The Current - How does experimental archaeology bring the past alive?

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Have you ever wondered what the food from Ancient Rome might have tasted like, how they created those iconic Roman hairstyles or how you can mummify a person today? These archaeologists have. They’re called experimental archaeologists, and they work to bring the past alive. Sam Kean has written about them in his new book: Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations.

Welcome to the Dudes Club, a brotherhood supporting men's health and wellness. Established in the Vancouver downtown Eastside in 2010, the Dudes Club is a community-based organization that focuses on indigenous men's health, many of whom are struggling with intergenerational trauma, addiction, poverty, homelessness, and chronic diseases. The aim is to reduce isolation and loneliness and for the men to regain a sense of pride and purpose in their lives. As a global health care company, Novo Nordisk is dedicated to driving change for a healthy world. It's what we've been doing since 1923. It also takes the strength and determination of the communities around us, whether it's through disease

awareness, fighting stigmas and loneliness, education, or empowering people to become more active. Novo Nordisk is supporting local changemakers because it takes more than medicine to live a healthy life. Leave your armor at the door. Watch this paid content on CBC Gem. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the Current Podcast. The story goes that he killed a dog with that knife, used this rib cage as a sled and used this hide to harness another dog and he sped off into the night. That is Meetanadhan, an archaeologist and anthropologist at Kent State University speaking

in 2019 to our colleagues at As It Happens. He was doing an experiment, trying to verify a story he'd read about. Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis had written years ago about a story he'd told of an Inuit man stranded in the Arctic who allegedly fashioned a knife from his own frozen feces to kill and butcher a dog. Meaton Aran decided to put that story to the test. Meaton Aran, Ph.D. We actually had dry ice with us, and so we were able to stick the knives into negative 50 degrees centigrade dry ice to get things really, really cold. And then in addition to that, we had a metal file, and so we were able to sharpen

these feces knives as best as we could. Danielle Pletka Meete and Aaron was getting really hands-on, recreating the story from history to learn more about it. And it turns out he's not alone. There's a new generation of researchers who are doing what they call experimental archaeology. Things like cooking and serving full Roman banquets, hauling buckets of sand to try to figure out how the Egyptians actually built the pyramids, or testing the techniques of ancient tattoo artists. American author Sam Kean has written all about these experiments and tried a few himself.

He writes about them in his new book, Dinner with King Tut, how rogue archaeologists are recreating the sights, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations. Sam Keane joins me from Washington. Good morning. Sam Keane Good morning. Danielle Pletka Let's start with the story of the frozen poop knife. Sam Keane Okay. Danielle Pletka Tell me more about that experiment.

Sam Keane Well, I got to actually visit Aereen at Kent State and he was probably the most gung-ho scientist I have ever met in my life any experiment you propose. He was completely excited to do it. And Yeah, he showed me a bunch of things about making stone tools I got to throw ancient weapons spears called that ladles with him And then I asked him about the poop knife. They do not work very well Despite what the claims were that this archaeologist had heard they actually don't cut skin or hide very well They're not very good for butchering. So they concluded from this that The stories that were going around among the Inuit people about someone who had used a poop knife were probably just some mischief and they were maybe pulling

the archaeologists or the anthropologist's leg that had first heard the story or maybe they were trying to, you know, impart a good lesson about how to use the cold to your advantage. Be clever about it. Don't just use the cold or think of the cold as something that's oppressive and bad, but use it to your advantage. You mentioned visiting the lab of Aaron, and he does a lot of work that is beyond testing frozen feces. Can you describe what it was like when you visited his lab? Kind of a mess. There was just stone everywhere. His expertise, what he's really good at is making stone tools. So I spent a few days with him essentially showing me how to turn a lump of church or

obsidian or something into an actual stone tool. One thing that really struck me about the work was how precise they were. One of the very first things that he told me was that he had to disabuse me of what he calls the 2001 Space Odyssey fallacy, which essentially is the idea that you take two rocks, you just sort of smash them together, then you pick through the shards and one of them happens to be sharp enough to make a tool out of. That's sort of the impression that I had going in. He had to disabuse me of that and he said, no, it's actually very, very precise. And I didn't realize how precise and good he was. He took a

chunk of I think it was chert or maybe flint and he took a sharpie marker and he sort of drew this dotted line on the bottom of it and then he turned it over and he drew a little circle with the sharpie on the top of it and then he took another stone a hammer stone a big kind of a smooth potato looking stone and he said when I hit this circle on top, it's going to fracture on the bottom exactly along that dotted line. And I thought, you know, okay, fine, he's going to, you know, approximately hit that line.

