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Dirt After Dark: Sorry to Barge In

Just as there have been rumors for ages that we would do this episode, so too were there rumors for ages that at the bottom of a very, very small lake in Italy there lay the remains of one or more opulent pleasure boats belonging to an infamous Roman emperor. This month, we bring you that story. From impressive feats of engineering to impressive feats of Amber

remembering things from undergrad, we look at the Nemi ships from their construction to their use to their ultimate destruction some two millennia later. Rich people, what's their deal?

Nemi Ships: How Caligula's Floating Pleasure Palaces Were Found and Lost Again (Discover)

Divers to scour lake for Emperor Caligula’s 2,000-year-old pleasure ship (Washington Post)

A missing mosaic from Caligula’s ship served as a coffee table in NYC home for 45 years (The Vintage News)

And check out Sebastiane on Wikipedia.

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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.