July 3, 2025 • 43 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Sam Kean about his new book “Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations.”
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going to
be talking with author Sam King, whose new book, Dinner
with King Tut How Rogue Archaeologists are recreating the site, sounds,
smells and Tastes of Lost Civilizations, is going to be
out July eighth. This is a terrific book, and I
(00:35):
really enjoyed chatting with Sam here about it. So let's
go ahead and jump right into the interview. Hi, Sam,
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
So the new book is Dinner with King tut How
rogue archaeologists are recreating the site, sounds, smells and Tastes
of Lost Civilizations. This deals with the topic that I've
found quite exciting for a while now, but I didn't
realize we had a specific name for it, experimental archaeology.
Tell us a little bit about experimental archaeology, how and
(01:08):
to what extent it is different compared to traditional archaeology,
and how the two get along.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
So I always had kind of a I guess a
gripe with regular archaeology in that on some level. It
was the most fascinating subject I could imagine, deals with
the deep history of humankind, where we came from, how
we spread across the globe, the rise of great civilizations,
all these big meaty questions about history. But whenever I
(01:35):
would go to an actual archaeological site, I always found
it extremely dull. It was just people sitting around in
the dirt brushing off pot shards or whatever with toothbrushes
dental picks. And it looked the same everywhere around the
world too, no matter what different cultures you were talking about.
So it was always a big disappointment to go to
these sites. And I contrast it in my mind with
(01:59):
experiment mental archaeology, which when I heard about it, I thought, ooh,
now this is the type of archaeology I like. Essentially,
experimental archaeologists make and do things so instead of just
digging something up and theorizing it, they actually try to
recreate the past in different ways, and that manifests itself
in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes they're creating ancient
(02:22):
foods and lost recipes. Sometimes they're making ancient tools or weapons,
or recreating medicines, things like that. At different points in
the book. I got to attend an authentic Roman banquet.
I got to spend a day out in Utah with
a guy who had built a giant medieval catapult, and
we spent an afternoon throwing these huge garden stones around.
(02:44):
I got to talk to people who made a human
mummy and Egyptian style mummy of a human in modern times.
They're just all of these different projects that people are doing.
And what really excites me about it is that it's
a very sensory rich version of archaeology in that you
can actually hear what it sounds like when a big
(03:05):
catapul ball slams home into a wall. You can taste
the food, the sour dough bread, or the beer that
King Tutt would have been. So it really brings the
past alive in a way that to me, traditional archaeology
just could not do.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
It kind of gets this halfway, at least to Indiana
Jones territory, I guess.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Just halfway there. Yes, much more than sitting around in
the dirt, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Now. I found it interesting you pointed out that some
traditional archaeologists have been opposed to this sort of thing,
and I guess I was a little surprised by this
as well, because I know that and we'll get to
some of these examples have encountered some of this work before,
and in some cases it's by very respected archaeologist of
you know, reconstructing tools from ancient times or you know,
(03:49):
creating you know, recreating Greek trirems, that sort of thing.
But yeah, you outline some of the pushback that experimental
archaeologists have encountered.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, there is a bit of an inflict in the
field with sort of you know, traditional scholarly academic archaeologists
and the people trying to do this new method of archaeology,
experimental archaeology. Some of that I think is just sort
of traditional inertia where people are used to doing things
a certain way. Might be a bit of a generational
gap as well in there too, But some of it
(04:21):
I think is a little bit of resentment of Sometimes
the people I talked to do in the book weren't
traditional archaeologists. They were maybe a brewer or a chef,
or even a hairdresser in one case who had an
interest in history and came in and sort of proved
traditional archaeologists wrong. And I think there was a bit
of resentment about that. They didn't like being told they
(04:44):
were wrong by essentially what they considered an amateur. So
there is a little bit of tension within the field still,
and to be fair, there is there are examples out
there of bad experimental archaeology where people just didn't take
the time to do do it properly the first time.
One good example of that was the person I talked
(05:05):
to who recreated Egyptian bread. His name was Seamus Blackley.
He's best known. Actually he worked at Microsoft and he
created the Xbox. That's sort of his claim to fame.
But after that he went and founded his own company,
and as a hobby, he decided he wanted to make
heirloom bread. So he started with medieval bread and eventually
(05:28):
transitioned into making Egyptian style bread. And his first attempt,
you know, he just got some yeast, got some basic grain,
put something up there on Twitter, and a lot of
people wrote to him and said, you're full of crap.
This is a terrible, terrible job you did recreating this bread.
And he thought about it, probably got a little mad
at first, but he said, you know what, They're right,
I did a poor job of this. I am going
(05:49):
to now do a proper job of it. So he
flew over to Egypt with a microbiology kit. He started
swabbing the inside of pots to get the actual yeast
from the pots and the molds that they used to
make the bread. He sourced some heirloom grain, he sourced
the kind of wood that they would have used. He
had some one make him an authentic bread mold. He
(06:10):
built a fire pit in his backyard. He kind of
went all out on this, and he got let me
try some of the bread eventually after he had sort
of perfected it, and it was probably the best thing
I ate in the entire book, one of the best
loads of bread I've ever had in my life. So
you do have people kind of doing poor jobs of
this work at the beginning, but in some cases they
(06:30):
learned from that and did much better jobs by the end.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
One quick question about the bread, what did you expect
it to taste like? Were you sort of expecting it
to taste like archaeology to some degree.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Or dusty, like really hard and great? Yeah? I didn't know.
I guess I expected it to be very bland and
very flat. Yeah. I pictured something just very flat, you know,
pretty bland, not much taste to it. I was surprised
first of all how big it was. It was about
a foot wide, maybe a little bigger even, and it
was conical shaped. It reminded me of if you've seen
(07:04):
those old pictures of the Mercury astronauts from NASA. They
would re enter the Earth in this sort of conical
shaped space capsule, and it looked a lot like that.
That was the shape. It had a nice springy crust
on it, and it had a really nice sour dough
taste to it. There were only a few ingredients in it.
Emer grain, coriander, salt, yeast, and water was basically it.
(07:29):
And the sour dough combined with sort of the whole
wheat from the emmer and the coriander coming in it
was delicious. It was far far better than I expected
it was going to be.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Now you mentioned bad experimental archaeology. I was wondering, this
isn't really something that is the focus of the book
or anything, But at least in your preliminary research, did
you find examples of experimental archaeology either veering into the
realm of or originating within the realms of alternative archaeology
or pseudo archaeology.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I definitely came across those kind of things, but most
of that stuff sort of falls in the realm of
maybe not traditional archaeology, but at least sort of the
methods they used, where it's a little bit more armchair
and removed. You're looking at documents, artifacts, things like that.
So certainly not good archaeology and poorly reasoned in a
(08:23):
lot of cases, but it is a little bit more
on the I guess, traditional side, so to speak, as
opposed to the people who are actually making and doing
things that you can hear and taste and touch.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Now getting back into the positives here, something you write
about numerous examples of this in the book. How important
is experimental archaeology for the exploration and even revitalization of
traditions that have been lost or eroded via s a
Western colonialism.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah, that's actually a really important theme in the book
is that there are a lot of different people doing it.
Some are traditional scholarly archaeologists who just you know, wanted
to do something a little different. But the other thread
on the other groups of people doing this are you know,
indigenous people, people from native cultures who to them this
(09:12):
isn't archaeology as much as it's their ancestry, it's their history.
And in a lot of cases, they are either reviving
the traditions themselves, you know, going back to look at songs, poems,
traditions that they had and reviving them, or in some
cases they have actually kept their traditions alive despite the
(09:32):
struggles of you know, colonialism and things like that kind
of decimating their culture. So in a lot of cases
they are the ones going to the archaeologists teaching them,
correcting them, showing them how their ancestors lived. That's another
really important element of the book is talking to those
people about the wonderful job they've done preserving and reviving
(09:55):
their cultures.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah. One example of this, I was excited to read
about traditional Native American acorn processing practices in the book.
This is something I myself had just learned about fairly
recently on a trip to Yosemite National Park, where they
have you know, various places where you can learn about this.
Can you tell us a little bit about the labor
that went into cultivating and processing these nuts and what
(10:18):
the final culinary results tasted like.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Yeah, So this was one of the cases in the book.
You know, kind of going through the different projects that
I did. In a lot of cases, I was essentially
just floundering around and that I was trying something out.
