Key to the Past

NOT a free plot bunny. It might be, instead, the archaeology novel I should have set out to write.



See, when I was working on my Stargate/Tomb Raider cross-over fanfic, there came a point where I wanted to separate Lara Croft from SG1 and have them both working on the mystery from different angles. Best way to have some time pass was for her to go low-profile and instead of flying direct to the next McGuffin, have to hitch a ride and drive across the US.

Which turned out to be the American Southwest (she started in Colorado and was heading to California). And I had the idea of her hooking up with a cable television pseudo-archaeologist, and there was a real one who had a whole team, a paramilitary look, and some unusual cars. So why not take this further: especially since I had by this point determined I was going to visit the Trinity Site (the first atom bomb), why not follow the people who have rebuilt the Landmaster from Damnation Alley and give my fictional team a reproduction Ark II from the television show of the same name.

I didn't flesh out the team too much because they were strictly side characters; there for atmosphere, with the Tomb Raider and Stargate casts continuing to do the heavy lifting. But I did flesh them out a bit; R. Barringer Newberry, the huckster and showman that might underneath it all believe in the greater truth he claims to seek. Barry Wentworth, the "tame scientist"; a shy, out of shape Aggie (Texas A&M) who pursues cryptids (that is, creatures like Bigfoot and Nessie) with intellectual honesty and scientific rigor.

Stan, Newberry's quiet older brother, who built Ark II, shows a surprising reserve of personal courage, and could in a longer novel be the required resident mechanical genius. Sarah Cojuangco, a driven athlete trying to make a name for herself in the extreme sports field, who does all the climbing and caving. And Wendy, who didn't get a last name in the credits of Key to the Past on the History Channel (she was only there for the eye candy) and in any case dropped out before Lara Croft came on the scene.

So all you need is to flesh out the team a bit more with a few drivers and someone to handle the high-tech instruments, and put in a legit archaeologist who fell into doing this when they couldn't find steady work in CRM (Cultural Resource Management; basically the legal requirement to make sure a new building project isn't going to destroy a significant archaeological site). So the conflict, between pseudo-archaeology and real science, and between cash and publicity versus professional anathema, is built into the protagonist themselves, with Newberry both companion and foil in the adventure.



And, well....!

So this would be all in the United States. We may not have history going all that far back (even the First Nations history is relatively recent, at least compared to Europe, much less Mesopotamia). But we have it and there's a lot of interesting stuff to delve into, from the Civil War to Cahokia. And there aren't so many of the monuments of pseudo-archaeology; no Giza Pyramids, no Yonagai Formation, but there are the Mounds, and Roswell -- there's enough (enough in the real world to have spawned a half-dozen cable television shows).

Plus a novel could do what I did with the fanfic; play with the back roads and the roadside Americana, all that Muffler Man and Googie diners and museums for giant balls of string.

I've been across the US a few times and wouldn't be against some more exploration. And I've mucked around some of the corners of the pseudo-history world, mostly in re various long-lived conspiracy theories and associated nonsense (JFK, the Apollo Program, Young Earth Creationism). And I'm not uninterested in the history of the US, going all the way back to the prehistory; back to Clovis and pre-Clovis (and very much not including any damned Solutreans, thank you very much!) So research would be fun and isn't entirely unfamiliar ground.

And doing boots on-the-ground research to get the look and feel of a Nevada ghost town is a lot cheaper than paying for flights to Greece and trying to recreate the look-and-feel of the Bronze Age Aegean!

Of course the essential problem of an archaeological fantasy is still there; how to have a secret which is dangerous to uncover and awesome when found but still stay within the bounds of honesty to real science -- particularly since the real history is so recent, there are peoples and cultures and even families who are still around.

About the only loose thread I have to pull on so far with this is the idea that what they find is never what they were originally looking for. As in, they might look for the truth of the Kensington Rune Stone, end up showing to the reader just how ridiculously wrong the KRS theories are, but while they are there finding something............else.

I'm not sure this actually helps, but it is an idea.