Decoder Ring | How to Hunt a Mammoth, and Other Experiments in Archaeology

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Slow Burn – Decoder Ring | How to Hunt a Mammoth, and Other Experiments in Archaeology

Date: August 13, 2025
Host: Willa Paskin (Narrator)
Featured Guests: Sam Kean, Susan Kaplan, Karen Harry, Naalehu Anthony
Theme: The episode explores the world of experimental archaeology—archaeologists and communities not just theorizing about the past, but actively recreating ancient tools, practices, and journeys to illuminate long-standing mysteries about human ingenuity and survival.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode investigates the power of experimental archaeology: archaeologists and practitioners today don't just dig and analyze—they actively recreate ancient practices to answer old questions. The episode traces legendary experiments, from butchering an elephant to recreate mammoth hunting, to solving the riddle of enigmatic Alaskan cooking pots, and finally to bold oceanic voyages that revitalize lost knowledge and cultural pride across Polynesia.

"Experimental archaeology is simply archaeology that involves experiments."
— Sam Kean (06:34)

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Excitement Gap" of Real-Life Archaeology

• Sam Kean reflects on his childhood fascination with action-archaeologists in pop culture (Indiana Jones, Lara Croft), and the contrast with the painstaking, often tedious reality of actual digs.
• Real-life archaeological fieldwork involves detailed, repetitive tasks—yet the discipline is critical for understanding humanity’s past.
• Sam struggled with making archaeology seem exciting as a writer until discovering experimental archaeology.

Quote:

"Most of the time, you show up at an archaeological site and it's scores of sunburned people lying around in the dirt, usually with a brush or a dental pick or something."
— Sam Kean (03:12)

Timestamp: 00:38–04:30

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2. What is Experimental Archaeology?

• Unlike traditional archaeologists who analyze artifacts, experimental archaeologists conduct hands-on reconstructions to learn by doing—making stone tools, building canoes, or recreating ancient recipes.
• Experimentation can reveal unknowns and solve puzzles that simple analysis cannot.
  • Example: British researchers testing an ancient Viking remedy, which turned out to be a potent antibiotic.

Memorable Moment:

"I look at it as sort of a form of time travel ... there's no other part of archeology that's as good as immersing you in the past as experimental archaeology."
— Sam Kean (08:39)

Timestamp: 06:34–09:48

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3. The Ginsburg Mammoth Experiment: How to Hunt a Mammoth

• Susan Kaplan recounts how, in 1977, a celebrity elephant named Ginsburg at the Boston Zoo died. She and a team of archaeologists acquired the carcass to address ancient hunting mysteries.
• Key questions: Could humans have hunted mammoths, with what tools, and how would bone tools have been made?
• The team used stone-tipped spears, butchering the elephant under cold conditions, with scientists tracking the force required.
• The experiment led to a new respect for experimental archaeology and changed assumptions about the difficulty and rarity of hunting megafauna.

Notable Quote:

"It's a little macabre. But ... they had these questions that they simply could have not answered without doing these experiments."
— Sam Kean (16:37)

Impact:

• Brought experimental archaeology into mainstream academic respectability.
• Demonstrated the challenge of hunting mammoths and that it likely wasn’t commonplace.

Timestamp: 09:48–18:46

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4. The Mystery of Alaskan Cooking Pots

• Archaeologist Karen Harry describes her skepticism at calling clunky, porous, thick-walled Alaskan pots “cooking vessels.”
• Standard cooking pots worldwide are thin, rounded, nonporous, but these defied all expectations.
• Collaboration with Alaskan communities, experimental pottery attempts, and consultation of ethnographic records revealed:
  • Alaskan cooking involved dipping meat quickly ("fondue style"), conserving nutrients such as Vitamin C.
  • Harsh environmental constraints (limited good clay, short dry seasons, scarce wood) shaped the pots’ design.
  • Innovatively, unfired pots were made watertight by a process of coating first with seal oil and then with seal blood—an aha moment for the team.

Quote:

"You can actually have an unfired pot and make it work."
— Karen Harry (30:54)

Timestamp: 18:46–32:16

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5. Indigenous Knowledge and Revitalization through Experimental Archaeology

• Experimental archaeology is not just academic—it’s a vehicle for indigenous peoples to revive and sustain ancestral knowledge, sometimes lost through colonization or cultural shifts.
• Indigenous practitioners often correct academics or preserve traditions independent of artifact analysis.

Quote:

"In a lot of cases, they have been keeping these traditions alive sometimes for thousands of years."
— Sam Kean (33:06)

Timestamp: 32:16–33:43

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6. The Polynesian Voyaging Revival: Proving Navigation By Stars

• Western skepticism once doubted that Polynesians could purposefully navigate thousands of miles across open ocean.
• Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition (1947)—drifting a raft from South America to Polynesia—popularized experimental archaeology but was based on a wrong theory (accidental settlement).
• The Polynesian Voyaging Society, led by Herb Kane and Dr. Ben Finney, used rigorous reconstruction; they built the double-hulled canoe “Hokule’a” and recruited Satawal master navigator Mau Piailug.
• In 1976, Hokule’a successfully sailed 2,500 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti using only traditional navigation (stars, waves, nature), touching off a renaissance of Polynesian culture and navigation skills.
• The project refuted colonial skepticism and fostered cultural pride and identity.