I was very poor at it, and it sort of
reinforced how difficult it was in some cases to do
something even basically get a meal for yourself. So essentially
(10:41):
what I did is I gathered a bunch of acorns
from different trees around my neighborhood, maybe a few hundred
of them, five hundred something like that. Then I had
to look around for a hammerstone and an anvil and
essentially just brought them home and started cracking them open,
digging the meat out, and processing them. I learned pretty
quickly that maybe a third or so of them were
(11:04):
rotten on the inside. Some actually had weavils inside them,
so I had bugs crawling around in my homes I'd
brought them in and the other and so I had
to discard a lot of them, and then I had
to just essentially grind them up into flour as finally
as I could. And that was a step especially that
got discouraging because I had, you know, a big bucket
(11:25):
full of acorns, and that eventually ground down to much
less than a cup of accnable flour, and it was very,
very frustrating thinking about all the work I had done
to gather them, to grind them up, oh, and actually
skip a step because I had to leach them then
to try to get the tannins the bitter flavor out
(11:46):
of them. And I ended up with basically just a
cup of flour and could make a few muffins out
of them. And then apparently I did a bad job
with the leeching as well, because they tasted like the
most bitter thing I've ever eaten my life. It was
like a colaxon of bitterness raging inside my mouth. They
were not very good the way I made them, But
(12:07):
I later actually got to travel to a school that
does some experimental archaeology work in Maine. They do teach
survivalist skills things like that, and they showed me a
little bit more about how to process them, and they
ended up being absolutely delicious. We made acorn pancakes fresh
on a hot stone griddle. We had a little bit
of butter on them. They were absolutely scrumgious, wonderful stuff.
(12:29):
So it was a good learning experience and humbling in
sort of a nice way to Yeah, to just show
how difficult it was to do something basic like get
a meal.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Now, you chat with a number of researchers in this
book whose work I was familiar with to some degree
or another, like they'd come up on previous episodes of
this show. One in particular is Lynn Wadley on the
topic of ancient bedding. I was familiar with her work,
but not the hurdles she faced over her own use
of experimental archaeology. Tell us a little bit about this.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Yeah, So she's an archaeologist in South Africa and she
does a lot of traditional archaeology sort of you know,
digging things out of the dirt, stuff like that. But
she had an idea she wanted to try and experiment
with the bedding that she found in one cave. There
she found what we think is probably the oldest bed
on Earth, from about seventy five thousand or so years ago,
(13:26):
and essentially it's a two part bed that's pretty ingenious
in a way. There's a layer of ash on the ground,
so you just burn a bunch of debris, get a
nice layer of ash there, and then you put what
she called a top sheet on there of aromatic leaves
that you can pick from trees around the cave. And
basically what that does is it provides a nice soft
(13:48):
place to lie down, which is kind of the main
function of a bed. But in combination, the ash and
the leaves keep insects away, They keep mosquitoes away, the
aromatic leaves keep the mistque away, and the ash is
important for keeping ticks away. And she showed this by
gathering a bunch of ticks on the farm that she
(14:09):
lives in in South Africa, and she essentially put them
down on I think they were in a bucket, and
she put a ring of ash around these ticks that
she had gathered, and she just saw what would happen.
She let them try to escape, so they had to
burrow through this ring of ash to try to get
out of there. And she found that most of the
(14:29):
ticks did not even make it through the ring of ash.
They died halfway through. The ones that did make it out,
their mouth parts were so gummed up with ash that
they couldn't effectively bite anyone. So this ash layer provided
a really nice barrier against ticks biting you, spreading diseases,
things like that. So I thought it was a really
(14:50):
ingenious experiment. And then she actually had some people spend
a night on one of the on a recreation of
one of these beds in the cave, which I thought
would have been really cool. I wish I'd gotten a
chance to do that. They said it was a little
nerve wracking, you know, they were kind of out there.
They had no animals prowling around or whatever, but apparently
(15:10):
the beds themselves were fairly comfortable. So she was telling
me about all this. I thought it was a really
cool little experiment, and I was surprised to hear that
she had a lot of trouble publishing anything about it,
And in fact, the editor of the paper said, you know,
I love all the traditional archaeology, I am not mentioning
this little informal experiment you did, either with the ticks
(15:33):
or having people spend a night on them. And the
editor would not budge on this and cut that section
from the paper. And it kind of highlights the tensions
that you see between traditional archaeology and even someone running
sort of an informal experiment. And I told her, and
I'd write about this in the book, that it's even
more disappointing because I was thinking about Charles Darwin especially,
(15:55):
he ran tons of informal experiments like this, and they
helped him generate new ideas to test. They helped inform
the biology of the time. So she was really working
in the spirit of Charles Darman. It was just disappointing
to see an editor just put his foot down like that.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, and then that's the kind of stuff too, that
helps make it real for people like most of most
of the listeners here, certainly like myself outside of the
academic world. Do you hear about these informal experiments and yeah,
it fleshes it out.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Yeah, and captures your imagination. You can imagine yourself lying
on this bed, what it would feel like. It's much
more close to your heart. Then you're just reading about
digging something up out of the dirt.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Now, speaking of digging things out of the dirt, can
you tell us a little bit about your experiences eating
toxic potatoes in Peru.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Yeah, that was another case where I was a bit
surprised at the outcomes of what happened. So potatoes are
native to the Andean Highlands in Peru, and I didn't
realize when I started doing this project. The sheer variety
you see of potatoes up there, just the colors, the shapes.
They're really really beautiful, all the different tubers you get
(17:06):
in the Andean Highlands where they're native to. One thing
I didn't realize also though, was that they're toxic. So
native potatoes you who cannot eat because they have certain
chemicals in them that will poison you. So you have
to process them in different ways. You can make a
couple of different dishes out of them depending on how
you process them. One way is essentially that you freeze
(17:29):
dry them, so you leave them out overnight soaking in water,
and the chemical reactions take place, and it essentially disables
breaks down these chemicals and they leech out and then
they're safe to eat after that. And another way is
you can process them a little bit but also mix
in a clay sauce. So you take dirt clay from riverbank,
(17:53):
mix it up with water, and you eat the potatoes
with that sauce, and the clay actually binds to the
poison chemicals and it goes through your digestive system so
it doesn't end up poisoning you. And when I got
started with this, the first dish, the freeze dried one
was the one I was excited about, so I thought
it was like sort of a you know, an ancient
(18:13):
astronaut food almost. I was like, this is so cool,
you know, the freeze drying his food in this way.
And I tried it and it just didn't taste good
to me. And I recognize I didn't grow up eating it,
so people there probably have a different opinion, but it
just tasted sort of like the desiccated husk of a potato.
There's a bit of flavor there, not much. It was
very mealy and dry and just did not really impressed me.
(18:37):
I just didn't enjoy the taste. So then I moved
on to the other one, which I was not excited about,
which was the one you mixed with clay, and to
my delight, that actually tasted really good. It had a
very nice, earthy flavor to it. The sauce was sort
of brown. It had kind of a nice almost a
texture like like a ti peanut sauce to it, So
a nice earthy flavor, a good texture, and I really
(18:59):
really enjoyed that dish. So it surprised me a bit that,
you know, eating clay essentially would really improve this dish
and make it good.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Oh wow, Yeah, I think that runs counter to what
I think my expectations would have been as well. I mean,
I guess we have a predisposition to judge the use
of clay and other related substances in our food. But
that's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, it's normally something we would brush off the food.
I think, like this is integral to be able to
eat the food. But it wasn't this case.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Now another I have to ask you about another topic
that had come up previously on Stuff to blow your mind.
You talk about the at lotto spear thrower. Tell us
what it was like getting to try out a reconstruction
of this weapon.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah. So the lattle is probably the most widespread hunting
tool in history. I was surprised at how widespread it is,
much more so than bows and arrows, much more or
so than spears. And if anyone has not heard of
an at laddle, it's essentially a long, flexible spear, but
instead of throwing it with your hand, you use a
(20:10):
throwing stick. So it's just a long straight stick with
a bit of a notch on the end, and you
put that in your hand, You hold that in your hand,
and you use that to throw the spear, and essentially
what it does is it extends the length of your arm,
gives you more leverage and power in throwing it. And
I spent a great afternoon at an experimental archaeology lab
(20:31):
at Kent State University. They have a wonderful little program there,
and the guy there and who was in charge of
this program, he had a bunch of at laddles and spears,
I mean, just so he spent an afternoon throwing them
at these little foam dummies that he had. They had
one that was sort of a beloved mascot that they
(20:52):
called Bambo. It was much loved, much abused. After years
of throwing at laddles at it, it actually didn't have
any legs anymore because I've been hit so many times.
So they propped that up in the field. Then they
had another one that was like a third size replica
of a cariboo I think it was they got it
from target or whatever. So we set those up in
the field and we just spent an afternoon throwing these
(21:15):
at laddle darts at them. And I was surprised at
how easy it was to get distance with an at
laddle dart. I don't remember off the top of my head,
but the world record for throwing one is something like
two hundred and fifty yards, whereas the world record for
the throwing a javelin is much closer to one hundred yards,
maybe one hundred and ten something like that. So you
can really get a lot of distance on these things.
