’s trash turns out to be another person’s actual treasure…but sometimes there’s no other way to describe it. In this newest series inside the Historiansplaining Podcast, Dr. Sam chronicles the unexpected yet invaluable archeological discoveries that have changed our understanding of the past, and reveal long ago civilizations that otherwise have been almost completely forgotten to time.
Each Full-Episode Details page links to the specific recordings on Apple, SoundCloud, Patreon, Spotify and several other major podcast platforms.
This series alternates between free installments and episodes available to patrons only for the first year after they’ve been recorded – Become a patron (at any amount you want to contribute) to unlock all the most recent series content.
The seven primary playlists of Historiansplaining:
Featured Playlist Episode:
The Sutton Hoo Treasure
Why was the excavation depicted in Netflix’s “The Dig” the most important archaeological discovery ever made in Britain, or arguably in all of Europe? How did some artifacts found in a mound near an English widow’s garden in Suffolk on the eve of World War II revolutionize our understanding of the “Dark Age”? Why would they come to serve as symbols of the ancient roots of the English nation, and how did Sutton Hoo vindicate the new science of archaeology? The story that Netflix did not tell you…
Doorways in Time Episodes:
All the episodes of the playlist on the four most popular platforms, starting with the most recent installments, including patron-only episodes on Patreon as well.
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds - 7: The Antikythera Mechanism
A stunningly complex piece of mathematical craftsmanship, the world's earliest known analogue computer, and the so-called "scientific wonder of the ancient world" - the Antikythera mechanism was discovered by chance in 1900, by Greek sponge divers who stumbled upon the wreckage of an ancient ship that foundered on its way from Greece to Rome. An object of bafflement, controversy, and misrepresentation for more than a century, thought to be an astrolabe or a planetarium, the Antikythera mechamism has only recently been proved by x-ray analysis to be a calendrical computing machine intended, for the purposes of astrology, to forecast heavenly events, especially eclipses, into the indefinite future. Also see:
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Unlocked: Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #4: The Library of Ashurbanipal
One moonlit night in 1853, an Iraqi excavator named Hormuzd Rassam and his team snuck into the hills outside of Mosul and began to uncover the massive palace of the last ancient Assyrian emperor, Ashurbanipal. Inside the palace was the largest trove of surviving documents from the ancient world that has ever been found. The massive library of over 30,000 tablets illuminated what had been the most mysterious empire of the Iron Age, brought to light the ancient masterpiece of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and provided the first window into the lost Near Eastern mythology that influenced the Biblical book of Genesis. While the discovery provided the greatest triumph of British imperial antiquarianism, in recent times Saddam Hussein and other Arab nationalists have attempted to reclaim its legacy by building a modern Library of Ashurbanipal.
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6: Early Audio Recordings
 | Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6: Early Audio RecordingsCurrently available to Patrons only, on the Patreon App and website: What do I get as a supporter?I'm already a supporter |
In the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the most brilliant and ambitious minds in both Europe and America were bent upon solving the problem of capturing sound waves from the air and playing them back. Most of their efforts, including the earliest "phonautograms" from more than a decade before Edison's invention of the phonograph, were either forgotten or lost to decay and degradation. In the past fifteen years, however, scientists and engineers, including the First Sounds collective, have located the surviving remnants of early sound recordings and devised ways to optically scan them and reproduce the sounds that they captured, revealing much of the auditory world of the nineteenth century and the pathways by which the now-ubiquitous technology of audio recording came into being.
Special thanks to the First Sounds collective, for recovering long-lost audio recordings and sharing their files freely with the global public, at www.firstsounds.org. All audio files used in this lecture are courtesy of First Sounds, except for the Edison/Wangemann cylinder recording from 1889, which is courtesy of the National Park Service and the Cylinder Archive.
Listen on Patreon Full Episode Details
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #5: Gobekli Tepe
We examine the so-called "zero point of history," the "first temple," the "world's oldest building," the massive and deeply ancient complex of stone-age megalithic monuments on a hilltop in Turkey, which since being uncovered in the 1990s, has dramatically overturned received ideas about the beginnings of civilization.
