Dinner with King Tut, with Sam Kean
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going to be talking with author Sam King, whose new book, Dinner with King Tut, How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations, is going to be out July 8th. This is a terrific book, and I really enjoyed chatting with Sam here about it. So let's go ahead and jump right into the interview. Hi, Sam. Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me. So the new book is Dinner with King Tut, How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. This deals with a topic that I 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 to what extent it is different compared to traditional archaeology, and how the two get along.

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 would go to an actual archaeological site, I always found it extremely dull because

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 that in my mind with experimental archaeology, which when I heard about it, I thought, oh, 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, an Egyptian style mummy of a human in modern times. So 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 catapult ball slams home into a wall. You can taste the food, the sourdough bread or the beer that King Tut would have eaten.

So it really brings the past alive in a way that to me, traditional archaeology just could not do. It kind of gets us halfway, at least to Indiana Jones territory, I guess. Halfway there, yes. Much more than sitting around in the dirt, for sure.

Now, I found it interesting that 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, I've encountered some of this work before. And in some cases, it's by very respected archaeologists, you know, reconstructing tools from ancient times or, you know, creating

creating, you know, recreating Greek triremes, that sort of thing. But yeah, you outline some of the pushback that experimental archaeologists have encountered.

Yeah, there is a bit of a conflict in the field with traditional scholarly academic archaeologists and the people trying to do this new method of archaeology, experimental archaeology. Some of that I think is just sort of traditional inertia where people are used to doing things a certain way. Might be a bit of a generational gap as well in there too.

But some of it, I think, is a little bit of resentment. Sometimes the people I talk to in the book weren't traditional archaeologists. They were maybe a brewer or a chef.

or even a hairdresser in one case, who had an interest in history and came in and sort of proved traditional archaeologists wrong. And I think there was a bit of resentment about that. They didn't like being told they 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 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 are 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. So he flew over to Egypt with a microbiology kit. He started swabbing the inside of pots to get the actual yeast out.

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 someone make him an authentic bread mold. He built a fire pit in his backyard. He kind of went all out on this. And he 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 loaves of bread I've ever had in my life. So you do have people kind of doing poor jobs at this work at the beginning, but in some cases they learn from that and did much better jobs by the end. One quick question about the bread.

what did you expect it to taste like? Did, were you sort of expecting it to taste like archeology to some degree or dusty, like really hard and great? Yeah. Um, I didn't know. I, I guess I expected it to be very bland and very flat. Uh, yeah, I pictured something just very flat, uh,

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 those old pictures of the Mercury astronauts from NASA They would and reenter the earth in this sort of conical shaped space capsule and it looked a lot like that That was the shape. I had a nice springy crust on it and

And it had a really nice sourdough taste to it. There were only a few ingredients in it. Emmer grain, coriander, salt, yeast and water was basically it. And the sourdough 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.

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?

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 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.

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, say, Western colonialism?

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 indigenous people, people from native cultures who to them, this isn't archaeology as much as it's their ancestry. It's their history.

And in a lot of cases, they are either reviving the traditions themselves, you know, going back to look at songs, poems, traditions that they had in 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 reviving

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.

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 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 the final culinary results tasted like? 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 what I did is I gathered a bunch of acorns from different trees around my neighborhood, maybe a few hundred of them, 500, something like that.

Then I had to look around for a hammer stone 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 weevils inside them. So now I had bugs crawling around in my homes. I'd brought them in. And so I had to discard a lot of them.

And then I had to just essentially grind them up into flour as finely as I could. And that was a step, especially that got discouraging because I had, you know, a big bucket of

full of acorns and that eventually ground down to much less than a cup of actionable 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 skipped 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 leaching as well because they tasted like the most bitter thing I've ever eaten in my life. It was like a klaxon 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 scrumptious, 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. You chat with a number of researchers in this book whose work I was familiar with to some to some degree or another, like they've 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 about this?

Yeah, so she's an archaeologist in South Africa, and she does a lot of traditional archaeology, sort of digging things out of the dirt, stuff like that. But she had an idea. She wanted to try and experiment with the bedding that she found. In one cave there, she found what we think is probably the oldest bed on Earth. It's from about 75,000 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 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 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 didn't know.

animals prowling around or whatever, but apparently the beds themselves were fairly comfortable. Um, so she was telling me about all this. I thought it was a really cool little experiment. Um,

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 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 Darwin. It was just disappointing to see an editor put his foot down like that.

Yeah. And then it'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. You hear about these informal experiments and yet it fleshes it out. 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 than you're just reading about digging something up out of the dirt.

Now, speaking of digging things out of the dirt, can you tell us a little bit about your experiences eating toxic potatoes in Peru? Yeah, that was another case where I was a bit surprised at the outcomes of what happened. So potatoes are native to the Andean highlands in Peru. And I didn't realize when I started doing this project that

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.

in the Andean highlands where they're native to. One thing I didn't realize also, though, was that they're toxic. So native potatoes you 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 leach 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. I thought it was like sort of an ancient astronaut food almost. I was like, this is so cool. They're freeze-drying this 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 impress 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 mix 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 Thai 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. Oh, wow. Yeah, 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.

Yeah, it's normally something we would brush off the food, not think like this is integral to be able to eat the food. But it was in this case. We get it. There are too many car insurance companies trying to convince you that they have the best car insurance rates. We don't think we need to convince you. We're rude and we do car insurance differently. We don't think it makes sense to only base your car insurance rate on things that have nothing to do with your driving, like your occupation or education.

