We’ll give tips on picking good archaeology-related books for yourself or your next book club!
A Pun Goes Here: The AAI Reads Fiction Book Club is a great guide for running your own archaeology-fiction related book club. However, you might want to know how we found the books for that Data Story. Or, you might want help finding new reads yourself. In this article, we’ll tell you how we got to the dozen books we included in that Data Story so you can try it out yourself.
A Pun Goes Here began when we decided adapt our non-fiction book club Data Story (the Of Mycenaean Men Data Story) for use with other books. Specifically, we thought that it would be cool for people to use fiction to explore archaeological data literacy. To pick good books, we first considered novels we’d read or heard about with some archaeological connection. After settling on a few, we realized that most were written for adults. So, we made adult readers the target audience for our first fiction book list.
Of Mycenaean Men is our nonfiction book club Data Story.
Then, we examined that initial group to explore what they shared. And realized we had a lot of science fiction and fantasy books, which makes sense. There are many that archaeological information inspires us to write stories set in the past, present, future, or in an entirely different universe. Unfortunately, our goal wasn’t a genre-specific book club, though that could be your goal. That’s because a genre-specific book club wouldn’t show our audience how frequently archaeological themes or archaeology-related data come up in fiction.
We also thought it might make the book club too narrow, only appealing to people interested in both the content (archaeology) and genre (sci-fi/fantasy). So, we decided to pick books from our sci-fi/fantasy pile that best aligned with our other intentions for the book club (diversity in creators, locale, characters etc.) and then intentionally looked at other genres.
Thankfully, some of us also read mysteries, which have a long history with archaeology (see Agatha Christie). However, we struggled to identify a third genre or theme that had the same wealth of archaeology-related themes or methods. What would be a good third theme that met the other intentions we had for the Data Story?
That’s when the recommendation of Sunflowers by an AAI staff member sparked the idea of books written by archaeologists. How cool would it be to compare a real archaeologist’s use of archaeology within fiction (if any) to those incorporated by non-archaeologists? So, we started searching for archaeologists who also wrote fiction. Although we had a couple to start with, we needed to find more so that each theme had an equal number of books.
Keyword searching on our preferred search engine resulted in a few options but many were white, male, and English-speaking. Also, if they’re easy to keyword search on a search engine, they’re probably the same ones everyone finds.
This was where a little bit of data literacy on our side came in. We used a more complex type of search on Wikipedia to find additional authors. We noticed that most entries about authors on Wikipedia stated what else they do or did. So we used the “Advanced Search” function to find people whose pages stated they were an “archaeologist” AND an “author” or “novelist” or “writer” or other variants on those phrases. Once we had this search list, we looked through the authors to see who had works that fit our other criteria.
Here’s a sample of what an advanced search might return.
This more complex search allowed us to sort through many potential authors and use a reliable platform of crowd-sourced information to do so. You can check out all the works we decided to include in this theme here. Or, if you want to look for other archaeologist-authors you can try this search out yourself!
So, that’s how we put together the adult fiction book list for A Pun Goes Here. If you have any recommendations for more books please let us know because we’re always looking for more diverse, ethical, accessible, and archaeology-related reads. If you’ve read all the works we’ve suggested, check out the recommended resources included in the discussion guides, the book data table (which includes some books we considered but didn’t include!), or the links included in this article to find more. And once you’ve got enough for your own list, you follow our guide to make your own Data Story-inspired book club.
Happy Reading!
Image credits: APGH_SelectionBlog_Header by Paulina F. Przystupa from the AAI / CC BY, adapted from “dark blue book case” (adapted from an Adobe stock image) and “APunGoesHere_Hat” (image provenance forthcoming) both by L. Meghan Dennis from the Data Literacy Program / CC BY-SA; OMM_TestingHeader_26April by Paulina F. Przystupa from the AAI / CC BY, adapted from Adobe stock and public domain images; and a screencapture from Wikipedia by Paulina F. Przystupa / CC BY-SA 4.0.
