Episode 215

Achoo, and Welcome to The Dirt

This week, Amber is recovering from a nasty cold that has left her normally dulcet tones extremely froggy. So we've made lemons out of that germy lemonade (ew, sorry). It's an episode about the archaeology, prehistory, and history of the common cold! Learn how to tell if a skeleton had the sniffles, figure out if there are ghosts in your colon, uncover the great Vitamin C scam, and more!

CONTENT WARNING: A case study from ancient Nimrud includes brief mention of a post-mortem treatment for burial that some listeners may find upsetting!

For more on this episode's topics:

Humans are 8% virus – how the ancient viral DNA in your genome plays a role in human disease and development (The Conversation)

Prehistoric viruses smuggled genes into our DNA (Chemical & Engineering News)

Cold Virus Found To Manipulate Genes (ScienceDaily)

Sequences capture the code of the common cold (University of Wisconsin)

Common cold virus may predate modern humans, ancient DNA hints (Live Science)

Paleomedicine and the Evolutionary Context of Medicinal Plant Use (Nature Public Health Emergency Collection)

Cowabunga! Horn reveals herbal mixtures used by medieval healers in South Africa (RFI)

Africa's Medical History Revealed (Origins)

Infectious Diseases in the Archaeological Record (Ember Archaeology)

Disease concepts and classifications in ancient Mesopotamian medicine (Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures)

The Life and Health of Assyrian Queens (Ancient Near East Today)

Cold Sore Virus Detected in Ancient Human Remains (Archaeology)

Common cold: The centuries-old battle against the sniffles (BBC News)

Medical Practitioners: Ancient Legacy (Prof. Sean Taylor, MSU Moorhead)

Ancient Egyptian Medicine: A Systematic Review (Philosophy, Social and Human Disciplines)

Glossary of Medical Terms Used in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Craig Thornber)

Ethnobotany of Purple Coneflower (Echinacea angustifolia, Asteraceae) and Other Echinacea Species (Economic Botany)

How Linus Pauling duped America into believing vitamin C cures colds (Vox)

Archaeobotanical evidence of the use of medicinal cannabis in a secular context unearthed from south China (ScienceDirect)


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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.