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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 atlatl spear thrower. Tell us what it was like getting to try out a reconstruction of this weapon. Yes, the atlatl 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 an atlatl, it's essentially a long, flexible spear. But instead of throwing it with your hand, you use a 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 the who was in charge of this program.

He had a bunch of ladles 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 atlantals at it. It actually didn't have any legs anymore because it had 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 caribou. 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 atlantal darts at them.

And I was surprised at how easy it was to get distance with an atlatl dart. I don't remember off the top of my head, but the world record for throwing one is something like 250 yards, whereas the world record for throwing a javelin is much closer to 100 yards, maybe 110, 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 caribou, 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. It was a pretty common experience. The archaeologist I mentioned actually brought his class in there. So there were maybe 30 of us students and me.

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. Now, I want to come back to the title of the book is, of course, Dinner with King Tut. 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. I did. Yeah. So I didn't go all out getting the grain source from Egypt and, you know, getting the right type of yeast, 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 my home with a basic beer fermenting kit. So you make the mash, you know, you heat it up, you add 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 we're 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 kombucha, 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, the spent grain. So the beer was a little maybe chunkier, you might say, in that there was stuff floating on the top.

And in some places, maybe not Egypt necessarily as much, but in some places in the Caucasus and other areas where they were making this beer, they actually traditionally drank the beer with a straw in order to get below the chaff line and just get at the beer as opposed to getting a big mouthful of the stuff you don't want.

Oh, wow. So any of us that are inclined to use a straw the next time we're having a pint out somewhere, we can just explain. It's an ancient tradition. Yes. Actually, 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 person.

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 mistook it for a scepter at first. That's how elaborate this straw was. But these were valuable items to people back then. 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.

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 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. Now, this is obviously the point to ask, to come back to something you mentioned earlier, the Maryland mummy, the work of Bob Breyer and Ron Wade. Tell us a little bit about this, how it went down, and how has this project aged? Tell us a little bit about how it was received at the time, and have archaeologists warmed up to it?

So this project got started in Baltimore, Maryland in the mid 90s. 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 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 traditions 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-ho 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

And he actually dug out the mineral that they use 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 wadis 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 U.S., all this unidentified white powder that he had in his luggage. But he got it into the U.S.,

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. You're not 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 Egyptologist 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 100 years.

So he got treated, as they put it, sort of like a king. 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 employed for donated bodies. Yes, that's a good point. Yeah.

And actually I got to, uh, 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 of a classic animal that you think is going to smell bad. It's not going to last very long, but

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 in that they mummified a lot of animals as well as human beings.

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 that.

with various Chinese traditions and inventions. You deal with multiple different time periods and places. There's the Viking chapter. So I'm only scratching the surface here with my questions. But I am going to ask you about the Mesoamerican ballgame.

This is one that I think anyone who's ever even like casually studied anything to do with Aztec history and Aztec culture has come across examples of this. Tell us a little bit about this. And did you get to play it?

Yeah, so if you're not familiar with it, the Aztec ball game 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 it past your opponent's end line.

And what makes this 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 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 and you hit the ball with your hip like Shakira. So that kind of puts you in the mindset of

Of what it's like to play this game. And I 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 ball 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, you toss it 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 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 what 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 100 burpees in a row, except then you had to knock a bowling ball back each time you did it.

And before long, maybe a 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 11-year-old child because I just couldn't take this anymore going up and down. And

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 growing 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 soldiers, because again, even after half an hour or so, I was I was a hurting unit.

Yeah, it's, yeah, absolutely sounds brutal. And yeah, you can see how it is certainly based on your experiences here. It's how it conditions the warrior. And yet it does feel weirdly foreign compared to like modern, so many modern popular sports, but in a weird way, like how is it really that different from soccer? We're kicking the ball around. Is it, you know, it's not like people kick each other in war. So I don't know. It's, it's, it's,

I guess it's just a difficult one to try and contemplate as someone familiar with modern sports.

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. Yeah, you can definitely see affinities with modern sports, but it is its own distinct thing.

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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 using fiction alongside the nonfiction to recreate, you know, possible chapters from the past.

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 75,000 years ago. Another chapter is medieval China. You're in ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, Viking times, Arctic a thousand years ago, a bunch of 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 happen 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, how 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 kind of a fun experiment. It's made for a fun reading experience as well. Oh, thank you. But I do have to wonder, though, is this because ultimately I can imagine thinking about this and planning this out at the planning stage of the book.

And then it sounds like you kind of set yourself up with a pretty

sizable challenge to write in addition to the nonfiction portions of the book, what 10 or 11 short stories each set in a different time and place and perspective. 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, what, how they thought about religion, how they thought about family, all these different things. So it did take a lot of reading. Um,

But I'd always been interested in these topics and I'd been kind of gathering string for this book for a while. So I had done some of the reading ahead of time and could draw on those kind of things. And I've been working on this book since actually, I think before the pandemic. So I've been put a lot of time and effort into this one. So I think it paid off. I think the richness of detail in each chapter really does bring a lot. Yeah. The proof is in the pudding.

So the book, again, is Dinner with King Tut, How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, 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. 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 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 and things like that. So just little snippets I've come across. Each one's pretty bite-sized, maybe 20 minutes or so. And yeah, they're out there, little fun-sized bits of science and history. 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. Thanks for having me.

All right. Thanks once again to Sam Keen for coming on the show and chatting with me. Again, his website is samkeen.com, and the book is Dinner with King Tut, How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. It is out in hardcover July 8, 2025.

Thanks, as always, to the excellent J.J. Possway for producing the show here. And if you would like to write in with any feedback, if you would like to just touch base with Joe or myself, well, you can email us at contact at StuffToBlowYourMind.com. Stuff To Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

♪

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