Real Ancient Booby Traps That Injured Archaeologists

in archaeology movies indiana jones the mummy act there's usually some booby trap or another protecting the site what are real life instances of still working booby traps that have been set off at historical sites that may have killed or seriously injured archaeologists or their workers there was an egyptian tomb where a corridor went downhill by about 60 feet and then uphill again but the engineers put dead animals and fresh plant ctc in there before they sealed it up and so the decline depression filled with co2 it stayed like that for centuries in modern times when they unearthed the tomb they found human skeleton centuries younger than the tomb where people had died trying to get in a deadly you bend off suffocation the most ingenious of traps valley of the kings has a stairwell in one of the tombs where they purposely made the stairwell steep and purposely made steps at odd heights to throw someone's balance off allowing them to tumble down the stairwell and at the bottom is a deep foot so they break a limb and are stuck with no way out that is just freaking evil the amount of times i stumbled because i thought there was one more step at the end of stare and there wasn't not a booby trap but in tutankhamun's tomb when it was first actually opened and howard carter put his head inside the entire place had vases with perfectly dried and preserved flowers and reeds that as soon as the relatively hot and moist air outside blew in completely disintegrated part of what makes that incredible is how tightly sealed the two must have been to preserve it but even the gust of air destroyed them sort of similar but not really a lot of cursed objects that have been uncovered throughout history were really just carrying deadly mold or bacteria that killed the people who took possession of the objects off the top of my head i know some tombs in south america have cinnabar sprinkled in them no clue if anyone has died from it though there may be a few weird examples of this but the real dangers of working at a site are heat exhaustion and alcoholism mostly alcoholism i saw a youtube video many years ago that i haven't been able to find since and the details are murky which i remember the gist of it was that there was a tunnel system under a german city that the nazis used to stash some of their gold allegedly it was mentioned that these tunnels were likely booba-trapped and the german government didn't want archaeologists messing with a site that was likely wired with bombs in an actual city i've tried to find it again but all that comes up is the nazi gold train craze that wound up yielding nothing does a pit with a bunch of spiky rocks at the bottom of it count as a booby trap most deaths to that kind of thing are encountered by grave robbers and looters not archaeologists the people interested in studying artifacts and restoring them tend to be more careful honestly any booby trap that was still functioning after thousands of years would be a far greater archaeological value than whatever artifact indiana was attempting to steal from the tomb and yes booby traps and tombs are totally a thing although they generally don't resemble anything you'd see in an indiana jones movie in my will i fully intend to request my coffin lid b spring loaded and filled with confetti cannons so that a thousand years from now i'll make an archaeologist's life a bit more exciting i was never able to confirm this but a cultural anthropology professor i was taught by in college used to be a field specialist on sites in central america he was a larger than life kind of dude who lived life to the fullest you'll see why he told us a story how when walking into what could best be described as a catacomb he got sprayed with a fine dust after he stepped on a pressure plate but luckily his student and other workers got him before he suffocated turns out it was a type of embalming powder that can coat your lungs if you breath it in a year or so later at a different site he and all of his team caught a form of malaria that was persistent and would lay dormant after he would get treatment the malaria would end up coming back and killing him a year after i finished college he made archaeology and anthropology friggin fun kinda the opposite of what you're asking but a major problem in nuclear disposal is how to convince people 10 000 years from now that this super fancy highly fortified structure isn't the tomb of some great emperor or a temple to the god of the underworld it's sealing away incredibly dangerous and extremely potent dark magic that will kill any who enter and contaminate the air water and land for millennia if it escapes and have those warnings be not only understood but also taken seriously and not brushed off a superstition or a bluff sounds like the plot of prometheus oh credit for the question to you nice cleavage 88 they asked it over on our ask historians but it was removed as against sub rules but i really wanted to see if there was a legit answer to this kudos on having an actual interesting question that i haven't seen on askreddit in the past year not being sarcastic genuinely don't recall having seen a similar question in the past year and i spent most of luck down on reddit unfortunately i don't have a proper answer maybe i missed it but the tomb of china's first emperor fits this category the one with the terracotta warriors they never actually got to the dude because of the lake of mercury that wasn't intended as a trap mercury was thought to have all sorts of mystical powers including granting immortality the tomb was a scale model and he intended to float around on the river of mercury in the afterlife howard carter discoverer of tutankhamun's tomb was accompanied by lord carnavan who was dead a few weeks after the discovery he allegedly was hit by a waft of fated air when we broke