Notable Quotes:

"All it proved was, like, you could get on a raft and, you know, drift for 90 days, and then these Polynesians have to come out and rescue you, you know, when you crash on their reef."
— Naalehu Anthony (41:21)

"When the canoe sails, it reinvigorates the values, the pride, the expectation that we can do these kinds of things."
— Naalehu Anthony (48:10)

Memorable Moment:

"At 2 in the morning when you come up and all you hear are the sounds of nature ... that's the one moment ... that I believe you can fully be in a place in space, surrounded in all your senses of what the ancestors had. It's just such a gift. It's such an amazing thing."
— Naalehu Anthony (50:08)

Timestamp: 33:43–51:09

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• "I just imagine, you know, you're driving down the highway that day, and you see this flatbed truck go by ... there's an elephant, a headless elephant on the back of it, its tail flapping in the wind." — Sam Kean (14:05)
• "I loved that movie." (on Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail) — Sam Kean (01:14)
• "They always know more than us ... I am having to catch up to what people knew a thousand years ago." — Karen Harry (31:22)
• "You have to do this. Of course you have to do this. How can Polynesians live without sailing?" — Mau Piailug (reported by Herb Kane) (44:58)
• "20,000 people come down to the beach to greet this canoe ... Something deep in our DNA understood what that meant." — Naalehu Anthony (47:01)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:38–04:30: Pop culture vs. real archaeology; the “excitement gap”
• 06:34–09:48: What is experimental archaeology? Stone tool and medieval remedy examples
• 09:48–18:46: The Ginsburg elephant experiment—mammoth hunting reimagined
• 18:46–32:16: Alaskan mystery pottery—experimentation, discovery, and indigenous knowledge
• 33:06–33:43: Role of indigenous practitioners and knowledge in archaeology
• 33:43–51:09: Experimental archaeology at sea—Thor Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki, Hokule’a revival, and Polynesian pride

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Conclusion

Experimental archaeology bridges gaps between the theory and lived experience of the past, sparking new discoveries, challenging assumptions, and empowering communities. Whether uncovering the realities of mammoth hunting, decoding the mysteries of ancient pottery, or proving the navigational brilliance of Polynesian ancestors, these hands-on experiments change our understanding—and sometimes, our identities.

"If you're talking about the purpose of reinvigorating this set of skills that are core to the reflection of who we are as Polynesians ... then absolutely, it's a success."
— Naalehu Anthony (49:32)

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Transcript

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[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Sam Keane is a science writer and back when he was a kid, he was really into Indiana Jones.

[Sam Kean]

Oh, sure, it wasn't everyone. With Indiana Jones you get the adventure. You know, people going to distant exotic places. They're going after, you know, gold statues and the Ark of the Covenant that.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Belongs in a museum. In every movie, Indy, played by Harrison Ford, is constantly retrieving legendary artifacts and treasures, venturing into temples and catacombs to rescue fertility idols and sacred Hindu stones.

[Sam Kean]

And the Holy Grail one, really. I loved that movie.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

He who finds the Grail must face the final challenge.

[Naalehu Anthony]

What final challenge?

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Three devices of such lethal cunning. Booby traps? Oh, yes.

[Sam Kean]

Just the idea of them finding these relics from the past I thought was just fascinating. The idea that they might be out there and that there were people whose whole lives were dedicated to finding them.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Though it can be easy to lose sight of amidst all the international daring do and bullwhipping. Indiana Jones is dedicated to finding all these ancient relics because of his job.

[Naalehu Anthony]

Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr. Is a professor of archaeology. And Indiana Jones is not the only fictional archaeologist to make the profession look like an action adventure. Lara Croft, tomb raider, is also Lara Croft, archaeologist. The engraving shows the painting hidden in something called the vault of trophies here. No problem. And the Egyptologists in the various versions of the Mummy are ostensibly on the hunt for ancient artifacts too.

[Naalehu Anthony]

Is he supposed to look like that?

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

No, I've never seen a mummy look like this before. He's still, still juicy, juicy For Sam, these pop culture archaeologists made the profession seem swashbuckling and full of adventure.

[Sam Kean]

I do think that there is a sense that in archeology people do do exciting things sometimes.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But then Sam grew up as the author of seven science history books. He's had occasion to visit a number of archaeological sites Digs where trained experts comb through the earth for clues about the human past. And he couldn't help but notice they are nothing like the movies.

[Sam Kean]

Most of the time, you show up at an archaeological site and it's scores of sunburned people lying around in the dirt, usually with a brush or a dental pick or something, and they're digging pot shards and other little things out of the soil, tossing them in a pile. And they just do that day after day, week after week, for entire seasons at a time.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Don't get him wrong. Sam admires and respects archaeology. He thinks its findings are important and fascinating and that they've helped answer some of the biggest questions we have about who we are and where we come from. But it was like there was an excitement gap between what archaeology can teach us and what archaeologists, archaeologists actually do. It's one the movie solved by having archaeologists behave like action heroes. But as a science journalist, Sam didn't have that option.

[Sam Kean]

I found it very, very dull to write about. I just couldn't find a good way to make it exciting.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But then Sam started to hear that there was something else out there, a whole discipline in which people really seem to be having something like real life adventures. They were hurling spears and making weapons and embarking on thrilling oceanic voyages, all in the name of archaeology.

[Sam Kean]

It was people actually doing things. You could taste things, you could hear things. It wasn't just about what things looked like or digging things out of the dirt.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And there were real archaeologists, trained, accredited, serious scholars behind this movement.

[Sam Kean]

And I was sort of captivated by this. I thought, wow, that's really cool. I want to try that myself.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Sam had discovered experimental archaeology. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. As you know, we love a cultural mystery around here, and so do archaeologists. They're dedicated to trying to answer big questions about how people in the past lived. And experimental archaeologists have given the field a whole new way to glean clues and get insights into the lives of our ancestors. Sam Kean is the author of a new book all about experimental archaeology, called Dinner with King Tut. And with his help and that of a few archaeologists, we're going to dig into a number of puzzles and that experimental archaeology has helped solve. These are real conundrums involving ancient megafauna, bizarre cooking ware, and deep sea voyages. So today on Decoder Ring, what ancient mysteries can we crack when we put history to the test? When you hear the term experimental archaeology, you might think it sounds experimental. Untested, newfangled, kooky, even but experimental archaeology is simply archaeology that involves experiments.

