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Exclusives

• Interview with the author
• David Gibbins’s Ten Favourite Archaeological Sites in the World
• Download an exclusive preview chapter of David Gibbins’s forthcoming novel, The Mask of Troy
• The images that inspired The Tiger Warrior

Interview with the author

Name: David Gibbins
Occupation: Archaeologist and author

Describe your typical day:
When I’m writing, I get up very early, have a strong coffee and go straight to work. My most productive time is usually before dawn. I do most of my writing on a remote farm in Canada, where I spent much of my childhood after my parents emigrated from England. We also lived in New Zealand for four years when I was a small boy, and I’d sailed round the world by the age of six. My life has continued to be pretty peripatetic: I divide my time between Canada and England – my daughter is at school in England, and I spend the holidays with her – and also do lots of travel for archaeological fieldwork. In the past few months I’ve been to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, Hawaii and Greece, hunting for new archaeological sites, diving and researching for my novels. When I’m away exploring, anything can happen. There’s no such thing as a typical day!

What’s the best thing about your job?
Complete independence; I’m my own boss. But my success as a novelist means that I’m doing one book a year, and have to work to strict deadlines.

And what’s the worst thing?
Deadlines!

How did you get into archaeology?
I’d been obsessed with diving since early childhood; there’s a photo of me aged four in New Zealand, kitted out with ersatz dive gear I’d made myself. By the time I was fifteen I’d worked on archaeological excavations and was a qualified diver, and I did my first shipwreck dive that year. Istudied archaeology and ancient history at the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, then spent ten years working as a university lecturer before leaving to write full-time and continue doing archaeology under my own steam. Throughout my career I’d always done a lot through my own initiative. There are many other routes into archaeology,though; some of the best archaeologists have never had any formal training and learned everything ‘in the dirt’. The beauty of archaeology is that it’s not a rarified science and anyone can have the insight to tease information out of the past, and gain great pleasure doing so. It’s our heritage and it’s open to all.

What’s the greatest discovery you’ve ever made?
As a boy I yearned to find a prehistoric flint projectile point, and I did – an exquisite spearhead that’s still one of my most cherished discoveries. A few years ago I found one of the earliest sites in Canada, almost 10,000 years old, and every year I find hundreds of chipped stone artefacts at that site. I’ve always loved having artefacts around me – though most go to museums, of course! As an underwater archaeologist I’ve made many fabulous discoveries – ancient Greek and Roman shipwrecks, sunken cities. Two finds that stand out are a Roman surgeon’s medical kit found in a shipwreck off Sicily, and a stack of intact painted Greek cups of the fifth century BC found off Turkey. I’ve found gold, underwater and on land. I can vividly recall each moment of discovery, and it never stops thrilling me. I’ve always had finder’s luck; you can rationalise it – a passion for discovery, perseverance, a trained eye for artefacts, knowing where and how to look – but it’s also something innate, like an ear for music. You can’t learn that. It’s there from childhood and archaeologists who have it are the ones who tend to make the great discoveries.

What type of person do you need to be to do your job?
Apretty unfettered imagination is essential for both an archaeologist and a novelist. You also need to be independent, ambitious, hard-working and passionate; a risk-taker,adreamer and a storyteller. You need to be someone who can see the bigger picture and is prepared to take the plunge. What’s the best piece of advice you could give someone who wanted to follow in your footsteps? Try to realise your childhood dreams; therein lies happiness. Don’t expect anyone to give you a leg-up. It may be a hard road, but persevere. I dreamed of being an underwater explorer, an archaeologist and a writer, and here I am.

David Gibbins’s Ten Favourite Archaeological Sites in the World

The Palatine Hill, Rome, Italy
The Palatine Hill is the site of the first prehistoric settlement in Rome, and its greatest monuments at the height of the Roman Empire: the palaces of the emperors, overlooking the Colosseum and the great racetrack of the Circus Maximus. You can still see the postholes of the prehistoric huts, revered by the Romans as the ‘House of Romulus’, as well as the massive remains of the palaces that grew ever larger with each successive emperor. So much in archaeology is anonymous, the detritus of people whose names are lost forever, but here you are endlessly confronted with the biggest names of ancient history: Augustus, Nero, Claudius, other famous names inscribed on monuments and buildings. The Palatine is a testament to how much history is about the whim of individuals, yet how fragile that all is. Some of the most interesting remains are of the period following the fall of the Roman Empire, showing how people reused the monuments: temples turned into churches, arches incorporated into medieval houses, and evidence of humble people who eked out a living in the rooms once occupied by emperors, grazing their animals among the ruins.

The British Camp, Malvern Hills, England
Ispent much of my childhood in Canada and New Zealand, but when we lived in England it was in Herefordshire, in sight of the Malvern Hills and the great Iron Age earthworks of the British Camp. Walking there as a child inspired my interest in archaeology, and I still go there with my daughter every year. The prehistoric earthworks of Britain are among the most impressive and beautiful monuments anywhere in the world, equal to any pyramid or classical ruin. There’s one stretch of ditch on the British Camp where you can walk out of sight and sound of the modern world, and on a misty day you are back in the Iron Age.

