August 1, 2026 • 43 mins
In this classic 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.” (originally published 7/3/2025)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we got a
vault episode for you here. This is going to be
my interview from seven three, twenty twenty five with author
Sam Keen about the book Dinner with King Tut full
title Dinner with King Tut How rogue archaeologist are recreating
(00:26):
the site sound, smells and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. Really
cool book. I keep seeing this one at bookstores and
I always have to point out to my family. I'm like, hey, hey,
I chatted with that person. I do this with any
book that I see in bookstores where I've interviewed the author.
It probably gets a little annoying, but I still I
love these conversations that I get to have with folks,
(00:48):
and this one was a lot of fun. So let's
jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
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 archaeologist 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 really
(01:27):
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 2 (01:37):
Hi thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
So the new book is Dinner with King Tut How
rogue archaeologist 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
(02:00):
to what extent it is different compared to traditional archaeology,
and how the to get along.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
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
(02:27):
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
(02:51):
experimental archaeology, which when I heard about it, I thought, ooh,
now this is the type of archaeology I like. Essentially,
experimental archaeologist 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
(03:14):
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.
(03:36):
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
(03:56):
catapult ball slams home into a wall, so 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 1 (04:10):
It kind of gets this halfway at least to Indiana
Jones territory, I guess.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Just halfway there. Yes, much more than setting around in
the dirt, for sure.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
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 archaeologists of
you know, reconstructing tools from ancient times or you know,
(04:41):
creating you know, recreating Greek trirems, that sort of thing.
But yeah, you outline some of the pushback that experimental
archaeologists have encountered.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, there is a bit of a conflict in the
field with sort of you know, traditional scholarly academic archaeologists
and the people trying to do this new method bit
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
(05:13):
of it 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
(05:35):
told they 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 are examples out
there of bad experimental archaeology where people just didn't take
the time to do it properly the first time. One
good example of that was the person I talked to
(05:58):
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 transitioned into
(06:21):
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
(06:41):
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
(07:02):
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
(07:22):
learned from that and did much better jobs by the end.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
One quick question about the bread, what did you expect
it to taste liked? Were you sort of expecting it
to taste like archaeology to some degree.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
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
(07:56):
those old pictures of the Mercury astronauts from NASA 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, emergrain, coriander, salt, yeast,
(08:19):
and water was basically it. 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 1 (08:31):
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 2 (08:52):
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
(09:15):
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 1 (09:27):
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 2 (09:43):
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 wanted to do
something a little different. But the other thread on the
other groups of people doing this are you know, indigenous
peopleeople from native cultures who to them this isn't archaeology
(10:05):
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
struggles of you know, colonialism and things like that. Kind
(10:28):
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
their cultures.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
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
(11:10):
the final culinary results tasted like.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
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
(11:33):
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
(11:56):
rotten on the inside. Some actually had weavils inside them,
so no, 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
(12:16):
bucket 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
(12:37):
flavor out 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 in my life.
It was like a colaxon of bitterness raging inside my mouth.
They were not very good the way I made them.
(13:00):
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. So it
(13:22):
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 1 (13:31):
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. Can you tell us a little bit
(13:52):
about this.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, So she's an archaeologist in South Africa and she
does a lot of traditional archaeology, digging things out of
the dirt, stuff like that. But she had an idea
she wanted to try an 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
(14:14):
seventy five thousand or so years ago. 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
(14:38):
that does is it provides a nice soft 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 mosquitoes away, and the ash is important for
keeping ticks away. And she showed this by gathering a
(14:59):
bunch of ticks on the farm that she 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,
(15:20):
and she found that most of the 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
(15:40):
like that. So I thought it was a really ingenious experiment.
And then she actually had some people spend a night
on one of the a recreation of one of these
beds in the cave, which I thought would have been
really cool. I wish I had gotten a chance to
do that. They said it was a little nerve wracking,
you know, they were kind of out there. They'd know,
animals prowling around or whatever. But apparently the beds themselves
(16:03):
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 or having people
(16:26):
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, He ran tons
(16:48):
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 Darwin and was just disappointing an editor put
his foot down like that.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
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 2 (17:15):
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 1 (17:27):
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 2 (17:33):
Yeah, that was another case where I was a bit
surprised at the outcomes of what happened. So potatoes are
native to the Andian 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
(17:58):
in the Indian Highlands where they're 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
(18:21):
freeze 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
(18:43):
clay from riverbank, 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. 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,
(19:05):
an ancient astronaut food almost. I was like, this is
so cool, you know, the freeze drying this food in
this way. And I tried it and it just didn't
taste good to me. And I recognized 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
(19:28):
really impressed me. 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 a ti peanut sauce to it.
