Introduction
I’ve always had a gripe with archaeology. On the one hand, it seems like the most thrilling field in science. It illuminates the deep history of humankind in a way no other discipline can—unveiling who we are as human beings, where we came from, what unites us today with every culture in our past. It reveals no less than our fundamental selves.
On the other hand, whenever I actually visited an archaeological dig, I felt my shoulders sag in disappointment. The work looked so…dull. No matter where I was in the world, it was just scores of sunburned men and women sprawled in the dirt, dusting off broken pot shards with toothbrushes. And not for a few hours, but day after day, year after year. It was such a letdown, the most godawful tedium I could imagine. In no other field is there such a disconnect between the stirring conclusions reached and the sheer monotony of the daily grind.
Imagine my delight, then, when I first read about experimental archaeology.
As the name implies, experimental archaeology puts ideas about the past to the test, either in the lab or out in nature. Many practitioners even subject themselves to experimentation, safely or not, to replicate different aspects of our ancestors’ lives—their food, clothing, shelter, body art, and more. Put another way, instead of just digging things up and passively theorizing about them, experimental archaeologists do things—actively recreate the past. They brew Viking beer. They make mummies. They drive chariots, play Aztec ballgames, revive ancient yeast and bake the tangy sourdough that King Tut ate. They build rickety ships and plunge out onto the open sea with all the verve of Indiana Jones, to trace the epic journeys of our ancestors. Indeed, some proponents call the field not experimental archaeology but experiential archaeology or even living archaeology. It doesn’t recreate the past as much as resurrect it.
I especially appreciate how sensory-rich the field is compared to traditional archaeology. Excavations and artifacts allow us to sketch a decent picture of what the past looked like, but by and large, conventional dirt archaeology neglects the other senses. Not experimental archaeology. You can smell the crab-like odor of a deer hide as you tan it, or taste the salty pinch of fermented Roman fish sauce. You can hear the boom of medieval cannons, or feel the bone-wearying fatigue of spending several hours grinding your own grain into flour—as well as the compensatory satisfaction of tearing into a fresh loaf of bread afterward, knowing it tastes twice as good because you earned your appetite.
Another exciting aspect of the field is how few rules there are; insight can spring from anywhere. Some adherents are hardcore lab geeks, very data- and tech-driven. Others are traditional archaeologists who sensed something missing in their previous work and longed to connect with lost societies on a more intimate level. Some are grouchy, live-off-the-land survivalists with tales of fending off grizzlies and tanning moose hides. (I’ve now met multiple Naked and Afraid contestants.) Some, frankly, are screwball enthusiasts who nevertheless got me thinking big thoughts about the human condition, and kept me thinking for days. Not everyone you’ll meet in these pages calls themself an experimental archaeologist, or even an archaeologist, period. But they all share a commitment to the messy fun of recreating the lives of our ancestors.
Their work fascinated me so much that I decided to embrace the spirit of the field and get active myself. There’s no better way to learn than by doing, and thankfully, these men and women were more than happy to let me tag along on their adventures and guide me on experiments of my own, however ill-advised. Under their tutelage, I’ve made a DIY mummy, fired a giant catapult, even tattooed someone. I’ve eaten guinea pig, llama, caterpillar, whale, and walrus. I’ve been spattered with urine, blood, blubber oil, and worse, in countries all over the globe. I loved every second of it.
To be sure, I didn’t emerge from this book as any sort of survival expert. I failed far more than I succeeded, even at simple tasks. (There’s nothing more humbling than realizing that, if I were teleported to pretty much any era in the past, I would have starved to death in about half an hour.) But in each case, the process proved more revealing than the results. I still can’t hurl a spear straight or make a decent loaf of acorn bread—and God help me if I ever have to perform another trepanation, a form of primitive neurosurgery (really) that’s been saving lives for 10,000 years. But I learned a vast amount about ancient life anyway. It was like running my fingers over a flat surface and suddenly feeling a third dimension ripple up. This work made the people of ancient Rome and Africa and Polynesia and Egypt come alive for me in ways they never had before, and keeps them alive for me now.
And yet, despite its delights, experimental archaeology remains controversial within the larger field. In some cases, this is simply healthy skepticism. Can we really recreate, say, ancient Egyptian bread or million-year-old tools? As you’ll see within these pages, the answer, increasingly, is yes. And even when we can’t recreate things with 100-percent, atom-by-atom fidelity (an impossible standard anyway), the tacit knowledge we gain fills important gaps in our understanding of the past, knowledge that’s impossible to glean from examining artifacts alone. However laudable our brains, we Homo sapiens are builders and makers deep down. To truly grasp something, you have to use your hands.
