Archaeology is a method and practice which resurfaces the past. It can help us reconstruct the history and culture of ancient (or not so ancient) people, and give us insight into what it means to be human. Archaeology produces more than museum displays, and it can be used to manipulate and disempower, to separate people from their past, or rewrite the history of the land itself. It’s no small question to ask who is doing the archaeology, and who is having archaeology done to them. Archaeology produces wonderous knowledge, but at what cost? Gothic and horror writers have drawn on the imaginative potential of once-hidden knowledge, remote tombs, and cursed artifacts to animate tales that slither under our skin and haunt us with questions about who is allowed to rest in peace and who is consigned to rest in pieces. It’s no mystery why so many archaeological ghost stories are set in museums!
Much like the history of archaeology itself, the archaeologically inspired horror fictions that emerged in the US and the UK co-evolved from similar scholarly interests, but within the context of different social and political concerns. At home, archaeology became a vital part of the work to understand and preserve the long history and culture of Great Britain and Ireland. Abroad, Empire-building afforded ample opportunities to fill the halls of museums with glorious materials from cultures around the world. The British were not alone in their exertion of control over the interpretation of ancient cultures, but the role they played in the development of Egyptology looms large.1
American archaeologists also excavated abroad, but as a field of study American archaeology grew up primarily among social science siblings—anthropological and sociological ethnography, linguistics, and physical (now biological) anthropology. Collecting, cataloging, and discursively erasing Native Americans was a critical element of westward expansion, one that filled museums with both material culture and the actual bodies of Native peoples. Collecting and pathologizing Egyptian mummies was integral to the development of scientific racism in the mid-nineteenth century, and on American shores these practices supported some of the justifications for the perpetuation of American slavery and other systems of inequality.
This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, one further narrowed by my own focus on the United States and the United Kingdom, both in regard to the history of archaeology and to archaeological horror fiction.2 As a discipline, archaeological practices are largely the same around the world, and the reason I split hairs here is to draw attention to some of the trends in fictional archaeology. Victorian archaeology’s closer kinship to Classics matters here merely to explain why so many protagonists are identified otherwise, as antiquarians or art historians or curators, for example, in stories that are clearly about the consequences of archaeological finds.
Romance, adventure, treasure, and archaeological authority were a perfect recipe for Victorian stories set in far-flung dangerous places. These exotic adventure narratives also underscored an important moral lesson, for the modern-day savages in these tales are the descendants of ancient cultures who collapsed under the misrule of decadent pagan rulers worshipping a multitude of false and terrifying gods. The vestiges of those pagan gods often had a little bite left behind their bark, of course. These stories operated in tandem with journalistic propaganda about colonial subjects unable to appreciate or preserve their own antiquities or run a proper government.
H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle poured pointedly virulent pro-Imperial sentiments into their work.3 Haggard’s immortal white witch Ayesha and the rugged adventurer Allan Quartermain stories are instructive examples. Haggard’s romantic adventure novel She has remained in print since it was first published in 1886 and the character of Ayesha appeared in numerous other stories. The story remains an exciting adventure yarn, but like the Quartermain stories, it depicts southern Africa (where Haggard served as an agent of the colonial British government during the Boer Wars), as a place peopled with savage and inferior races undeserving of their wealth of natural resources. Similarly, the keen attention influential American writers such as Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft paid to the contemporary debates in the fields of anthropology and archaeology in the early 20th Century reproduced the scientific discourses about inferior races in a format that spread these ideas beyond the halls of academia.
The imperial plunder of Egypt fills museums, the bounty for wealthy Western museums who financed the lengthy and expensive excavations prior to Egyptian independence. It’s important to remember that tourism to Egypt in the nineteenth century resulted in mountains of artifacts, trinkets, and even mummies returning to households around the world. Over time, these items were inherited, sold, or ended up in museums large and small. Stories of creepy Egyptian artifacts or mysterious papyri could be relatable to almost anyone. The imaginative potential was a goldmine for writers, who could be quite certain that even readers who never ventured out of their own village had knowledge of scarab beetles, mummies, and other iconic imagery.
In Richard Marsh’s singularly salacious work of Egyptian Gothic, The Beetle (1897), a sexually insatiable, murderous, gender-fluid ancient Egyptian deity arrives in London to visit tragedy upon a politician. This weird tale of vengeance is rarely discussed without mention of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although as Minna Vuohelainen points out in her introduction to the excellent 2008 Valancourt Press edition, The Beetle was actually published in serial form prior to the publication of Dracula. In both of these works, a dangerous foreigner contaminates Britain, a cautionary tales about the dangers of immigrants and the perilous status of white women in a world with porous borders and technological travel advances.
