Most archaeologists spend time digging in the dirt or piecing together broken artifacts or bones in the lab, attempting to make sense of the past in a painstakingly slow process. But others use that information — and a little ingenuity — to re-create the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of ancient societies through a practice called experimental archaeology.

In his book "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations" (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), author Sam Kean delves into the overloaded sensory world of experimental archaeology practitioners. Along the way, he learns to knap a stone tool like early Homo sapiens did, create an intricate hairstyle that would make a Roman woman proud, tattoo someone using ancient tools, play an Aztec ball game, and bake the kind of sourdough loaf that King Tut once ate.

Kristina Killgrove: What intrigued you about experimental archaeology?

Sam Kean: There was sort of a conflict within me because, on the one hand, I really love the questions that archaeology brings up. There's some big, meaty questions about who we are as a species, how we spread across the Earth, how we changed as we spread across the Earth ‪—‬ these really important, big questions about human history. But whenever I would go to an actual archaeological site, it just seemed to me like the most boring work I could imagine. It's just people sitting around in the dirt with toothbrushes or dental picks or whatever, picking up potsherds, and it just seemed so tedious to me.

Experimental archaeology seemed like a lot more lively, sensory-rich field because archaeologists in this field are actually doing things. They're re-creating stone tools, making ancient foods. You can smell the past. So it was just a lot more exciting way for me to get into archaeology.

KK: Tell me about your research process for this book. Did you "embed" with archaeologists and participate in their experiments?

SK: Each chapter is set in a different time and place, so you're really immersed in a day in the life of that person. There was a lot of reading about traditional archaeology and what we've learned from that, because we have learned a lot from it. But then I would go talk to experimental archaeologists and go through the process of brain-tanning leather or getting on a ship that they would have sailed on, and I just experienced it in the way that they're doing their research and experienced it more like people would have in the past too.

KK: Did you have a favorite experiment that you learned about or a favorite archaeologist you embedded with?

SK: There's a guy out in Utah who built a trebuchet — a giant medieval catapult. It was about 30 or 40 feet [9 to 12 meters] tall, I think. And we just spent a lovely day flinging these giant garden stones around at this palisade that he had built, as a stand-in for a fort, essentially. And we just spent a day flinging these huge stones at this fort and watching it smash in and splinter the wood and try to destroy this little fort. Getting to pull the trigger on this catapult — it was just like this majestic dragon coming to life, almost, as it started to fling these balls. And it was like a whip cracking of the sling as it would fling the stone out. That was just a really lovely memory, partly because everything worked properly that day.

A lot of the book was actually me floundering around, failing to complete the projects or figuring out what I was doing wrong. And I think that was a good learning method. I did learn a lot by flailing around, probably more than I would have had I gotten things correct the first time immediately. But it was nice when things went right every once in a while. And the catapult was a good example of that.

KK: That sounds so cool! And in the excerpt that we are publishing on Live Science from your book "Dinner with King Tut," you talk to people who used ancient Egyptian mummification techniques on a real human body. What did you learn from talking to these people? And did you get to try mummifying a body yourself?

SK: Not a body, but I did do a little mummification myself. I didn't know this before I started writing the book, but the Egyptians mummified a lot of animals, a huge variety of animals, dozens of different types, and on a big, big scale. There's one grave site they found with something like 4 million bird mummies. So there have been a fair number of archaeologists in modern times who have tried to — and succeeded in — mummifying different animals, even though the Egyptians didn't write down a whole lot about the process. We don't know if it was lost to time or if it was just sort of a guild secret where they didn't write things down. So they would do this to learn about the mummification process with animals.

But, of course, the thing that really intrigues us about ancient Egypt are the human mummies. And everyone thought we couldn't actually make a human mummy until two guys did in the '90s. It was one Egyptologist [Bob Brier] and the guy who was in charge of the Maryland state anatomy board [Ronn Wade], who got to decide where cadavers went that had been donated to science. He decided this was a worthwhile project.

The donor remains anonymous, but he was a 76-year-old man from Baltimore who had died of a heart attack. They went all out to be authentic for this project. They went to Egypt to get the mineral natron that they would have used to mummify him. They had ancient tools made, and they went through all the steps that were known in mummification and turned this person into a mummy.

