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Wall Street Journal
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Dinner With King Tut' Review: The Taste of Ancient Egypt
The science writer Sam Kean's all-in approach to research is evident not only from the ink on the pages of his books but from the ink on his skin. In 'Dinner With King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations,' Mr. Kean spends time with various specialists devoted to understanding the lives of our distant ancestors. In the course of his travels, he makes stone tools, tans leather, mummifies a fish and renders seal blubber into oil. The depth of the writer's commitment is tested when he meets with a Southern Californian tattooist proficient in ancient methods of body art. While he is, in his own words, 'not a tattoo guy,' the author feels obligated to submit to the artist's needle, settling on a small asterisk on his thigh. 'Given how universal tattooing was in prehistory, I realized I'd always have a gap in my understanding of life unless I sucked it up and got a hand-poked tattoo myself,' he writes, referring to the manual method some experts believe was used to ink Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummy discovered in the Alps. Traditional archaeology holds little appeal for Mr. Kean. He recalls time spent at archaeological digs, where he observed practitioners meticulously sifting through dirt, as 'such a letdown, the most godawful tedium I could imagine.' He's instead drawn to the burgeoning subfield of experimental archaeology (also known as experiential or living archaeology), whose adherents attempt to accurately replicate elements of ancient people's lives. Each chapter of this lively book covers a specific time and place, beginning 75,000 years ago on the African savanna and concluding with 16th-century Mexico. Stops along the way include ancient Egypt, Imperial Rome, Viking Europe and medieval China. Each chapter presents an overview of life during the period and introduces the experimental archaeologists Mr. Kean meets in his travels. (Some, it should be said, aren't technically archaeologists but are, in the author's fond description, 'screwball enthusiasts.')
New York Times
25-06-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Scientists Retrace 30,000-Year-Old Sea Voyage, in a Hollowed-Out Log
In 1947, against the best navigational advice, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl and five crew members set sail from Peru on a balsa wood raft to test his theory that ancient South American cultures could have reached Polynesia. The frail vessel, called Kon-Tiki, crossed several thousand nautical miles of the Pacific in 103 days and showed that his anthropological hunch was at least feasible. In 2019, in much the same spirit, a research team led by Yousuke Kaifu, an anthropologist at the University of Tokyo, built a dugout canoe in order to study another aspect of western Pacific migration: How did ancient humans, more than 30,000 years ago, navigate the powerful Kuroshio current from Taiwan to southern Japanese islands, such as Okinawa, without maps, metal tools or modern boats? 'Since any physical evidence would have been washed away by the sea, we turned to experimental archaeology, in a similar vein to the Kon-Tiki,' Dr. Kaifu said. Two new studies published on Wednesday in the academic journal Science presented the results of those experiments. In one report, advanced ocean models recreated hundreds of virtual voyages to pinpoint the most plausible routes for the crossing. 'We tested various seasons, starting points and paddling methods under both modern and prehistoric conditions,' Dr. Kaifu said. The other paper charts the 45-hour journey that Dr. Kaifu's crew made from eastern Taiwan to Yonaguni Island in the southern Ryukyus. The mariners, four men and one woman, paddled the 25-foot canoe, a hollowed-out cedar log christened Sugime, for 122 nautical miles on the open sea, relying solely on the stars, sun and wind for their bearings. Often, they could not see their target island. 'Yosuke Kaifu's team has found the most likely answer to the migration question,' said Peter Bellwood, an archaeologist at the Australian National University who was not involved in the undertaking. Such a crossing between islands, he said, would have been one of the oldest, and among the longest, in the history of Homo sapiens up to that period, exceeded only by the migration to Australia from eastern Indonesia some 50,000 years ago. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
