Name: Decoding history’s mysteries: From the pyramids to the hidden atomic bomb | Sam Kean: Full Interview
Uploaded: 2026-03-06T18:11:22.000Z
Duration: 53 min 4 s
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I am the author of several books and my latest book is Dinner with King How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells and Tastes of Lost Civilizations.

Participle clauses

Part one, Bringing Ancient History to Life.

Chapter One, Resurrecting Ancient Practices.

If you're thinking of Indiana Jones, traditional archaeology is not that.

It's things buried in the ground that you have to dig up, put in context and try to piece together the past.

Brushing off little pot shards and bits of bone with toothbrushes, day after day, hour after hour.

Traditional archeology is very good about what the past looked like.

So they can tell you there was a wall here, there was a building over here.

You get a good general sense of the landscape and, and

probably the range of materials that an ancient civilization was using.

But what I was lacking was all of the other senses.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I discovered experimental archaeology.

Experimental archaeologists make and do things.

They try to recreate the past in all sorts of different ways, whether it be making ancient recipes and foods, stone tools, ancient medicines, building ships and heading out into the ocean.

All sorts of things that involve resurrecting the past.

If you have deep knowledge about how to do something or how to make something, you're going to ask different, better questions about it and have a better eye about what to look for, the range of things people might have used, stuff like that.

And another thing experimental archaeology can do is help us solve some of the great mysteries of the past.

How did they actually build the pyramids in Egypt?

How did they erect those giant statues on Easter Island?

How did we hunt ancient creatures, big pachyderms and things like that?

Experimental archaeology can help us get at those questions.

For this book, I attended an authentic Roman banquet and ate strange foods of all kinds, everything from caterpillars to walruses.

I spent a day out in Utah with a guy who built a 30 foot catapult and we spent an afternoon hurling these giant stone boulders around.

I got to give and get my very first tattoo.

I got to try my hand at ancient neurosurgery and all sorts of other projects.

One thing I really like about experimental archaeology is the range of people that are involved in doing it.

In some cases you have sort of hardcore lab geeks.

They're in a lab collecting data, just sort of like a traditional scientist would.

In other cases, you have archaeologists who fell in love with some ancient civilization, and

they wanted to connect with it on a deeper level.

And they figured there was no other way to do that except to go out and try to recreate certain aspects of the past.

You also have indigenous communities who in a lot of cases have kept these traditions alive for thousands and thousands of years.

And often they are the ones actually teaching archaeologists about this material.

So it's really a two way street with these groups where they are the ones imparting their knowledge to the scholars and academics.

And then you can go all the way to sort of these grouchy survivalists who live out in the woods.

But they've picked up tricks or tricks have been passed down to them and they have a lot of knowledge, some cases implicit knowledge that you just don't get from armchair archaeology.

And in some cases they've actually rewritten what we know about archaeology because they brought to bear their own knowledge on the field and showed the experts where they were wrong.

So imagine you're a person in Africa 75,000 years ago.

You probably travel around from place to place, maybe spend a few weeks sleeping in a cave.

But caves have hard dirt floors, not very comfortable, so you're going to have to make a bed of some sort.

Also your main activity is probably going to be gathering food and water.

So you would have a canteen of some sort to carry water around, probably made from an ostrich egg.

And then to get ready to find food that day, you're going to have to make your own tools and go out on a hunt.

The first thing you would do is you would spread a bunch of debris around in the cave and you would light it on fire, it would burn.

also importantly, leave a nice soft layer of ash that's essentially going to be your mattress.

Then you're going to go out and gather some plants, aromatic leaves especially.

You're gonna lay those down as sort of a top sheet on that layer of ash.

So this is going to be fairly comfortable because ash, it's nice and soft, sort of like sleeping on the beach.

And people have actually recreated these beds and have slept in them overnight.

And they said that they were in fact pretty comfortable.

It also had another benefit in that the ash kept away ticks.

Insects were a big problem for people thousands of years ago.

They didn't have repellent, they didn't have ways of keeping them off.

So having a nice ash layer on the ground prevented ticks from burrowing up and locking onto your legs.

I talked to a woman who actually gathered a bunch of ticks, put them in the center of a nice ring of ash, and

The ticks tried to burrow through the ash.

And the ones that did make it through the ash, their mouthparts ended up so gummed that they couldn't bite anyone afterward.

So the ash also provided a way to prevent ticks from biting your legs.

They were usually aromatic leaves that kept mosquitoes away.

So in addition to providing comfort, this bed also kept away parasites that can annoy you and spread diseases.

So when you get up in the morning, you're probably thirsty.

And if you're in this cave, you're going to reach for your water receptacle, which will be an ostrich egg canteen.

Ostrich eggs are usually pretty large and they're usually pretty thick and dense.

So what they would do is they would take a stone tool and they would saw the top of the ostrich egg open, usually make a little square or something like that.

They would pour the insides of the eggs out and then they would clean it out with some aromatic herbs, wash it, and

then you have a nice little canteen for the book.

I actually bought an ostrich egg online and tried these steps myself.

I, I got to cook the ostrich egg in a big old skillet.

The yolk was this amazingly rich, sort of caramelly egg flavor.

The whites were less good, a little runny, kind of foamy.

Not my favorite, but you know, they weren't horrible.

And then after I had cut open the top of the ostrich egg with the stone tool, I washed it out and used it to hold water.

And one really cool thing about ostrich eggs is that they're slightly porous.

Not so much that water's going to leak out of it, but

microscopically, there are tiny little pores in the ostrich egg that let water escape from it.

Evaporation cools it, so it keeps the water colder than the ambient temperature.

So an ostrich egg is actually a self cooling canteen.

So after you get your nice drink of water, you're probably going to start on one of the main activities of the day, which is making stone tools.

For this you're probably gonna use chert or flint, a very hard rock that fractures very cleanly.

This is an example of a stone that you might try to make a tool out of.

So you're gonna hold it in your lap like this.

Then you're gonna take another stone called a hammer stone, and you're gonna drop it onto this tool.

So imagine my fist here is the hammer stone.