In 2019 we told you about an interesting experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an old Inuit man who made a knife from his own frozen feces in the 1950s. He used it to kill a dog, skin it, and use its ribcage as an improvised sled to take him to the North Pole. Metin Ellen, an archaeologist at Kent State University, created a rudimentary blade from his own frozen feces to test whether it could cut through pig skin, muscle, and tendon.
Sadly for the legend, the blade failed all tests, but the research was versatile enough to earn Ellen the Ig Nobel Prize the following year. And that’s just one of the many fascinating projects he regularly takes on. Experimental Archeology LaboratoryThere, he and his team try to reverse engineer all sorts of ancient technologies, including stone tools, pottery, metals, butchery, and textiles.
Ellen’s lab is extremely prolific, publishing 15 to 20 papers a year. “The only limitation we have is time,” he said. While many tend to attract media attention because of their colorful and quirky elements, Ellen insists that what she does is not entertainment, but very serious science. “I think sometimes people look at experimental archeology and think it’s no different than LARPing,” Ellen told Ars. “I have nothing against LARPers, but it’s very different. It’s not play time. It’s hard-core science. I make stone tools no more than a chemist pouring chemicals into a beaker. No change. But that act alone is not an experiment. It is not an experimental process, although it may be the most flashy.
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