(21:38):
And even I, who had never picked one up before,
could throw it, you know, most of a football field
pretty easily. But accuracy was another matter. I tickled the
chin of that cariboo, I swear like four or five times.
It just kept going just left, just right, just over it.
I just could not quite hit it. There was a
(21:59):
pretty common ex experience. The archaeologists I mentioned actually brought
his class in there. So there were maybe thirty of
US students and me of flinging these around and we
probably hit it, you know, maybe a dozen times over
the course of a couple of hours. And the students
were motivated. They got extra credit if they hit it,
so they were really motivated to try to hit this thing.
(22:20):
But it proved difficult to aim for us amateurs. But
it's a really fun way to spend an afternoon.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Now. I want to come back to the title of
the books. Of course, Dinner with King Tutt, we already
talked a little bit about Egyptian bread. But how about
Egyptian beer? Now, this is this is another one where
you attempted to brew this yourself right at home.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
I did. Yeah, So I didn't go all out getting
the grain source from Egypt and you know, getting the
right type of e stuff like that. I just wanted
a basic flavor of what it might have tasted like.
So I got some Emmer grain, which is the grain
that they would have used, and barley, a mix of
those two things, and I essentially just fermented them in
(23:02):
my home with a basic beer fermenting kit. So you
make the mash, you know, you heat it up, you
had the yeast, all those kind of things. Threw in
some different plausible ingredients that they might have used in beer, cinnamon,
things like that. And one important difference was that they
did not use hops in Egyptian beer. That's a later
invention from medieval times, and that really makes a big
(23:23):
difference with beer because hops is a fairly strong bitter flavor.
So the Egyptian beer did not have the bitter flavor
that were used to with modern beers, and that actually
allowed other flavors to come forward, sour flavors especially, and
to my taste, it tasted less like a beer than
(23:43):
it did like a cambucha essentially. So it was a
nice sour flavor to it, and I could imagine it
being really delicious and thirst quenching after a long hot
day in the sun, you know, shoving pyramid blocks into
place or whatever. So that was one interesting thing, was
the taste was sour. And the other thing that I noticed,
(24:04):
and you know, you hear about this from archaeologists or
people have recreated the beer in other ways, is that
they didn't have filters back then modern filters to get
the chaff and the little bits of grain out of
the beer. They spent grain, so the beer was a
little maybe chunkier, you might say, and that there was
stuff floating on the top. And in some places, maybe
(24:26):
not Egypt necessarily as much, but in some places in
the Caucuses and other areas they were making this beer,
they actually traditionally drank the beer with a straw in
order to get below the chaffline and just get at
the beer, as opposed to, you know, getting a big
mouthful of the stuff you don't.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Want Oh wow, So any of us that are inclined
to use a straw the next time we are having
a pint out side.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Yes, yes, there were, actually it was This was in
a different area, not in Egypt, but there was one
case where archaeologists found a straw that they think it
was you know, maybe a king would have given it
as a gift to a visiting monarch or something like that.
But it was about two or three feet long, so
very big, and it was so ornately decorated that they
(25:12):
mistook it for a scepter at first. That's how elaborate
this straw was. But you know, these were valuable items
to people back then.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Wow, that's awesome. Now, on the subject of Egyptian bread
and beer, you also get into how these would not
just be valued for their role as sustenance and refreshment,
but these were also spiritually important.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, beer and bread were. They basically permeated every aspect
of Egyptian life. The workers on the pyramids, for instance,
were paid wages in bread and beer, and then they
ate them with every meal, both of those things, with
every meal, and when they were preparing people for the
afterlife their tombs, they would always include bread, and beer
(25:55):
to get them to the afterlife and for sustenance in
the afterlife. It was ingrained in their culture. They could
not imagine life or the afterlife without these two things.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Now, this is obviously the point to ask to come
back to something you mentioned earlier, the Maryland Mummy, the
work of Bob Bryer and Ron Wade. Tell us a
little bit about this, how it went down, and how
has this project aged like. Tell us a little bit
about how it was received at the time, and have
archaeologists warmed up to it.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
So this project I started in Baltimore, Maryland in the
mid nineties. There was an egyptologist and the head of
the State Anatomy Board. There an anatomist and the egyptologist
I think he was sort of the prime mover behind this.
He realized that, you know, we have a lot of
Egyptian mummies, but there's not a lot written down about
how they actually made the mummies. It's kind of a
(26:47):
mysterious process and we don't know if you know, the
information got lost. We don't know if they were keeping
it a secret, they just passed down to rissions orally
whatever the case was. But there's not a lot written
about how they actually made the mummies. So he decided
he wanted to recreate a human mummy. He approached this
anatomist who was head of the State Anatomy Board, and
(27:08):
he said, here's a proposal for a project. You know,
people donate their bodies to science. What do you think
The anatomist was gung how about it, and so they
decided they were going to mummify a human being. And
the egyptologist especially got pretty excited about this idea in
that he tried to be as authentic as possible, to
the point that he flew over to Egypt and he
(27:31):
actually dug out the mineral that they used to dehydrate
the body. It's a mineral called natron, and chemically it's
essentially a mix of baking soda and table salt, so
pretty simple chemically, but it forms naturally in dry gullies
and waddies over in Egypt. So he flew all the
way over there, got a shovel, dug out hundreds of
(27:53):
pounds of this stuff. And actually, he said one of
the more ticklish aspects of the project was smuggling it
back into the US, all this unidentified white powder that
he had in his luggage, but got it into the US,
got it down to Maryland, and they essentially just mummified
the body. They opened it up, got the organs out,
(28:15):
dried them out with the natron, you know, washed the
body out the way that they would have back then,
used oils on it, got the brain out of the
head in the way that they would have back then,
and then just piled it under hundreds of pounds of
this natron mineral to dry it out. And when word
got out there about this experiment, it proved pretty controversial
(28:36):
within the archaeological community and sort of the wider biology community.
There were some bioethicists who came out against it. Some
archaeologists also came out against it. They said it was
sort of tasteless, macabre. They didn't see much value in it.
And I do see their point that, you know, when
you're donating your body to science, you're probably assuming it's
(28:56):
going to go to a medical school or something like that.
Not in Thisss necessarily signing up to become a mummy.
But you know, legally they had backing for it. It said,
you know, you're going to end up in a medical school,
or we have other projects. Sometimes we use, and they
defended the project by saying that they actually learned a
lot about how we mummified the body. So they learned
(29:19):
how long it took roughly to mummify the body. They
learned how to get the organs out of the body,
which is something they did not know. One really cool
thing I think they learned is the Egyptologists had always
wanted to know. You know, you see a classic mummy.
Its skin is very dry, it's pulled back from the face,
the teeth are probably protruding. It sort of has a
(29:40):
classic mummy look to it. And he wanted to know
is that due to the mummification process or is that
because this body has been in a very dry environment
in Egypt for three or four thousand years? What causes
these changes to the body and about I think it
was like five weeks into the project they had to
change the mineral out and put fresh mineral on, but
(30:01):
they decided to take a peek at the body, and
even by that point five weeks in, the egyptologist was
sort of startled and he said, oh my god, this
looks exactly like Ramses the Great. It was incredible. So
it was the mummification process they learned that caused the
changes in sort of give mummies their iconic look. So
(30:22):
they defended it by saying, you know, they first of
all learned a lot about it, and second of all,
they said, they treated this body much better than most
bodies get treated. And the body is still around today.
It's in an office building in Maryland. It is perfectly
well preserved. It's probably going to look a lot better
than any of us will in one hundred years. So
he got treated, as they put it, sort of like
(30:43):
a king.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
It's been many years since I read Mary Roach's book Stiff,
but if memory serves, it's like the mummification process is
probably a step above some of the other legitimate uses
that are donated body.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Yes, that's a good point. Yeah, And actually I got to,
you know again, sort of doing a secondary version of this.
I actually made a fish mummy in my apartment in Washington, DC.
And you know, it's kind of sweltering hot right now,
and it was when I made that fish mummy. But
that fish I bought it whole from the store. It
never saw the inside of a refrigerator. And fish are
(31:20):
sort of a classic animal that you think is gonna
smell bad. It's not gonna last very long. But I
just mixed some baking soda and salt together, put it
in a casserole dish, and mummified this fish and it
went perfectly well. The fish never smelled, never got rotten.
I still have it on my counter today. It's perfectly preserved.