So a nice earthy flavor, a good texture, and I
(19:51):
really 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 1 (20:00):
Oh wow, Yeah, that 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 2 (20:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
This case. 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
or reconstruction of this weapon.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah, so the laddle 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 so
than spears. And if anyone has not heard of a
net laddle, it's essentially a long, flexible spear, but instead
of throwing it with your hand, you use a throwing stick.
(21:03):
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
(21:23):
at Kent State University. They have a wonderful little program there,
and the guy there and the 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
(21:44):
that they 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 it's been hit so
many times. So they propped that up in the field.
Then they had another one that was like a third
size replic of a cariboo. I think it was I
got it from target or whatever. So we set those
up in the field and we just spent an afternoon
(22:07):
throwing these 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 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
(22:29):
these things. 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.
(22:51):
There was a pretty common experience. The archaeologist I mentioned
actually brought his class in there. So there were maybe
thirty of us students and me the fling 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
(23:11):
hit this thing. But it proved difficult to aim for
us amateurs. But it's a really fun way to spend
an afternoon.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Now I want to come back to the title of
the book is, of course, Dinner with King Tutt. We
already talked a little bit about Egyptian bread, but how
about Egyptian beer. Now, this is one, this is another
one where you attempted to brew this yourself right at home.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
I did. Yeah, So I didn't go all out getting
the grain source from Egypt and you know, getting the
right type of ye 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
(23:53):
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 through 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
(24:15):
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
(24:35):
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,
(24:56):
and you know, you hear about this from archaeologists or
people have re created 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,
(25:18):
maybe 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 want.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Oh wow, So any of us that are inclined to
use a straw the next time we are having a
pint out se.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
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
(26:04):
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 1 (26:11):
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 2 (26:24):
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
(26:47):
to get them to the afterlife and for sustenance in
the afterlife. It was so ingrained in their culture they
could not imagine life or the afterlife without these two things.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Now, this is obviously the point to ask to come
back to some thing 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 2 (27:16):
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
(27:39):
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 brissions 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
(28:00):
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 gonna 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 actually
(28:23):
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 pounds of this stuff,
(28:47):
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, dried them out with the natron,
(29:09):
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 within the archaeological community and sort of
(29:30):
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 going to go to a medical
school or something like that. You're not necessarily signing up
(29:53):
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 how long it took
roughly to mummify the body. They learned how to get
(30:15):
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 classic mummy look to it,
and he wanted to know is that due to the
(30:36):
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 they decided to take a
peek at the body, and even by that point five
(30:58):
weeks in, the Egyptology 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 they defended it by saying, you know,
they first of all learned a lot about it, and
(31:18):
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 the king.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
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 employees donated body.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
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 refrigerator. And fish are sort
(32:13):
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, and
(32:35):
in some ways it sort of fulfills the Egyptian traditions
and that they mummified a lot of animals as well
as human beings.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
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
(33:05):
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 2 (33:23):
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 knock
get past your opponent's end line. And what makes this
(33:45):
game 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.
(34:08):
So 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 rubber
(34:30):
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,
(34:50):
it was fun at first because you serve the ball
you tossed to 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 hips.
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
(35:11):
hit it with your hip. So 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
(35:32):
ground before the ball gets back 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 a hundred burpies 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 with fatigue and cramping.
(35:58):
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 was very good. They
were popping right up and down. She was just knocking
(36:20):
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 a lot of sports
(36:41):
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 you know, days at a
time sometimes and they actually used it as training for
war to toughen their warriors up, and I can really
see how it would be effective as training for so
because again, even after half an hour or so, I
(37:02):
was I was a hurting unit.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
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 that
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
(37:25):
the 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 2 (37:39):
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,
(38:01):
you can definitely see affinities with modern sports, but it
is its own distinct thing.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
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
(38:33):
the past.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
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 times, Arctic a thousand years ago, a bunch of
(38:54):
different places. And the premise of each chapter was to
really immerse you and just 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
(39:16):
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 happen to them, but you're going through a day
in their life, experiencing what they would have experienced. And
(39:39):
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 imm yourself
(40:00):
in that time 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 1 (40:13):
It's made for a fun reading experience as well.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Oh thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
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, in place,
(40:37):
and perspective.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
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 for
(41:00):
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 1 (41:19):
Live Yeah, the proof is in the pudding. So the
book again is Dinner with King tut 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 this I do.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
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 history that just don't fit
(42:01):
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 of the human body,
(42:23):
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 1 (42:33):
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 2 (42:42):
Thanks for having me, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
All right, Thanks once again to Sam Keen for coming
on the show. And chatting with me again. His website
is sam Keen dot com and the book is Dinner
with King Tut how rogue archaeologists are recreating the site
Sound Smells and Case of Lost Civilizations. It is out
in hardcover July eighth, twenty twenty five. Thanks as always
(43:07):
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 2 (43:20):
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.
