Cretan Labyrinth | Maya Child Sacrifice | Shackleton’s Quest Shipwreck | Archaeology News: June 2024

Hi everyone! Welcome to the June 2024 edition of Archaeology News. Come on a journey through time with me exploring the latest exciting archaeological discoveries from around the world. As an archaeologist, I have used my years of study and work experience to carefully research and craft this video to provide you with well-sourced and interesting accurate news about real archaeology. No pseudoscience or clickbait here. Have we found the famous Minoan labyrinth on the island of Crete? What new artifacts have been found at the Native American site of Cahokia? Why did the Maya sacrifice closely related or twin male children at Chichen Itza? What have the Turkish Heritage Ministry revealed about the legal sale of the Parthenon marbles to Britain? Stay tuned to find out the answers to these questions and more about other captivating stories from our past, including an exclusive interview with some of the research team who did all of the work on the male child sacrifices at Chichen Itza. Don't forget to take a few seconds to subscribe or like to help support the channel and tell the algorithm to promote it to new viewers. Every bit of engagement helps. Alright everyone, let's dig in! We have seven stories in our top discovery segment which I will be covering in chronological order, starting with those going the farthest back in time and then running up closer to modern day. Our first story is the discovery of a unique concentric ringed structure in Crete, the aisle at the center of the Greek myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. The Greek Ministry of Culture announced the find near the beginning of the month in June. It was found during excavations in advance of the construction of the new international airport of Heraklion, Crete in Castelli. Located at the highest point of Papoura Hill, the monumental architectural structure has a circular shape roughly 48 meters in diameter, which is unique for Minoan archaeology. It consists of eight superimposed stone rings with an average thickness of 1.4 meters and a maximum estimated surviving height of 1.7 meters. They were developed at different elevations. In the center, the rings form a circular building, the interior of which is divided into four quadrants. This building is then surrounded by a second main zone where radial walls intersect vertically the rings of the lower levels, forming smaller spaces that connect with each other through narrow openings. It looks a bit like a labyrinth or a maze to me. On the southwest and northwest sides, there are two possible main entrances. The quantity and types of artifacts found here, including the presence of large amounts of animal bones, does not indicate that it was a permanent residence, but probably experienced periodic use in the form of rituals that could have been taking place where people were consuming food, wine, and perhaps giving offerings to the gods. This is the first monument of this type that has been identified and excavated in Crete. Its size, architectural structure, and the kind of construction work that would have been needed to build it mean that considerable work, specialized experience, and a strong central administration would have been needed in order to construct it. What we do know is that it's some type of community building, a landmark in the wider area of the plain around it. The fact that it's monumental and prominent in the landscape probably indicates the importance of the location, but also the range of the population that it would serve. The main period of use seems to have spanned between 2,000 and 700 BCE. Right now, the excavation of this site is not finished, it's still ongoing. The location itself was originally earmarked for the installation of radar systems for the new airport. However, in light of the discovery and its potential importance and significance to Cretan and Greek archaeology, another site for the radar will be found. Could this be the place that inspired the myth of the Minotaur? Hopefully, the ongoing excavations will give us further clues. Next, we jump forward 2,000 years and head to southern Spain. There, five years ago, a rare untouched Roman tomb was accidentally discovered in the town of Carmona. The tomb contained eight burial niches, six of which held funerary urns that contained cremated human remains. The tomb made headlines last year when it was announced that they had found a crystal bottle in one of the urns that contained a 2,000-year-old patchouli-scented Roman perfume. Now, it has appeared in the headlines again, as analysis by the University of Cordoba has found that a reddish-brown liquid that was found in one of the urns is actually wine, which makes it the oldest wine ever discovered in its original liquid form. The liquid's chemical biomarkers match those of modern wines from the region, making it a local vintage. The lack of syringic acid, which forms when the main pigment in red wines decomposes, point to it being a white wine as well. The current color of the liquid is the result of chemical reactions since the wine was originally poured into the urn a few thousand years ago. However, don't line up for a tasting anytime soon. While microbiology has confirmed that it is not toxic, the vintage is truly full-bodied as it also contains