I am a recovering archaeologist.
I taught archeology and anthropology for twenty years at Cal State Fullerton, did extensive fieldwork abroad, particularly in the Middle East, was awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities fellowship for a year at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, I was the director of the California State University overseas campus at the Hebrew University, and then in 1995, the last time the State of California had more in the pension fund than in the budget, I took a handshake. golden hands, that would give me more money not to teach than to teach.
There was a restriction, of course. Under the terms of the handshake, he could no longer teach at any Cal State campus, not even the extension, so after twenty years of teaching, he was doomed.
Then someone told me that the University of California had a different retirement system, so I went to the University of California at Irvine and started teaching two classes in extension. There they encourage extension professors to take extension courses in other departments, and since they have a famous writing program, I tried two extension writing courses, one in short stories and one in mysteries. Short stories, I thought, are easier to write (they’re not), and I always liked mysteries.
They told me to write what you know. What did she know? She knew archaeology. And she could tell them stories.
There was the archaeologist, Sir William Flinders-Petrie, a genius and a complete madman, who had single-handedly invented modern archaeology. (No, it wasn’t Schliemann. Schliemann was a liar and a con man, who salted the sites and stole some of the artifacts. He could tell you stories!) Petrie, on the other hand, had gone to Egypt in 1882 to measure pyramids because he believed in the power of the pyramids. When he got there, he was upset that nobody knew what happened and when, and he decided to do something about it. He developed a series of date sequences and clarified Egyptian archaeology.
He then moved to a site in Palestine, and using the Egyptian pottery he found there for cross-dating, with a toothache and a three cane, he established the chronology for the archeology of Palestine and went on to train a generation of British . archaeologists, known as Petrie’s pups.
It was so bright that he was convinced his head was growing.
When he retired from the University of London, he moved to Jerusalem, where the sky was blue, prices were low, and the air was like champagne. He and his wife moved into a room at the American School of Oriental Research, and he spent the rest of his years walking the American School garden arm in arm with her wife, stroking her long white beard. as she eagerly accepted braces. fans.
He bequeathed his head, with all his knowledge, to the University of London Medical School in Gower Street.
When he died in 1942, his head was duly cut off, placed in a hatbox on the mantelpiece of the headmaster’s home of the American School, and the rest buried in the Protestant Mount Zion Cemetery.
We had just entered World War II and the director of the American School received a cable from Washington telling him to come immediately. Because of wartime travel restrictions, it took him two months to get to Washington: by ship to South America, through the jungles of Central America, and on to Washington. When he got there, he was told to go back and do an archaeological survey of Transjordan for the OSS. Two months later, he was back in Jerusalem. And the hatbox was gone.
Searching for Petrie’s head became an entertaining pastime at the American School. People looked for him in the library, under the stairs, in the attic. Once, they found a trunk full of skulls in the attic, but they turned out to be from a graveyard at a place called Bab-edh-Dra.
When I got an NEH fellowship for research at the American School in 1983, we received a clipping in the mail from the Illustrated London News: a picture of a head severed at the neck. The caption below read “WHO IS THIS MAN?” It looked exactly like Petrie, except it was the head of a young man with a black beard and black hair.
Write what you know.
I wrote a story, sent it to a literary magazine in San Francisco, and sold it for fifty dollars and a T-shirt. That was my first foray into published fiction.
Write what you know.