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we got a
vault episode for you here. This is going to be
my interview from seven three, twenty twenty five with author
Sam Keen about the book Dinner with King Tut full
title Dinner with King Tut How rogue archaeologist are recreating
(00:26):
the site sound, smells and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. Really
cool book. I keep seeing this one at bookstores and
I always have to point out to my family. I'm like, hey, hey,
I chatted with that person. I do this with any
book that I see in bookstores where I've interviewed the author.
It probably gets a little annoying, but I still I
love these conversations that I get to have with folks,
(00:48):
and this one was a lot of fun. So let's
jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
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 archaeologist 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 really
(01:27):
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 2 (01:37):
Hi thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
So the new book is Dinner with King Tut How
rogue archaeologist 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
(02:00):
to what extent it is different compared to traditional archaeology,
and how the to get along.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
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
(02:27):
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
(02:51):
experimental archaeology, which when I heard about it, I thought, ooh,
now this is the type of archaeology I like. Essentially,
experimental archaeologist 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
(03:14):
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.
(03:36):
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
(03:56):
catapult ball slams home into a wall, so 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 1 (04:10):
It kind of gets this halfway at least to Indiana
Jones territory, I guess.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Just halfway there. Yes, much more than setting around in
the dirt, for sure.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
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 archaeologists of
you know, reconstructing tools from ancient times or you know,
(04:41):
creating you know, recreating Greek trirems, that sort of thing.
But yeah, you outline some of the pushback that experimental
archaeologists have encountered.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, there is a bit of a conflict in the
field with sort of you know, traditional scholarly academic archaeologists
and the people trying to do this new method bit
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
(05:13):
of it 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
(05:35):
told they 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 are examples out
there of bad experimental archaeology where people just didn't take
the time to do it properly the first time. One
good example of that was the person I talked to
(05:58):
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 transitioned into
(06:21):
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
(06:41):
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
(07:02):
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
(07:22):
learned from that and did much better jobs by the end.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
One quick question about the bread, what did you expect
it to taste liked? Were you sort of expecting it
to taste like archaeology to some degree.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
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
(07:56):
those old pictures of the Mercury astronauts from NASA 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, emergrain, coriander, salt, yeast,
(08:19):
and water was basically it. 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 1 (08:31):
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 2 (08:52):
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
(09:15):
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 1 (09:27):
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 2 (09:43):
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 wanted to do
something a little different. But the other thread on the
other groups of people doing this are you know, indigenous
peopleeople from native cultures who to them this isn't archaeology
(10:05):
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
struggles of you know, colonialism and things like that. Kind
(10:28):
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
their cultures.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
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
(11:10):
the final culinary results tasted like.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
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
(11:33):
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
(11:56):
rotten on the inside. Some actually had weavils inside them,
so no, 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
(12:16):
bucket 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
(12:37):
flavor out 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 in my life.
It was like a colaxon of bitterness raging inside my mouth.
They were not very good the way I made them.
(13:00):
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. So it
(13:22):
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 1 (13:31):
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. Can you tell us a little bit
(13:52):
about this.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, So she's an archaeologist in South Africa and she
does a lot of traditional archaeology, digging things out of
the dirt, stuff like that. But she had an idea
she wanted to try an 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
(14:14):
seventy five thousand or so years ago. 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
(14:38):
that does is it provides a nice soft 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 mosquitoes away, and the ash is important for
keeping ticks away. And she showed this by gathering a
(14:59):
bunch of ticks on the farm that she 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,
(15:20):
and she found that most of the 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
(15:40):
like that. So I thought it was a really ingenious experiment.
And then she actually had some people spend a night
on one of the a recreation of one of these
beds in the cave, which I thought would have been
really cool. I wish I had gotten a chance to
do that. They said it was a little nerve wracking,
you know, they were kind of out there. They'd know,
animals prowling around or whatever. But apparently the beds themselves
(16:03):
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 or having people
(16:26):
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, He ran tons
(16:48):
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 Darwin and was just disappointing an editor put
his foot down like that.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
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 2 (17:15):
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 1 (17:27):
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 2 (17:33):
Yeah, that was another case where I was a bit
surprised at the outcomes of what happened. So potatoes are
native to the Andian 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
(17:58):
in the Indian Highlands where they're 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
(18:21):
freeze 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
(18:43):
clay from riverbank, 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. 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,
(19:05):
an ancient astronaut food almost. I was like, this is
so cool, you know, the freeze drying this food in
this way. And I tried it and it just didn't
taste good to me. And I recognized 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
(19:28):
really impressed me. 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 a ti peanut sauce to it.