KK: Did these researchers learn more than what is in the historical records? What did they learn from doing this themselves?

SK: It was a controversial project. People said, when you donate your body to science, that's not a blank check to do whatever you want. Some people called it horrifying. And some people said that they didn't think it had any scientific value. I understand the ethical concerns, but I don't think it's true that we didn't learn anything.

One thing that sticks out in my mind that I was surprised about is how they used authentic tools. Archaeologists have found obsidian blades with mummies — those are volcanic glass — and they found copper tools associated with them. So, when these guys were trying to open the body up initially, it turned out that the copper blades they had were not good at all. They could not get through the skin and the muscle of the abdomen very well. The obsidian tools turned out to be much better at that task, which surprised me. I wouldn't have thought that the stone tools would have been better than the metal tools. That's something we wouldn't have learned had we not gone through the process.

Also, the iconic look of the mummy: It has retracted teeth and sparse hair and a forehead pulled very tight. Bob Brier, the Egyptologist involved, had seen a lot of mummies, and he always wanted to know, do they look like that because they've been sitting in Egypt, a dry environment, for 3,000 years, or is it the mummification process that gives them that look? And he said that even after about five weeks, when they took a peek at the body, they could tell it had that classic iconic mummy look. He said it looked exactly like Ramesses the Great to him. So we did learn things about the mummification process through this that we just wouldn't have known otherwise.

KK: That's amazing that this controversial experiment produced new knowledge. You mentioned you mummified something — tell me about it.

SK: I did mummify a fish for the book. That was kind of a fun process, and it was a surprisingly easy thing to do. You can rub the oils in, wrap them up, include little spells like they did back then. But the basic process is just using natron — which is baking soda and salt — and you just put the fish or whatever you want to mummify underneath this. Then it just does the work on its own.

KK: Then I guess the real question is, did you eat that fish that you mummified?

SK: No, but it's sitting on my shelf still as a little memento. I did accumulate quite a nice collection of artifacts and things – stone tools I made, I opened and ate an ostrich egg. I made tapa or kapa — which is a type of Polynesian bark cloth. So I did get to do and make and take home a lot of cool souvenirs from this.

KK: That's so fun! And your book is a little different from some other popular science books because you include these fictional narratives based in archaeological and historical fact. In the introduction, you call them a "form of time travel." Tell me a bit more about why you chose this unusual structure for the book and what you hope readers will get out of that.

SK: What I really value about experimental archaeology is that it's pretty immersive, especially the sensory aspects of it. You do get to feel — to some degree, at least — that you are there and that you are doing the things that people back then were doing. I thought that fiction would allow me to take that even one step further and really get in the minds and be in the world that those people lived in. So you get to wake up where they did, eat the foods that they did, and experience their society. Something like religion or their beliefs in the supernatural or spiritual beliefs are not going to be amenable to experimental archaeology, but you can do that in fiction. And so it allowed me to take it one step further, and it was just fun to try and fun to write as well.

KK: Is experimental archaeology going to be something you cover more in a future book?

SK: I think I could do it if I wanted to revisit it because there were other cultures that, for various reasons, I decided to not include. People are doing work in ancient Greece, but that didn't make it into the book. I do have one chapter in sub-Saharan Africa tens of thousands of years ago, but that was the Cradle of Humankind. I could certainly do other aspects of that. There's definitely fodder out there for another book, especially as these techniques get more accepted. It has been heartening to see that people are more accepting of experimental archaeology, and even people on traditional digs now are running maybe an experiment or two. So they're not going all the way to experimental archaeology, but they're incorporating these practices.

It's just such a fun field. I really would encourage people to get involved with it and to try it out, because you can do a lot of basic things like gather acorns and try to make a recipe out of those. Or research some ancient Roman or Greek food and try to re-create that stuff ‪—‬ just little experiments and things you can do to get people excited about it and bring the past alive in a new way.

And I have a new book coming out in the fall called "The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History" [National Geographic, 2026]. It's about the greatest lost treasures in history and has some interesting archaeological angles in there.

KK: I'll look forward to reading that. Thanks for chatting with me!

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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