the cremated bones of a man and a gold ring decorated with the image of the two-headed Roman god Janus. Now, we travel to the coastal city of Gyeongju in South Korea, where a discovery in the ancient tomb site at Gyeoksam has challenged the long-held assumptions about early Korean burial practices. This ancient cemetery site serves as the noble burial ground for over 1,300 noble tombs dating back to the kingdom of Silla. This kingdom ruled southeastern Korea from the 1st century BCE to the 7th century CE and was renowned as a country of gold. In this discovery, two recently excavated tombs from the cemetery have revealed a previously unknown burial type for the period. Typically, early Silla burials feature a wooden frame for the body covered by an earthen mound and surrounded by a distinctive stone boundary. The new tombs date back around 1,500 years and differ from this template in structure and contents. Tomb J171 is a single chambered tomb while tomb J172 contains both a main and an auxiliary chamber. Notably, both lack the traditional stone boundary and instead feature a unique stone mound structure. Inside the mounds, archaeologists found a trove of artifacts including decorated pottery lids, leg bowls, and an array of silver laden equipment for horses. These silver horse ornaments have sparked particular interest as they are considered to have been important status symbols in ancient Silla society. Next up is a site in the United Arab Emirates. On the island of Al-Siniyah, excavations have uncovered ruins from the 6th century CE which may be the remains of the lost city of Tuam, making it potentially one of the most significant recent archaeological discoveries in the Persian Gulf region. Previous research on the island revealed a pearling village and Christian monastery. Now the excavation team have found evidence of a sizable settlement that began in the 4th century CE and peaked in the 5th and 6th centuries. The evidence consists of large semi-urban tenement buildings, each around 30 square meters, and tightly packed around narrow alleyways. These buildings, indicating a sophisticated and densely populated city, suggest the presence of a stratified social structure and a thriving urban environment. Also found were significant amounts of date wine jars, likely from Iraq, and fish bones, indicating a well-connected and diverse trade system. Other findings also show the inhabitants were connected to wider trade networks that ran through Iraq, Persia, and India. Jars inscribed with Aramaic, the dominant language before Arabic, further underscore the city's sophisticated trade and cultural connections. This is by far the largest settlement ever found on the Gulf coast of the Emirates, aligning perfectly with the city of Tuam described in early Islamic geographical sources as a regional capital famed for its pearl fishing and trade in precious gems. The city reached its zenith in the 6th century, matching the chronology of this site. While definitive evidence, such as an inscription with the settlement's name, has not yet been found, the absence of other major settlements from this period on the coast strengthens the argument that this is Tuam. Now we go to the famous site of Chichen Itza in Mexico. There, new analysis on the remains of child sacrifices originally found in an underground cistern in 1967 has found that all of the individuals examined around 64 were male, and several of them were closely related, including two pairs of identical twins, a possible nod to the Maya hero twins, central figures in the oldest entirely preserved Maya myth. I took some time this week to catch up with two of the project researchers, Rodrigo and Cristina, to learn more about this fascinating discovery. Let's dig into the interview. Welcome to the channel, Cristina and Rodrigo. It's lovely to have you here. Can you please start by introducing yourselves and your relation to this project, how you got involved with it, etc.? I am a molecular archaeologist, and I am a professor of anthropology at Harvard University and also a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Hannes Strauss Group in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. We started working on this because of the expertise that Cristina has in Mesoamerica and the common questions that we both have in terms of studying Mesoamerican archaeology through ancient DNA. Can you give us a bit of an introduction to the project, what exactly it is that you have found in your research? One thing that's really exciting about our field in archaeology is over the past decade or so, ancient DNA techniques have become extremely powerful. The early days of the field really focused on places like Europe and Asia, cold places of the world where DNA preserved really well, and many places got very little attention during the development of the field, in part because it was more challenging to work there, and certainly Mesoamerica is one of those regions. Because of the tropical climate and the high temperatures, it's always been a challenging place to do ancient DNA work, but there's been tremendous gains in technology over the past decade, and we're at the point now where it's really becoming possible for the first time to do large-scale genetic genomic studies in the Maya region, for example. We have this whole bank of archaeological questions that have been built