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Unlocked: Doorways in Time:The Great Archaeological Finds #2: The Nag Hammadi Library and the Gnostic Gospels
Unlocked after one year for patrons only: The secretive Gnostic stream of Christianity, which taught a radically different metaphysics and spiritual cosmology from "orthodox" doctrine in the first four hundred years of the church, was largely lost to history, until 1945, when a camel-herder in a remote part of Egypt stumbled upon an old ceramic jar with 13 massive books containing 52 ancient Gnostic texts. We consider what the so-called "Nag Hammadi Library," which may have been hidden in the desert to protect it from destruction, reveals about the origins and importance of the Gnostics' secret teachings. Also see:
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #3: The Terracotta Army & the Tomb of Qin
In 1974, group of Chinese farmers drilling a well in a parched field in a far northwestern corner of China found pieces of terracotta sculpture, which would point the way to East Asia's greatest ever archaeological discovery -- a tremendous trove of sculpted warriors, each one unique, amassed in a great army marching eastward from the necropolis of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. Just spared destruction in the Cultural Revolution, the army is most likely only the tip of the iceberg of the wonders still waiting to be excavated deep within the emperor's burial mound. In 1974, group of Chinese farmers drilling a well in a parched field in a far northwestern corner of China found pieces of terracotta sculpture, which would point the way to East Asia's greatest ever archaeological discovery -- a tremendous trove of sculpted warriors, each one unique, amassed in a great army marching eastward from the necropolis of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. Just spared destruction in the Cultural Revolution, the army is most likely only the tip of the iceberg of the wonders still waiting to be excavated deep within the emperor's burial mound. Also see:
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #1: The Sutton Hoo Treasure
Why was the excavation depicted in Netflix's "The Dig" the most important archaeological discovery ever made in Britain, or arguably in all of Europe? How did some artifacts found in a mound near an English widow's garden in Suffolk on the eve of World War II revolutionize our understanding of the Dark Age? Why would they come to serve as symbols of the ancient roots of the English nation, and how did Sutton Hoo vindicate the new science of archaeology? The story that Netflix did not tell you. Also see:
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds - 7: The Antikythera Mechanism
A stunningly complex piece of mathematical craftsmanship, the world's earliest known analogue computer, and the so-called "scientific wonder of the ancient world" - the Antikythera mechanism was discovered by chance in 1900, by Greek sponge divers who stumbled upon the wreckage of an ancient ship that foundered on its way from Greece to Rome. An object of bafflement, controversy, and misrepresentation for more than a century, thought to be an astrolabe or a planetarium, the Antikythera mechamism has only recently been proved by x-ray analysis to be a calendrical computing machine intended, for the purposes of astrology, to forecast heavenly events, especially eclipses, into the indefinite future. Also see:
Listen on SoundCloud
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Unlocked: Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #4: The Library of Ashurbanipal
One moonlit night in 1853, an Iraqi excavator named Hormuzd Rassam and his team snuck into the hills outside of Mosul and began to uncover the massive palace of the last ancient Assyrian emperor, Ashurbanipal. Inside the palace was the largest trove of surviving documents from the ancient world that has ever been found. The massive library of over 30,000 tablets illuminated what had been the most mysterious empire of the Iron Age, brought to light the ancient masterpiece of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and provided the first window into the lost Near Eastern mythology that influenced the Biblical book of Genesis. While the discovery provided the greatest triumph of British imperial antiquarianism, in recent times Saddam Hussein and other Arab nationalists have attempted to reclaim its legacy by building a modern Library of Ashurbanipal.
Listen on SoundCloud
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6: Early Audio Recordings
| | Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6: Early Audio RecordingsCurrently available to Patrons only, on the Patreon App and website: What do I get as a supporter?I'm already a supporter |
In the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the most brilliant and ambitious minds in both Europe and America were bent upon solving the problem of capturing sound waves from the air and playing them back. Most of their efforts, including the earliest "phonautograms" from more than a decade before Edison's invention of the phonograph, were either forgotten or lost to decay and degradation. In the past fifteen years, however, scientists and engineers, including the First Sounds collective, have located the surviving remnants of early sound recordings and devised ways to optically scan them and reproduce the sounds that they captured, revealing much of the auditory world of the nineteenth century and the pathways by which the now-ubiquitous technology of audio recording came into being.
Special thanks to the First Sounds collective, for recovering long-lost audio recordings and sharing their files freely with the global public, at www.firstsounds.org. All audio files used in this lecture are courtesy of First Sounds, except for the Edison/Wangemann cylinder recording from 1889, which is courtesy of the National Park Service and the Cylinder Archive.