Mycenae, Greece
Mycenae, like Troy, is one of those places where myth, history and archaeology come together,and continue to beguile us with questions. According to the Greek poet Homer, Mycenae was the citadel of Agamemnon, the Bronze Age king who led the Greeks against Troy. The Greeks of the classical period revered the place, and in the 1870s the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann proved its importance with his discovery of fabulous golden treasures he attributed to Agamemnon. Standing before the great ‘lion gate’, it’s impossible not to be seduced by the legend. But unlike Troy, which is complex and difficult to interpret, at Mycenae you can set aside all the myth and still be overawed by the place, a fortress set in a cleft between the mountains with walls which truly look as if they were built by Cyclops. And then you can stand on the site of the palace and imagine Agamemnon, king of kings, as he looked to the sea and contemplated leading his ships to Troy, into myth and maybe into history.

The Roman Amphitheatre, London, England
London’s archaeology is as rich and wonderful as its historic buildings and monuments. Beneath the City lies the remains of Roman Londinium, fascinating glimpses of which have been revealed during development work since the Second World War. There’s not much to see – fragments of buildings embedded in cellars, parts of the city walls – but there’s enough to fuel the imagination. The most amazing discovery has been the foundations of the amphitheatre, found beneath Guildhall Yard during the 1980s. The position of the elliptical wall was marked in the pavement of the yard after the excavation was over. You can see it on Google Map – Roman London is visible from space! You can go underground through the Guildhall Art Gallery and stand in the arena of the amphitheatre, with fragments of Roman walls extending off into the darkness around you. For me, it’s as awesome as standing in the Roman Colosseum itself.

Herculaneum, Italy
Most visitors to the Bay of Naples go to Pompeii, but equally extraordinary is the other town buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, Herculaneum. The excavated area lies within a suburb of Naples, below crowded modern buildings. Unlike Pompeii, which was buried in ash, Herculaneum was buried in volcanic mud and was better preserved – the mud encased the buildings completely so their upper stories survive. Ancient walls protrude from the sides of the pit, and you can imagine what extraordinary treasures might still lie there, unexcavated just beyond. Herculaneum is so well preserved that you can almost smell the fear, as if the place is still frozen at that moment when its inhabitants knew they were doomed. From the edge of the site, you can look at the Roman buildings, up at the very similar buildings of the modern town, then at Vesuvius behind – an image of continuity, of lessons not learnt, and of the overwhelming power of nature.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, Israel
Ispent time in the Old City of Jerusalem in the weeks leading up to the first Gulf War, when there were no tourists and I had the sites to myself. Standing alone in the rock-cut chambers below the Holy Sepulchre, tracing my fingers over the crosses carved into the walls by medieval pilgrims, made a powerful impression on me. The depth of the carvings seemed to represent the strength of faith, imprinting a history on the place that may one day be confirmed by archaeology – something I explored in my novel The Last Gospel. Above the underground chapels, the church seems to rise like a continuum of history to the complexities of the present-day, to the Ethiopian monks who live on the roof, in sight of the Al-Aqsa mosque above the foundation walls of the ancient Jewish temple, another of the extraordinary archaeological sites of that city.

Chichen Itza, Mexico
I visited this site in the Yucatan when I was researching my novel Crusader Gold, and I dived in the nearby cenotes, the sacred ‘wells’ of the Maya which have been found filled with gold and other artefacts. Chichen Itza was a Maya ceremonial centre deep in the jungle, with a pyramid, a platform surrounded by carved representations of human skulls, a sacrifical altar, and a cenote where divers have found numerous human remains. The local guides may try to convince you otherwise, but there is no escaping the fact that this was a place of gruesome death, focused on a cult of human sacrifice. It’s a disturbing site, and a lesson from history: societies with this kind of terrible disfunction can flourish.

L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site, Newfoundland, Canada
Athousand years ago a group of Norse adventurers landed on the eastern shore of Canada, and established a tiny settlement. They stayed only a few years, but they were the first known European settlers in the Americas, pre-dating Columbus by almost five hundred years. Today L’Anse aux Meadows is a UNESCO World Heritage site and you can visit the reconstructed turf longhouses of the Vikings, set in a bleak but beautiful landscape of bog and rocky shoreline, with icebergs grounded offshore. The site features in Crusader Gold and I stayed there when I was researching the book, imagining life there a thousand years ago – very little has changed.

Cholpon Ata petroglyph museum, Kyrgyzstan
This is a wonderful site on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul on the northern arm of the ancient Silk route. It features in The Tiger Warrior. The setting is fabulous: at the east end of the lake is the beginning of the descent into China, and to the south lie the snow-capped mountains of the Tien Shan. The ‘museum’ is in reality an open-air site containing thousands of boulders with ancient carvings, made by the nomadic peoples of the region several thousand years ago – animals, scenes of hunting, mysterious symbols. When I was there, I was struck by how all the great movements of history through this place – the travellers of the Silk road, the immense wealth that passed in both directions – had left almost no mark, and instead it was the local hunters and herders whose imprint endured on the landscape.

The Pyramid of Cheops, Giza, Egypt
Try to imagine that the Egyptian pyramids don’t exist, then convincing people that they once had. Nobody would believe you! The pyramids are on my list not only for what they are, but also for what they show about future discoveries in archaeology –anything is possible.

Download an exclusive preview chapter of David Gibbins’s forthcoming novel, The Mask of Troy

• Download the preview chapter of The Mask of Troy by clicking here [the_mask_of_troy.pdf] (0.05 MB)

The images that inspired The Tiger Warrior

• Download the article and images by clicking here [images_from_the_tiger_warrior.pdf] (1.86 MB)

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