Still, much of the disdain for experimental archaeology stems from something deeper than mere skepticism. Some academics despise the field as a rogue upstart, and dismiss even well-designed experiments as “theater.” One foe insists that the only reason people go into experimental archaeology is “the satisfaction of character deficiencies.” Perhaps. But many indigenous groups have found experimental archaeology invaluable for reconnecting with cultural traditions, traditions that have nearly been wiped out over the past few centuries. It seems callous to dismiss that as “character deficiencies.” Moreover, my sympathies will always lie with those who subject their ideas to testing and bring some practical knowledge to bear on their research. As one archaeologist told me, “Anyone who’s doing work on [excavating] foundations should learn how to lay stone; anyone who’s doing beermaking should be brewing it.” It says something curious about the state of archaeology that these are considered radical notions.
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A word on the book’s structure. Unlike my previous books, Dinner with King Tut combines fiction and nonfiction. The nonfiction consists of both archaeological research and first-person reported accounts from my trips to visit scientists, historians, practitioners of lost arts, and plain old eccentrics around the globe. In parallel with those accounts, each chapter also recreates a day in the life of a specific man or woman in a specific time and place, starting in sub-Saharan Africa 75,000 years ago, and moving forward toward the present. Along the way, we’ll track vicious game with South American hunters, help build (and rob) pyramids in Egypt, endure bitter cold in remote Alaskan villages, and navigate between impossibly far-flung Polynesian islands, among other adventures. But even these fictional sections are built on fact. That is, while the characters in each chapter are invented, they are representative of their time and place, and the details of their lives—what they ate, where they slept, what they smelled and heard and saw—are based on real archaeological research. In short, everything that happens to them could and did happen to people in ancient times, and in a modest way, these stories aim to do some experimental archaeology of their own in recreating the life experiences of ancient people.
In combination, the novelistic and nonfictional elements allow you to not only experience what ancient people did, but get inside their minds and grasp their worldviews—what made them laugh and cry, what terrified and humiliated them, their entire gestalt.
Beyond relating some incredible tales, I hope this book can illuminate what human beings have lost in modern times, and encourage us to preserve traditions that face extinction or eradication across the world. There’s a real cost to being cut off from our heritage. People once smelled hay and dung and blood and cooking smoke constantly. They once had to build or make most everything around them, and they couldn’t shy away from the ugly aspects of life—death very much included. Today, we live in a far more sanitized world, and have little tangible knowledge about where our food and other goods come from. We’re narrower as people, and live in a way that would feel alien to virtually every ancestor we have. That seems unhealthy, even destabilizing. Human beings are social creatures, with social needs and instincts, and we’re drifting further and further from the types of societies that once nurtured and fulfilled us.
But experimental archaeology—living archaeology—can reconnect us. When you make your own clothes and build your own hearth, butcher your own food and navigate your own path through the wilderness using nothing but your wits, well, there’s something deeply human about that. The stories here are meant to be instructive and fun, but they’re also a form of time-travel—passing traditions down, connecting one generation to the next. Indeed, as close to time-travel as we humans can ever hope to get.
Chapter 1: Africa—75,000 Years Ago
Our species, Homo sapiens, arose roughly 300,000 years ago in Africa, and by 75,000 years ago, a full suite of modern behavior was on display, including tool use, trade, artistic and symbolic behavior, and more. These ancestors of ours—every bit as intelligent as we are today, and every bit as prone to folly—lived in small bands as nomadic hunter-gatherers, roaming from place to place as the seasons passed to collect and hunt food.
No modern human group lives exactly like people did way back when, obviously, but some live much closer to the old hunter-gatherer ways than others, including the famous San people of southern Africa (formerly known as the Bushmen). Today the San are largely confined to the Kalahari, a harsh desert, but historically they ranged much more widely throughout southern Africa, including into relatively lush areas. This chapter combines aspects of the age-old San lifestyle with archaeological evidence of how people in those lusher areas lived.
Contrary to popular belief, the hunting-gathering life was not a constant struggle to survive. Much of the time, in fact, life was quite pleasant—rich and fulfilling, with people having as much or even more leisure time than we do today. Still, when things went badly for people back then, they went very badly indeed. As the saying goes, it doesn’t matter how well you eat for eleven months of the year if you don’t eat at all during the twelfth…