So it's pretty easy to do this project on your own,
(31:43):
and in some ways it sort of fulfills the Egyptian
traditions and that they mummified a lot of animals as
well as human beings.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Now, I want to make it clear for listeners out
there that I'm not asking you about even I think
half of the wonderful examples and topics you get into here.
There's a whole chapter dealing with with various Chinese traditions
and inventions. You deal with the multiple different time periods
and places. There's the Viking chapter. So I'm only scratching
(32:13):
the surface here with my questions, but I am going
to ask you about the Meso American ballgame. This is
one that I think anyone who's ever even like casually
studied anything to do with az tech history and as
tech culture has come across examples of this tell us
a little bit about this and did you get to
play it?
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Yeah, So if you're not familiar with it, the Aztec
ballgame is a it's sort of a weird mashup of
maybe tennis and soccer, I guess is the way you
would describe it. You have two teams and you're knocking
a ball back and forth from one team to the other,
but you're also moving down the field trying to knocket
past your opponent's end line. And what makes this game
(32:54):
unusual is that you can't kick the ball. You can't
use your arms at all. You can only use your hips.
You have to turn and you have to hit the
ball with your hip. And when I was learning how
to so it spoiler a bit, I guess I did
learn how to play the game. And when I was
learning how to do it, the instructor said, just do
a shakira, So you take your hip and you twist
it hit the ball with your hip like shakira. So
(33:16):
that kind of puts you in the mindset of what
it's like to play this game. And it was surprised
about a few things, especially the size of the ball,
in that it was roughly the size of a bowling
ball and it was also as heavy as a bowling
bar was. It was softer than a bowling ball because
it was made out of rubber, but it was solid
(33:37):
rubber all the way through. There was no inflatable bladder
or anything inside it. So it was a really heavy,
dense ball. And this is the ball that you're knocking
with your hips, hitting it back and forth. So imagine
basically sending a padded bowling ball bouncing back and forth
with your hip. So despite that, when I did get
to play this game, it was fun at first because
(34:00):
you serve the ball, toss it the other team, and
when the ball's bouncing back and forth, you know, you
kind of get the hang of it. You hit it
with your hip. It's sort of a fun little game.
The problem is, because the ball is so heavy, it
eventually loses momentum and starts rolling along the ground. And
again you can only hit it with your hip. So
(34:20):
you have to do is when the ball comes your way,
you have to drop to the ground. We were playing
on hard pavement here, not grass or anything. You have
to drop to the pavement and use your hip like
a pinball paddle essentially, and sort of swing it and
knock the ball back with your hip and then you
have to pop back up because it's a penalty if
you're still on the ground before the ball gets back
(34:41):
to the other team. You have to pop back up,
and then they'll hit it right back to you. You
have to drop to the ground again, hit it back,
pop up, and just keep doing this over and over
and over. It was like doing essentially one hundred berpies
in a row, except then you had to knock a
bowling ball back each time you did it. And before long,
maybe half an hour in, my legs were just quaking
(35:03):
with fatigue and cramping. I was really really hurting after
doing all of these calisthenics for a while, and eventually
I feel a bit craven about this, but eventually I
was hiding behind one of my teammates who happened to
be an eleven year old child, because I just couldn't
take this anymore going up and down, and the child
(35:25):
was very good. They were popping right up and down.
She was just knocking the ball back and forth. So
I let her have her fun after a while and
sort of effectively quit playing this and then spent the
next day limping around Mexico City, where I ended up
going to play it, just limping around, wincing every time
I had to use the stairs. But it really did
drive home what an unusual game this was. I played
(35:48):
a lot of sports going up, but never anything like this.
And just how tough the people were who played this game,
because these games could go on for days at a
time sometimes and they actually used it as training for
war to toughen their warriors off. And I can really
see how it would be effective as training for soldiers,
because again, even after half an hour or so, I
(36:10):
was I was a hurting unit.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah it's yeah, absolutely sounds brutal, and yeah, you can
see how it is, certainly based on your experiences here.
It's it's how it conditions the warrior. And yet it
does feel weirdly foreign compared to like modern so many
modern popular sports, but in a weird way, like how
is it really that different from soccer? We're kicking the
(36:33):
ball around? Is that? You know, it's it's not like
people kick each other in war, So I don't know,
it's it's it's it's I guess it's just a difficult
one to try and contemplate as like a modern, somewhat
familiar with modern sports.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
Yeah, and I guess I didn't even think about sports
as something you could really investigate with archaeology. We think
about them as much more of a modern phenomenon. And yeah,
this was just kind of an unusual chance to do
something outside of the normal realm of recreating recipes, recreating tools,
things like that, to try out a sport that. Yeah,
(37:09):
you can definitely see affinities with modern sports, but it
is its own distinct thing.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Now, on the subject of like recreating recreating history certainly
a huge part of experimental archaeology, tell us a little
bit about how you utilized fiction writing in this book,
using fiction alongside the nonfiction to recreate possible chapters from
(37:41):
the past.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Yeah, So the book structure is a bit unusual. Each
chapter puts you in a specific time and a specific place.
So one chapter is Africa seventy five thousand years ago,
another chapter is medieval China. You're in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome,
Viking time, Arctic a thousand years ago, a bunch of
(38:02):
different places. And the premise of each chapter was to
really immerse you and to spend a day in the
life of a person from that time and that place
and each of the things that I do and describe
the archaeological experiments are related to that time and place.
But overall, I thought, you know, fiction can do some
(38:24):
things that nonfiction cannot. It's a bit more immersive being
in that character's point of view. So for each chapter,
there is a fictional sort of a short story, where
you are in the character's mind going through a day
in their life, usually a pretty bad day, some dramatic
things happened to them, but you're going through a day
in their life, experiencing what they would have experienced. And
(38:47):
then the story, the fiction story sort of stops at
a dramatic moment, jumps to the nonfiction, and then I
come in, explain what they were doing, Explain how the
experimental archaeology works, stuff like that, who it fit in
with our culture. Then you jump back to the fiction
and it sort of alternates like that. But basically, the
fiction seemed like a better way to really immerse yourself
(39:08):
in that time and place, and it was a lot
of fun to write. All my books so far have
been strictly nonfiction. There's definitely a narrative component to it,
but this was explicitly fiction, and so it was a
kind of a fun experiment.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
It's made for a fun reading experience as well. Oh
thank you. But I do have to wonder, though, is
this because ultimately I can imagine thinking about this and
planning this out at the planning stage of the book,
and then it sounds like you kind of set yourself
up with a kind of a sizeable challenge to write.
In addition to the nonfiction portions of the book, what
ten or eleven short stories each set in a different time,
(39:44):
in place, and perspective.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Yeah, it took a lot of reading to make sure
I got all the details right of all of these places,
and you know, not only what places looked like, but
also people's worldviews, how they thought about religion, how they
thought about family, all these different things. So it did
take a lot of reading. But I'd always been interested
in these topics, and I'd been kind of gathering string
(40:08):
for this book for a while, so I had done
some of the reading ahead of time and could draw
on those kind of things. And I've been working on
this book since actually I think before the pandemic, so
I've been put a lot of time and effort into
this one. So I think it paid off. I think
the richness of detail in each chapter really does bring a.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Live Yeah, the proof is in the pudding. So the
book again is Dinner with King Tide. How rogue archaeologists
are recreating the site, sound, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations.
It's fantastic. Highly recommend it to listeners of this show,
and as far as podcast listeners go, you also host
a podcast tell us a little bit about.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
This I do. It's called Disappearing Spoon, which happens to
be the name of my first book, and if you're
familiar with that book, the podcast is actually on a
different topic. The book was about the periodic table. This
is more. I come across a lot of stories when
I'm doing research, really good, interesting stories about science and
(41:07):
history that just don't fit in the books that I'm writing.
And it always killed me to have no place for
these stories. I had this big file of orphan stories
that I had, but having the podcast gives me a
chance to put them out there. So I've done series
on things like you know, the dumbest mistake Einstein ever made?
Or you know how climate change could change the shape
(41:30):
of the human body, and things like that, So just
little snippets I've come across each one's pretty bite sized,
maybe twenty minutes or so, and yeah, they're out there,
little fun sized bits of science and history.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Awesome. Well, Sam, thanks again for coming on the show
and chatting with me again. The book Dinner with King
Tut fabulous read, highly recommend it.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Thanks all right, Thanks once again to Sam Keen for
coming on the show and chatting with me again. His
website is Sam Keene dot com and the book is
Dinner with King Tut. How rogue archaeologists are recreating the
site Sound, Smells and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. It is
out in hardcover July eighth, twenty twenty five. Thanks as
(42:14):
always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show
here and if you would like to ride in with
any feedback, if you would like to just touch base
with Joe or myself, well you can email us at
contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Dot Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
The pi ns A for a pub
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going to
be talking with author Sam King, whose new book, Dinner
with King Tut How Rogue Archaeologists are recreating the site, sounds,
smells and Tastes of Lost Civilizations, is going to be
out July eighth. This is a terrific book, and I
(00:35):
really enjoyed chatting with Sam here about it. So let's
go ahead and jump right into the interview. Hi, Sam,
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
So the new book is Dinner with King tut How
rogue archaeologists are recreating the site, sounds, smells and Tastes
of Lost Civilizations. This deals with the topic that I've
found quite exciting for a while now, but I didn't
realize we had a specific name for it, experimental archaeology.
