Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations

An exploration of sensory details of the past, with a frequent focus on the tastes and smells of food thanks to a discipline known as experimental archaeology.

Sam Kean, a New York Times-bestselling science writer, alternates between imagining aspects of the daily lives of people over the last 75,000 years and profiling the researchers who attempt to reconstruct everything from the honing of stone tools and the tanning of hides to learning how early Andean foragers discovered ways to prepare wild potatoes so they would not be toxic and how Arctic populations learned to eat sea mammal meat raw to consume vitamin C.

Kean enjoys interviewing and profiling the professional and amateur investigators who strive to understand these processes, among them Sally Grainger, author of Roman Recipes for Modern Cooks, and a Los Angeles computer programmer who explores ancient Egyptian bread making processes.

Kean offers narrative reconstructions of daily life in places such as the plains of Africa and aboard a Polynesian canoe to illustrate the importance of key developments in various technologies and perceptions. Their imagined conflicts are not the strongest part of the book and he seems more at home getting to know modern investigators.

Still, for anyone who occasionally ponders the line attributed to Jonathan Swift, "He was a bold man that first ate an oyster,” this is an eye-opening exploration of what had to be learned for us to eat as we do today.

Hardcover. Black-and-white photographs.