But then he hit it perfectly, he turned it over and it had bisected that Sharpie line. I was amazed at how precise he was at doing this. And it really made me appreciate how good people were in prehistorical times, the precision they could bring to making tools. It made me appreciate the technology and skills they had. Danielle Pletka In a way, it's not surprising. I mean, it's centuries of sort of craftsmanship that go into all of these ancient tools and dishes and all the things that people used in everyday life.

Michael O'Brien Yeah, I mean, once I started doing these experiments and thinking about it a little bit more, you do realize how good they are. They were masters of practical chemistry, practical physics. They had a lot of clever ideas. It's just that there is sort of a stereotype out there that, you know, cavemen and cavewomen just didn't know what they were doing or they had primitive thoughts and ideas, things like that. So it was a really nice lesson to be disabused of all that. AMT – So in general, what do we mean when we talk about experimental archaeology? BD – It is kind of a wide field. What I think about in my mind is I differentiate

it from traditional dirt archaeology, where you're, you know, digging in the ground with maybe a toothbrush or dental picks or whatever, you find some pot shards or little fragments of something, and then you theorize about that. That's traditional archaeology. It's a really interesting field. They have insights into thousands of different things that we've gained from that field. But whenever I would go to a traditional archaeology site, I always found it really flat and maybe even a little boring. I mean, they're talking about really big things about humankind, like where we came from, who we are as a species. But the sites just look exactly the same all over the world, and it was just people sitting around in the dirt day after day, digging

up these pot charts. And as a writer, I really couldn't find much that was interesting to write about since every site was exactly the same. But experimental archaeology is really about creating and doing things. You're trying to recreate the past in a lot of different ways, whether that's stone tools, whether it's people recreating ancient recipes and lost foods. During the book, I got to try out my hand at tattooing. I got to try ancient surgery. I got to attend an authentic Roman banquet, just all sorts of really cool things that really brought the past alive in a new

way. It's a really sensory-rich and interesting field. Now, some of these experiments are also kind of gruesome. I'm thinking about the chapter you have where you write about the researchers who tried to butcher an elephant. Can you tell us about that, what they were trying to find out? Yeah, so the essential idea was, you know, we have an idea that human beings were hunting mammoths and elephants way back when because there was a lot of meat on them. But there were questions about this because elephants and especially mammoths have really thick hides. There's a lot of blubber there. especially mammoths have really thick hides.

There's a lot of blubber there. With mammoths, there's hair on top of that. We were just throwing spears or using probably ad ladles, a kind of a variation on spears, to try to hunt these game. Archaeologists and anthropologists had questions about whether we had the arm strength to penetrate their hides and blubber deeply enough to actually kill them and to be able to eat them that way. So starting in the 1970s, an elephant died at a zoo in Boston named Ginsburg the Elephant.

And it was actually kind of a famous elephant. She had been in a movie with John Wayne, this rom-com set in Africa. I've never seen it. Sadly, she got an infection, she died, and there were some archaeologists at the Smithsonian who, when they heard the news on the radio that Ginsburg had died, they thought, we have got to get a hold of the carcass because we want to test how well these stone tools worked. So they sent someone up from Washington, D.C DC to Boston in a flatbed truck that they had borrowed from the whale specialist at the Smithsonian. On the way

back, apparently an ice storm swept in. So we had this elephant strapped to the back of it was kind of speeding down the highway. Eventually it froze on the way back because it was freezing outside. But it was sort of this madcap story about getting this elephant back to Washington so they could run some tests on it. And there were some different conclusions that people drew, but from this and other similar experiments over the years, they realized that it's actually pretty hard

to get through elephant hide, unless you hit it in very specific spots like the stomach. Unless you're hitting it there, humans just didn't have the arm strength to get through the elephant hide and mammoths would be even tougher than that. So the idea is that when we have found pachyderm bones with cut marks on them, human beings were probably scavenging these bones or they were scaring other animals away that had actually taken them down. And that's kind of a cool insight because it's something we wouldn't have been able to tell unless they had done these experiments.

