About a month ago I wrote about my discovery of Agatha Christie’s mystery novels.

I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say that I’ve always enjoyed ‘golden age’ novels both for their stories and their portraits of a now vanished world.

Somehow a discount easyJet flight to Bodrum just doesn’t have the romance of the Orient Express. Even a TGV to Nice, while clean, efficient and comfortable is hardly le train bleu.

Agatha Christie, despite being very much a woman of her time, clearly had an adventurous streak, going surfing, and travelling to Baghdad by train and bus at a time when Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq were still strange exotic places, and not simply a source of dismal news headlines.

After all, when she travelled there, it was not that long since Gertrude Bell and a certain TE Lawrence had been almost the only Europeans to travel through what had been a remote and inaccessible part of the Ottoman empire.

Later on, in the mid 1930s, she spent several seasons in the field with her husband Max Mallowan when he was excavating in Syrian Kurdistan.

And she wrote a memoir, Come, tell me how you live, describing her time in the field, with a little bit of poetic licence along the way.

Like much of her writing it is very much of its time and some of the attitudes and language used jars a little bit today, but it does convey how archaeology was done before it became the highly technical and scientific discipline it is today, as well as the joys of fieldwork, from bedbugs to beautiful mornings in remote areas.

Unlike some of her earlier books it’s not yet in the public domain. As it was only published in 1946 despite mostly being written in the 1930s, it will be a few years until it becomes available for download.

The book itself seems to have dropped out of sight, but not quite – such is the power of the Christie’s name, it’s still available in paperback, although Amazon wants the best part of forty bucks for a copy. Ebook editions are more reasonably priced, and as the book has been reprinted on an off over the years, second hand copies are easy enough to track down if you prefer a physical copy.

It’s not TimeTeam by any means, but if you are interested in how archaeology was conducted in the 1930s, it’s a valuable source…