up over decades that would really benefit from a molecular approach, and it's very exciting that for the first time we can really apply genetics now to try to reconstruct these aspects of history that have been so difficult to understand otherwise. Basically, what we had were a lot of questions that we wanted to answer in the best way possible, because we know that when we work with archaeological remains, it's a semi-destructive procedure. We need to drill, we need to cut, we need to analyze, and the bone is never going to be the same afterwards. We wanted to get as much information as possible out of the bones that we selected. That was the main reason that we wanted to make so many questions. We have a little bit of questions related to the archaeology of the place. We have some questions regarding genetics. We have questions regarding immunology. We put all of them together, and we're working closely with the community, because we're also involved with present-day Maya people from Xochitl to Duke. We also got some questions from the community, and of course some feedback from their perspectives on this project. One of you tell me a little bit more about the specific sample that you've analyzed, and why did you decide to sample it, or why is it significant to the site of Chichen Itza? Chichen Itza is a really special and really important site. Many people know it because it's probably one of the most iconic and most visited archaeological sites in Mexico, but it has also a really interesting history. It's a terminal classic Maya site, and a lot of people don't quite know what that means. The period of fluorescence of the ancient Maya is during the Classic Period, which runs from approximately 200 AD to around 700 or 800 AD. All these elements for which the ancient Maya are famous develop during this Classic Period, and at the end of that period, there's a kind of political collapse that occurs. After that, there's a kind of resurgence of Maya populations and urban centers, but the kind of focus shifts northward into the Yucatan Peninsula, and Chichen Itza is really iconic of one of those cities that kind of rises out of the ashes of the fall of the Classic Period. It dominates the entire Yucatan region. It has far-flung connections all across Mesoamerica, so there's many, many questions as to what's happening at Chichen Itza, and how does it kind of relate to these broader historical events that are occurring amongst the Maya. One of the reasons Chichen Itza is also very well known is there's extensive evidence of human sacrifice at the site, and so that's always been a question as to what does that mean? When was human sacrifice performed? In what context? What kind of significance does it have? We wanted to actually make sure that what we would find was not only archaeologically or genetically interesting, but also for other purposes, so we selected Chichen Itza for a number of reasons. First of all, because we had a large number of individuals. This was a good way to start these large-scale projects in Mesoamerica, because this is the first time it was possible to analyze such a large number of individuals. Second of all, this particular burial had so many questions from the very beginning, because when it was first excavated in 1967, they only could analyze back then the individuals using classical osteology. There was not a lot of archaeological information, and there were many questions, like who are these individuals? Are they from here? Are they from somewhere else? Are they related? Many of those questions you cannot answer without DNA, so we wanted to start incorporating all these new techniques and put them together in a way in which we could tell the whole story. The other idea was to involve people who would actually be interested in engaging with community, and we found with Oana and Julio, one of our co-authors from Yucatan, we found the perfect team. What we're really excited about is to be able to bring a lot of new ways of investigating this history and try to bring clarity over what were the kinds of activities that took place here, and what might they have meant to the people who performed them. We can summarize the three main findings in one part that is regarding the archaeology of the site, in which we found that these individuals that are aged between three and six years old, many of them are related, all of them are male, and we found two sets of identical twins, which already points to some ethnohistorical accounts for the hero twins in the Maya cosmogony. Second finding is the genetic continuity between the people that once lived in Chichen Itza and modern, the Maya people from the region, so the people from Tizcaipa to Yucatan, they basically shared the same genetic background and same genetic makeup, which allowed us to answer the questions regarding adaptation to metabolism to diseases, and that would be the third main finding in which we found that some genes, some immunity-related genes, have shifted the frequency from the times of Chichen Itza and present-day individuals, and this points to an adaptation to salmonella and salmonella infection, so they became resistant to salmonella, which is a pathogen that was introduced during the colonial period in Mexico. You mentioned already the hero twins. Can you elaborate a little bit more about the significance of the relation between