Tell us a little bit about experimental archaeology, how and
(01:08):
to what extent it is different compared to traditional archaeology,
and how the two get along.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
So I always had kind of a I guess a
gripe with regular archaeology in that on some level. It
was the most fascinating subject I could imagine, deals with
the deep history of humankind, where we came from, how
we spread across the globe, the rise of great civilizations,
all these big meaty questions about history. But whenever I
(01:35):
would go to an actual archaeological site, I always found
it extremely dull. It was just people sitting around in
the dirt brushing off pot shards or whatever with toothbrushes
dental picks. And it looked the same everywhere around the
world too, no matter what different cultures you were talking about.
So it was always a big disappointment to go to
these sites. And I contrast it in my mind with
(01:59):
experiment mental archaeology, which when I heard about it, I thought, ooh,
now this is the type of archaeology I like. Essentially,
experimental archaeologists make and do things so instead of just
digging something up and theorizing it, they actually try to
recreate the past in different ways, and that manifests itself
in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes they're creating ancient
(02:22):
foods and lost recipes. Sometimes they're making ancient tools or weapons,
or recreating medicines, things like that. At different points in
the book. I got to attend an authentic Roman banquet.
I got to spend a day out in Utah with
a guy who had built a giant medieval catapult, and
we spent an afternoon throwing these huge garden stones around.
(02:44):
I got to talk to people who made a human
mummy and Egyptian style mummy of a human in modern times.
They're just all of these different projects that people are doing.
And what really excites me about it is that it's
a very sensory rich version of archaeology in that you
can actually hear what it sounds like when a big
(03:05):
catapul ball slams home into a wall. You can taste
the food, the sour dough bread, or the beer that
King Tutt would have been. So it really brings the
past alive in a way that to me, traditional archaeology
just could not do.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
It kind of gets this halfway, at least to Indiana
Jones territory, I guess.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Just halfway there. Yes, much more than sitting around in
the dirt, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Now. I found it interesting you pointed out that some
traditional archaeologists have been opposed to this sort of thing,
and I guess I was a little surprised by this
as well, because I know that and we'll get to
some of these examples have encountered some of this work before,
and in some cases it's by very respected archaeologist of
you know, reconstructing tools from ancient times or you know,
(03:49):
creating you know, recreating Greek trirems, that sort of thing.
But yeah, you outline some of the pushback that experimental
archaeologists have encountered.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, there is a bit of an inflict in the
field with sort of you know, traditional scholarly academic archaeologists
and the people trying to do this new method of archaeology,
experimental archaeology. Some of that I think is just sort
of traditional inertia where people are used to doing things
a certain way. Might be a bit of a generational
gap as well in there too, But some of it
(04:21):
I think is a little bit of resentment of Sometimes
the people I talked to do in the book weren't
traditional archaeologists. They were maybe a brewer or a chef,
or even a hairdresser in one case who had an
interest in history and came in and sort of proved
traditional archaeologists wrong. And I think there was a bit
of resentment about that. They didn't like being told they
(04:44):
were wrong by essentially what they considered an amateur. So
there is a little bit of tension within the field still,
and to be fair, there is there are examples out
there of bad experimental archaeology where people just didn't take
the time to do do it properly the first time.
One good example of that was the person I talked
(05:05):
to who recreated Egyptian bread. His name was Seamus Blackley.
He's best known. Actually he worked at Microsoft and he
created the Xbox. That's sort of his claim to fame.
But after that he went and founded his own company,
and as a hobby, he decided he wanted to make
heirloom bread. So he started with medieval bread and eventually
(05:28):
transitioned into making Egyptian style bread. And his first attempt,
you know, he just got some yeast, got some basic grain,
put something up there on Twitter, and a lot of
people wrote to him and said, you're full of crap.
This is a terrible, terrible job you did recreating this bread.
And he thought about it, probably got a little mad
at first, but he said, you know what, They're right,
I did a poor job of this. I am going
(05:49):
to now do a proper job of it. So he
flew over to Egypt with a microbiology kit. He started
swabbing the inside of pots to get the actual yeast
from the pots and the molds that they used to
make the bread. He sourced some heirloom grain, he sourced
the kind of wood that they would have used. He
had some one make him an authentic bread mold. He
(06:10):
built a fire pit in his backyard. He kind of
went all out on this, and he got let me
try some of the bread eventually after he had sort
of perfected it, and it was probably the best thing
I ate in the entire book, one of the best
loads of bread I've ever had in my life. So
you do have people kind of doing poor jobs of
this work at the beginning, but in some cases they
(06:30):
learned from that and did much better jobs by the end.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
One quick question about the bread, what did you expect
it to taste like? Were you sort of expecting it
to taste like archaeology to some degree.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Or dusty, like really hard and great? Yeah? I didn't know.
I guess I expected it to be very bland and
very flat. Yeah. I pictured something just very flat, you know,
pretty bland, not much taste to it. I was surprised
first of all how big it was. It was about
a foot wide, maybe a little bigger even, and it
was conical shaped. It reminded me of if you've seen
(07:04):
those old pictures of the Mercury astronauts from NASA. They
would re enter the Earth in this sort of conical
shaped space capsule, and it looked a lot like that.
That was the shape. It had a nice springy crust
on it, and it had a really nice sour dough
taste to it. There were only a few ingredients in it.
Emer grain, coriander, salt, yeast, and water was basically it.
(07:29):
And the sour dough combined with sort of the whole
wheat from the emmer and the coriander coming in it
was delicious. It was far far better than I expected
it was going to be.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Now you mentioned bad experimental archaeology. I was wondering, this
isn't really something that is the focus of the book
or anything, But at least in your preliminary research, did
you find examples of experimental archaeology either veering into the
realm of or originating within the realms of alternative archaeology
or pseudo archaeology.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I definitely came across those kind of things, but most
of that stuff sort of falls in the realm of
maybe not traditional archaeology, but at least sort of the
methods they used, where it's a little bit more armchair
and removed. You're looking at documents, artifacts, things like that.
So certainly not good archaeology and poorly reasoned in a
(08:23):
lot of cases, but it is a little bit more
on the I guess, traditional side, so to speak, as
opposed to the people who are actually making and doing
things that you can hear and taste and touch.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Now getting back into the positives here, something you write
about numerous examples of this in the book. How important
is experimental archaeology for the exploration and even revitalization of
traditions that have been lost or eroded via s a
Western colonialism.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Yeah, that's actually a really important theme in the book
is that there are a lot of different people doing it.
Some are traditional scholarly archaeologists who just you know, wanted
to do something a little different. But the other thread
on the other groups of people doing this are you know,
indigenous people, people from native cultures who to them this
(09:12):
isn't archaeology as much as it's their ancestry, it's their history.
And in a lot of cases, they are either reviving
the traditions themselves, you know, going back to look at songs, poems,
traditions that they had and reviving them, or in some
cases they have actually kept their traditions alive despite the
(09:32):
struggles of you know, colonialism and things like that kind
of decimating their culture. So in a lot of cases
they are the ones going to the archaeologists teaching them,
correcting them, showing them how their ancestors lived. That's another
really important element of the book is talking to those
people about the wonderful job they've done preserving and reviving
(09:55):
their cultures.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah. One example of this, I was excited to read
about traditional Native American acorn processing practices in the book.
This is something I myself had just learned about fairly
recently on a trip to Yosemite National Park, where they
have you know, various places where you can learn about this.
Can you tell us a little bit about the labor
that went into cultivating and processing these nuts and what
(10:18):
the final culinary results tasted like.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Yeah, So this was one of the cases in the book.
You know, kind of going through the different projects that
I did. In a lot of cases, I was essentially
just floundering around and that I was trying something out.
