Episode 220

The Dirt Plays Pretend

TRY THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK TO LEARN ABOUT THE PAST, FAST!

We're talking scams, frauds, fakers, and pretenders this week.

Anna just hauled a whole household halfway across the country and is still recovering. So Amber has stepped up with a super fun episode about some of the trickiest pretenders from history (ancient and modern). Tune into some Old Assyrian family drama, unwrap misleading mummies, discover a heroic art movement, and more!

For further reading:

Behistun Inscription (with English translation) (Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative) 

Achaemenes (Encyclopedia Iranica)

The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (Project Gutenberg)

How Ancient Scammers Tricked Consumers (World of Chinese)

The secret letters of history's first-known businesswomen (BBC Worklife)

Women of Assur: and Kanesh Texts from the Archives of Assyrian Merchants (via WorldCat)

Demosthenes’ Against Zenothemis (Perseus)

Bottomry (Wikipedia)

A Third of Animal Mummies Contain no Animals at All (Smithsonian)

Disumbrationist School of Art (Museum of Hoaxes)

Bogus pupil set to lose place at university (The Independent)

Exclusive: Brian MacKinnon Tells The Herald ‘How I Was Unmasked’ (The Herald)

Brandon Lee: The model school pupil who was a 30-year-old imposter (BBC)

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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.