And that's one thing I like about the field is that it opens up new questions and helps us answer old mysteries about humankind. Now in a similar vein, people have also experimented with Egyptian mummification. Can you walk us through that process? Yeah, so there's kind of two threads of these experiments. I didn't realize this going into the book, but the Egyptians mummified a lot of animals as well. In fact, there are graveyards. We can find millions upon millions of animal mummies that the Egyptians made, usually for religious offerings. So there are scientists out there today who do animal

mummification. And I actually made a fish mummy in my apartment in Washington, DC, and just a red snapper that I found, and it mummified perfectly well in, you know, just a couple of weeks. And I still have it sitting on my counter today, perfectly preserved. So it's amazing how well and how quickly this process works. But I also talked to an archaeologist who actually made a human mummy, an Egyptian-style human mummy, in modern times. Where did he get the human? He was working with someone who was the head of the anatomy board in Maryland.

And they had a pool of bodies that had donated their body to science, and instead of giving them to a medical school like you would probably expect, they diverted one and they used it in their experiment. And the guy I talked to, Bob Breyer, was kind of a hoot to talk to. It was a lot of fun. And he decided he was going all out with these experiments. He actually flew over to Egypt to get the mineral that they used to dry out bodies. It's a mineral called Natron, and it's essentially just a mix of baking soda and salt. That's the basic chemical formula. But he decided he had to go over there and get actual Natron from Wadi's or

Gulley's in Egypt. And down in Baltimore, they did this research, and they had a lot of questions. They didn't know how long, roughly roughly it took to make a human mummy. He also made authentic tools from obsidian and copper, and they wanted to know, you know, how these tools worked, you know, whether one worked better than the other. They wanted to know how to get the organs out of the body, so the Egyptians would remove the liver and lungs. That's right. And they would desiccate. They would dry those out. They would also get rid of the brain.

They wanted to know how exactly they got rid of the brain. And so they had all these questions that the Egyptians really didn't answer, and the very little we have about mummification. Did this experiment have scientific value in the end? Yeah, it was controversial. A lot of people thought it was sort of macabre. Some people called it tasteless.

But I think it had a lot of scientific value. Because again, we just don't have a lot of people thought it was sort of macabre, some people called it tasteless, but I think it had a lot of scientific value because again we just don't have a lot of records about what the Egyptians were doing when they mummified things. Maybe we lost the records, maybe it was a secret, but doing this they were able to answer how much natron roughly they needed, how long it took, what tools they used, and the big question that Bob Breyer had about the mummification process was, you know, you see a kind of a classic iconic mummy look. Their face, the skin on it is really stretched, maybe their teeth are exposed a little bit, it's probably a little off color, and he wanted to know, was that a function of mummification or was

it the fact that these bodies have been sitting in a very dry climate in Egypt for thousands of years? What actually causes those anatomical changes? And they had to change the natron after putting it on the body for a bit. And even after five weeks, when they broke the natron off of this body, the crust of natron off, and looked at it, Breyer was astounded that it looked, in his words, exactly like Ramsey's the Great, even after five weeks. So he sort of got chills at that moment. He said, wow. Question answered.

Yeah, mummification is what gives mummies their iconic look. Welcome to The Dudes Club, a brotherhood supporting men's health and wellness. Established in the Vancouver downtown Eastside in 2010, the Dudes Club is a community-based organization that focuses on indigenous men's health, many of whom are struggling with intergenerational trauma,

addiction, poverty, homelessness, and chronic diseases. The aim is to reduce isolation and loneliness, and for the men to regain a sense of pride and purpose in their lives. As a global healthcare company Novo Nordisk is dedicated to driving change for a healthy world. It's what we've been doing since 1923. It also takes the strength and determination of the communities around us whether it's through disease awareness, fighting stigmas and loneliness, education or empowering people to become more active.

Novo Nordisk is supporting local changemakers because it takes more than medicine to live a healthy life. Leave your armor at the door. Watch this paid content on CBC Gem. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at Viking.com. Now in addition to mummification and finding out about the butchering of an elephant, people are also doing things like recreating ancient meals to find out what things tasted like

back then, like bread or beer in ancient Europe. What was it like for you to try that? They were delicious. I think that's sort of another stereotype people have that people were probably eating mushy or kind of bland things way back when. But the bread especially, I remember eating, the ancient Egyptian bread was absolutely delicious. It was the best loaf of bread I have ever had in my life.