the seal and opened the door to the tombs but we also have possibly george gould who dies a short while after entering the tomb later we discovered aspergillus fumigatus a pathogenic fungi had colonized the tomb fungal spores and yeasts can survive for centuries in a dormant state we have cultured yeasts same group as fungi from bottles or roman wine recovered from the mediterranean and 2000 year old ampoules and yeast from bakeries in ancient egypt ancient egyptians may not have no germ theory but observationally they may have observed the impact of this fungi on people and deliberately seeded the tomb this would not be as flashy as a ball rolling one a slope but if the curse of the pharaohs was a biological weapon word would soon get around that if you open the tomb you'd die quite a discouragement i've heard a theory that king tut's tomb and the curse associated with it sudden mysterious deaths of initial archaeologists soon after inspecting the tomb may have been some form of toxic micro dust that was laid across and throughout the entire tomb and when the seal was broken and airflow kicked up the dust it was inhaled and wreaked havoc on people who came into contact with it again i have zero evidence to back this up it is something i heard theorized but also don't underestimate the egyptians for being able to create such a substance a real danger for archaeologists are highly toxic mold spores and that was one theory for tutankhamen's tomb but the curse is just a myth toxic spores not to mention the whole range of toxic stuff used by various cultures for embalming is a good reason to never enter a tomb without rubber gloves and a high quality breathing filter okay all answers aside i just want to mention that it's kind of funny that this post is nsw just cause the word booby was mentioned in the post i just assumed it was because booby traps would be literally nsw for archaeologists archaeologist here a friend of mine was working on a site in england where they had been bombing during the blitz in world war ii and the bomb squad had given the all clear to excavate the archaeologists later found unexploded shells that they hadn't found in the survey and had been digging with a pickaxe right next to it not exactly a booby trap but definitely a holy crap moment is there actually any booby trap out there where the ceiling slowly descends or where the walls move in to crush you where does this originate from i asked someone this question years ago when i was a kid terrified by the concept and long before tv tropes existed and it was suggested that the novel king solomon's minds by h ryder haggard might have originated that idea oh my time to shine i run a daily trivia game where i angrily text my friends random questions every day we've been running for like a year and a half we did this one below on booby traps the 10th of december 2020 daily log you have a store of riches or perhaps a secret most dreadful it must be protected at all costs how booby traps the dangerous hidden secretive silly named devices have deterred many a delightful who valued riches more than his own skin which of the following is not an actual booby trap a mechanical crossbows and rivers of liquid mercury protected the terracotta army a massive series of sculptures depicting the armies of kim shi wang the first emperor of china spicy bee ivan vasilevich the first tsar of russia was a tyrant nicknamed ivan the terrible a ruthless leader it was wise to fear him in both life and death in his mausoleum his death mask was painted with a highly poisonous red cinnabar paint and toxic hematite dust was sprinkled everywhere see the baja 1000 a mexican off-road race is among the most prestigious off-road races in the world it covers roughly 1 000 miles of dangerous desert it is plagued by spectators who set dangerous traps for the drivers including hidden holes jump ramps and hidden caches of rocks d the bamboo pit viper was weaponized by the viet's kong in the vietnam war snake traps were known as three-step traps because you only had time to take three steps before the venom killed you in the tunnel complexes they stuffed the irritated snake into the hollow bamboo framework meaning that any us tunnel rats were in for a nasty surprise i'm voting 4b cinebar and hematite were used as pigments as late as the 19th century as far as i can remember appalachian and norcal landmine fields around marijuana grows are definitely a real thing there are waterproof duffles of cash buried or stashed nearby if that counts nor cal land mine fields around marijuana grows it's an old memory but i used to hear about law enforcement searching for marijuana fields by finding dead deer and other animals tripwires connected to gun send a very particular message apparently on archaeological surveys on federal land in humboldt county ca we had to be on the lookout for illegal pot grows in their booby traps i've heard horror stories about someone's eyes being sliced open from hidden fish wire lines in the vegetation yes my time to shine former archaeologist over here while not a booby trap i was working on a civil war era cemetery dig and apparently a popular embalming chemical at that time contained arsenic so if we ever smelled garlic we had to immediately put on hazmat suits and latex gloves dig season is also usually during the summers when it's easier to get to volunteers which means we were always drenched in sweat at the end of the day because those things do not breathe at all comma because those things do not breathe at all yes but because they don't breathe you continue to do so i remember hearing that most egyptian tombs were actually robbed by the family members of the deceased or the priests responsible for preparing the body in the tomb they knew which tombs had the best loot it was frowned upon for religious reasons and officially it was highly illegal but apparently