the individuals, specifically the identical twins, and how you think that ties into this myth? So there's a colonial book called the Popol Vuh. It's a very famous book that records a lot of mythology and the history of the Maya people. It's one of the few books that really survives today because the Spanish famously burned most of the Maya books that they encountered. In it, there is the story of the hero twins, and the hero twins are not known only from this document, but they appear throughout classic Maya art. They're present in lots of different paintings on vases, on murals. We have a lot of evidence of the story of the hero twin. It seems to be one of the oldest Maya stories and goes back to the very beginning of Maya society. Within the story, there is a set of twins who upset the gods with playing of the ball game, and they battle the gods of the underworld, and they lose. But before they're fully gone, one of them impregnates a maiden who's part of a tree, and she has twins. So they're twins of twins, and those twins grow up and again draw the attention of the gods of the underworld who try to trick them. But they descend into the underworld, and they actually outwit the gods, and they avenge their fathers. Part of the way that they avenge their fathers is they undergo repeated cycles of sacrifice and rebirth. The story of the hero twins is often linked to the agricultural cycle of maize, and it's a really fundamental story within Maya mythology. So when we first saw in this particular context, first of all, these children were buried in something called a chultun, which is a subterranean chamber that was used for water storage in the Yucatan. Subterranean chambers, whether they're caves or chultuns or these kind of watery underground structures, are often associated with access to the underworld, access to the gods of the underworld. And because of the story of the hero twins battling the gods of the underworld and finding identical twin pairs within this chultun, immediately kind of recalled this connection between the hero twins story and what seems to be this particular context of ritual sacrifice that we think is related to the story of the hero twins. This is one of those things that we could not have information about if it were not for DNA. Because before, I mean, if you look at bones, you cannot tell whether these two individuals are related anyhow. But now that we have access to these amazing technologies, we can actually see what's going on there. Finding these individuals and finding that many of them are actually related to each other within the chultun, and given the fact that these individuals span through at least 500 years, one can start imagining how important this burial was. It was not just some random burial. It was not just one in a lifetime sacrifice. This is something that was carried on by generations over generations. We know from other contexts from the colonial period that there were many instances in which individuals were selected to embody certain gods or certain deities and would live as those deities and then be sacrificed at the end as part of a regularly occurring annual or semi-annual religious festival. We think, given the time period over which this took place and the number of relative pairs that we found, that this may very well be what this represents. In the early 20th century, E. H. Thompson dredges the sacred cenote and he finds the skeletal remains of many young individuals. Drawing on some colonial sources in his own imagination, he asserts that these are young women being thrown into the cenote as sacrificial victims. This captures a lot of people's imagination at the time. It appears in travelogues and it enters into this public consciousness of what the sacrifice was about. But actually, there's many different contexts in which sacrifice took place amongst the ancient Maya. In many cases, the sacrifices are of children. Not all, but in many cases. One of the problems with trying to understand those burials is that you cannot determine the sex of a child who has not yet gone through puberty. In this particular case, we were able to use genetic analysis to determine the sex of these children. What was totally remarkable, or something that at first we just were completely surprised by, was that every single one of them was male. This is something that very rarely in archaeology do you see such a really clear pattern. This spoke to a very specific ritual that was taking place. Then to find on top of that the evidence that they were related, that you had pairs of individuals. We had brothers, we had cousins, we had identical twins in here. Those pairs had more similar diets to each other than any other pair. It's not that all the pairs had a similar diet. It's that each pair had a certain diet that was distinct from all the other pairs. That suggested they were being raised in the same household. That was really interesting. Overall, we found that about a quarter of the individuals, the children, the little boys that were buried here, were related to someone else in there. Now, the actual number was probably much higher. We were able to retrieve genomic information from 64 of the boys, but there were more boys in the burial. Probably, very likely, all of them had a relative there. It's just some of them were amongst the ones we weren't able to analyze. You need to