Books like Spooky Archaeology — picked by fans

As part of my “fifty sites project” for another book, I visited the best-known Native American earthwork sites in the American Midwest including: precisely crafted conical burial mounds; enormous, flat-topped “platform mounds;” embanked enclosures; and remarkable effigies in the shapes of birds, bears, and snakes. I was awed by their beauty and sophistication, but, sadly, settlers did not always view them as the work of Native People. Prolific author Jason Colavito conducts a deep dive into the racist roots of the myth of a “lost race” of ancient inhabitants of America who were claimed by some to have built those earthworks. Colavito brilliantly deconstructs the myth of a lost race of mound builders and gives due credit to the true authors of those earthworks, America’s Native People.

Dighton Rock in Massachusetts is covered in incised images, some in geometric patterns, others in the shape of animals, and others still depicting human-like figures. It’s fascinating and, like many before me, when I saw it I wondered about the meaning and origin of that rock writing. As soon as European settlers encountered the artifact in the seventeenth century, they vigorously contested its origins. Some claimed the highly eroded markings reflected an assortment of Old World languages including Phoenician and Norse. Others asserted that its message recorded the presence of Portuguese explorers in the early 1500s. Author Douglas Hunter shines an investigative light on Dighton Rock, masterfully debunking all of these speculations, proving the rock’s messages should be credited to the Native People of New England.

I was only 9 or 10 years old when I first saw the Cardiff Giant at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. I was enthralled by the recumbent ten-foot tall stone man and his story continues to fascinate me. Though it pales in comparison to the famous Piltdown Man fraud in terms of its longevity and archaeological significance, as Scott Tribble shows in his informative and entertaining book, the Cardiff Giant hoax of 1869 was much funnier. Deemed by some to be the remains of a biblical giant, thousands of dollars were made from its exhibition until a cigar manufacturer in Binghamton, New York admitted to crafting it. P.T. Barnum tried to buy it. Mark Twain penned a short story about it. And Scott Tribble wrote this marvelous book about it.

Whenever I encounter people who interrogate me concerning my archaeological skepticism that the “Lost Continent of Atlantis,” as described by Greek philosopher Plato in about 360 BC, was a real place or even one loosely based on an actual historical event, I invariably direct them to Paul Jordan’s thorough and definitive book. “But didn’t Plato say that Atlantis was real?” they ask. Nope. “But don’t ancient civilizations share so much in common they must have derived their cultures from a single source, Atlantis?” Nope. “But didn’t Plato base his discussion of Atlantis on the catastrophic destruction of the Minoan civilization?” Nope. Why all my “nopes?” Read Jordan’s authoritative book to find out. He is a terrific researcher and a damn good writer.

Palace of King Minos at Knossos on Crete seized the imaginations of scores of modernist writers, artists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers as wealthy English archaeologist Arthur Evans had its ruins disinterred and reconstructed with reinforced concrete, a novel building material in the early twentieth century. Evans' imaginative palace complex is today mobbed by tourists (I recommend going off-season in January, as I did) who revere the Aegean as the birthplace of Civilization. Gere ties it in to Modernist projects rejecting Victorian overstuffed ornamentations in favor of supposed ancient purity. Her fascinating documentation of culture leaders from Freud to Le Corbusier buying into Evans' myth of an idealized past embeds archaeology in arts and humanities fashions that still confuse speculation with history.

Akhenaten was a real outlier in Egyptian history, and I found this book very insightful and readable, even though it is an academic book. This Pharaoh was erased from history (by the following 19th dynasty), and this book goes a long way in explaining why this happened.

It’s an incredible story, and one must wonder how he died and why there were so many sudden deaths in the family. Perhaps not all the answers will come to light, but this is an amazing insight into his life and the short-lived religion he created.

I remember reading this when it first came out and being unable to put it down. The Mayan decipherment is still ongoing, and Michael Coe wrote with the knowledge and expertise of someone on the front line of researchers. The decipherments of Hieroglyphic Egyptian and Linear B are usually told as ‘hero-narratives’, in which one individual’s genius was able to make the breakthrough. This book reminds us that all decipherments are made incrementally, and gives due space to the many different contributions made to a decipherment.

I first read this book when I was trying to pull together all the disparate locations, time periods, and art movements for my book.

This task was a little overwhelming and Digging Up Britain taught me how to make choices about what to include and what to leave out, how to weave it all into a narrative that makes sense, and how to bring prehistory to life.

Unusually, this book travels back in time as we travel through it. It is like an archaeological dig – we start with the Vikings and then the Staffordshire Hoard but end up with the Star Carr deer hunters and a million years of history.

It is a book you can dip into or read cover to cover (as I did) and it has some good illustrations and maps throughout. 

Since hunter-gatherer times, our relationship with animals has been full of contradictions. We relied on them not only as a source of food and traction but also worshipped and deified creatures through the millennia.

This feisty and, at times, refreshingly irreverent book pulls together everything we know about the cultural history of human-animal relationships, from pampered pets to sacrificial offerings.

Reading this book is like watching an adventure movie on a Sunday afternoon on the couch. But it’s not a movie; it actually happened. The late author, a recognized geologist, recounts his personal biography during the 1970s, exploring the Afar region of Ethiopia and searching for the earliest human ancestors.

The “plot” involves the US government, spy accusations, funny stories about personalities in the field, and one of the “game changers” in paleoanthropology: The discovery of “Lucy,” the skeleton of a tiny female of Australopithecus afarensis that lived more than 3 million years ago. Knowing some of the personalities mentioned in the book, the pages flew in front of my face, and I effortlessly read it in no time.