The Beginning of 'The Artifact Hunter'
My journey as an author began with my first book, Beyond the Halls: An Insider’s Guide to Loving Museums. I am a long time writer, creator, reader... and in many ways (though it’s cliche to say) I have always had the desire to write a book. My first book was non-fiction and began with the intention of creating something that would give me a competitive edge in the job market; the very competitive and bleak museum industry job market. In writing the book, I enjoyed the content creation aspects; writing and storytelling, and I was eager to hold the final product in my hands.
I enjoyed the journey so much, that before I had even sent the manuscript off to copy editing, I already had an idea for another book.
In October of 2019, I was deep in the revisions phase of developing the manuscript for Beyond the Halls, and honestly, I was still writing mountains of new content. True to form, I am deep in the writing zone, and suddenly I have a diverging thought; another idea for a book! This time: fiction. At the time, the idea that came to me was something of a cross between Back to the Future and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I knew there would be time travel. The initial idea was an intern who time travels with a curator in a Delorean stored at a Florida museum and explores a variety of time periods and places where famous artifacts were first created, in use, or stolen and transported to the museum they live in today.
“Are you going to write another book?” people would ask not days after the public launch of Beyond the Halls. Hell, someone asked me at the launch party. I told them about this new story idea in it’s baby stages, and the more I told it, I realized that I was not in love.
Time passed, and I devoted my energy to the sale and success of Beyond the Halls and all of the wonderful opportunities it brought me. Within that year, I spent day in and day out coaching hundreds of authors in publishing their own books. I had the pleasure of meeting and working with some very talented fiction writers. I was so intimidated by their skill and the idea of taking on a complex novel of any length. How do you even begin to keep track of the plot, the characters, intense detail??
After celebrating a year of Beyond the Halls in December 2020, I settled into a routine bubble bath and was suddenly struck with inspiration and was instantly in love. I leapt out of the bath and whipped out a journal I keep at my bedside. Getting dressed can wait, I have an amazing idea. Late at night, I hand-wrote about fifteen pages of mind maps, bullets, questions, plot points, characters, and thus was the birth of The Artifact Hunter. (Though, it did not have a name yet.)
Immediately I took to chatting with friends and family about the plot; it was natural, exciting. Suddenly the idea became less intimiating. I knew what I wanted to write, the story I wanted to tell; and after that, it practically writes itself. There’s this world in my head where this story plays out, and all I need to do is put the pen to paper. This, of course, is easier said than done.
What’s the story? Why museums? I am borderline obsessed with museums— I love them. I have a deep fascination with displays of human culture and how and why we attach value to and display objects; the stories they tell, the context of their discover, provenance, use and more. The people who work in museums also are responsible for bringing the stories to life, and I have the utmost respect for them. After spending so much time, energy, research, and lived experience with museums and the people who work in them, it truly consumes much of my thoughts. The exciting part was getting people to be as excited or at least interested in museums and their stories as I was. There are countless movies, tv shows, and books that take place in museums or utilize them for setting— people have an interest in museums and their potential for action packed adventure. This book follows in the footsteps of those works.
In writing and talking about Beyond the Halls, the story that always seemed most compelling to the audience was that of the Elgin Marbles; and rightfully so, it’s engaging, tragic, and invokes anger and frustration. The Elgin Marbles are a classic, and frequently taught, example of dissonance in museum ethics and the repatriation of artifacts (or lack there of in this case).
The Elgin Marbles are a very large set of hand-carved marble nabbed from the top of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece; currently living in the grand halls of the British Museum in London, United Kingdom. They are truly an iconic symbol of ancient Greek culture. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; which Greece was a part of at the time. He invited several skilled artists to make drawings of ancient monuments in Athens, and claimed that he received a royal decree from the sultan of the Ottoman Empire authorizing him to take casts of the sculptures, fix the scaffolding around the Parthenon, and... take any items of interest.
The admittedly ambiguous firman from the Sultan probably meant they could take little things they may have found in their excavations, but Lord Elgin conveniently interpreted it as “take whatever you want, including whole chunks of the building.” So, Thomas Bruce and his merry men took several slabs of sculpted marble off the top of the Parthenon along with several sculptures, and crates full of other antiquities. TOOK IT. Several thousand pounds of marble, carefully crafted, well over two thousand years-old at the time. Not only did he take the marbles, but he got in a shipwreck on the way back to England, and a team of divers had to retrieve the marbles from the sea. This guy.
Knowing their cultural value and potential worth, he wanted to sell them to Great Britain, and he did: for 35,000 pounds (about 4 million USD). In recent years, the Greeks requested that the marbles be returned to Greece and reside in the Acropolis Museum. The British Museum denied the request and claimed that the Acropolis Museum did not have adequate conditions to house the ancient marbles. So, the Greeks built a brand new Acropolis Museum, state of the art; complete with space left specifically for the missing marbles, and the British Museum still denied their request. The acquisition of the Acropolis Marbles was ultimately a product of looting on the part of the British, in the infancy of proper archaeological practice, and during a time of political turmoil for the Greek, but these conditions are no justification for the interning of heritage.
It is this story that inspired the key quest in this book; to find and prevent the lifting of an artifact of significant cultural value from its homeland.
Many of the other components of this book are drawn from prior experiences, my life’s journey, and the people I’ve met along the way.
I cannot wait to share The Artifact Hunter with you. Stay tuned.