Description:
When Jennifer Wallace travelled round Greece as a student, hiking through olive groves to hunt out the stones of old temples and lost cities, she became fascinated by archaeology. It was magical. It was absurd. Give an archaeologist a few rocks and, like a master storyteller, he could bring another world to life.
Brief description: Jennifer Wallace is Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK, author of Tragedy Since 9/11: Reading a World Out of Joint (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and editor of A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Her previous books include Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (2007).
Review Quotes:
"Digging the Dirt is an original foray into some of the reasons why archaeology fascinates us ... A fascinating progression through hearty parsonical barrow-diggers, body-snatchers, philosophers, savants, and poets - from Shelley and Wordsworth to Seamus Heaney ... The book is a fresh and engaging tussle with archaeology and the imagination." --The Sunday Telegraph
"Wallace engages in an extended literary treatment of archaeology. This attachment to archaeology built up in her in her travels to different places around the world where she explored archaeological sites real and reputed. With her literary temperament, she sees archaeology as involving a "poetics of depth." Not so much concerned with the discipline and deductions of archaeology, Wallace sees, and feels, it as a desire to uncover the millennial secrets of human nature and as a countervailing activity to the centrifugal tendencies of the postmodern world. Beginning her book with an anecdote about Schliemann--who discovered the site of ancient Troy--believing that the face of a buried warrior he came upon was that of the king Agamemnon only to have the face disintegrate upon being exposed to the air, Wallace writes of the romance of archaeology as it has affected noted and unknown archaeologists, writers, and artists, and also herself. Digging the Dirt makes good reading for Wallace's literary style, and for its occasional lucid notes of social critique implicit in the author's romantic view of archaeology." --Midwest Book Review, "Library Bookwatch" "As a compulsion it is modern: Jennifer Wallace, in her profound and fascinating new book, Digging the Dirt, locates its beginnings in figures such as William Stukeley, whose lively, some said fantastic, explorations of Avebury and Stonehenge in the early 18th century began the work of fleshing out our remote ancestors." --The Independent "The business of digging things up cannot help but be an imaginative enterprise as much as a scientific one." --The Washington Times