Come, Tell Me How You Live

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There's thread in the discussion forum in Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets on fiction with an archaeological component.   I've put lots of books on hold at the library.........


Come, Tell Me How You Live is not fiction.  Agatha Christie's second husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist.  Agatha met him at Ur, where Puabi (whose treasures I saw in Philadelphia at the Penn Museum last year) was found.

Max dug in Iraq, and in Syria, and Agatha went along and was indispensible.  She became a ceramics specialist, and did a lot of photography (artifacts, and dig sites, and....), including developing the film and printing photographs.

Come, Tell Me How You Live is a memoir.  There are moments of beautiful description of the landscape and the atmosphere.  But mostly the book consists of anecdotes describing how difficult life was.  Dirt, disease, government bureaucracy, mice, bats, culture clash (not only between Europeans and Arabs, but between Arabs and Kurds, Arabs and Armenians, and, of course, clashes between Arabs and Arabs....).

While most of it sounded seriously awful to me, nearly always when she describes how she felt about life on a dig in the middle east between the wars, she found it deeply satisfying.

Guarded recommendation.  I'd rather have heard more about the aspects of that life she loved, and less about the difficulties.  Especially since, over all, she seems to have really loved it.  (And, for the record, though they were at digs for almost the whole book, there is vanishingly little archaeology in the book.  The "managing a dig" parts appear, but the "what did we find and what did we make of it" -- alas, no.)

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