[Sam Kean]

Sometimes these are archaeologists who just decided they had a question about something and there was no good way to answer it unless they ran experiments about it in a lab. Sometimes it's archaeologists just trying to recreate something. Maybe they're not taking data, they just want to see how they might have done something in the past.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Where traditional archaeologists may study research, analyze and theorize about how artifacts were made or used, experimental archaeologists try to recreate tests and use them to see what they can learn. Take stone tools, an extremely common artifact. We've learned a huge amount from digging them up, sorting and analyzing them. But there's also a lot to learn from making them. And so people have been flint knapping their own tools for decades. Doing so has taught archaeologists lots of things they wouldn't otherwise know about. Methods, materials, hand grips. But flint knapping has also taught archaeologists things they didn't even know they didn't know. Like how to recognize a flawed stone tool when they come across one. Learning from their own mistakes to recognize the mistakes of an ancient person learning to flint knap for themselves. Or take another example, there's a thousand year old Viking book full of medicinal cures, most of which sound so goofy to modern ears, no one thought they could have any merit.

[Sam Kean]

The one I remember is you have to find a virgin who's going to withdraw water from an eastward flowing spring.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But a decade ago, two British scholars decided to run an experiment. They followed the not so clear directions for one of the recipes in it meant to heal a stye on your eye.

[Sam Kean]

It involved mixing wine, garlic, onions and ox gall together. They were just curious about it and wanted to know whether it would actually work.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And after letting it sit for many days, they found that instead of smelly goo, it was a powerful antibiotic just hiding out in an ancient tome.

[Sam Kean]

And.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And they never would have known this if not for actively trying to recreate the past.

[Sam Kean]

I look at it as sort of a form of time travel in that part of the fun of time travel is going to a place and immersing yourself in it. And there's no other part of archeology that's as good as immersing you in the past as experimental archaeology.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Sounds great, right? Exciting and useful even. So for much of the 20th century, this kind of experimentation was often side eyed by the academy. It seemed like the stuff of amateurs and hobbyists, wannabe archaeologists obsessed with making their own arrowheads or figuring out how the pyramids were constructed. But accredited scholars had questions they couldn't answer without experimentation too. And so slowly, the skepticism about experimental archaeology began to give way. And now the first of three mysteries we're gonna share that couldn't have been solved without it. The first is one that brought experimental archaeology into the academic fold. A project out to answer big questions about humans relationship to big game that involved a famous elephant named Ginsburg.

[Sam Kean]

So Ginsburg was a celebrity elephant at the Franklin Zoo in Boston in the 1970s. And she was a celebrity because she had starred in a rom com with John Wayne, of all people. That was set in Africa.

[Naalehu Anthony]

That was a cow. She was trying to tell us to.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Leave her baby alone. The movie is called Hatari, and it was filmed on location in Africa. In it, John Wayne plays a leader of a crew of game catchers who end up adopting a bunch of baby elephants, including Ginsburg. The baby elephant walk song from the movie became a Grammy winning hit. And in Boston, Ginsburg the elephant became.

[Sam Kean]

A local celebrity because she had been in a John Wayne movie. She was a big draw for people to the zoo.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But then one day in 1977, as she was being moved from her enclosure, she fell, broke her leg and got a blood clot.

[Sam Kean]

And unfortunately, the news went out over the radio that this beloved animal had died. And there was someone at the Smithsonian who heard this news.

[Susan Kaplan]

One weekend I'm listening to the radio and I hear that Ginsburg had died. My brain went, oh.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Susan Kaplan is now a professor of anthropology and archaeology at Bowdoin College, where she runs the Peary McMillan Arctic Museum. But at the time, she was a pre doctoral student at the Natural History Museum at the Smithsonian, where she was working in the archaeology lab of a man named Dennis Stanford.

[Susan Kaplan]

Dennis was a specialist in paleo Indian studies, people who entered the new world first.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And at the time he was particularly interested in mammoth bones.

[Susan Kaplan]

He was excavating these piles of broken bones and he had formulated a theory that human beings were hunting these mammoths to make bone tools.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But embedded in this theory were all sorts of unanswered questions. Like just for starters, were humans even capable of killing these creatures? And if so, what weapons would they have used? And then how would they have butchered them? What tools would they have used and how would those tools have held up? And then could they have broken a mammoth bone and made that into tools? The archaeologists had so many things they wanted to know, but. But without a mammoth, they couldn't get any answers. Mammoths, needless to say, are extinct.

[Susan Kaplan]

So they're sitting around bemoaning the fact that those animals don't exist anymore. And I'm sitting there taking all of this in.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And it was right around this time that Susan heard the radio report about ginsburg the elephant. Sudden death from a blood clot at a Boston zoo.

[Susan Kaplan]

I thought not a mastodon, not a mammoth, but as close as you can get.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

If the archaeologists couldn't answer their questions by running experiments on an actual mammoth, maybe its close relative, this newly deceased elephant would do. Susan hurried over to her boss, Dennis Stanford.

[Susan Kaplan]

And I said, gee, you know, this has happened. And as I recall, he said, well, maybe you can get a leg bone.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

She did better than that.

[Susan Kaplan]

I did make a lot of phone calls, and I actually convinced the Boston zoo to give me the entire carcass.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Well, minus the head and the internal organs, which were already promised elsewhere.

[Susan Kaplan]

I went into Dennis office and went, uh, Dennis, I got the whole elephant, except for the head, except that I have to pick it up.

[Sam Kean]

The catch is, the zoo will not.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Deliver Sam Keene again.

[Sam Kean]

It's not going to bring the elephant carcass down to them.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Fortunately, the whale curator at the Smithsonian agreed to lend them the giant truck he'd used to move whales around. And they dispatched a driver up to Boston.

