- This is it. This is the knife made out of poop.
- That is a knife made out of my own poop!
There's actually an ethnographic account that says
some people would make knives out of their own frozen feces.
We tested it and it does not work.
- It doesn't work. - Like a brown crayon,
it just streaks on the meat.
- [George] In a quiet corner
of Kent State University's main campus,
scientists are exploring innovative,
sometimes strange new ways to study the past.
It's called the Experimental Archaeology Lab.
And what they do there is just as intriguing as it sounds.
- While we do field work, and we look at ancient artifacts,
the thing that distinguishes us is that we re-create
the artifacts that we find and study and dig up.
And then we put them to the test
and we figure out how they work.
And so we learn a lot about ancient technologies,
not only from making them, but then using them.
And seeing how they would have been used in the past.
A lot of archaeologists will just look at an artifact
they dug up and then sort of wax lyrical
and think about what an artifact could have been used for,
how it worked, whatever.
That's not good enough for us.
So in this lab we make stone tools, we make pots,
we make copper, bronze weapons, we do tattooing.
And then we break everything that we can
at every possible moment.
Whoops, sorry.
- That was glass.
- [Metin] My bad, we can-
- I didn't know you were still here.
- [Metin] Yeah, sorry, we can do it again.
But it works.
- Our ancestors relied upon stone tools
for hundreds of thousands of years.
The process of shaping rocks into useful tools,
such as spearheads, knives, and hammers,
is called flint knapping.
And Professor Eren is one of only a few dozen experts
in the world still practicing this ancient craft.
By manufacturing accurate replicas,
the Kent State Lab is able to test the strength, durability,
and sometimes fragility of these tools
so they can better understand how they were used
without having to damage actual relics.
Although the process looks simple enough,
flint knapping can take decades to master.
So, what's the general, just looking at it,
where would I even start with such a thing?
- Well, we'll start with the grip,
because you've got a power grip
and you've got to be a lot looser
and also hold it on the sides.
- [George] Show me again the second grip.
- [Metin] You want a precision grip like this.
- [George] Ah, gotcha.
- [Metin] And just sort of let the weight of the stone
just come and hit that spot.
And hold it with the other hand pretty tightly.
(rock clanks)
- Let me just adjust that slightly, there we go.
(rock clanks)
Hit a little closer to the edge.
- Okay.
- Oh.
- That's why the goggles, right?
(rock clanks) - There we go.
Got a nice big flake here.
So that's your first stone tool.
Welcome to the species.
- Right on, I would've survived the Paleolithic era.
- [Metin] You would've.
- [Geroge] Some experimental archaeology
is better performed outside the lab.
Armed with spears, an atlatl spear thrower,
and a well-bludgeoned plastic deer,
we made our way to an open field
where we re-created some prehistoric hunting techniques.
(bright music)
- All right, do you want to try throwing the stone-tip one?
It's slightly heavier.
I don't know if that'll help or...
- Wow! (all laughing)
- So, you could be, on our team,
you can be the squirrel hunter.
So, I bet what happened is the first time it hit the tree,
it probably put maybe a little microfracture in there.
And then when you just hit it, it just snapped it right off.
And this is very interesting because this is exactly
the kind of thing we try to study in the lab.
And then we can go from a lab breakage
to something like this in the archaeological record
and know this is from wood impact.
- [George] Sure, lots of fun,
but there is also some very serious science going on.
- [Michelle] The copper research that I am doing here
is really something that has never been looked
at before in the past.
We know that at some point in time people transitioned away
from stone tools, which they had used for millions of years.
So, understanding how copper functions as a raw material
is really something new that we don't know much about.
- [George] A prized possession of the lab
is the Instron materials testing machine,
a device normally seen in industrial settings.
Here, archaeologists use the device to crush,
twist, and stretch a variety of replicated items,
including stone tools, pottery, and various metals.
These tests place limits on how materials
and designs were used, or avoided by our ancestors,
such as arrowheads incapable of penetrating certain prey.
- I think people have more of this
Indiana Jones-type persona that they think of
when they think of archaeology, or maybe the pyramids.
But we're really trying to get at the lives
of the daily person living 10,000, 50,000 years ago
depending on who we're talking about.
- It was thought for many decades that Neanderthals
produced technologies that were less efficient
than later homo sapiens.
And so what we did was we made a lot of Neanderthal,
or what we call middle-Paleolithic technologies,
and we compared them to the technologies
of later homo sapiens.
And we actually showed that Neanderthal
and other middle-Paleolithic hominins,
their technologies were just as sufficient,
if not more so, than the technologies of later humans.
Because of that, our models of human technological evolution
are much stronger.
What we dig up,
the archaeological record, is indeed a finite resource.
So to really understand the past, we need to re-create it
and figure out how all that stuff
that we dug up actually works.
- I got a phone call one day,
and Dr. Eren wanted to do research on tattooing.
And I literally had to sit down, it literally floored me.
I just didn't think that was a thing.
I can draw perfect circles on people and no one cared.
You were just another tattooer.
(inquisitive music)
- I knew I wanted to study archaeology,
so I came here to Kent State.
Just the first question is,
what sound are these rocks making?
Could they have influenced the beginnings
of music-making?
- When we recruit students,
we actually look for students that have craft skills.
We look for musicians, we look for artists.
We look for people that like working with their hands.
Because it's very difficult and it takes years
to become a musician, or a flint knapper,
or a ceramicist.
So, if we can recruit people that already have those skills,
we then teach them the science.
That stuff is actual much easier to teach a student
than trying to put in a decade's worth of craft experience.
- [George] So instead of guessing how something
was manufactured or how it might work,
these archaeologists endeavor to figure it out.
Importantly, they're are also producing
meaningful scientific data, which can be used to forge
new theories about the ancient past
or even overturn longstanding ideas
that don't hold up to deeper scrutiny.
But experimental archaeology also makes sense
simply on account of their being fewer and fewer artifacts
for us to find in the field.
The future of archaeology is most certainly in the lab.