How does learning about bread or beer, which was another thing you experimented with, how does that help us understand more about the role that they played in the development of complex civilizations in history? 2. So there's always been kind of a question among archaeologists about how farming got started. We know where roughly it got started, we know they were domesticating grains and growing those, but there was kind of a question about what really was the impetus for us doing it. And the idea for a long time has been that it was bread that really drove people to domesticate grains. That they figured out they could make bread out of these grains,

and you know, they started settling down a little bit, and really bread was the big driver for us to domesticate grains and become sedentary farming people. But archaeologists nowadays, some of them are kind of questioning that assumption, and they think that actually beer might have been more of a driver of farming. Because if you think about it, making a loaf of bread is kind of a pain. It takes a lot of work to gather the grains. You have to grind them up, you have to bake them, and it's not obvious how to bake them if you don't know already. It takes a lot of work to do that.

You wouldn't know to add yeast necessarily or something like that. So the idea that bread came first could be a bit problematic, whereas beer, you know, beer is kind of fun. You know, people would use it in religious festivals maybe, things like that. That might have been worth all of the work that people were doing to make beer. So it's kind of upended the idea that farming and then civilization after that was driven by the need for bread.

It might have been beer that was actually the driver there. AMT – Many of the people doing this kind of work are academics, but in your book, many others are not. There are people who have regular jobs and their experimental archaeology is sort of a side gig. One is Janet Stevens. Can you tell us about her? She was really interesting and she spends some of her spare time recreating Roman hairstyles. Yeah, she was a real hoot to talk to you. She's another person in Baltimore and she is a hairdresser by training. And one day she was walking around in a museum and there was a room at the museum that had

some Roman busts. And they were arranged in kind of an unusual way in that instead of being along the side of the room, kind of like people at a parade, they were in a circle in the middle of the room. And as a hairstylist, the first thing she wanted to see was the backs of the heads. That's her usual point of view, looking at a head. And she saw these busts that had these amazingly tall mountains of curls on top of them. And she thought, wow, that's a really fascinating hairstyle.

I would like to recreate that. So she went home and she has some styling dummies there. And she used the tools that they would have had back then, you know, usually bobby pins, things like that. And she could not recreate these hairstyles no matter what she did as a professional. She thought, that's weird, I can't recreate this. Let me go do a little bit of research, see what other classicists have said about Roman hair styling.

And as soon as she started reading these papers, she realized that these classicists had no idea what they were talking about. They had never styled hair before in their life, and the things they were saying about hair just did not make any sense to her. And she realized that, well, if someone's going to solve the mystery of how they made this hair, it's going to have to be me. And this was kind of a big challenge for her because she's somewhat dyslexic, and she had also failed Latin when she was in school. But she was pretty determined, and she started typing pages and pages of old Latin books into Google Translate and just looking for any sort of clue she could find to how they made this hair.

And eventually she found one passage in this obscure grammar book that mentioned something about the needle that the tailor and the hair stylist used. And she realized, aha, they weren't pinning hair into place, they were sewing hair into place. And once she got a needle and a thread, she realized that she could recreate all of these elaborate hairstyles by sewing hair into place. So Ashley traveled up to Baltimore and spent an afternoon recreating these Roman hairstyles with these dummies in her basement. It was a lot of fun. Now, indigenous communities are also getting quite involved in some of this work. What's

the motivation for them? In a lot of cases for them, this isn't so much, you know, archaeology, kind of an academic field where they're just trying to understand it. In a lot of cases, this is their ancestry. So sometimes they are trying to revive things that sort of got eliminated through colonization or other processes. And sometimes these are actually traditions that they have kept alive, and they are the ones going to archaeologists and correcting them and telling them the way things were. So those are kind of the three groups that I talk about in the book. There were this sort of regular academics who are doing experiments. There's

the enthusiastic amateurs. And then there's the indigenous groups who are really keeping these traditions alive. And a lot of people call the field not just experimental archaeology, but experiential archaeology, or even living archaeology. And especially for the indigenous groups, it is really living archaeology to them or in some cases just their everyday life So you really got your hands dirty with some of these experiments and you also got some ink on your leg Can you tell me about your experience of getting tattooed in the name of research for this book? Yeah, I was actually on my thigh that I got this tattoo right above my knee. Yeah.

