Dirt Bags: An Archaeology Podcast

Archaeology has given us some of the greatest discoveries in human history and some of the greatest stories ever told. It’s also given us dynamite, fraud, bitter rivalries, stolen credit, imperial treasure hunting and an extraordinary number of men announcing that they’d discovered places local people already knew about.

Thanks to the support of our wonderful Subscribers, we’ve been able to get our long-awaited podcast up and running. We’re pleased to introduce Dirt Bags – the podcast where we excavate archaeology’s greatest legends, and find out what’s lurking under the topsoil.

Dirt Bags takes us back to the scene of some of archaeology’s most famous discoveries, and asks what really happened.

In each episode, Louise, Nat and special guests dive deep into the rivalries, the disasters, the stolen credit, the extremely questionable methods (and the occasional archaeologist taking excavation advice from a ghost). Because archaeology is about more than what people found – it’s about who got the credit, who got written out and the details history conveniently left on the spoil heap.

Dirt Bags isn’t a podcast about laughing at the past from the comfort of the present. Many of its subjects were brilliant, difficult and contradictory people, whose work transformed archaeology – even when their methods destroyed evidence, or their conclusions turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

Alongside the serious questions (and there are serious side quests into themes such as imperialism, racism and the culture wars of it all), Dirt Bags embraces the fact that the history of archaeology is often deeply funny.

We’ve heard stories about archaeologists mistaking jewellery for the treasure of Priam, cleaning ancient ivories with face cream, keeping hate mail in a file marked “Insane”, and consulting dead medieval monks about where to put their next trench.

Is it funny? Yes! Will you learn a lot? Yes to that too – because some of these stories are absolutely outrageous.

Whose reputation should we dig into next? Let us know!

If you’ve not listened yet, what are you waiting for?! Find us on the streaming platforms below.

• Dirt Bags on YouTube
• Dirt Bags on Spotify
• Dirt Bags on Apple Podcasts