I was very poor at it, and it sort of
reinforced how difficult it was in some cases to do
something even basically get a meal for yourself. So essentially
(10:41):
what I did is I gathered a bunch of acorns
from different trees around my neighborhood, maybe a few hundred
of them, five hundred something like that. Then I had
to look around for a hammerstone and an anvil and
essentially just brought them home and started cracking them open,
digging the meat out, and processing them. I learned pretty
quickly that maybe a third or so of them were
(11:04):
rotten on the inside. Some actually had weavils inside them,
so I had bugs crawling around in my homes I'd
brought them in and the other and so I had
to discard a lot of them, and then I had
to just essentially grind them up into flour as finally
as I could. And that was a step especially that
got discouraging because I had, you know, a big bucket
(11:25):
full of acorns, and that eventually ground down to much
less than a cup of accnable flour, and it was very,
very frustrating thinking about all the work I had done
to gather them, to grind them up, oh, and actually
skip a step because I had to leach them then
to try to get the tannins the bitter flavor out
(11:46):
of them. And I ended up with basically just a
cup of flour and could make a few muffins out
of them. And then apparently I did a bad job
with the leeching as well, because they tasted like the
most bitter thing I've ever eaten my life. It was
like a colaxon of bitterness raging inside my mouth. They
were not very good the way I made them, But
(12:07):
I later actually got to travel to a school that
does some experimental archaeology work in Maine. They do teach
survivalist skills things like that, and they showed me a
little bit more about how to process them, and they
ended up being absolutely delicious. We made acorn pancakes fresh
on a hot stone griddle. We had a little bit
of butter on them. They were absolutely scrumgious, wonderful stuff.
(12:29):
So it was a good learning experience and humbling in
sort of a nice way to Yeah, to just show
how difficult it was to do something basic like get
a meal.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Now, you chat with a number of researchers in this
book whose work I was familiar with to some degree
or another, like they'd come up on previous episodes of
this show. One in particular is Lynn Wadley on the
topic of ancient bedding. I was familiar with her work,
but not the hurdles she faced over her own use
of experimental archaeology. Tell us a little bit about this.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Yeah, So she's an archaeologist in South Africa and she
does a lot of traditional archaeology sort of you know,
digging things out of the dirt, stuff like that. But
she had an idea she wanted to try and experiment
with the bedding that she found in one cave. There
she found what we think is probably the oldest bed
on Earth, from about seventy five thousand or so years ago,
(13:26):
and essentially it's a two part bed that's pretty ingenious
in a way. There's a layer of ash on the ground,
so you just burn a bunch of debris, get a
nice layer of ash there, and then you put what
she called a top sheet on there of aromatic leaves
that you can pick from trees around the cave. And
basically what that does is it provides a nice soft
(13:48):
place to lie down, which is kind of the main
function of a bed. But in combination, the ash and
the leaves keep insects away, They keep mosquitoes away, the
aromatic leaves keep the mistque away, and the ash is
important for keeping ticks away. And she showed this by
gathering a bunch of ticks on the farm that she
(14:09):
lives in in South Africa, and she essentially put them
down on I think they were in a bucket, and
she put a ring of ash around these ticks that
she had gathered, and she just saw what would happen.
She let them try to escape, so they had to
burrow through this ring of ash to try to get
out of there. And she found that most of the
(14:29):
ticks did not even make it through the ring of ash.
They died halfway through. The ones that did make it out,
their mouth parts were so gummed up with ash that
they couldn't effectively bite anyone. So this ash layer provided
a really nice barrier against ticks biting you, spreading diseases,
things like that. So I thought it was a really
(14:50):
ingenious experiment. And then she actually had some people spend
a night on one of the on a recreation of
one of these beds in the cave, which I thought
would have been really cool. I wish I'd gotten a
chance to do that. They said it was a little
nerve wracking, you know, they were kind of out there.
They had no animals prowling around or whatever, but apparently
(15:10):
the beds themselves were fairly comfortable. So she was telling
me about all this. I thought it was a really
cool little experiment, and I was surprised to hear that
she had a lot of trouble publishing anything about it,
And in fact, the editor of the paper said, you know,
I love all the traditional archaeology, I am not mentioning
this little informal experiment you did, either with the ticks
(15:33):
or having people spend a night on them. And the
editor would not budge on this and cut that section
from the paper. And it kind of highlights the tensions
that you see between traditional archaeology and even someone running
sort of an informal experiment. And I told her, and
I'd write about this in the book, that it's even
more disappointing because I was thinking about Charles Darwin especially,
(15:55):
he ran tons of informal experiments like this, and they
helped him generate new ideas to test. They helped inform
the biology of the time. So she was really working
in the spirit of Charles Darman. It was just disappointing
to see an editor just put his foot down like that.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, and then that's the kind of stuff too, that
helps make it real for people like most of most
of the listeners here, certainly like myself outside of the
academic world. Do you hear about these informal experiments and yeah,
it fleshes it out.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Yeah, and captures your imagination. You can imagine yourself lying
on this bed, what it would feel like. It's much
more close to your heart. Then you're just reading about
digging something up out of the dirt.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Now, speaking of digging things out of the dirt, can
you tell us a little bit about your experiences eating
toxic potatoes in Peru.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Yeah, that was another case where I was a bit
surprised at the outcomes of what happened. So potatoes are
native to the Andean Highlands in Peru, and I didn't
realize when I started doing this project. The sheer variety
you see of potatoes up there, just the colors, the shapes.
They're really really beautiful, all the different tubers you get
(17:06):
in the Andean Highlands where they're native to. One thing
I didn't realize also though, was that they're toxic. So
native potatoes you who cannot eat because they have certain
chemicals in them that will poison you. So you have
to process them in different ways. You can make a
couple of different dishes out of them depending on how
you process them. One way is essentially that you freeze
(17:29):
dry them, so you leave them out overnight soaking in water,
and the chemical reactions take place, and it essentially disables
breaks down these chemicals and they leech out and then
they're safe to eat after that. And another way is
you can process them a little bit but also mix
in a clay sauce. So you take dirt clay from riverbank,
(17:53):
mix it up with water, and you eat the potatoes
with that sauce, and the clay actually binds to the
poison chemicals and it goes through your digestive system so
it doesn't end up poisoning you. And when I got
started with this, the first dish, the freeze dried one
was the one I was excited about, so I thought
it was like sort of a you know, an ancient
(18:13):
astronaut food almost. I was like, this is so cool,
you know, the freeze drying his food in this way.
And I tried it and it just didn't taste good
to me. And I recognize I didn't grow up eating it,
so people there probably have a different opinion, but it
just tasted sort of like the desiccated husk of a potato.
There's a bit of flavor there, not much. It was
very mealy and dry and just did not really impressed me.
(18:37):
I just didn't enjoy the taste. So then I moved
on to the other one, which I was not excited about,
which was the one you mixed with clay, and to
my delight, that actually tasted really good. It had a
very nice, earthy flavor to it. The sauce was sort
of brown. It had kind of a nice almost a
texture like like a ti peanut sauce to it, So
a nice earthy flavor, a good texture, and I really
(18:59):
really enjoyed that dish. So it surprised me a bit that,
you know, eating clay essentially would really improve this dish
and make it good.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Oh wow, Yeah, I think that runs counter to what
I think my expectations would have been as well. I mean,
I guess we have a predisposition to judge the use
of clay and other related substances in our food. But
that's fascinating.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, it's normally something we would brush off the food.
I think, like this is integral to be able to
eat the food. But it wasn't this case.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Now another I have to ask you about another topic
that had come up previously on Stuff to blow your mind.
You talk about the at lotto spear thrower. Tell us
what it was like getting to try out a reconstruction
of this weapon.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah. So the lattle is probably the most widespread hunting
tool in history. I was surprised at how widespread it is,
much more so than bows and arrows, much more or
so than spears. And if anyone has not heard of
an at laddle, it's essentially a long, flexible spear, but
instead of throwing it with your hand, you use a
(20:10):
throwing stick. So it's just a long straight stick with
a bit of a notch on the end, and you
put that in your hand, You hold that in your hand,
and you use that to throw the spear, and essentially
what it does is it extends the length of your arm,
gives you more leverage and power in throwing it. And
I spent a great afternoon at an experimental archaeology lab
(20:31):
at Kent State University. They have a wonderful little program there,
and the guy there and who was in charge of
this program, he had a bunch of at laddles and spears,
I mean, just so he spent an afternoon throwing them
at these little foam dummies that he had. They had
one that was sort of a beloved mascot that they
(20:52):
called Bambo. It was much loved, much abused. After years
of throwing at laddles at it, it actually didn't have
any legs anymore because I've been hit so many times.
So they propped that up in the field. Then they
had another one that was like a third size replica
of a cariboo I think it was they got it
from target or whatever. So we set those up in
the field and we just spent an afternoon throwing these
(21:15):
at laddle darts at them. And I was surprised at
how easy it was to get distance with an at
laddle dart. I don't remember off the top of my head,
but the world record for throwing one is something like
two hundred and fifty yards, whereas the world record for
the throwing a javelin is much closer to one hundred yards,
maybe one hundred and ten something like that. So you
can really get a lot of distance on these things.
