The article mentions how some archeologists learn flintknapping, which helps them understand their finds better.

Do you think they are playing Stone Age people?

For what it's worth, https://www.ht.lu.se/en/the-faculties/staff-training/interna... says funding came from Erasmus+ traineeship, several other grants, "and my own earnings", and he started while a grad student. (That page is from 2023.)

So no, he did not "monetize" his PhD as he didn't have one while doing this fieldwork, and he paid for part of it himself.

Also, my high school grades got me a college scholarship. I don't interpret that as me monetizing my high school degree, but then, I don't view everything through a hustle lens.

His has "a general interest in ancient seafaring and experimental archaeology" with a focus on "reconstructing the sailing routes used by sailors from the Viking Age in Western Scandinavia". He "spent 11 months learning about traditional sailing and boatbuilding techniques at Fosen Folkehøgskole", "conducted a series of sailing trials and trial voyages onboard traditional clinker-built, square-rigged boats", and "spent about 500 hours sailing or rowing, often for several days at a time, enduring every kind of weather imaginable, in an attempt to test the performance of these boats under the widest possible range of conditions."

How do you get from that hard work to "playing Viking", without being dismissive?

Of course, Heyerdahl's diffusion model was completely wrong, but that's a different topic.

> "The Viking Age ends in the 11th century, and we're talking about boats from 800 years later," he said. "But the construction techniques and the way they are rigged and their general performance characteristics are similar enough. Because this is a project about voyages and not a project about boat building, it seemed like a defensible analogy."

His guess - whether right or not - is that this ship-structure is similar enough that it serves as a possible way to identify possible Viking era landing places.