And essentially I wanted to know a bit how they tattooed and what it felt like way back when. Obviously they didn't have tattoo guns like nowadays. They would use a needle and they would deposit ink under the skin with a needle. So I went out to a place in Orange County in California that actually does this old style of tattooing and got a little tattoo. It ended up taking longer than I expected with the hand poking.

But it was fun to really see how they did it, to actually experience it. It was my first tattoo. And then afterward actually, the guy turned to me and he said, hey, do you want to give me a tattoo? Whoa! And I thought, well, I kind of have to now, I can't back down from this. So I feel like I'm probably one of the very first people who both got and gave their first tattoo on the same day. And tell us about how his turned out. His turned out okay. I'm not the world's best artist, I

will say that. My stick figures can even look a little dicey sometimes. But it turned out okay. Danielle Pletka Now, one of the men you visit, the one who was trying to unravel the mystery of how the Egyptian pyramids were built, he's actually considered a bit of a rogue. Why is there so much skepticism about this field from more mainstream archaeologists? There's a lot of bad archaeology out there. There's everything from, you know, aliens built the pyramids to there were civilizations

tens of thousands of years ago to even people who just don't do a good job with experimental archaeology. You know, they're not careful about what they're doing, things like that. So some of the skepticism is, I think, warranted. But I think some of it is just inertia. There's a sense among archaeologists that this is the way we do things, the way we've always done things. We dig things out of the dirt. We don't get our fingers dirty and hands dirty in the lab doing things like that.

So yeah, there is a lot of skepticism among sort of scholarly archaeologists about the field in general. And in the case of the pyramids, how much light was somebody like Roger Larson, who was a man in this case, how much was he able to shed on that big question of how the pyramids were built? Yeah, I was kind of surprised that archaeologists don't know how the pyramids were built.

We just don't really have any idea at all. I think a lot of people assume they were, you know, on log rollers, these big blocks, and were pushing them up ramps. But experiments have shown log rollers are very poor. They do not work very well at all. And the idea with ramps, you know, they seem good on paper. But given how big and tall the pyramids are, to get a block all the way to the top of that pyramid, the height and length of a ramp you would need, the volume of that ramp, would be many times more than even the pyramid itself. So the amount of work it would take to do that is just astronomical. And I spent a day with Roger Larson in his shop in Mississippi where he had built a scale

model of a pyramid, and we spent an afternoon pouring sand, building a ramp out of material they could have used in ancient Egypt. And again, the amount of material that would have gone into the ramp was far, far bigger than the volume of the pyramid itself. So it was a nice demonstration that ramps probably did not work very well in building these pyramids. So he convinced me on that that I really don't think the ramps hold water. Did he get any closer to how they were built?

He did have some theories about that and this is where it gets more hypothetical and conjectural because after the demonstration he took me out to this quarry outside of town where he had built what he called his pyramid machine. And it's essentially a frame, two frames, two A-frames with levers attached to them made out of big beams. And then there's this complex contraption with ropes and ratchets in the middle. And then there's a sledge.

And essentially he showed with this machine that it was possible using equipment and ropes that Egyptians had to drag blocks up the face of the pyramid itself. So instead of using a ram, you could drag it straight up the side of the pyramid, these very large blocks. Now, whether the Egyptians actually used something that looked like what Roger Larson did, I have no idea. Neither does he. No one has any idea.

Danielle Pletka And any interest in that from mainstream archaeologists? Dr. Robert K. Hickman There really was not. He tried to get his results published in a journal. He even tried to buy an ad in an archaeology journal just saying, hey, I tried this experiment out, anyone interested in collaborating or testing it? And the archaeology journals turned down a paying advertisement in their journals because they were so allergic to the very idea of experimental archaeology. And Larsen used to run an alternative newspaper in his hometown in Mississippi. And as a publisher, he said, I can't imagine turning down an ad, but they turned it down. newspaper in his hometown in Mississippi. And as a publisher, he said, I can't imagine

turning down an ad, but they turned it down. Yeah, I guess they really didn't want it. Sam Keane, thanks so much for speaking with me. Thanks for having me. Sam Keane's new book is called Dinner with King Tut, How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sight, Smells and Tastes of Lost Civilizations. He also hosts the Disappearing Spoon podcast. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.