tell me what your reaction was when you first got these results. We were expecting, at the very least, that the burial would not be sex biased. When we found that they were all male, first of all, you rerun everything, because you don't want to make such a claim. We rerun all the tests, and we were trying to be completely sure that this was the case. After that, we were completely sure, and then we were shocked. We were like, okay, this is a big thing, because this is challenging these ideas that were already embedded in pop culture as well, about this virgin girl's sacrifice. Now, you're retelling the story. Second, when we found that there were some individuals that were related to each other, because then you have an ensemble of male individuals, but then you learn that they are actually related. Then you learn that there are two sets of twins, and this changes everything, because now you can add another level, another perspective on what's actually happening there. This gave us the opportunity to actually analyze and make an interpretation based on the ethnohistory of the Maya about this specific burial. It was very exciting. It was one great experience to work with these individuals, because we learned so much through the process of analyzing them and then telling the whole story. My reaction, I remember when, Rodrigo, when you first shared the results with me, I was just completely surprised. I remember just sitting there thinking, huh. Immediately, I thought of the Popofu. It really was incredible to have that added level of detail, of knowing that these were twins and closely related boys, and they were all boys. Those were clues we would have never had without DNA that really helped shape the entire interpretation. It's a long-running joke within archaeology that whenever you don't understand something, you just say it's ritual, but in this case, we could actually say something about the ritual and actually understand it or put it in a cultural context. Those little clues really helped us contextualize this entire find. I also just want to give a shout-out to Rodrigo, because his study design here was brilliant. We might have missed this entirely with a different study design. One of the problems we have with the Chultun is that it's a commingled burial. This was used over centuries to deposit the skeletons into. Over time, as the bodies decay, the bones of the skeleton, they don't hold together. They shift. They move around. Especially with children of this age, many of their bones aren't even fused together. All the bones are commingled and mixed. How do you even count how many individuals are there in that kind of a context? One of the ways you can do it is select a single bone, a left temporal bone, for example, and count how many times you find it. That gives you a minimum number of individuals. What Rodrigo did is, instead of analyzing all the bones or a random selection of bones, he only analyzed the left petrus from all of these individuals. We didn't double-sample the same individual. That's how we were able to find identical twins. If they had been two different bones, we might have assumed that we had mistakenly sequenced two different bones from the same child and would have never thought any further. What is going to happen next? Obviously, there's already been a paper published on your results that people can read for free on the internet, if they so wish. I can say we have a few big ideas that we want to pursue. There's many open questions within Maya archaeology that I think genetics could really help with, especially if we combine it with all of the new advances in hieroglyphic decipherment and with all the new information that we have, for example, with remote sensing and LIDAR. We have all these different technologies and advances converging at once, which is making it possible to ask these really nuanced questions about the ancient Maya. I think that we also want to look further into the past and further into the future. Further into the past includes where these individuals came from. Can we track back where this all started? If we can find a population from which the classical period Maya came from, that would be one question. We are working on some samples that may point to that direction. On the other hand, looking to the future, one of the great things that we got out of working with the community is that we can explore questions that we never thought of. I look forward to hearing what all of your research is going to bring to us in the future. Thank you so much for coming on today. It's been really interesting to learn about this and to hopefully be able to follow further research and see what else ancient DNA can tell us about the Native American population. Hopefully you can all agree with me that this is a really exciting find and contribution to our knowledge of Maya religion, culture, and sacrificial practices. Our next discovery takes us north to the site of Cahokia in Illinois, America. Cahokia is the largest and most significant urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, known for its massive earthen platform mounds built approximately 500 years before European contact. While the people who lived at Cahokia were one of North America's most sophisticated societies, there is still so much to be discovered about them and this site. No one actually knows their