Review of Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations by Sam Kean

I was intrigued by the description of Sam Kean’s latest book. I love learning about history in various new ways! So I was pleased to receive an eARC of Dinner with King Tut from NetGalley and publisher Little, Brown and Company. Indeed, one cannot fault Kean for his scrupulous commitment to embodying experiential archaeology—this book reads like a Discovery channel series, back when Discovey channel was good.

Kean is upfront and warns us that the book is partially fiction. Each chapter is set in a different place and time in human history (or prehistory). He intercuts his modern-day exploits with vignettes about an inhabitant of that time period doing activities that he discusses in the contemporary parts of the chapter: hunting, navigating, tanning hides, going on a daring rescue mission across rotten sea ice—you know, the usual. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting it, and the first few felt jarring. But I warmed to these narratives and the way they reminded me of my connection to these people of the past—our shared humanity. As Kean reminds us, all of these people were anatomically modern humans, identical to me and you in every respect save the time of their birth. Food for thought.

As far as his interviews and experiments go, they’re a mixed bag. Kean positions most of his interviewees as outsiders and mavericks, noting that experimental/experiential archaeologists get a bad rap by the mainstream ones. Some of the stuff he passes on sounds a bit dodgy to me, and it leaves me wondering how accurate (to the best of our current knowledge) is Kean’s depiction of the various cultures he fictionalizes herein.

So I would recommend this book with a grain of salt. While I have no doubt Kean did the research (sometimes to his own detriment!), he is ultimately a writer, not a scientist or an historian. Dinner with King Tut is interesting and occasionally illuminating, as long as you don’t mistake it for a more rigorous text.