Stoker produced several stories which are foundational to the development of the archaeological gothic. The short story “Lot 249” and the novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903, revised in 1911) are both works of fevered Egyptomania. Stoker conflates a number of imperial enthusiasms, particularly Indian beliefs about reincarnation and Victorian interpretations of Egyptian cosmology. This gives The Jewel of the Seven Stars a potentially outsized role in the history of the genre. 4 In its wake, a staggering number of fictional archaeologists have learned that their daughters are reincarnated Egyptian princesses. The allure of this logic is obvious. An archaeologist reclaiming treasure that was rightfully theirs in a past life isn’t a looter, after all!5
It’s unsettling to peel back the layers of these ideologically-fueled justifications for violence and plunder, but there’s power in understanding their histories and their tropes, whether we choose to read the works themselves or not. There’s value, and pleasure, in reading these works. Additionally, an increasing amount of recent work subverts or reclaims older tropes, calling upon those old terrors but giving readers new things to fear. In fiction, as in life, archaeological excavations are uncanny ventures which reveal not just cool stuff, but evidence that life went on before we were here and it will go on after. More critically, work in places with grand civilizations remind us, perhaps uncomfortably, that empires that rise inevitably fall.
The post-World War II economic boom in the United States brought with it a rapid expansion in the social sciences and accelerated specialization and professionalization of scholarly fields. As the GI Bill expanded the population of (men) in college and created ever-more professorships, a proliferation of satire, science fiction, and horror stories about academia and academics followed. Erudite polymaths and wealthy swashbuckling adventurers never go out of style, of course, and for a time adaptations and homages to Haggard’s eighteen Quartermain stories were their own cottage industry, before the brash American Indiana Jones emerged onscreen to punch Nazi and take relics. For freedom. Of course.
Two of my favorite mid-century horror novels revolve around the arrogance and self-confidence of anthropology/sociology professors who marched headlong into danger in the tweediest and most mundane ways possible. They believe themselves iconoclasts, unable to comprehend that what they foresee as their heroic academic ascent to published greatness is going to be the very least of their problems. The best known of these is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). Dr. Montague plunges into an anthropological study of a haunted house, where his swaggering self-confidence in the importance of his methods and the chaotic disruptions by his spiritualist wife have devastating consequences for the young women he recruited as assistants.6
Fritz Lieber’s novel Conjure Wife (1943) centers on Norman and Tansy Saylor, a pretentious couple at a provincial small college. Like Jackson’s Montagu, Norman Saylor is an ethnographic legend in his own mind. In the academic milieu Lieber conjured, the men are rational and scientific while the women secretly practice the dark arts to guide their husband’s careers and manipulate campus politics. Tansy wields a powerful form of African-American voodoo, which she learned while working as Norman’s assistant during his ethnographic fieldwork in the American South. It’s a chilling tale, set in motion when a procrastinating Norman stumbles upon Tansy’s secret stash of gristly magical supplies. The reader spends considerable time in Norman’s head and the sexism and racism that underlie his worldview are neither subtle nor blunted by Lieber’s satirical intent. Norman’s obnoxious internal monologue can be read subversively, and often humorously, as evidence of his inability to recognize his own extraordinary mediocrity and narrow-mindedness. As a historical document, it’s an excellent—albeit sobering—reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that men were hired for faculty positions based in no small part on the free labor their wives were expected to supply the campus community. In Tansy’s shoes, who wouldn’t take such extreme measures to ensure tenure and promotion?
Fictional archaeologists are uniquely positioned to rupture the veil between the living and the dead. It’s their actual job to open the tomb, solve the puzzle, reveal the genealogical secrets, and, if they’re particularly unlucky, enrage the dead. This archaeology is often a dramatic, action-packed endeavor in which the fate of the world rests in the hands of a plucky group of scholars who can’t remember where they parked their car but can translate a dead language and navigate a series of complex traps and devious puzzles. While I enjoy a rollicking artifact-enabled apocalypse-aversion as much as the next reader, I’m particularly interested in stories in which ancient evil, lurking dread and deadly consequences stalk scholars through shadowy museum halls, auction houses, dusty libraries, and field sites that are maybe just a little too close to home.
Archaeological Must-Reads
Katie Soar and Amara Thornton. Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895-1954. (Handheld Press, 2022).
This collection includes representative stories by Arthur Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle, MR James, and Algernon Blackwood. More importantly, it also includes work by a number of early to mid-twentieth century women writers, including Margery Lawrence, Eleanor Scott, Dorothy Quick, and Rose Macauley. In putting together this collection, Thornton and Soar sought out stories in which archaeologists are also practitioners of the occult. These archaeologists know they’re meddling in something powerful and they bring fantastical dangers down upon their heads anyway because their obsessive quest for knowledge overrides common sense. Once they’ve ruptured the veil, their fates are sealed. Soar and Thornton omit mummy stories, as the ones which fit into their rubric are well-represented elsewhere.
Michael Talbot. The Bog. (William Morrow and Company, 1986, Valancourt edition, 2015)
The Bog is, ostensibly, a mummy story. It opens with all of the trappings of a basic horror story: a tedious American archaeologist, his grad student, and his family arrive in rural Western England and find themselves at odd with the superstitious villagers. But then they find a Mary Poppins-esque housekeeper and some extraordinary Roman-era bog mummies and they all live happily ever after! Just kidding. Our archaeologist protagonist is very proud of his reputation as “both brilliant and a maverick” and is certain he can bully the wealthy and eccentric local noble who owns the bog—a recipe for indiscriminate archaeological exploits and the consequences thereof. The twists and turns of The Bog will keep you guessing, even as you groan at how little progress academic spouses have made in the decades since Conjure Wife.
