Dinner with King Tut, with Sam Kean

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 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 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. 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 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.

But yeah, you outline some of the pushback that experimental archaeologists have encountered.

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

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 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 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 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

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 learned from that and did much better jobs by the end.

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. 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.

So certainly not good archaeology and poorly reasoned in a 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.

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 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.

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

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 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

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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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, 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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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 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. 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 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. But it proved difficult to aim for us amateurs. But it's a really fun way to spend an afternoon.

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 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 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, 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 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.

the afterlife. It was ingrained in their culture. They could not imagine life or the afterlife without these two things.

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 a king.

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 in some ways it sort of fulfills the Egyptian traditions and that they mummified a lot of animals as well as human beings.

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?

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 was I was a hurting unit.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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, 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.

out in hardcover July eighth, twenty twenty five. Thanks as 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.