Listen on Patreon Full Episode Details
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #5: Gobekli Tepe
We examine the so-called "zero point of history," the "first temple," the "world's oldest building," the massive and deeply ancient complex of stone-age megalithic monuments on a hilltop in Turkey, which since being uncovered in the 1990s, has dramatically overturned received ideas about the beginnings of civilization.
Listen on SoundCloud
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Unlocked: Doorways in Time:The Great Archaeological Finds #2: The Nag Hammadi Library and the Gnostic Gospels
Unlocked after one year for patrons only: The secretive Gnostic stream of Christianity, which taught a radically different metaphysics and spiritual cosmology from "orthodox" doctrine in the first four hundred years of the church, was largely lost to history, until 1945, when a camel-herder in a remote part of Egypt stumbled upon an old ceramic jar with 13 massive books containing 52 ancient Gnostic texts. We consider what the so-called "Nag Hammadi Library," which may have been hidden in the desert to protect it from destruction, reveals about the origins and importance of the Gnostics' secret teachings. Also see:
Listen on SoundCloud
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #3: The Terracotta Army & the Tomb of Qin
In 1974, group of Chinese farmers drilling a well in a parched field in a far northwestern corner of China found pieces of terracotta sculpture, which would point the way to East Asia's greatest ever archaeological discovery -- a tremendous trove of sculpted warriors, each one unique, amassed in a great army marching eastward from the necropolis of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. Just spared destruction in the Cultural Revolution, the army is most likely only the tip of the iceberg of the wonders still waiting to be excavated deep within the emperor's burial mound. In 1974, group of Chinese farmers drilling a well in a parched field in a far northwestern corner of China found pieces of terracotta sculpture, which would point the way to East Asia's greatest ever archaeological discovery -- a tremendous trove of sculpted warriors, each one unique, amassed in a great army marching eastward from the necropolis of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. Just spared destruction in the Cultural Revolution, the army is most likely only the tip of the iceberg of the wonders still waiting to be excavated deep within the emperor's burial mound. Also see:
Listen on SoundCloud
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #1: The Sutton Hoo Treasure
Why was the excavation depicted in Netflix's "The Dig" the most important archaeological discovery ever made in Britain, or arguably in all of Europe? How did some artifacts found in a mound near an English widow's garden in Suffolk on the eve of World War II revolutionize our understanding of the Dark Age? Why would they come to serve as symbols of the ancient roots of the English nation, and how did Sutton Hoo vindicate the new science of archaeology? The story that Netflix did not tell you. Also see:
Listen on SoundCloud
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6: Early Audio Recordings
| | Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6: Early Audio RecordingsCurrently available to Patrons only, on the Patreon App and website: What do I get as a supporter?I'm already a supporter |
In the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the most brilliant and ambitious minds in both Europe and America were bent upon solving the problem of capturing sound waves from the air and playing them back. Most of their efforts, including the earliest "phonautograms" from more than a decade before Edison's invention of the phonograph, were either forgotten or lost to decay and degradation. In the past fifteen years, however, scientists and engineers, including the First Sounds collective, have located the surviving remnants of early sound recordings and devised ways to optically scan them and reproduce the sounds that they captured, revealing much of the auditory world of the nineteenth century and the pathways by which the now-ubiquitous technology of audio recording came into being.
Special thanks to the First Sounds collective, for recovering long-lost audio recordings and sharing their files freely with the global public, at www.firstsounds.org. All audio files used in this lecture are courtesy of First Sounds, except for the Edison/Wangemann cylinder recording from 1889, which is courtesy of the National Park Service and the Cylinder Archive.
Listen on Patreon Full Episode Details
Unlocked: Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #4: The Library of Ashurbanipal
One moonlit night in 1853, an Iraqi excavator named Hormuzd Rassam and his team snuck into the hills outside of Mosul and began to uncover the massive palace of the last ancient Assyrian emperor, Ashurbanipal. Inside the palace was the largest trove of surviving documents from the ancient world that has ever been found. The massive library of over 30,000 tablets illuminated what had been the most mysterious empire of the Iron Age, brought to light the ancient masterpiece of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and provided the first window into the lost Near Eastern mythology that influenced the Biblical book of Genesis. While the discovery provided the greatest triumph of British imperial antiquarianism, in recent times Saddam Hussein and other Arab nationalists have attempted to reclaim its legacy by building a modern Library of Ashurbanipal.
