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