everybody did it and it was a common custom the authorities often look the other way when family members robbed a tomb i heard somewhere about some tombs having massive lakes of algae-infested waters something about the waters left them incredibly acidic or something basically falling and it would cause seriously gruesome injuries there's this story of two holder brothers we'll call them j and k cause i can't remember their names who lived in an apartment together jay was disabled and fully dependent on kay for having basic needs met because of the sheer amount of stuff they had everywhere the place was basically booby-trapped they may have placed some traps intentionally but i don't remember exactly they were also very reclusive and seldom left or allowed anyone in someone in their building called for a wellness check for one reason for another and they found the decomposing bodies of both brothers in their apartment kaye had been killed by one of the booby traps and as a result jay died several days later a part of ancient egypt had made a huge pit of snakes to protect her tomb before and the snake's bred to where there were king cobras everywhere it nearly killed two but medicine and some survival instincts saved them at least if this book i read it correct but i am not sure as an archaeologist i can tell you every site is a booby trap when you account for how drunk students get on a field school on a more serious note the biggest dangers to our health are injuries from improper footing falling material bad control of tools sometimes vehicles more tangibly its disease from biting insects some locations wildlife is a factor the only potentially dangerous stuff to dig up that i've either encountered myself and known people who have his disease from preserved biological remains and unexploded ordnance from past conflicts i mean on the one side i worked on i was the only one with any familiarity with firearms and explosives so everyone freaked out over nothing every time they found something and i just went ahead and disposed of it for where that site was and how heavily the area was bombed i'm sure the only reason there wasn't anything major left was because the farmers had cleared it out in the plowing a related question if i were to activate said booby traps then the next tomb raider wouldn't have to deal with them or is there some kind of ancient technology recharging the poison dart machine i don't know about archaeological sites but definitely in modern day m labs lots of booby traps they don't want people in their m so here in russia we have some enthusiasts who are called black diggers people going by this name can be just some hobbyists or archaeologists without a permit to work on site or some guys looking for stuff left in the wilderness to sell on black market and when i mean wilderness i mean old camps and bunkers left in world war ii by nazis when they retreated while some could still find some old grenades or even more serious crap like mp40 some could also find minefields and sometimes it can be too late to acknowledge this if you catch my drift i can totally suspend my disbelief to accept that ancient people's rig tombs and crap with booby traps to keep out looters what i can't accept is that these rudimentary machines still function perfectly after hundreds of years of no maintenance take a brand new corolla stick it in a cave and abandon it for 500 years but see if it still works no but a 1994 corolla wood the first emperor of china is buried in a mound style pyramid full of booby traps and mercury rivers the gov doesn't want to go in and get wrecked so they forbid anyone from trying to enter it may not be of any historical value but during the vietnam war there was actually a hole placed in the ground on my family's property supposedly connected to other tunnels and holes my cousins tried to trick me into going into it until my uncle came across us and they got in major trouble apparently the hole was boober trapped and no one knew how to turn them off anymore i asked for more detail from my cousins later on and they theorized everything from pockets of napalm to explosives i have no idea if they were still just freaking with me but probably this is a really good question usually the danger while doing archaeology comes from digging accidents like cave-ins and falls and environment like getting hurt while camping around a secluded site or heat stroke a lot of these movies don't really show digging practices these days you're trained to section off a site in an organized manner level your unit and document everything as you dig down bit by bit if you don't do this you kind of ruin the whole point of digging for example the artifact indiana jones looted from that indigenous group the item itself is just as important as where and how it was placed so is having a good relationship with locals if you aren't a part of the community yourself your research should be in service to their community and informed by them and their needs archaeologists treat sites more like crime scenes and because of that it's not likely a booba trap will just spring out at you plus a lot of deterrent may not look or act like a romanticized hollywood idea of a boobatrap if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

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Keywords: booby traps, real booby traps, archeological discoveries, archeology, #updootst, updoot, updoot reddit, updoot everything, reddit on tap, toadfilms, pewdiepie, emkay, reddit, askreddit, funny reddit, reddit stories, top posts, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, /r, r/, r/askreddit, top posts of r/, askreddit reading, best reddit posts, top posts of all time, people of reddit, askreddit question, ask reddit, subreddit, sub, askreddit school, r/askreddit how to

Id: bnGYBxrn534

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021