Steve Toase. Dirt Upon My Skin. Black Shuck Books, 2024.
Stories about the dangers of sedentary lab work, repetitive stress injuries from kneeling in a grid all day, and the impatience of developers who view archaeologists as expensive impediments to profit might not sound terribly enthralling at first glance. Archaeologist and horror writer Steve Toase’s short fiction proves that assumption wrong on every page of this collection of short fiction in which supernatural incursions upon the everyday world of contract archaeology turn the most mundane places into sites of exquisite terror and dread.
Anna Lee Walters Ghost Singer. University of New Mexico Press, 1988.
In North America, filling museums with the bones of Native peoples and propagating the myth of the vanishing Indian were foundational—not incidental—to the creation of American archaeology.7 Native writer Anna Lee Walters sets her novel in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and on reservations in Oklahoma and Arizona. In the museum, the ghosts of the Indians whose bodies and possessions sit in drawers and on shelves drive curators to their deaths. The book is a welcome rejoinder to tedious stories of cursed Indian burial grounds, which render Native people ghostly and extinct. Instead, this is a character study that humanize living descendants and confronts the reader with the generational legacy of colonial violence. It gives voice to the struggles of non-White scholars who are treated as both biased and inferior. It’s also a creepy and gripping read, from an accomplished novelist.
Elizabeth Hand. Waking the Moon. HarperCollins. 1994
If you love secret societies, magically-infused Dark Academia, museum horror, feminist archaeology, and seriously scary ancient moon goddesses, Waking the Moon is the book for you. Be mindful that the first American print edition was 120 pages shorter than the original British edition. Hand delivers you into a world where feminist archaeologists are celebrities and a society of academics control the world’s wealth and power, and you probably won’t want to miss a moment of her evocative world-building. Fortunately, the original, longer version is now widely available as an ebook. Waking the Moon is largely set in Washington, DC and our protagonist, a young woman archaeologist named Sweeney, works at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, which seems to have recovered from the events in Ghost Singer. I’m generally quite critical of stories that are built around the notion that archaeologists are hiding knowledge from the public, but over time I’ve come to appreciate the brilliant absurdity of the frightening world Hand created.
V. Castro. Immortal Pleasures. Del Ray, 2024.
V. Castro deftly weaves folklore, history, identity, and Gothic themes of haunting and loss in her stories, and I find this feminist erotic horror-thriller to be, perhaps, her boldest and most fully realized work to date. In horror fiction, ancient Mesoamerican culture propels doomsday plots which obscure the reality that these are people and places neither lost nor extinct. Castro makes extraordinary use of colonial history and an intriguing vampire mythology in Immortal Pleasures. In this chilling story of revenge, Castro’s immortal Aztec vampire travels the world to reclaim the looted heritage of Mesoamerica. Malinalli is an antiquarian on a very different mission than the anxious white men who met their death or succumbed to gibbering insanity under the polluting influence of exotic artifacts in the pages of those Victorian ghost stories.
1. British colonial rule of Egypt began in 1882 and ended with Egyptian Independence in 1922, but the British continued to occupy Egypt until the Suez Crisis in 1956.
2. For those so inclined, Bruce Trigger’s A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is an epic examination of the global history of archaeological theory and practice.
3. It may seem peculiar to modern readers that Haggard elevated and exoticized the magic and culture of ancient Egypt, but one result of Western control of Egyptology was a long-standing assumption that ancient Egyptians were light skinned or white, and thus superior to the surrounding Africans. Doyle, who wrote a number of highly influential archaeological stories, such as “The Ring of Thoth,” was highly critical of the Egyptian nationalist movement.
4. Much like the secrets that refuse to stay buried in them, many of these early stories continue to find new life on the large or small screen. Stoker’s novel The Lair of the White Worm is now perhaps best-known as the source of Ken Russell’s 1988 film of the same title, in which an archaeologist finds himself mired in a folk horror nightmare in an otherwise bucolic British town. Numerous archaeological ghost stories by MR James have been adapted by the BBC for their Ghost Stories for Christmas series, and Stoker’s mummy story “Lot 249” was adapted for Ghost Stories for Christmas as recently as 2023.
5. Roger Luckhurst writes at length about this idea as well as the broader history of the Egyptian gothic in his essential book The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2012).
6. This is a topic I cover at greater depth in my chapter “A Lady of Undeniable Gifts but Dubious Reputation”: Reading Theodora in The Haunting of Hill House in the Bram Stoker Award nominated volume Shirley Jackson: A Companion, edited by Kristopher Woofter, (Peter Lang, 2021).
7. Samuel J. Redman’s Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Harvard University Press, 2016) is an excellent place to begin exploring the difficult history of museums and human remains.
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