We’ve always been fascinated by far-off lands, unknown civilisations and lost cities. Ancient legends, from Gilgamesh to Odysseus to St Brendan, told of voyages that discovered lands lying just a little off the map. During the late mediaeval and early modern period, countless books were published purporting to tell of voyages to bizarre and fantastic countries. These were the books Jonathan Swift was satirising in Gulliver’s Travels.
In time, of course, the world shrank. Or, more accurately, the areas of the world we could plausibly fantasise about shrank, as more and more of the earth was explored. But then a new frontier opened up.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, archaeology really took off. It wasn’t a new discipline1 but this was when it began to evolve from random hunting for treasure or sacred relics into the academic discipline it is today. Discoveries in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor and many other countries fired the imagination of people who longed for unknown worlds. Here they were, emerging from the past.
Tales of Lost Worlds
In this atmosphere, “lost world” fiction blossomed in the later 19th century, led by H Rider Haggard. In novels such as King Solomon’s Mines and She, many of them featuring his iconic character Allan Quartermain, he created a genre of stories where explorers, mainly in Africa, find lost civilisations, sometimes (as in She, for instance) including supernatural elements.
Haggard writes according to the colonial concepts of his time, and the stories today do come over as racist. For their time, though, they were relatively liberal in their portrayal of Africans, compared with the prevailing views, and many of his African characters were portrayed positively.
Many authors followed Haggard in the lost world genre. Perhaps the most notable was Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan books frequently involved the discovery of similar hidden civilisations.
Another approach to archaeology in fantasy popular in the earlier part of the 20th century was for stories that revolved around ancient remains that prove to have supernatural powers. An example of this is A. Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar, in which an archaeologist gets caught up in a battle between two ancient gods. A related approach can be seen in the 1932 film The Mummy, which combined archaeology, Egyptology and magic.
The Return of the Archaeologist
Lost world tales never disappeared, but they became somewhat less fashionable, until 1981, when Spielberg and Lucas introduced the world to Dr Henry Jones junior — better known as Indiana. George Lucas, who wrote the story, based Indy loosely on Allan Quartermain (including the iconic hat), and the films inspired a whole new range of films and games, from Tomb Raider to the new versions of The Mummy.
Most of the characters in these, like Quartermain and the heroes he inspired, are explorers and treasure hunters more than real archaeologists2, but serious archaeology was also becoming extremely popular, at least in the UK. This was largely due to various TV shows, such as Time Team, which showed archaeology in progress and had huge audiences.
Some experts accused these programmes of dumbing down the discipline. Whether or not this was justified, the fact remains that large numbers of people were not only hooked, but also could recognise Samian ware when they saw it and understood the importance of geophysical surveys. They were both educating and entertaining the public.
Nevertheless, mingling fantasy adventures with the methodical processes of true archaeology has proved less successful. The BBC drama series Bonekickers (2008), for instance, attempted this and bombed. In spite of having excellent writers and cast, it proved to be rather dull and unconvincing.
Archaeology in Other Worlds
Lost world stories have also been a staple of secondary world fantasy. This is especially true of sword & sorcery, where endless heroes and heroines have crossed mountains to find forgotten kingdoms or searched dense forest for lost cities, lost temples, lost towers… lost pretty much anything. For the most part, they’re after the treasure that’s been left lying around, but occasionally they also crave (as Henry Jones senior put it) “enlightenment”.
But what about real archaeological fantasy in secondary worlds? After all, Indy and his kind investigate our world’s ancient legends — and other worlds would have their own to uncover.
Back in 2011, when I was getting into the idea of writing “modern” stories in the Traveller’s World, it occurred to me that archaeology would most likely have developed there. And the big advantage I had was that I’d already written about many of its ancient legends.
The story I wrote was The Lone and Level Sands, which was published as a standalone eBook by Musa Publishing — unfortunately, just before the publisher folded, so that it was only briefly available. It involved two students helping their professor excavate a site associated with the ancient city of Kebash, which occupies a position in their mythology roughly equivalent to Atlantis. And, needless to say, they uncover more than they’d bargained for.
It’s taken a while, but I’m currently working on a sequel, provisionally called Secrets of the Black Cape. Here, the same characters, a few years on, are excavating a site associated with events in At An Uncertain Hour — and again, they find more than they expected, this time perhaps with slight shades of She.
The stories certainly have an Indiana Jones vibe, but they’re also both set in the context of properly organised excavations. I’ve no definite plans for further stories — but there are still plenty of legends to investigate, so who knows?
I’m not aware of any other works of secondary world archaeological fantasy, but it seems unlikely that I’m the only person who’s thought of it. I’d love to read other authors’ takes on the genre — but, in any case, I hope my stories will soon be available to fill the gap.
1 It’s been suggested that the first archaeological expedition (that we know of, at least) was St Helena, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, finding the True Cross and other relics in Jerusalem in the 4th century. This is highly dubious, but certainly similar activities were common and could loosely be described as archaeology.
2 Although Raiders of the Lost Ark does actually show Indy doing some excavating at one point. Archaeology also plays a significant role in two classic Doctor Who stories: The Daemons and Battlefield.
The Fantasy Worlds of Nyki Blatchley 