So a nice earthy flavor, a good texture, and I
(19:51):
really 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 1 (20:00):
Oh wow, Yeah, that 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 2 (20:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
This case. 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
or reconstruction of this weapon.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah, so the laddle 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 so
than spears. And if anyone has not heard of a
net laddle, it's essentially a long, flexible spear, but instead
of throwing it with your hand, you use a throwing stick.
(21:03):
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
(21:23):
at Kent State University. They have a wonderful little program there,
and the guy there and the 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
(21:44):
that they 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 it's been hit so
many times. So they propped that up in the field.
Then they had another one that was like a third
size replic of a cariboo. I think it was I
got it from target or whatever. So we set those
up in the field and we just spent an afternoon
(22:07):
throwing these 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 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
(22:29):
these things. 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.
(22:51):
There was a pretty common experience. The archaeologist I mentioned
actually brought his class in there. So there were maybe
thirty of us students and me the fling 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
(23:11):
hit this thing. But it proved difficult to aim for
us amateurs. But it's a really fun way to spend
an afternoon.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Now I want to come back to the title of
the book is, of course, Dinner with King Tutt. We
already talked a little bit about Egyptian bread, but how
about Egyptian beer. Now, this is one, this is another
one where you attempted to brew this yourself right at home.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
I did. Yeah, So I didn't go all out getting
the grain source from Egypt and you know, getting the
right type of ye 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
(23:53):
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 through 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
(24:15):
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
(24:35):
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,
(24:56):
and you know, you hear about this from archaeologists or
people have re created 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,
(25:18):
maybe 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 want.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Oh wow, So any of us that are inclined to
use a straw the next time we are having a
pint out se.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
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
(26:04):
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 1 (26:11):
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 2 (26:24):
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
(26:47):
to get them to the afterlife and for sustenance in
the afterlife. It was so ingrained in their culture they
could not imagine life or the afterlife without these two things.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Now, this is obviously the point to ask to come
back to some thing 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 2 (27:16):
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
(27:39):
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 brissions 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
(28:00):
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 gonna 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 actually
(28:23):
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 pounds of this stuff,
(28:47):
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, dried them out with the natron,
(29:09):
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 within the archaeological community and sort of
(29:30):
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 going to go to a medical
school or something like that. You're not necessarily signing up
(29:53):
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 how long it took
roughly to mummify the body. They learned how to get
(30:15):
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 classic mummy look to it,
and he wanted to know is that due to the
(30:36):
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 they decided to take a
peek at the body, and even by that point five
(30:58):
weeks in, the Egyptology 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 they defended it by saying, you know,
they first of all learned a lot about it, and
(31:18):
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 the king.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
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 employees donated body.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
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 refrigerator. And fish are sort
(32:13):
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, and
(32:35):
in some ways it sort of fulfills the Egyptian traditions
and that they mummified a lot of animals as well
as human beings.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
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
(33:05):
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 2 (33:23):
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 knock
get past your opponent's end line. And what makes this
(33:45):
game 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.
(34:08):
So 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 rubber
(34:30):
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,
(34:50):
it was fun at first because you serve the ball
you tossed to 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 hips.
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
(35:11):
hit it with your hip. So 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
(35:32):
ground before the ball gets back 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 a hundred burpies 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 with fatigue and cramping.
(35:58):
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 was very good. They
were popping right up and down. She was just knocking
(36:20):
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 a lot of sports
(36:41):
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 you know, days at a
time sometimes and they actually used it as training for
war to toughen their warriors up, and I can really
see how it would be effective as training for so
because again, even after half an hour or so, I
(37:02):
was I was a hurting unit.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
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 that
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
(37:25):
the 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 2 (37:39):
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,
(38:01):
you can definitely see affinities with modern sports, but it
is its own distinct thing.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
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
(38:33):
the past.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
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 times, Arctic a thousand years ago, a bunch of
(38:54):
different places. And the premise of each chapter was to
really immerse you and just 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
(39:16):
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 happen to them, but you're going through a day
in their life, experiencing what they would have experienced. And
(39:39):
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 imm yourself
(40:00):
in that time 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 1 (40:13):
It's made for a fun reading experience as well.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Oh thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
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, in place,
(40:37):
and perspective.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
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 for
(41:00):
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 1 (41:19):
Live Yeah, the proof is in the pudding. So the
book again is Dinner with King tut 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 this I do.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
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 history that just don't fit
(42:01):
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 of the human body,
(42:23):
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 1 (42:33):
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 2 (42:42):
Thanks for having me, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
All right, Thanks once again to Sam Keen for coming
on the show. And chatting with me again. His website
is sam Keen dot com and the book is Dinner
with King Tut how rogue archaeologists are recreating the site
Sound Smells and Case of Lost Civilizations. It is out
in hardcover July eighth, twenty twenty five. Thanks as always
(43:07):
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 2 (43:20):
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.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com