There is a special kind of archaeology that does not just dig and describe. It recreates. In “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 talks about experimental archaeology as the opposite of tedious: instead of staying in the lab, practitioners handle materials, make tools, and test how ancient processes might actually work. The sensory premise is fun. The stakes get real when Kean describes a controversial attempt to use ancient Egyptian mummification techniques on a modern-day human body.

Kean says that “everyone thought we couldn't actually make a human mummy until two guys did in the '90s”: Egyptologist Bob Brier and Ronn Wade, who was in charge of the Maryland state anatomy board. They used a donated body and tried to be “all out to be authentic,” including traveling to Egypt to get the mineral natron that the Egyptians would have used, having ancient tools made, and then running through the steps known in mummification. The donor was a 76-year-old man from Baltimore who had died of a heart attack, and the donor remains anonymous. The backlash was immediate and intense, with some people calling it “horrifying,” and others arguing that donating your body to science is not a “blank check” for “whatever you want.” Kean also points out that critics doubted the project’s scientific value.

From a decision-maker perspective, this is the archaeology version of a high-risk pilot: expensive, controversial, and ethically loaded, with an outcome that only matters if it produces knowledge that traditional records cannot. Kean makes the case that it did. He says the researchers learned something that historical accounts alone would not have taught them, and he highlights a surprise about tools. Archaeologists have found obsidian blades with mummies. They have also found copper tools associated with them. Yet when Brier and Wade tried to open the body initially, 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 worked better at that task, which Kean admits surprised him, because he “wouldn't have thought that the stone tools would have been better than the metal tools.” The implication is simple: if you only read what survives on paper, you might miss what physics and materials actually do under real constraints.

There is another practical takeaway hiding in the details: the iconic look of a mummy is not just a product of archaeology tourism and museum labels. Kean explains that Bob Brier wanted to know whether the classic appearance comes from sitting in Egypt’s dry environment for 3,000 years or from the mummification process itself. After about five weeks, when they took a peek at the body, Brier said they could tell it had the “classic iconic mummy look,” including retracted teeth, sparse hair, and a forehead pulled very tight. Kean adds that Brier “said it looked exactly like Ramesses the Great to him.” In a world where people argue about interpretation versus evidence, this is a rare moment where timing, process, and result all get tested in the same experiment.

But the ethical framing matters, and Kean does not pretend it went away. He describes the controversy around the body-donation premise: some people said you should not treat consent as unlimited. Kean acknowledges those concerns, while also pushing back on the claim that “we didn't learn anything.” His argument is that experiential constraints can reveal what written sources do not, and that the process itself functions like a test of the plausibility of past techniques. For boards, funders, and research leaders, this matters because the same tension shows up across fields: when a project is designed to be authentic, it may require methods that are uncomfortable to justify unless the knowledge gain is specific and demonstrable.

Kean’s broader book mission is to show how experimental archaeology produces learning through doing, and he uses other examples to make that point. He describes a chapter set in a different time and place as an immersive day-in-the-life. He says he spoke with experimental archaeologists and even learned processes like brain-tanning leather and “getting on a ship that they would have sailed on,” aiming to experience the work the way people would in the past. He also describes a Utah trebuchet built about 30 or 40 feet (9 to 12 meters) tall, where he and others spent a day flinging large garden stones at a palisade stand-in for a fort. He calls the experience “majestic” and compares the sling to a “whip cracking” as the stone flew. And then, crucially, he admits he struggled: “A lot of the book was actually me floundering around, failing to complete the projects or figuring out what I was doing wrong.” That is an important reminder for anyone funding or governing experiments: iteration is not a bug. It is often how the real learning happens.

Zoom out and the pattern is familiar to operators in every industry. You start with unanswered questions, you test methods under constraints, you discover that assumptions about “better” tools can reverse when used correctly, and then you translate the results into knowledge that is hard to get any other way. The second-order risk is governance: if stakeholders are uncomfortable, you need consent frameworks and transparency that stand up under scrutiny. The second-order reward is also tangible: evidence that can update how people understand the past, and by extension how they understand the reliability of historical reconstruction more broadly. If you are an investor, a researcher, or a board member weighing whether experimental work is worth the controversy, Kean’s story is a case study in how authenticity can both unlock new knowledge and force you to answer the toughest ethics question up front: what exactly did you learn, and would you have learned it any other way?