Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Brazilian Jars

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

In the 1970s big news was made when some underwater artifacts were found in a bay by Rio de Janeiro that would have rewritten history. Then it just kind of petered out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.

Producer Dave is out there somewhere in spirit, which means it's short stuff. Hamanahamana. Plus tax. Plus what? My friend Meredith used to say, Hamanahamana plus tax. Is that not a thing? No. What's Hamanahamana mean? Hamanahamana is just kind of like an old vaudevillian thing. I'm not exactly sure what it means or where it came from, but I always associate it with like old timey vaudeville stuff. Please don't let it be racist. As I was saying vaudeville, I was like, oh God, I feel like maybe like Jackie Gleason or Laurel and Hardy, not Laurel and Hardy, Abin Castello maybe.

As long as it's not from a minstrel show. Right, yeah. But yeah, I think it's like exclamation of excitement or looking forward to something. All right. Well, I see Jackie Gleason on the internet, so hopefully we're covered. You see Jackie Gleason on the internet? Say Hamanahamana. Okay, good, good. Let's just get going. So yeah, this is a short stuff, Chuck. We're never going to be able to end this now. We're talking today about Brazil, the country that was first landed as far as Europeans go by a guy from Portugal named Pedro Alvarez Cabral, right? And he landed there in 1500 and

things went pretty poorly for the local populations as a result. Yeah. And I think Cabral was one of those people that Brazil had always celebrated as the first European to show up there and like, you know, this is our person and let's celebrate this person. And then in the 70s, something happened. I don't know where you found this. It's very interesting, but something happened that kind of put that all in doubt. I found a contemporary New York Times article about it. I don't remember how, but I did and I said, by God, this is a gift from Zeus himself. So here's what was happening for a while. There were fishermen off of Guanabara Bay near Rio, who for years had been fishing and saying, hey,

pull up our fishing nets a lot of times and we'll get these jars in our nets. And we think this might just be like the local native tribes used to offer these up, you know, before Cabral actually landed on the scene. And maybe these are ancient who knows. And then in 76, a man named Jose Tashara was diving there, brought two of them to the surface and said, I think these are really, really, really old. Yeah. And not just really old too, because that could have been accounted for by the native tribes, but they were in a shape that people hadn't seen before. And Tashara brought them ashore and I guess handed them over to the Navy, I think, who kept them in a tank of sea water for a very long time until they caught the attention of a guy named Robert Marks,

who went on to become, I don't know if he was or not by this time, I think he was fairly famous, but he wanted to become a world famous, deeply renowned underwater archaeologist. In fact, he's known as the father of underwater archaeology. But he caught wind of these jars being found and had a look at them or got his hands on some pictures of them and said, these are not supposed to be here. These are not some local Brazilian jar. These look a lot like Roman emphora. And Roman emphora were jars that were used very famous, like vase jars with the double handles at the top. They were used by Romans, Phoenicians and Greeks back around the turn of the last millennia. And there's no good reason that these should be here in this bay in Brazil.

Yeah. So after first thinking it might be a hoax, he did say he thinks they're real. And let me get some other divers and go down there and check out and see what's going on. And about 90 feet down, sure enough, they found about 200 intact and broken emphora. And they were, he said they were kind of concentrated in an area about the size of three tennis courts. Very interesting. And he was like, sure. And he said, there's no way that these were planted here. He said, you know, these things, some of these were like five feet under the mud. We had to dig them out with our hands out of the mud. And there's just, they're barnacle encrusted. Some of them have coral and this coral was killed off like 30 or 40 years earlier. So there's no way these were

planted down there anytime recently. Yeah. He became pretty convinced that it wasn't a hoax. And his suspicions were backed up by an expert that he enlisted from UMass named Elizabeth Will, who was an expert in ancient Roman emphory, which is like, that is a very specific focus of study. But she basically, she looked at the type of them, looked at their manufacturer, like the, what they, she got her hands on some of the samples that Tashara had brought up, I think. And she said, not only are these Roman emphory, I can tell you exactly where they were made and roughly when. And she traced the design of these particular emphory to a place called Coas K-O-U-A-S-S in what is now present day Morocco. And the Coas emphory of this design were being made around

the third century CE. So about 1200, 1300 years before Pedro Alvarez Cabral showed up in Brazil in 1500. Yeah. So Marx puts that together and says, all right, I have a theory. He said, they used to have boats back then and ships that could make, you know, that certainly could have traveled over here from the Mediterranean. And I think what might have happened is they were blown off course, maybe, and they ended up kind of shipwrecking after they anchored off Rio. Maybe there was a big storm or something that drove this ship onto a reef and these jars just kind of ended up here. And no one knew that they were here until these fishermen started pulling them up. Yeah. So I mean, that's a pretty good assumption, especially considering that these jars are spread

out over about a three tennis court size area. That's maybe the size of a Roman ship's hold. And it's possible since they had seaworthy ships. But the thing is, is if that were true, that would totally rewrite history. Like it was how there used to be vague legends about how Vikings made it to North America. And we suddenly found that settlement. I can't remember the name of it. That was a Viking settlement in North America that said unequivocally they had been here before. This would basically be like that. But there had been no legend before it. No one had any idea that the Romans had made it to Brazil in the third century. So this was a complete, it required a complete revision of history. Even if it was just this tangential, fleeting contact between one small

group of Roman sailors and prehistoric Brazilian tribes, it still was a big deal to find these things there. All right. Maybe we should take our break and come back and talk about the response to Brazil right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband,

Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one kids relationships. Life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody you everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app or podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikar and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately,

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All right. So Marx has this theory. He's got these jars. The Brazilian government steps in. And they don't say, this is amazing. Thank you. We're going to have a press conference and here's a podium and we want to hear all about it. They said, you know what? You're shut down. We're shutting down your operation. We don't like the looks of this. He started excavating again, I think in 83 or was that the first one? No, that was the second time. The first time was when he found them and said he found like a couple hundred of them and that they were spread out over the tennis court. This is when he returned the next year to really excavate the site in earnest. And he also found out that the Brazilian Navy

like literally covered this stuff up. It dumped a bunch of filled dirt over the site and said, you know what? We think you're a plunderer. We want to keep it from being plundered. And we covered it up in your band. You can't even come into our country anymore. Yes. He was accused of having stolen artifacts from other sites in Brazil and selling them at European auction houses, essentially on the black market. But out in the open, they had just been basically stolen from Brazil. That's a huge accusation to level against somebody. But apparently the Brazilian authorities were convinced enough by it that they actually banned him from Brazil and shut down all marine archaeological excavations in the

country. There was just like a blanket ban on them because they had just been so, I guess, rattled by the perceived theft of relics. The thing is, if Robert Marx had been anybody else, just some dude, it would have been easy to buy that that had happened. But he really had a good reputation, especially by the end of his life in 2019, right? Yeah. He was knighted in three countries. He wrote the UNESCO laws about underwater archaeological digs. And he was a book writer. I think he's kind of the granddaddy of underwater archaeology who's very much not a plunderer of things. So it seemed like Brazil was being a jerk. It does. So that seems like a bit of a twist that they would literally cover up this history

rewriting site. And at the time in that New York Times article, I think Robert Marx suspected that it was because they were so venerating of cabral that they couldn't stand the idea of somebody, some other Europeans having beaten them there by hundreds of years. The thing is, it's entirely possible that the Brazilians didn't cover up that site and that there wasn't 200 of those amphorae and that there was no Roman galley that sunk in Brazil. It's possible none of this happened at all. Yeah. I mean, this is the real cool twist here. It is in 1983, there was a diver, a freediver named Americo Santrelli. And Americo said, you know, all this hullabaloo about these amphorae, these are mine. These are replicas.

And I buried these out there to try and age them. I dropped 16 of these things out there to age them. And that's what they are. Yeah. He'd spent some time in Rome and had kind of fallen for amphorae. They were his thing, kind of like how some people collect different outfits to put on their concrete geese that they keep out in the front yard. This guy was into amphorae like that. Sure. The thing is, is okay, so Americo Santrelli claimed that those were his amphorae after this world famous underwater archeologist had declared that there were 200 of them buried five feet beneath the muck that a UMass expert had declared that they were made from co-ass in Morocco in the third century. This guy says, no, they were mine and there were only 16 of them.

And I dropped them there in the 60s. Yeah. That's the one thing I couldn't reckon with. Were there not 200? Was that just BS? Here's the thing. It's kind of like the end of the usual suspects. If you go back and look at all of the evidence we have, almost all of it is coming out of Robert Marx's mouth. He's the one who saw the 200 amphorae. He's the one who said that they were spread out over a few tennis court-sized fields. He's the one who said they were encrusted by barnacles. He's the one who sang in a barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois. That's exactly right. And when you go back and you look at this, you say, well, wait a minute, there's not really much other evidence to back up this idea that he has aside from him saying all this stuff.

And I think the most telling thing about how they actually were, America, San Areles, 16 amphorae that he dropped in the beta age is that Robert Marx just kind of dropped the whole thing. The whole thing goes cold after that. Yeah. Isn't that weird? It is very weird. He even wrote a book in 1992 that was about prehistoric contact between Europe and the Americas. And as far as I know, he didn't mention the jars in the bay in Brazil. And that's that, as far as I'm concerned. I think since we mentioned usual suspects, we should shout out. For end of the show, Kevin Pollock, one of the stars of usual suspects in a role where he gets to play the rare heavy. And Kevin has a great improv comedy show on our network called Alchemy

This. Yeah, that is a great show. And actually, he has a cameo in our book too. I can't remember what part we talk about, but there's one of the footnotes about the live show in LA where he brought us water because we said we were thirsty. He brought us water up on stage. That's right. And he also played the role of Christopher Walken in my movie crush April Fool's interview a couple of years ago that delighted a lot of people and angered a few. Hey, man, if you're delighting and angering at the same time, you're doing something right. So hats off to both of you for that. Yeah, I love Pollock. Good, good dude. Good dude. Well, I think that's it, right? You got anything else about Kevin Pollock or

Brazilian jars? No, I want to get my hands on one of these. Well, just start diving. You will find one in Brazil off the Costa Rio. Great. And since I said that, everybody, that means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.