Zach Carter's Reviews > Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations
Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations
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This is a fun, impressive, wide-ranging account of how experimental archaeologists are trying to reconstruct the sensory world of the past through hands-on methods. Kean moves chronologically and geographically from early humans in Africa (75,000 years ago) to post-conquest Mesoamerica. Each chapter focuses on a particular civilization and the researchers who are trying, sometimes obsessively, to bring its material culture back to life.
The book works best when it leans into labor and craft: how things were made, how they decayed, and what that tells us about the people who made them. While not overtly political, Kean doesn’t entirely avoid questions of power, class, conquest, and collapse. One of the most successful aspects of the book is its blending of fiction with nonfiction. Kean's reconstruction of what life might have felt like in a given time and place in narrative form was really impressive to pair with the hard science of how we know those things. They aren’t overdone or sentimental, and they do a lot of work grounding the research in lived experience. It’s a smart structural choice that keeps the book from reading like a disconnected string of fun facts.
Some chapters are stronger than others, and there’s an unevenness in how much historical or cultural depth is given to each region. But as a whole, the book is well-researched, well-paced, and refreshingly fun!
The book works best when it leans into labor and craft: how things were made, how they decayed, and what that tells us about the people who made them. While not overtly political, Kean doesn’t entirely avoid questions of power, class, conquest, and collapse. One of the most successful aspects of the book is its blending of fiction with nonfiction. Kean's reconstruction of what life might have felt like in a given time and place in narrative form was really impressive to pair with the hard science of how we know those things. They aren’t overdone or sentimental, and they do a lot of work grounding the research in lived experience. It’s a smart structural choice that keeps the book from reading like a disconnected string of fun facts.
Some chapters are stronger than others, and there’s an unevenness in how much historical or cultural depth is given to each region. But as a whole, the book is well-researched, well-paced, and refreshingly fun!
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