Come, Tell Me How You Live
by Agatha Christie
Buy on AmazonAgatha Christie was already a celebrated writer of mysteries in 1930 when she married archaeologist Max Mallowan. She enthusiastically joined him on archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, providing backgrounds for novels and "everyday doings and happenings". Pre-war Syria years are remembered here, not chronologically, but in a cluster of vignettes about servants and aristocrats who peppered their lives with annoyances and pleasures.
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"I was surprised to see a book by Agatha Christie on your list: Come, Tell Me How You Live . Agatha Christie was married to a man named Max Mallowan, a well-known archaeologist, particularly in the near east. She wrote Come, Tell Me How You Live in 1946. It’s a tremendously chirpy account of absolutely colonial archaeology: of expeditions in Syria or parts of Iraq and digging up mounds. It’s a fun read, very cheerful, but one of the difficulties archaeology has is to try to extract itself from being a colonial profession and one of the very big questions now is what does archaeology mean to indigenous people in post-colonial continents? Does it really mean only the material relics of the past, or does it mean something broader and quite different from old-fashioned Eurocentric archaeology? Could it be that indigenous perspectives are more valid, more interesting than ours?"
Archaeology · fivebooks.com