ethnicity, language, songs, or even what they call themselves. Recently, archaeologists and students from St. Louis University have conducted a series of excavations on the western periphery of the Cahokia mounds and made some surprising discoveries. Including wall trenches, micro drills, ceramics, and structures that date back 900 years. These finds shed new light on a critical period in the chieftain's history coinciding with Cahokia's rapid population growth. To find out if there are any more mounds or archaeological features within the acres of dense forest and marshy land close to the site, an aerial survey using drones and lidar was also conducted. Soon, researchers will also embark on an ambitious project to create the most comprehensive and reliable 3D map of the Cahokia mounds, aiming to provide a detailed and accurate representation of the famed prehistoric site, which will serve as a valuable resource for future studies and research. Our last discovery for June was found off the Atlantic coast of Canada in the Labrador Sea. There, an expedition led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society have found the remains of the Quest, the ship carrying Ernest Shackleton back to Antarctica seven years after his famous but ill-fated attempt to cross the continent which spawned one of the greatest survival stories in the history of exploration. Unfortunately, the great explorer never reached his intended destination as while aboard the Quest, he had a heart attack and died in 1922. The ship continued sailing for another 40 years until it sank on his seal hunting voyage in 1962. Shackleton's ongoing legacy and the discovery of his more famous ship, the Endurance, at the bottom of the Weddell Sea last year spurred on a desire to find the wreckage of his last ship. But the discovery didn't come easily. The crew battled treacherous conditions including dense fog and malfunctioning equipment after they left the port of St. John's on the June 5th. They scanned the ocean floor using sonar for 17 grueling hours before finding the ship intact and sitting on its keel with the mast down. The next five hours were spent towing the sonar back and forth over the wreckage, gathering more angles and pictures of it at the bottom of the Labrador Sea. Eventually, the experts aboard were able to definitively declare that they had found the Quest. There are plans to return to the site later this year to take more images and video footage of the wreck. A podcast has been recorded and released about the discovery and I have linked it in the video description here if you'd like to listen. That's it for our top discoveries. Which one was your favorite? Let me know in the comments. If you enjoyed this segment and are enjoying the video, don't forget to give us a like. Now we're going to move on to current news and events. First up is the announcement that UNESCO officials have recommended adding Stonehenge to a list of World Heritage Sites that are in danger because of the plan to build a tunnel under the precious prehistoric landscape around it. Not directly under Stonehenge, just want to make that clear. The proposed two-mile tunnel is intended to speed up journey times and remove the Stonehenge's surrounding landscape. Those opposed to the tunnel argue it will wreak havoc and irretrievably damage the prehistoric landscape around one of the UK's most famous and oldest monuments. Next month, the plan will be discussed by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee at a meeting in Delhi. What do you think? Have you been to Stonehenge and seen all the cars go by? Do you think a tunnel is a good idea or not? Let me know in the comments. Next, the Parthenon marble ownership issue between the UK and Greece has once again landed in the news. I almost feel like at this point, if I wasn't pregnant, I would be able to play a pretty successful drinking game about how often this tends to come up in the news. I feel like I talk about it like every single month. This happened after a Turkish official cast doubt on the existence of proof, long cited by Britain, that it had legally acquired the 2500-year-old sculptures from the Acropolis in Athens. The British Museum maintains that Lord Elgin removed the sculptures legally after Ottoman authorities granted him an imperial edict, also known as a firman. However, this month at a UNESCO meeting in Paris, when a British participant repeated this claim, Zeynep Boz, the head of the Turkish Culture Ministry's anti-smuggling committee, said that no such firman document has been found in their archives despite years of searching by historians. The only known existing document referring to the imperial edict is an Italian translation of it, which contains no signature, stamp, or seal of the sultan to show that it was official. The Greek Culture Minister says this supports what they have been arguing for years, that there was no firman at all. When asked for a response, the British Museum referred to a statement it gave to the UNESCO meeting reiterating its desire for a Parthenon partnership or sharing agreement of the sculptures between Greece and the UK to resolve the dispute and said it had nothing more to add. That's the end of current news and events. We'll close our program today talking about archaeology and entertainment and pop culture. First, Netflix has renewed Graham Hancock's