[Sam Kean]

And I just imagine, you know, you're driving down the highway that day, and you see this flatbed truck go by, you barreling down the highway. There's an elephant, a headless elephant on the back of it, its tail flapping in the wind. I cannot imagine what these people were thinking.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

At one point, the elephant got stopped at a state border for fear it had some contagious disease.

[Susan Kaplan]

And so I had to make some phone calls and got ahold of the zoo vet and got the elephant declared healthy but dead.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Finally, Ginsburg arrived at a Smithsonian facility in the mountains of Virginia.

[Susan Kaplan]

Luckily, it was a very, very cold winter, and so she was mostly frozen.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And that's how she stayed outside on a pallet.

[Susan Kaplan]

In the meantime, Dennis Stanford is on the phone to all of his colleagues. He is calling basically all the people he works with, who are these experts in paleo Indian studies. And so people start making stone tools.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

In March 1977, with the dusting of snow still on the ground, but spring around the corner. About a dozen archaeologists and experts showed up at the site with their replica stone tools, ready to experiment on their replica mammoth.

[Susan Kaplan]

Everyone arrives at the top of the mountain. People were very excited.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

For five days, they tried all sorts.

[Susan Kaplan]

Of things people were interested in. Okay, if we haft this stone tool on a shaft, so It's a spear, and we hurl it. Will it penetrate that thick elephant skin?

[Sam Kean]

And actually, they recruited a scientist from NASA to wire these tools up to a modified polygraph machine so it would record the movements of them, and they could tell how much force exactly it took to cut through the hide, how much it took to cut through the muscles, through the tendons, things like that.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

They observed the force it took to pierce tough elephant skin and the way that skin and meat wore down stone blades and which ones worked best. Once the bones were revealed, they tried to break them and flake them into bone tools. They realized you had to work pretty fast if you didn't want the elephant to spoil. One scientist chewed on one of Ginsburg's tendons to make a kind of string to attach a stone blade to a haft.

[Sam Kean]

It's a little macabre. But again, they had these questions that they simply could have not answered without doing these experiments.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And remember, this elephant had already died. There was nothing cruel or unethical about these experiments, as strange as they might have been to behold.

[Susan Kaplan]

I sort of watched sort of in amazement at what I had wrought. But also, you know, the thing about archeology is that in order to try and understand human behavior that you can no longer see, all you have is this material culture. And so you want to use as many tools as you can to try to understand what the behavior of people would have been and what thought processes would be going on.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

The Ginsburg experiment started to concretely answer a host of questions about how ancient Americans had actually lived and hunted and eaten. It got a lot of attention from the mainstream press and led to a number of academic papers. It also kicked off something of a fad over the next few years for similar experiments and others in conversation with it continue to this day. These later investigations have both expanded on and challenged the first set of findings, and in so doing, introduced a rigorous way for archaeologists to test and adjust their theories while deepening our knowledge of the oldest people on our continent. Because it turns out what the Ginsburg experiment helped us start to figure out is that killing mammoths is really hard. Let's just say they were no giant sloths. And if humans did eat them occasionally, we know now it was surely not an everyday affair.

[Susan Kaplan]

And so I think the Ginsburg experiment, I don't know that it was the first experimental archeology project, but it certainly brought respectability of doing this kind of work into the academy.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And experimental archaeology hasn't looked back. When we return, the mystery of some truly Head scratching ceramics. Over the course of the 20th century, experimental archaeology went from being the purview of adventures in all rans to also being a part of the mainstream archaeological toolkit, an additional approach to a practice or object holding onto its secrets. And to see how that actually works, to see contemporary experimental archaeology in action, I want to turn to some homely, squat cooking pots. Pots that, despite this uninspiring description, are part of a mystery so complex Sam wrote about it, even though pottery usually makes his eyes glaze over.

[Sam Kean]

I mean, I know this is an anathema to admit in an archaeology book because I know how important it is. Pottery's really good about diagnosing what cultures were where, how they moved around, things like that. But I just found the taxonomy of pottery so, so dull. But once I heard about Alaskan pots, I thought, now these are cool.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Sam learned about these pots from an.

[Sam Kean]

Expert in ceramics, an archaeologist named Karen Harry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

[Karen Harry]

So in my lab, because I've also excavated, we analyze artifacts, but we also do a lot of experimental work.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

This is Karen Harry. She studies the southwestern United States.

[Karen Harry]

We've had students trying to replicate how they would make their pueblos out of the local clays. We had a student working with war clubs in my lab. So we've done a lot of experimental archaeology.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

She's used to seeing a specific kind of ceramics in the Four Corners region where she primarily works, Mesa Verde, and.

[Karen Harry]

All the Puebloan remains where they make the most beautiful pots and such well made pots.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But one day, an anthropologist colleague came by with a piece that was little less than beautiful.

[Karen Harry]

He stopped me in the hall one day and he showed me this pot shirt, and he said, this is from an Alaskan cooking pot. And I said, that is not from a cooking pot because that is completely wrong for a cooking pot.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Karen said this was such confidence because she knew that ceramic cooking pots across the world should share certain characteristics. They're always thin walled so that heat can transfer quickly and that the walls don't crack. They're rounded so there's not stress. At a right angle joint, they should be able to hold about a gallon of liquid or enough to make a whole meal. And they're never porous, so the water doesn't seep right through them.

[Karen Harry]

So cross culturally from Africa to modern bean pots being sold out of clay, they all have that same, same shape and same look.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And these pots, the shard, it was none of these things.

[Karen Harry]

It was none of these things. No, it was really, really thick. It had really big, clunky, coarse inclusions, which made it very porous, which, to my mind, meant that the water should just seep right out when you tried to make a stew. And I was like, how can that be a cooking pot? One of them probably held about a cup and a half. You can't make enough of a meal to feed one person enough. And, you know, I always feel a little bit bad saying this. I can tell you how to make a pot, but I can't make a pot. But they were just coarsely made, just clunky and falling apart.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Is it fair to say, like, you were kind of used to beautiful pots and these were sort of not?

[Karen Harry]

Yeah, I think that is.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

That is very fair in every regard. The piece her colleague was showing her did not look anything like what he claimed it to be.

[Karen Harry]

So I told him, with my PhD knowledge, I told him he was wrong. And he told me, with all due respect, that I was wrong, that it was from a cooking pot.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Karen's colleague, Dr. Liam Frink, was not a pottery expert, but he is an Alaskan expert, and he knew that in Alaska, pots like this were known as cooking pots, even if they seem to break all the rules of cooking pots. They show up in museums as cooking pots. They're in the recollections of trappers and explorers as cooking pots. And most importantly, the locals, the people who have and continue to live in western Alaska know and remember these pots as cooking pots, even if they don't make them themselves anymore or recall exactly how it's done.

[Karen Harry]

And when I told him it could not be a cooking pot, and when he told me it absolutely was a cooking pot, that's when we knew that we had something. We had to figure out how and.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Why were Alaskans using small, squat, thick, breakable cooking pots unlike any others in the world.

[Karen Harry]

So everything about Alaska was just. Everything just didn't fit together.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

To solve this mystery, they knew they needed to go up to western Alaska. They got a grant to do so, and headed to the town of Tunawak, where pots like this used to be made. Their first break came when they began to speak to people who lived there, the living descendants of the people who had made these pots.

[Karen Harry]

One by one, the clues started, started coming in. My colleague, Liam Frink, he went to interview a woman, and she was making lunch, and he realized real quickly she was cutting up meat, and she wasn't really cooking it. She was just quickly submerging it into the boiling water to get the outside nice and hot. Think of it like A fondue pot. So that was a big clue, because.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

If that's how Alaskans like to prepare meat, they wouldn't have needed large pots. And when Karen and the team looked back at writings from the past, it confirmed that Alaskans had been doing this kind of parboiling for a long time, which they came to learn was not all only because they liked the taste.

[Karen Harry]

That culinary preference, as it turns out, has some nutritional benefits. Up in Alaska, you're on the tundra and there's just not a lot of vegetable materials to eat that provide vitamin.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

C. But you know what does have a lot of vitamin C? Unlike fully cooked meat, meat dunked like a chunk of fondue.

[Karen Harry]

So they could just do a very quick heat up that water, do a quick fondue. So you didn't need a big pot.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

So that explained the size. What about the shape of the pots? Why were they so flat bottomed, thick and kind of lumpy? They knew the only way to figure this out was to experiment to make the pots themselves. Karen and her colleagues had brought two professional potters along with them to work in the same town where some of the originals had been crafted using the same clay. Ideally, clay is malleable and smooth or can be made so. But the potters quickly learned that was not this clay.

[Karen Harry]

This. You could just tell it was kind of a lousy clay. It's a little bit plastic, but it's not great. That clay would never be able to make a nice rounded pot.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Even more challenging than the raw material was the Alaskan weather.

[Karen Harry]

The important thing when you make a pot, you cannot fire it out until it's totally dry. But in western Alaska, I mean, most of the time it's snowy and dark and cold, and even in the summer, it's always rainy, always wet.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Karen and her colleagues had come to Alaska during a very specific time of year, the same one when Alaskans had originally made these pots. A narrow three week window in July when it's relatively temperate, the temperature reaches about 60, and it stops raining quite so much.

[Karen Harry]

That is the only time in Alaska that you could even begin to make a pot.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And yet it still proved incredibly difficult for the potters working with Karen, even with all the modern amenities they enjoyed.

[Karen Harry]

We had an oven, we had blow dryers, we had electricity. We had a lot of things that the potters 100 and 200 years ago would not have had. And we were still having it. You know, we were. We put our pots in the oven overnight, trying to get them just to dry enough that we could Put them in the kiln. But it was very, very hard.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And for the original pot makers, it would have been harder still because field.

[Karen Harry]

Wood up there is very, very scarce. You know, the only way they get their firewood is from logs that float up and wash up on shore. And so that's a very sought after resource, a very expensive resource.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And there would have been one more difficulty after that. Those relatively temperate three weeks. The only time when women could possibly have made these pots was also the exact same three weeks. Those same women would have been drying the fish they would eat for the entire year. They would have been extraordinarily busy, too busy to fuss over a pot.

[Karen Harry]

And so what they've got is this need to make a pot out of poor clay when it's wet. And in that context, it makes sense. That flat bottomed pot shape that they were using, flat with the sides that come up, you can make a pot like that in about 20 minutes.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

So Karen and her team had an answer to why these pots looked like they did. There wasn't a lot of choice. All western Alaskans had to work with was lousy clay on very wet days with little wood and even less time. Within these constraints, they had resourcefully come up with these squat, flat, little vessels. But Karen and her colleagues still had one giant mystery to how had these pots held water until it's fired? In a kiln, clay is not ceramic. It's still just clay earth that water will make soft again.

[Karen Harry]

By definition, if a clay pot is not fired, that water is going to dissolve it. That's just definitional. The firing process turns and fuses it into something hard and permanent.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And yet she'd read ethnographic accounts saying that some of these Alaskan pots were not fired at all.

[Karen Harry]

I did not believe that. I said an unfired pot cannot hold water.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But once you got to Alaska, some of the examples and the museums Karen visited really did seem unfired. And then the team's experience trying to fire pots themselves and barely being able to dry them out, even in a modern oven, made her reconsider what she had thought was impossible. Could unfired clay hold water?

[Karen Harry]

The question then became, how did they make this work?

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

They did have one clue. In some writings, there was mention that indigenous Alaskans had added seal blood and seal oil somewhere in the process. But nobody knew how exactly. So Karen's team got started by just mixing blood and oil directly into the clay.

[Karen Harry]

And when you poured the seal oil in it, it didn't work. Let me just say it didn't work. You're putting oil into this wet clay mass, and oil and water, we all know don't mix well. So it didn't mix, and it didn't make a very good clay. When we mixed the blood into the clay, at first it really helped. They were mixing it in and it's like, now it's getting nice and plastic. This is great. But what happened is within just a few seconds or minutes, that clay began to dry and harden up. And it was like adding Elmer's glue to clay.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

So they ruled out mixing blood and oil into the clay. Then they wondered what would happen if they painted the blood and oil on, like, a glaze. They experimented by coating some pots with just seal oil and observed that while it did help to conduct and spread the heat heat, it did not make the vessels watertight.

[Karen Harry]

Once you put the water in, the pot would melt and it would just collapse on itself and dissolve.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

The ones coated in just sealed blood didn't collapse.

[Karen Harry]

At least that sealed blood acts like a glue and it waterproofs that pot, but it also wouldn't come to a boil.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But then finally, they tried putting oil on first and then applying blood.

[Karen Harry]

And with both the seal blood and the seal oil, the water stays clear, the pot doesn't melt, and you can bring it to a boil. So I think that was my aha moment of you can actually have an unfired pot and make it work.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Were you guys excited?

[Karen Harry]

Oh, absolutely. I'm always excited with archaeology.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

These experiments had helped resurface the ingenuity of the original potters.

[Karen Harry]

They always know more than us, let me just put it that way. Whenever I can I can't figure out something, I just say I am having to catch up to what people knew a thousand years ago.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Karen sometimes imagines that such people can see her, that they're watching as she struggles to figure out something they already know how to do.

[Karen Harry]

I don't know what the afterlife is. My personal point of view is none of us can really know, right? But I always like to picture them looking down and thinking, that is not how we did it, or that is how we did it, or you're all the wrong track because to them, it's as easy as, you know, for us tying our shoes. It's so obvious why you would make a pot that way. But to us, it's not so obvious. You know, I love archaeology. I always say it's like doing this big jigsaw puzzle. And. And then at the end, I want somebody to tell me how close I got.

[Susan Kaplan]

I guess sometimes you must feel like.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

You got pretty close.

[Karen Harry]

I think on this one we got real close.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

When we come back, one last example of experimental archaeology, but one that's less about solving a mystery than revitalizing a spirit. So far, we've focused on examples of experimental archaeology undertaken by academics trying to understand people and practices from long ago. But as you just heard in the story about the oddball Alaskan pottery, indigenous people often know a great deal about old practices, and they too play an important role in the field overall.

[Sam Kean]

In a lot of cases, they have been keeping these traditions alive sometimes for thousands of years.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Sam Keene again.

[Sam Kean]

And they are the ones going to the archaeologists and correcting them and showing them how things were done, or in other cases, the practices that they had cherished for a long time got wiped out by missionaries, by colonial officials, whatever the case was. And they just want to revive them. And for them, it's not so much archeology, you know, a discipline where they're trying to understand the past, they are trying to connect with their ancestors, they're trying to revitalize and revive aspects of their culture.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

And the story we're about to share now is an example of both of showing the so called experts how things are done and reviving a lost cultural practice. It starts with a seeming mystery about Hawaii.

[Naalehu Anthony]

Hawaii is the most remote archipelago on the planet. So there's been this question since the point of Western contact, how did everybody get here?

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Naalehu Anthony is a native who Hawaiian community advocate and storyteller. And when he says the point of Western contact, he's referring to the arrival of Captain James Cook in Hawaii in 1778. Cook arrived with a navigator he'd brought aboard in Tahiti.

[Naalehu Anthony]

And the navigator gets off the boat and he can speak to these people. They spoke the same language. And Captain Cook, he's just amazed at this because this is so remote.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Tahiti and Hawaii are 2,500 miles apart, and yet clearly the people who lived in both places were somehow connected, as were all the people throughout what became known as Polynesia, a region consisting of over a thousand islands strewn like stars across 10 million square miles of ocean. How could these people have found one island after another in a vast sea without maps, modern boats or equipment? Among Westerners, the question has lingered for centuries. But if you'd asked native Hawaiians, they'd have told you. According to centuries of oral tradition, their ancestors had been great explorers. They voyaged from distant lands to the west, traversing the seas in great canoes using celestial navigation, or as it's also known, non instrument navigation, Charting a course by extraordinary close study of signs in nature.

[Naalehu Anthony]

Anything in your natural environment that you can see or feel or hear can be a navigational clue. There's no gps, there's no magnetic compass, and there's no sextant. So it really starts with observation. Keen, keen observation. And at the base of that, there's observation of celestial bodies.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

This skill was passed down from generation to generation until it wasn't anymore. By the time Captain Cook arrived there, Hawaiians had forgotten how to sail this way.

[Naalehu Anthony]

You know, I wish I could blame the colonizers on this. I mean, there was certainly a lot of knowledge lost because of depopulation from the point of when Captain Cook comes. But deep sea voyaging had stopped several hundred years prior.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

It's not clear exactly why this is so, But Hawaii is extremely abundant. So once people can meet most of their needs by farming and fishing close to shore, maybe they didn't need to find new lands. And long distance deep sea voyaging became a lost art in Hawaii. Even so, we now have copious evidence that deep sea voyaging is exactly how Polynesia was settled, Beginning with skilled mariners from east Asia who, sailing against the trade winds, fanned out from island to island. But many westerners, as they colonized these very islands, refused to believe that Polynesia could have been discovered on purpose. They couldn't imagine that Polynesians could do something so difficult. And so they started coming up with alternate explanations. And one came from a Norwegian zoologist and ethnologist named Thor Heyerdahl.

