In 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who made a knife from his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, and used his ribcage as a makeshift sled to venture to the North Pole. Metin Eren, an archaeologist at Kent State University, made rudimentary knives from his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig skin, muscle and tendons.
Unfortunately for the legend, the blades failed every test, but the research was colorful enough to earn Eren an Ig Nobel Prize the following year. And it's just one of many fascinating projects routinely carried out in his Laboratory of Experimental Archaeology, where he and his team try to reverse engineer all kinds of ancient technologies, be they stone tools, ceramics, metal, butchery, textiles , and so forth. .
Eren's laboratory is quite productive, publishing 15 to 20 papers per year. “The only thing we are limited by is time,” he said. Many have colorful or quirky elements and therefore often attract media attention, but Eren emphasizes that what he does is very serious science, and not entertainment. “I think sometimes people look at experimental archeology and think it's no different than LARPing,” Eren told Ars. “I have nothing against LARPers, but it is very different. It's not play time. It's hardcore science. My making a stone tool is no different than a chemist pouring chemicals into a beaker. But that act alone is not the experiment. It may be the flashiest, but that is not the experimental process.”
Read the full article
Comments