(21:38):
And even I, who had never picked one up before,
could throw it, you know, most of a football field
pretty easily. But accuracy was another matter. I tickled the
chin of that cariboo, I swear like four or five times.
It just kept going just left, just right, just over it.
I just could not quite hit it. There was a
(21:59):
pretty common ex experience. The archaeologists I mentioned actually brought
his class in there. So there were maybe thirty of
US students and me of flinging these around and we
probably hit it, you know, maybe a dozen times over
the course of a couple of hours. And the students
were motivated. They got extra credit if they hit it,
so they were really motivated to try to hit this thing.
(22:20):
But it proved difficult to aim for us amateurs. But
it's a really fun way to spend an afternoon.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Now. I want to come back to the title of
the books. Of course, Dinner with King Tutt, we already
talked a little bit about Egyptian bread. But how about
Egyptian beer? Now, this is this is another one where
you attempted to brew this yourself right at home.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
I did. Yeah, So I didn't go all out getting
the grain source from Egypt and you know, getting the
right type of e stuff like that. I just wanted
a basic flavor of what it might have tasted like.
So I got some Emmer grain, which is the grain
that they would have used, and barley, a mix of
those two things, and I essentially just fermented them in
(23:02):
my home with a basic beer fermenting kit. So you
make the mash, you know, you heat it up, you
had the yeast, all those kind of things. Threw in
some different plausible ingredients that they might have used in beer, cinnamon,
things like that. And one important difference was that they
did not use hops in Egyptian beer. That's a later
invention from medieval times, and that really makes a big
(23:23):
difference with beer because hops is a fairly strong bitter flavor.
So the Egyptian beer did not have the bitter flavor
that were used to with modern beers, and that actually
allowed other flavors to come forward, sour flavors especially, and
to my taste, it tasted less like a beer than
(23:43):
it did like a cambucha essentially. So it was a
nice sour flavor to it, and I could imagine it
being really delicious and thirst quenching after a long hot
day in the sun, you know, shoving pyramid blocks into
place or whatever. So that was one interesting thing, was
the taste was sour. And the other thing that I noticed,
(24:04):
and you know, you hear about this from archaeologists or
people have recreated the beer in other ways, is that
they didn't have filters back then modern filters to get
the chaff and the little bits of grain out of
the beer. They spent grain, so the beer was a
little maybe chunkier, you might say, and that there was
stuff floating on the top. And in some places, maybe
(24:26):
not Egypt necessarily as much, but in some places in
the Caucuses and other areas they were making this beer,
they actually traditionally drank the beer with a straw in
order to get below the chaffline and just get at
the beer, as opposed to, you know, getting a big
mouthful of the stuff you don't.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Want Oh wow, So any of us that are inclined
to use a straw the next time we are having
a pint out side.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Yes, yes, there were, actually it was This was in
a different area, not in Egypt, but there was one
case where archaeologists found a straw that they think it
was you know, maybe a king would have given it
as a gift to a visiting monarch or something like that.
But it was about two or three feet long, so
very big, and it was so ornately decorated that they
(25:12):
mistook it for a scepter at first. That's how elaborate
this straw was. But you know, these were valuable items
to people back then.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Wow, that's awesome. Now, on the subject of Egyptian bread
and beer, you also get into how these would not
just be valued for their role as sustenance and refreshment,
but these were also spiritually important.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, beer and bread were. They basically permeated every aspect
of Egyptian life. The workers on the pyramids, for instance,
were paid wages in bread and beer, and then they
ate them with every meal, both of those things, with
every meal, and when they were preparing people for the
afterlife their tombs, they would always include bread, and beer
(25:55):
to get them to the afterlife and for sustenance in
the afterlife. It was ingrained in their culture. They could
not imagine life or the afterlife without these two things.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Now, this is obviously the point to ask to come
back to something you mentioned earlier, the Maryland Mummy, the
work of Bob Bryer and Ron Wade. Tell us a
little bit about this, how it went down, and how
has this project aged like. Tell us a little bit
about how it was received at the time, and have
archaeologists warmed up to it.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
So this project I started in Baltimore, Maryland in the
mid nineties. There was an egyptologist and the head of
the State Anatomy Board. There an anatomist and the egyptologist
I think he was sort of the prime mover behind this.
He realized that, you know, we have a lot of
Egyptian mummies, but there's not a lot written down about
how they actually made the mummies. It's kind of a
(26:47):
mysterious process and we don't know if you know, the
information got lost. We don't know if they were keeping
it a secret, they just passed down to rissions orally
whatever the case was. But there's not a lot written
about how they actually made the mummies. So he decided
he wanted to recreate a human mummy. He approached this
anatomist who was head of the State Anatomy Board, and
(27:08):
he said, here's a proposal for a project. You know,
people donate their bodies to science. What do you think
The anatomist was gung how about it, and so they
decided they were going to mummify a human being. And
the egyptologist especially got pretty excited about this idea in
that he tried to be as authentic as possible, to
the point that he flew over to Egypt and he
(27:31):
actually dug out the mineral that they used to dehydrate
the body. It's a mineral called natron, and chemically it's
essentially a mix of baking soda and table salt, so
pretty simple chemically, but it forms naturally in dry gullies
and waddies over in Egypt. So he flew all the
way over there, got a shovel, dug out hundreds of
(27:53):
pounds of this stuff. And actually, he said one of
the more ticklish aspects of the project was smuggling it
back into the US, all this unidentified white powder that
he had in his luggage, but got it into the US,
got it down to Maryland, and they essentially just mummified
the body. They opened it up, got the organs out,
(28:15):
dried them out with the natron, you know, washed the
body out the way that they would have back then,
used oils on it, got the brain out of the
head in the way that they would have back then,
and then just piled it under hundreds of pounds of
this natron mineral to dry it out. And when word
got out there about this experiment, it proved pretty controversial
(28:36):
within the archaeological community and sort of the wider biology community.
There were some bioethicists who came out against it. Some
archaeologists also came out against it. They said it was
sort of tasteless, macabre. They didn't see much value in it.
And I do see their point that, you know, when
you're donating your body to science, you're probably assuming it's
(28:56):
going to go to a medical school or something like that.
Not in Thisss necessarily signing up to become a mummy.
But you know, legally they had backing for it. It said,
you know, you're going to end up in a medical school,
or we have other projects. Sometimes we use, and they
defended the project by saying that they actually learned a
lot about how we mummified the body. So they learned
(29:19):
how long it took roughly to mummify the body. They
learned how to get the organs out of the body,
which is something they did not know. One really cool
thing I think they learned is the Egyptologists had always
wanted to know. You know, you see a classic mummy.
Its skin is very dry, it's pulled back from the face,
the teeth are probably protruding. It sort of has a
(29:40):
classic mummy look to it. And he wanted to know
is that due to the mummification process or is that
because this body has been in a very dry environment
in Egypt for three or four thousand years? What causes
these changes to the body and about I think it
was like five weeks into the project they had to
change the mineral out and put fresh mineral on, but
(30:01):
they decided to take a peek at the body, and
even by that point five weeks in, the egyptologist was
sort of startled and he said, oh my god, this
looks exactly like Ramses the Great. It was incredible. So
it was the mummification process they learned that caused the
changes in sort of give mummies their iconic look. So
(30:22):
they defended it by saying, you know, they first of
all learned a lot about it, and second of all,
they said, they treated this body much better than most
bodies get treated. And the body is still around today.
It's in an office building in Maryland. It is perfectly
well preserved. It's probably going to look a lot better
than any of us will in one hundred years. So
he got treated, as they put it, sort of like
(30:43):
a king.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
It's been many years since I read Mary Roach's book Stiff,
but if memory serves, it's like the mummification process is
probably a step above some of the other legitimate uses
that are donated body.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Yes, that's a good point. Yeah, And actually I got to,
you know again, sort of doing a secondary version of this.
I actually made a fish mummy in my apartment in Washington, DC.
And you know, it's kind of sweltering hot right now,
and it was when I made that fish mummy. But
that fish I bought it whole from the store. It
never saw the inside of a refrigerator. And fish are
(31:20):
sort of a classic animal that you think is gonna
smell bad. It's not gonna last very long. But I
just mixed some baking soda and salt together, put it
in a casserole dish, and mummified this fish and it
went perfectly well. The fish never smelled, never got rotten.
I still have it on my counter today. It's perfectly preserved.
So it's pretty easy to do this project on your own,
(31:43):
and in some ways it sort of fulfills the Egyptian
traditions and that they mummified a lot of animals as
well as human beings.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Now, I want to make it clear for listeners out
there that I'm not asking you about even I think
half of the wonderful examples and topics you get into here.