[Thor Heyerdahl]

In spite of all the research in this area, we can at least say with certainty that the problem has never been solved.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

On a visit to some Polynesian islands, Hydraulic had become convinced that the ancient statues there bore a resemblance to some other relics he'd seen in South America.

[Thor Heyerdahl]

And I began to speculate as to whether there could have been any connection.

[Sam Kean]

And his theory was that people started on the west coast of South America and that they had colonized Polynesia through dumb luck.

[Naalehu Anthony]

He says, okay, well, they drifted. They couldn't have possibly sailed into the trade winds with purpose. They drifted from South America into the Pacific.

[Sam Kean]

You know, a storm blew some boat away on a fishing trip, and they just got pushed to an island, and they just decided to colonize the island after that. And he ran into a lot of resistance to this theory based on other archaeological evidence. And he decided, well, the only way to prove myself right, that people could have made this trip Would be to build a authentic old boat and just go sailing and see what happens.

[Thor Heyerdahl]

Introducing the fantastic adventures of the Kon Tiki expedition.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Using Incan methods dating back hundreds of years, Heyerdahl and five other Scandinavian crew members built a raft named kon tiki. In 1947, it embarked on a daring sea journey.

[Thor Heyerdahl]

They were inviting certain death, Attempting to duplicate a voyage which hadn't been made for 15 centuries.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

They set off from Peru, intending to drift to Polynesia on the trade winds and currents, like they imagined South Americans had done long ago.

[Thor Heyerdahl]

As we waved farewell, we were left completely isolated, floating on our logs in the ocean. Our nearest goal. The first islands ahead of us were 4,000 miles behind the horizon.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

This is how Heyerdahl in a documentary from 1950 that was filmed on the raft. In addition to cameras, they brought radios, watches, charts, a sextant, a rubber dinghy, but they had no motors. They drifted on the wind and the waves to make progress.

[Thor Heyerdahl]

The first few days were a nightmare of struggle.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

The Koniki encountered killer whales, weather waves, and sharks.

[Thor Heyerdahl]

We had a complete chaos on board.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Nevertheless, they stayed on the ocean for 100 days. And then on the 101st day of their journey, after those 4,000 miles, they crashed into a reef surrounding an uninhabited atoll.

[Thor Heyerdahl]

The sea raced up in perpendicular walls and tossed the raft against the reef.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

The Kon Tiki itself was wrecked, and Heyerdahl and the crew found themselves marooned. But they had made landfall in Polynesia. After about a week, some villagers from a nearby island canoed over and rescued them. Thor Heyerdahl's journey was finally over.

[Sam Kean]

It was a foolhardy thing to do. He easily could have died. But the fact that they made it was pretty amazing.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Instead of simply theorizing, Heyerdahl had actually gone out and tried something, and he.

[Sam Kean]

Ended up writing a book about this that is a really stirring sort of monument to the idea that you can just go do these kind of things.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Heyerdahl's book became a bestseller in 1951. The documentary about his journey won the Academy Award. More than any other experiment, the Contiki expedition is what first sparked people's imagination about the possibilities of experimental archaeology.

[Sam Kean]

He got them thinking about archaeology in a whole, whole new way and is really a pioneer of the field. Even though he was wrong in every single detail.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

The voyage's success didn't actually prove Heyerdahl's theory that Polynesia had been accidentally settled by South Americans. Heyerdahl also believed for what it's Worth that these South Americans had been from an ancient race of godlike, bearded white men. He didn't prove that part either.

[Naalehu Anthony]

All it proved was, like, you could get on a raft and, you know, drift for 90 days, and then these Polynesians have to come out and rescue you, you know, when you crash on their reef.

[Sam Kean]

Even at the time, it was a dubious theory. And all of the archaeological evidence, the genetic evidence that we now have, everything that we know disproves the Kon Tiki theory.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But even though Heyerdahl's theory was bogus, it got so much attention, people believed it. Yet many native Polynesians knew that their stories weren't wrong, that their ancestors hadn't just gotten lucky. They had been sophisticated, ingenious sailors able to purposefully sail the ocean seas with the stars as their guide. And so, in the 1970s, amidst a larger renaissance of Hawaiian culture and traditions, a group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society set out to prove just how wrong Thor Heyerdahl had been. Two of its founders were later interviewed for a documentary by Naalehu Anthony. My own personal interest was in rebuilding.

[Naalehu Anthony]

What I saw to be the central.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Object of Polynesian culture.

[Herb Kane]

What we have to do is rebuild the canoes, relearn the navigation, and then sail navigated voyages between the islands.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Herb Kane was a native Hawaiian artist and historian. Dr. Ben Finney was a classically trained anthropologist.

[Naalehu Anthony]

The response for Kon Tiki was what we need to do is we need to build a performance accurate replica of a voyaging canoe, and we need to sail with the ways of the old on one of the longest routes that you could find.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

If they could voyage over thousands of miles of open ocean without western navigational instruments, using only the skills of their ancestors, it would do more than just refute Thor Heyerdahl, who most experts already knew was wrong. It would revive a lost body of knowledge. Heyerdahl may have been a proto experimental archaeologist, but now a group of academics and experts was going to use more rigorous techniques to debunk him. Based on extensive research, the Polynesian Voyaging Society designed and built a double hulled voyaging canoe, 22ft wide and 62ft long, which they called Hokulea, meaning star of gladness. They chose a route from Hawaii to Tahiti. All they needed now was a navigator. And though there was no one in all of Polynesia who knew the ancient ways, there were a handful of people in Micronesia, an island region some 2,000 miles to the west, who did in.

[Naalehu Anthony]

The Most remote islands of the western Pacific, the secrets of navigation are still passed down from one generation to the next. Tiny islands are separated by vast ocean distances, and the people depend on navigators for survival.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

One of these navigators, from a tiny atoll called Satawal, was a man in his 30s named MAU Piailug.

[Naalehu Anthony]

Mao had learned from his grandfather canoe building, medicine, understanding storms and weather, understanding all of these elements to become a navigator.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

The sun, the stars, the wind, the currents, the rise and fall of the canoe. Mao could read them all.

[Naalehu Anthony]

There were probably less than a couple dozen people that could have done it, and most of them were really old.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

So it was an incredible stroke of luck that in 1976, when the men who built Hokulea were looking for a navigator, Mao was living nearby on Oahu.

[Herb Kane]

I told him about the project. I could hardly finish talking, and he let go with a barrage of words. He said, you have to do this. Of course you have to do this. How can Polynesians live without sailing?

[Naalehu Anthony]

Even though he'd never been to Tahiti, even though his time south of the equator, which would then change what stars you could utilize, was very limited, he understood what was being asked of him, and he took it on.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

On May 1, 1976, Hokulea set sail for Tahiti, carrying a crew of 17.

[Naalehu Anthony]

They wanted to recreate what a voyage must have been like. So there was a chicken on board, there was a dog on board, there was a pig on board. You know, they had the canoe plants that would have been on board. Will the plants survive?

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

It was risky, truly. A voyage into the unknown for everyone on board.

[Naalehu Anthony]

You're getting on a canoe that has never sailed anywhere. You're sailing out of sight of land for 2,500 miles for 30 days.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

The other crew members noticed that their navigator rarely slept because Ma was dead.

[Naalehu Anthony]

Reckoning he was memorizing what direction he was going at what speed, for how long, and if he went to sleep, there would be a gap of information. And so he had this ability to.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Just, like, not sleep for 28 days. Mao used only what he could see and hear and feel to fix Hokulea's position.

[Naalehu Anthony]

And on the 29th day, he saw land birds heading back to land. And land birds never go more than a day worth of flying because they nest on land. So he says, tomorrow we'll see land. And then they. They sight land the next day.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

They had done it. They had made it to Tahiti, guided only by knowledge of the natural world, over 2500 miles of open ocean. Mao's estimated positions had never been more than 40 miles off.

[Naalehu Anthony]

And when they get to Tahiti, they don't know what's going to happen. They don't know, you know, they could just sail up to the beach and say, hey, you know, touch the ground. We made it. 20,000 people come down to the beach to greet this canoe. They come all the way into the water. You can't tell where the water ends and the land starts because it's just filled with people touching the canoe. Something deep in our DNA understood what that meant.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

The plan to this point had been for the 1976 expedition to Tahiti to be Hokulea's one and only voyage. Once it became clear how much the canoe meant to Polynesians, the Hokulea sailed again and again. And MAU Pialug trained others in the art of celestial navigation, including Nainoa Thompson, who in 1980 became the first native Hawaiian to lead a deep sea voyage in 600 years. And today, Hokulea is currently in the midst of its 15th major voyage, circumnavigating the globe.

[Naalehu Anthony]

When the canoe sails, it reinvigorates the values, the pride, the expectation that we can do these kinds of things, which, at the end of the day, I think changes our perception as Polynesians and Pacific Islanders for our own selves.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Hokulea might have been built for one specific purpose, to prove something very concrete about ancient voyaging, but it accomplished more than that.

[Naalehu Anthony]

If you ask the scientists and the anthropologists who were on board, it was like, could they build a canoe that was a performance, accurate replica, find a navigator and sail with purpose and pull land out of the sea without use of any Western instrument? It seemed like a really big purpose. But looking back on it now, it's pretty shallow. But if you're talking about the purpose of reinvigorating this set of skills that are core to the reflection of who we are as Polynesians and reconnecting us to our cousins who are down south and other places and strengthening this larger nation that is defined by the 10 million square miles of open ocean rather than the colonial outpost that we have become, then absolutely, it's a success.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

Naalehu Anthony was inspired by Hokulea himself As a child. After her first voyage, crew members came to his survival school.

[Naalehu Anthony]

And I remember thinking, this is impossible. I can't believe they spent a month on a canoe. There's no way I could ever do something like that.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

But the canoe stayed with him, and starting in college, Naalehu trained to be a crew member on Hokulea himself. His first long sail was from Easter island to Tahiti in 1999. He's gone on half a dozen voyages since, rising early every day so he'll be awake to photograph and the sunrise's golden light.

[Naalehu Anthony]

And at 2 in the morning when you come up and all you hear are the sounds of nature. No one's talking, there's a full canopy of stars and you're sailing along following a star. It's like that's the one moment in this hundreds of years of change since that time that Captain Cook came until today that I believe you can fully be in a place in space, surrounded in all your senses of what the ancestors had. It's just such a gift. It's such an amazing thing.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. For more on the story of Hokulea, you should watch Naalehu Anthony's documentary Papa the Wayfinder. You should also go out and buy Sam Kean's book Dinner with King Tut. How rich rogue archaeologists are recreating the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of lost civilizations. Believe me, it contains so many more cool archaeological mysteries and adventures than we possibly could have gotten into here. But we did get into one more in our new bonus episode available right now for Slate plus members. It's all about how an Egyptologist rediscovered how to make mummies.

[Sam Kean]

And he remembers that even after five weeks he said, oh my God, it looks exactly like Ramses the Great. He was stunned at the resemblance even after five weeks.

[Narrator (Willa Paskin)]

To hear more, sign up for Slate Plus. You can do that from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify or visit slate.comdecoder ring+ to get access wherever you you listen. This episode was produced by Katie Shepard and Max Friedman. Decoder Ring is also produced by me and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merrick Jacob is senior technical director and we had mixing help from Kevin Bendis. We'd like to thank Met and Aaron and Paul Benham. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email [e-mail] and you can also call us now at our new phone number. That number is 347-460-7281. We love hearing from you guys and we'll see you in two weeks.

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