What’s it really like to be an archaeologist in the Middle East? How can modern travelers experience Egypt beyond the pyramids and tourist traps? What will survive from our digital age when future archaeologists dig through our ruins, and how does studying ancient civilizations change the way you see the world today?

Canadian ex-archaeologist and award-winning author Sean McLachlan shares insights from 25 years of full-time writing and decades of travel through Egypt, Morocco, and the Middle East.

Sean McLachlan is a Canadian ex-archaeologist and the multi-award-winning author of history, travel, and fiction. His books include The Masked Man of Cairo Historical Detective series, the Moroccan Mysteries, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, Toxic World.

• Sean’s previous archaeology career in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, including dangerous moments


• The reality of archaeological fieldwork vs. Hollywood portrayals, from Roman bath games to 3000-year-old fingerprints


• His Masked Man of Cairo detective series set in 1919 Egypt during the independence movement


• Hidden gems in Egypt beyond ancient sites: Islamic Cairo, desert oases, