I Read The Lost Tomb Because I Am ALWAYS Down To Gossip About Clovis Point Conmen and Gripe About NAGPRA

I went to Hell Creek and did NOT make the most important scientific breakthrough of my time. Humph!

The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas Preston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The pull of this book for me was, of course, the ancient Native American and Ancient Egypt content, but I actually found myself invested in all the mysteries.

“The Clovis Point Con” chapter is on a topic that I haven’t really read about before, ie. Clovis points, but now I’m fascinated, especially because the chapter is about Clovis points, and also about a con man, and ALSO about an eccentric rich guy who made a hidden treasure clue hunt. As with some of his other articles, Preston comes to this subject because he was apparently good buddies with the eccentric rich guy in question, Forrest Fenn, and so was able to have boots on the ground as soon as Fenn started to have suspicions about the magically perfect Clovis points he was being sold. Interestingly to me, a lot of Fenn’s own collections have uncertain, sometimes downright suspicious provenance, but he sailed through a genuine FBI investigation scott-free, so who am I to judge?

I like that Preston spills a lot of interesting tea, but none of it is salacious. Here’s a nice bit from “The Clovis Point Con,” when he’s tracing the chain of provenance of the faked Clovis points from their maker, Woody Blackwell, to Fenn through an elderly antiques dealer who was friends with Blackwell: “Everyone agrees that the antique dealer was duped by Blackwell; the man has a severe heart condition, and I was asked not to mention his name in the article for fear of giving him a heart attack.”

Like, I’m even madder at Blackwell now. Dude got a guy with a HEART CONDITION wrapped up in his criminal caper!

“The Mystery of Hell Creek” is my favorite chapter, because once upon a time, I got to do my own paleontological excavation in Hell Creek. Although if I’d found something important in my own dig, I’d have immediately been booted off of it, lol!

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Since these articles are several years (and sometimes several decades!) old and not re-edited to reflect the current time, you get a snapshot of what it looks like to have a mystery in progress, which I think is especially interesting after it’s been solved. The Tanis fossil site written about in “The Mystery of Hell Creek,” for instance, is now generally accepted to be what DePalma originally theorized that it was, a snapshot of the hours after the asteroid that would kill the dinosaurs hit our planet, but Preston’s article about it was written in 2019, the same year that the original 2019 paper describing the discovery was published. You should read that article, by the way, because it has pictures of the site! So the article describes not just DePalma’s discovery and what he says about it, but also the controversy surrounding it at the time and the skepticism of many in the paleontology community. Academics seriously can be the worst for political machinations and power brokering and defending their own personal intellectual fiefdoms, ugh.

Preston digs into even more political machinations in his couple of articles that have to do with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. I have complicated feelings about that act, mostly for selfish reasons because I want to see more of the artifacts from Spiro Mound, but most are not on display because of various connotations of that act. In thinking about that and other artifacts found at ancient Native American sites, my reasoning has always been that since we don’t know what peoples their descendants are, we should be able to study them, because Knowledge. Preston, though, in “Skeletons in the Closet,” an article actually written before that act was passed, makes a point that I have to respect: “The real issue, it seems to me, is that most Native Americans feel deeply about reburial, for whatever reason. It is not for us to judge the legitimacy of this feeling.”

FINE! I will respect the feelings of most Native Americans and continue to express my irritation only silently inside my head!

Tangent: if I ever get the chance to have any superpower I want, I will choose the superpower of knowing anything that I want to know. Like, I ask a specific question, and the answer will simply come to me. I’ll have a lot of missing person cases to get through first, but as soon as those are solved I’ll get right to the mystery of Spiro Mound.

The chapter “The Skeleton in the Riverbank” carries the point of NAGPRA further, in that Kennewick Man, a skeleton of huge archaeological importance, caused a huge custody battle that contrasted its worth to science with the desire of the native peoples of the area to rebury it. At first, it was ruled that Kennewick Man wasn’t related to any of the local native peoples so it was okay to study it, but then further study proved that it WAS related to them, so it was eventually relinquished and reburied.

Which means that it’s no longer available for further study, but I’m officially not griping about that anymore.

Another ethically complicated and very interesting issue that Preston explores includes the whole can of worms that evidence of cannibalism by historical Native Americans in the American Southwest opened up among the academic and native communities. People have a lot of feelings when you accuse their ancestors of eating each other! Even more so when you provide archaeological evidence that said ancestors smashed open the skulls of women and children, cut off their heads, roasted those heads on a fire, and then ate their roasted brains out of their skulls. To be fair to the horrified descendents, that feels kind of extreme even for cannibals…

You know I love myself some Ancient Egyptian tomb mysteries, so the titular chapter, “The Lost Tomb,” is my second favorite. It’s so bonkers to me that Egyptian tombs are still being rediscovered, and that they’re then not excavated and explored IMMEDIATELY! As I’ve previously mentioned, I want to know All The Things. This chapter introduced me to the Theban Mapping Project, which somehow in all my reading about Ancient Egypt I’ve never previously learned about. Now when I read about burials and tombs, I can finally visualize where they are! There’s another first-person connection in this chapter, as Preston actually goes to visit KV5 during its excavation season, and, charmingly, wheedles the workers a couple of different times into boosting him into newly opened chambers so he can be the first to have a look since they were buried.

The weakest chapter is the last one, “In Search of the Seven Cities of Gold.” The tone is very different, and the subject is a poorly-contextualized horseback riding trip that Preston and his buddy, Walter, took through Arizona and New Mexico in an attempt to follow Coronado’s path. This is the only passage that I loved, and found hilarious, because I, too, am, in the eyes of my immediate family, infamously obsessed with Bag Balm:

“Fortunately, in our medicine chest we found a tube of a substance called Bag Balm. Billed as an “Antiseptic Emollient Treatment for Horses & Cattle, Other Livestock, Small Animals,” this marvelous embrocation was for “Hoofs, Body & Legs, Udder & Teats.” It was also ideal for sore hands and butts. During the course of our journey we went through three large tubes of the stuff, very little of which was applied to the horses.”

I don’t know about its use as an antiseptic or a liniment, but it makes an EXCELLENT lotion for my chronically dry elbows! It smells kind of nasty, but we must all decide the price we’re willing to pay to be well-moisturized.

Even though I didn’t love that chapter, reading it made me crave a re-watch of Esteban and the Mysterious Cities of Gold. I’ve ALWAYS loved a good ancient mystery!

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I'm Going To Find the Lost Loot of KV 55 and Then Join King Tut's Death Cult

visiting a mummy in the Yale Peabody Museum, 2013

Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt by Chris Naunton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the kind of book that I would love to see a large-format, sumptuously illustrated and thoroughly annotated edition of. To be fair, there ARE some illustrations and some annotations, some maps and some diagrams, but in order to fully appreciate the information and process it I would have needed a lot, lot, LOT more. And maybe I’m just a dummy and this book is meant for experts who already know where the Valley of the King is compared to where the Theban necropolis is and where the Great Pyramids are in relation to all that, but I don’t think it is. The cover is too cute to be solely for experts!

Even having to look a lot of stuff up and just wonder about other stuff when I was too lazy to look it up, though, I did get a lot from the book. I thought it was interesting that all the regular folks who buried their loved ones in shallow graves at the edge of the desert were the ones who got it right, because the temperature and the lack of humidity naturally mummify corpses buried in that manner. It’s only because the royalty wanted to put themselves somewhere special that they had to go through all that work to do manually what the elements would have otherwise done for them perfectly well. Like, even in the ancient times people were showing off their wealth by making other people work harder!

At first, I also wanted to feel sorry for the long-ago deceased royalty. Having all that stuff/symbolic stuff around their corpses was super important to them, right, because then that’s the nice stuff they’d have around them in their afterlife? So imagine that you’ve done your nice burial and you have all your nice, sumptuous things around you and you’re having an absolutely awesome afterlife, but then all of a sudden your shit just starts disappearing, because back on earthside some grave robbers have discovered your tomb!

Tutankhamun, who in this book is hilariously described as the Benjamin Harrison of pharaohs, probably thought he had it MADE in the afterlife. For thousands of years the bigger, better pharaohs were just walking around naked, all their nice stuff having been stolen or excavated already, while he had ALL his nice stuff. Every single piece! I bet all the other pharaohs laughed their asses off when one day his chariot just disappeared--poof!--out from under him, followed by all his servants, and his cool clothes, and everything else that made the afterlife worth living.

And then he never got any of it back, because his stuff is in a museum and he’s back on display in his tomb!

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Honestly, it all made me kind of wonder if the entire concept of archaeology, excavating these people’s tombs that they deliberately had hidden on purpose, then removing all their nice stuff and displaying it in museums all over the place when their religious practice was to keep it all with their bodies, is actually unethical. I mean, wouldn’t respect for the religious beliefs of these fellow humans require that you NOT unearth and fish out and display all their stuff? How far back in time do you have to go before it’s definitely okay to put a full-on person’s corpse in a museum?

It reminds me of one of my other favorite excavations, Spiro Mounds, and how one of my pet peeves is that we can’t get a good exhibit going of most of the properly acquired stuff (we can still see the looted stuff, of course--there are goods looted from Ancient Native American mounds in the British Museum!) because they’re Native American grave goods and so need permission from the people who make up their descendants, but we don’t know who the descendants of the Spiro Mounds people are so there’s nobody to give permission so we can’t display it. What’s the ethical difference between people whose goods we’re not allowed to display and people whose goods we are? Coolness factor? The fact that one indigenous group was a genocided minority, maybe, and therefore we should be a lot more careful with them now since we were so careless with them previously?

Speaking of unethical acquisition... here's a mummy I visited in the British Museum in 2023!

Ethical or not, I’m super fascinated by the stories of tombs of Egyptian royalty that we know should be around somewhere, but that still have not been found. And Naunton keeps ending chapters by talking about how such and such a place and such and such another place were thought to be likely spots for excavation, but then the archaeologist died or lost their funding or spent the rest of their career working on something else and those spots never did get excavated. Dude, just buy me a plane ticket and book me a guide who speaks the language and *I’LL* go excavating for these lost tombs!

My favorite extracurricular deep dive comes from Naunton’s chapter on “The Missing Amarna Royals.” In it, Naunton tells the story of the excavation of KV 55, including this VERY “intriguing note:”

“The coffin found in KV 55 was lined with several sheets of gold foil, which had become detached from the badly decayed wooden case, and were subsequently kept in storage separately in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. These subsequently disappeared, but resurfaced on the art market in the 1980s, and were then purchased by two German museums. Those sheets that were part of the original coffin base--by now perished--were restored to a plexiglass substitute, which was repatriated to Egypt in 2001, along with the fragments that had once been attached to the lid.”

First of all: what the HELL, Germany?!? I thought we’d all agreed that you needed to be on your best behavior until the end of time! How does your museums purchasing stolen antiquities accomplish that?

Anyway, I thought that was such a weird thing to have happened, and such a weirdly neutral way to have put it--like, what are you saying by *not* saying it, Naunton?--that obviously I had to dive deeper. And the deeper you dive, the more interesting and weirder KV 55 gets!

 As in, there were a LOT of shenanigans involving its excavation. A LOT of shenanigans, and a lot of those shenanigans were perpetrated by the archaeologist in charge, who should have known better. So I guess much of the mystery surrounding who KV 55 could be, because we still don’t know, is because the archaeologists did such a piss-poor job excavating that they lost and destroyed a lot of important evidence. And then someone(s) on the team stole a bunch of stuff and sold it and that ended up in all kinds of places, and then even stuff in the museum got stolen and sold and ended up in all kinds of places? If you’re looking for your next obsession, there are a LOT of KV 55 conspiracy theories to invest yourself in.

So that’s going to be my next conspiracy theory obsession, I guess. And when I get bored with that, I heard that King Tut might have had a death cult!

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