Listen on YouTube
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6: Early Audio Recordings
| | Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Discoveries #6: Early Audio RecordingsCurrently available to Patrons only, on the Patreon App and website: What do I get as a supporter?I'm already a supporter |
In the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the most brilliant and ambitious minds in both Europe and America were bent upon solving the problem of capturing sound waves from the air and playing them back. Most of their efforts, including the earliest "phonautograms" from more than a decade before Edison's invention of the phonograph, were either forgotten or lost to decay and degradation. In the past fifteen years, however, scientists and engineers, including the First Sounds collective, have located the surviving remnants of early sound recordings and devised ways to optically scan them and reproduce the sounds that they captured, revealing much of the auditory world of the nineteenth century and the pathways by which the now-ubiquitous technology of audio recording came into being.
Special thanks to the First Sounds collective, for recovering long-lost audio recordings and sharing their files freely with the global public, at www.firstsounds.org. All audio files used in this lecture are courtesy of First Sounds, except for the Edison/Wangemann cylinder recording from 1889, which is courtesy of the National Park Service and the Cylinder Archive.
Listen on Patreon Full Episode Details
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #5: Gobekli Tepe
We examine the so-called "zero point of history," the "first temple," the "world's oldest building," the massive and deeply ancient complex of stone-age megalithic monuments on a hilltop in Turkey, which since being uncovered in the 1990s, has dramatically overturned received ideas about the beginnings of civilization.
Listen on YouTube
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Unlocked: Doorways in Time:The Great Archaeological Finds #2: The Nag Hammadi Library and the Gnostic Gospels
Unlocked after one year for patrons only: The secretive Gnostic stream of Christianity, which taught a radically different metaphysics and spiritual cosmology from "orthodox" doctrine in the first four hundred years of the church, was largely lost to history, until 1945, when a camel-herder in a remote part of Egypt stumbled upon an old ceramic jar with 13 massive books containing 52 ancient Gnostic texts. We consider what the so-called "Nag Hammadi Library," which may have been hidden in the desert to protect it from destruction, reveals about the origins and importance of the Gnostics' secret teachings. Also see:
Listen on YouTube
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #3: The Terracotta Army & the Tomb of Qin
In 1974, group of Chinese farmers drilling a well in a parched field in a far northwestern corner of China found pieces of terracotta sculpture, which would point the way to East Asia's greatest ever archaeological discovery -- a tremendous trove of sculpted warriors, each one unique, amassed in a great army marching eastward from the necropolis of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. Just spared destruction in the Cultural Revolution, the army is most likely only the tip of the iceberg of the wonders still waiting to be excavated deep within the emperor's burial mound. In 1974, group of Chinese farmers drilling a well in a parched field in a far northwestern corner of China found pieces of terracotta sculpture, which would point the way to East Asia's greatest ever archaeological discovery -- a tremendous trove of sculpted warriors, each one unique, amassed in a great army marching eastward from the necropolis of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. Just spared destruction in the Cultural Revolution, the army is most likely only the tip of the iceberg of the wonders still waiting to be excavated deep within the emperor's burial mound. Also see:
Listen on YouTube
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
Doorways in Time: The Great Archaeological Finds #1: The Sutton Hoo Treasure
Why was the excavation depicted in Netflix's "The Dig" the most important archaeological discovery ever made in Britain, or arguably in all of Europe? How did some artifacts found in a mound near an English widow's garden in Suffolk on the eve of World War II revolutionize our understanding of the Dark Age? Why would they come to serve as symbols of the ancient roots of the English nation, and how did Sutton Hoo vindicate the new science of archaeology? The story that Netflix did not tell you. Also see:
Listen on YouTube
Full Episode Details + Listen on Any Platform
An Additional Doorway to Explore:
Fortresses on Sand: The History of Florida – pt. 1
How did a luxury housing development on the “Space Coast” of Florida accidentally uncover the most important prehistoric burial site ever found in America? Listen to the first 20min of the episode to find out…
And Wait, There’s More…
In addition to the 7 main playlists, Historiansplaining boasts full-video lectures on western architecture, guest interviews, commentary on current events, and critiques of recent books, film & television, plus our Most Popular Episodes and Hot Off the Presses lists – all with Quick Samples of featured episodes:
- Full-Video Lectures: Western Architecture
- Special Guest Conversations and Interviews
- History As It Happens: The News in Historical Context
- Books, Film, and Television
- Most Popular Episodes
- Hot Off the Presses!
Things You Don’t Know
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