pseudo-archaeological documentary series Ancient Apocalypse for a second season. I'm not mad about this. I'm not even surprised. I'm just disappointed. First released on Netflix in November 2022, this series depressingly became one of the most popular programs of the year for the streaming giant. And so, like I said, I'm not really surprised that an entertainment company would want to create more of the kind of content that clearly a lot of people are going to watch, despite the objections by many archaeologists and lots of other people to the claims of the program that it's non-fiction. The Society for American Archaeology even went so far when it was released to ask for it to be reclassified as fiction. There is a plethora of content from archaeologists that you can find on YouTube and the wider internet about why the program and its claims are basically bogus. I would recommend starting with Mini Minuteman or the Flint Dibble and Graham Hancock debate on the Joe Rogan Show if you want to learn more about why this kind of content just doesn't really hold up. At the time that I was writing this, it was also announced that the series actually had to scrap filming plans for the second season at the Grand Canyon and the Chaco Canyon due to objections from Native American groups. This is because the program and Hancock promote an idea, I can't really even bring myself to call it a theory because there is no scientific evidence behind it, that an advanced ice age society responsible for modern understanding of math, architecture, and agriculture was wiped out by floods triggered by comet strikes nearly 12,000 years ago. Key to this development is that this idea is presented in the program as being superior to what the first inhabitants of the area, the Native Americans, have to say about their own history. An application to film at the Grand Canyon was lodged by ITN Productions to make Ancient Apocalypse in February with a further permit for Chaco Canyon then granted. A National Park Service spokesperson has confirmed this, however ITN has now said that neither of the permits will be taken up with the show instead looking to film at locations outside of the U.S. The company declined to specify a reason for this move. Hopefully this trend of the permits being denied continues in their other filming locations. In my opinion, there is no need for the program to film at these places since all they're doing is effectively using it for background scenery and they're not actually going there to conduct any excavation, research, or analysis that will contribute to our overall knowledge of the site. They just want to go there to talk about what they think happens there. Learn to use a green screen, Graham, honestly. Our last entertainment story featured for today concerns a British High Court ruling on the portrayal of a former university official in Steve Coogan's film The Lost King. I reviewed this film when it first came out and you can watch what I thought here. To summarize quickly, the film portrays Philippa Langley in a positive light while the university official and in some ways the archaeologists in the film are made out to be the villains who are in her way. Which, like, okay, to an extent I get that. That is what makes a good story and having such like a clear distinction helps an audience identify and sympathize with the lead character. However, the problem here is that they're applying what you could argue is a pretty biased perspective in script writing to a real-life situation that has more than one perspective to it. The case was brought forward by Richard Taylor, a former deputy registrar at the University of Leicester, who claims that the movie shows his character behaving in an abominable way towards Philippa Langley and shows him taking credit for himself and the university that was rightfully Langley's for the 2012 discovery of Richard III's remains in a Leicester car park more than 500 years after the king's death. The defendants denied this but after a preliminary hearing the judge has now ruled that the portrayal was defamatory. This means that the case can proceed to a full trial where Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the script and starred in the film, his production company Baby Cow, and the film distributor Pathé will have to defend this portrayal. Alright everyone, time to pack up our finds and hang up our shovels for today. Did you like this video? Is there anything important that I missed? Don't forget to comment, like the video, and subscribe to the channel before you leave. As I said before, if you're feeling extra generous you can give me a super thanks or go to my Ko-fi page and support me with a small donation. I'm currently saving up to buy a better camera. If you're looking for a more tangible return, go have a look at my Redbubble shop and get a sticker, t-shirt, hat, or mug with your favorite archaeology slogan, all designed by me. Taking a few seconds to support me in any way you can, liking, sharing, subscribing, helps grow the channel and promotes quality heritage content that is well sourced, researched, and presented by someone who is an expert in this subject. As I said before, it shows the algorithm that people are interested in real archaeology. Thank you so much for watching, stay curious, and I hope to see you on my next adventure into the world of archaeology.