There's a whole chapter dealing with with various Chinese traditions
and inventions. You deal with the multiple different time periods
and places. There's the Viking chapter. So I'm only scratching
(32:13):
the surface here with my questions, but I am going
to ask you about the Meso American ballgame. This is
one that I think anyone who's ever even like casually
studied anything to do with az tech history and as
tech culture has come across examples of this tell us
a little bit about this and did you get to
play it?
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Yeah, So if you're not familiar with it, the Aztec
ballgame is a it's sort of a weird mashup of
maybe tennis and soccer, I guess is the way you
would describe it. You have two teams and you're knocking
a ball back and forth from one team to the other,
but you're also moving down the field trying to knocket
past your opponent's end line. And what makes this game
(32:54):
unusual is that you can't kick the ball. You can't
use your arms at all. You can only use your hips.
You have to turn and you have to hit the
ball with your hip. And when I was learning how
to so it spoiler a bit, I guess I did
learn how to play the game. And when I was
learning how to do it, the instructor said, just do
a shakira, So you take your hip and you twist
it hit the ball with your hip like shakira. So
(33:16):
that kind of puts you in the mindset of what
it's like to play this game. And it was surprised
about a few things, especially the size of the ball,
in that it was roughly the size of a bowling
ball and it was also as heavy as a bowling
bar was. It was softer than a bowling ball because
it was made out of rubber, but it was solid
(33:37):
rubber all the way through. There was no inflatable bladder
or anything inside it. So it was a really heavy,
dense ball. And this is the ball that you're knocking
with your hips, hitting it back and forth. So imagine
basically sending a padded bowling ball bouncing back and forth
with your hip. So despite that, when I did get
to play this game, it was fun at first because
(34:00):
you serve the ball, toss it the other team, and
when the ball's bouncing back and forth, you know, you
kind of get the hang of it. You hit it
with your hip. It's sort of a fun little game.
The problem is, because the ball is so heavy, it
eventually loses momentum and starts rolling along the ground. And
again you can only hit it with your hip. So
(34:20):
you have to do is when the ball comes your way,
you have to drop to the ground. We were playing
on hard pavement here, not grass or anything. You have
to drop to the pavement and use your hip like
a pinball paddle essentially, and sort of swing it and
knock the ball back with your hip and then you
have to pop back up because it's a penalty if
you're still on the ground before the ball gets back
(34:41):
to the other team. You have to pop back up,
and then they'll hit it right back to you. You
have to drop to the ground again, hit it back,
pop up, and just keep doing this over and over
and over. It was like doing essentially one hundred berpies
in a row, except then you had to knock a
bowling ball back each time you did it. And before long,
maybe half an hour in, my legs were just quaking
(35:03):
with fatigue and cramping. I was really really hurting after
doing all of these calisthenics for a while, and eventually
I feel a bit craven about this, but eventually I
was hiding behind one of my teammates who happened to
be an eleven year old child, because I just couldn't
take this anymore going up and down, and the child
(35:25):
was very good. They were popping right up and down.
She was just knocking the ball back and forth. So
I let her have her fun after a while and
sort of effectively quit playing this and then spent the
next day limping around Mexico City, where I ended up
going to play it, just limping around, wincing every time
I had to use the stairs. But it really did
drive home what an unusual game this was. I played
(35:48):
a lot of sports going up, but never anything like this.
And just how tough the people were who played this game,
because these games could go on for days at a
time sometimes and they actually used it as training for
war to toughen their warriors off. And I can really
see how it would be effective as training for soldiers,
because again, even after half an hour or so, I
(36:10):
was I was a hurting unit.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah it's yeah, absolutely sounds brutal, and yeah, you can
see how it is, certainly based on your experiences here.
It's it's how it conditions the warrior. And yet it
does feel weirdly foreign compared to like modern so many
modern popular sports, but in a weird way, like how
is it really that different from soccer? We're kicking the
(36:33):
ball around? Is that? You know, it's it's not like
people kick each other in war, So I don't know,
it's it's it's it's I guess it's just a difficult
one to try and contemplate as like a modern, somewhat
familiar with modern sports.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
Yeah, and I guess I didn't even think about sports
as something you could really investigate with archaeology. We think
about them as much more of a modern phenomenon. And yeah,
this was just kind of an unusual chance to do
something outside of the normal realm of recreating recipes, recreating tools,
things like that, to try out a sport that. Yeah,
(37:09):
you can definitely see affinities with modern sports, but it
is its own distinct thing.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Now, on the subject of like recreating recreating history certainly
a huge part of experimental archaeology, tell us a little
bit about how you utilized fiction writing in this book,
using fiction alongside the nonfiction to recreate possible chapters from
(37:41):
the past.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
Yeah, So the book structure is a bit unusual. Each
chapter puts you in a specific time and a specific place.
So one chapter is Africa seventy five thousand years ago,
another chapter is medieval China. You're in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome,
Viking time, Arctic a thousand years ago, a bunch of
(38:02):
different places. And the premise of each chapter was to
really immerse you and to spend a day in the
life of a person from that time and that place
and each of the things that I do and describe
the archaeological experiments are related to that time and place.
But overall, I thought, you know, fiction can do some
(38:24):
things that nonfiction cannot. It's a bit more immersive being
in that character's point of view. So for each chapter,
there is a fictional sort of a short story, where
you are in the character's mind going through a day
in their life, usually a pretty bad day, some dramatic
things happened to them, but you're going through a day
in their life, experiencing what they would have experienced. And
(38:47):
then the story, the fiction story sort of stops at
a dramatic moment, jumps to the nonfiction, and then I
come in, explain what they were doing, Explain how the
experimental archaeology works, stuff like that, who it fit in
with our culture. Then you jump back to the fiction
and it sort of alternates like that. But basically, the
fiction seemed like a better way to really immerse yourself
(39:08):
in that time and place, and it was a lot
of fun to write. All my books so far have
been strictly nonfiction. There's definitely a narrative component to it,
but this was explicitly fiction, and so it was a
kind of a fun experiment.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
It's made for a fun reading experience as well. Oh
thank you. But I do have to wonder, though, is
this because ultimately I can imagine thinking about this and
planning this out at the planning stage of the book,
and then it sounds like you kind of set yourself
up with a kind of a sizeable challenge to write.
In addition to the nonfiction portions of the book, what
ten or eleven short stories each set in a different time,
(39:44):
in place, and perspective.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Yeah, it took a lot of reading to make sure
I got all the details right of all of these places,
and you know, not only what places looked like, but
also people's worldviews, how they thought about religion, how they
thought about family, all these different things. So it did
take a lot of reading. But I'd always been interested
in these topics, and I'd been kind of gathering string
(40:08):
for this book for a while, so I had done
some of the reading ahead of time and could draw
on those kind of things. And I've been working on
this book since actually I think before the pandemic, so
I've been put a lot of time and effort into
this one. So I think it paid off. I think
the richness of detail in each chapter really does bring a.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Live Yeah, the proof is in the pudding. So the
book again is Dinner with King Tide. How rogue archaeologists
are recreating the site, sound, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations.
It's fantastic. Highly recommend it to listeners of this show,
and as far as podcast listeners go, you also host
a podcast tell us a little bit about.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
This I do. It's called Disappearing Spoon, which happens to
be the name of my first book, and if you're
familiar with that book, the podcast is actually on a
different topic. The book was about the periodic table. This
is more. I come across a lot of stories when
I'm doing research, really good, interesting stories about science and
(41:07):
history that just don't fit in the books that I'm writing.
And it always killed me to have no place for
these stories. I had this big file of orphan stories
that I had, but having the podcast gives me a
chance to put them out there. So I've done series
on things like you know, the dumbest mistake Einstein ever made?
Or you know how climate change could change the shape
(41:30):
of the human body, and things like that, So just
little snippets I've come across each one's pretty bite sized,
maybe twenty minutes or so, and yeah, they're out there,
little fun sized bits of science and history.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Awesome. Well, Sam, thanks again for coming on the show
and chatting with me again. The book Dinner with King
Tut fabulous read, highly recommend it.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Thanks all right, Thanks once again to Sam Keen for
coming on the show and chatting with me again. His
website is Sam Keene dot com and the book is
Dinner with King Tut. How rogue archaeologists are recreating the
site Sound, Smells and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. It is
out in hardcover July eighth, twenty twenty five. Thanks as
(42:14):
always to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show
here and if you would like to ride in with
any feedback, if you would like to just touch base
with Joe or myself, well you can email us at
contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Dot Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
The pi ns A for a pub
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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