AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Some people just love history in any form, and the dustier the book, the better. But what if, instead of just reading about ancient cultures, you learn by doing, like hanging out, watching medieval catapults miss and hit their targets, or maybe snuggling down on a bed of ashes and grass like they made 200,000 years ago? Maybe you could help solve some mysteries about how people lived.
It's not reenacting. It's experimental archaeology. And it's the focus of Sam Kean's new book, "Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating The Sights, Sounds, Smells And Taste Of Lost Civilizations." Sam Kean joins me now. Welcome to the program.
SAM KEAN: Hi. Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: So you didn't actually sleep in a bed of ash. You talked to someone who did. But you did eat, like, ostrich eggs and deer jerky and South American guinea pigs and bugs (laughter).
KEAN: I had...
RASCOE: You ate a lot of stuff.
KEAN: ...I had a lot of bugs. I had, you know, caterpillars. I had walrus. I made acorn bread, which did not turn out well when I made it, but then I talked to someone who knew what they were doing, and it turned out amazing.
RASCOE: And what did you learn about these civilizations from eating all of these different foods?
KEAN: I was amazed, first of all, by the - just the sheer variety of things that people were eating thousands of years ago, and also just how delicious some of it was. I think archaeology in general does a very good job of what the past looks like. So they can say, OK, we had a site here. There was a wall here, buildings here. There is where the trash pile was, stuff like that. But you don't get the sounds, you don't get the smells, you don't get the tastes the way you do in experimental archaeology.
RASCOE: Yeah, I mean, 'cause you learned about making weapons - I guess it's called napping, but, like, kind of breaking the stones and making the tips. And you also learned about making poisons. I mean, by doing this, you kind of get to see how hard it was and how much precision it took - right? - to do all of this stuff.
KEAN: Yeah. That's one thing that page after page of the book drove home, was just how hard it was sometimes to do basic things, like get a meal. One of the more tedious things that I had to do was I brain-tanned some leather. So you take...
RASCOE: Oh, yes.
KEAN: ...A hide and you mix the brains in, essentially, to treat the hide and turn it into leather.
RASCOE: And you're saying the brains of the animal, just to be clear?
KEAN: The brains, in the skull.
RASCOE: Yes. In the skull.
KEAN: Yes. The brains of the animal.
RASCOE: You - yes, you would use that to tan the animal, which sounds very gross (laughter).
KEAN: It was a little squishy. Yeah. You kind of use your hands. You just got to massage it in there, really work it in there. My shoulders were pretty sore. The flies had a field day. But again, if you needed a piece of leather, you know, needed to make clothing for yourself, that's just what you would have had to do in that time.
RASCOE: You know, the way you set up this book is, like, really fascinating because what I - I was so drawn into it once I realized what you were doing because each civilization that you catalog is its own chapter, but you mix your experiences, your research, and then you have these short stories that you've written. These characters have, you know, loves, family. They have all these issues that they're trying to deal with. How big a lift was this for you as a writer?
KEAN: So the premise of the book is you are immersed in a specific day, at a specific point in history, at a specific spot on the globe. And I could do that somewhat with the experimental archaeology. But to really get deep down into the character, I realized that fiction would be a better way to do that. So everything that happens to this person, to the main character, could and would have happened to people at the time.
RASCOE: And lots of your characters, they don't meet good ends (laughter). Like, that's a...
KEAN: Some of them have happy endings, so they...
RASCOE: Some of them do. Yes.
KEAN: Yeah.
RASCOE: Some of them do have happy endings. Yeah.
KEAN: I mean, the past was a rough place.
RASCOE: Well, I mean, in your chapter on Ancient Egypt, and - which, of course, we should talk about a little bit, 'cause the title of the book is "Dinner With King Tut" - there is still this big mystery about how the pyramids were constructed. You met up with Roger Larsen, a carpenter in Mississippi, who's been experimenting and thinks he has a solution or a possible solution. Talk to me about how he thinks the pyramids were made, because basically, they would have had to lay these massive blocks. They don't have wheels, and they would have had to lay them, like, one every five minutes for 20 years, which is insane to me.
KEAN: So sort of the classic theory has always been that they used ramps to build them. So they just built a big dirt ramp and they would push the blocks up them on maybe a log roller. But the experiments have shown that log rollers, you know, however good they look on paper, really do not work well in real life, especially if you're trying to push something up a ramp.
And Larsen - his point is that the ramps that you would have had to build to get to the very top of the pyramids - the volume of material you need to build one of those ramps ends up being something like two or three times the volume of the pyramid itself. It seems impossible to do, given the short time frames that we had.
He took me out to a quarry, and he had built what he called his pyramid machine. It was essentially two big A-frames with big lever arms. There was a series of winches and ropes in the middle. And he and some friends got together, and they were essentially using this machine to drag these blocks that weighed thousands of pounds up a slope in the quarry to show that this might have been a way that they could have gotten blocks up the side of the pyramid.
RASCOE: One thing your book gets into is that some archaeologists don't really like the experimental archaeologists.
KEAN: Yeah, there is a bit of a tension within the field, where I think there's sort of a contingent, especially among sort of academic professional archaeologists, that kind of the whole idea of it is off or that you can't really learn any true insights by running an experiment. There's some good reason for this skepticism in some cases 'cause you can do a bad job with some of these experimental archaeology projects. If you're not careful about what you're doing, or, you know, you don't source the right materials, you can produce some misleading results. So there is some justified skepticism.
Well, one thing I think is an important point is that in a lot of cases, this is, you know, academics, professional archaeologists, doing this work. But one really, I think, interesting aspect of this field is that you have a lot of, you know, Indigenous communities, native communities who - to them, this isn't, you know, archaeology. This is actually their ancestry. These are their own people's past. And in a lot of cases, they're the ones who are going to archaeologists, going to the professionals, and they're actually correcting them, and they're actually showing them how their ancestors lived and sort of bringing their knowledge to bear on this.
RASCOE: After doing all of this with the book, like, what ancient mysteries still interests you? I mean, like, I'm rooting for aliens helping with the pyramids myself, but are there mysteries that still fascinate you that you'd want to look into?
KEAN: Yeah, I think there are thousands of mysteries. I actually just wrote a story recently about something - they're called the quipus, which are a language, maybe, that the Inca used in Peru. So instead of writing things down on paper, you know, papyrus or whatever, or chiseling something into stone, they actually recorded information on knotted strings. So they would tie a knot into the string to encode information.
And we know how to read some of them. Archaeologists, anthropologists know how to read some of them, but there's a swath of them that we just don't know how to read these things. And so that's a - I think that'd be a fascinating mystery, to sort of get at this lost language of the Inca empire.
RASCOE: That's Sam Kean. He's the author of the new book, "Dinner With King Tut." Thank you so much for talking with us today.
KEAN: Thank you for having me.
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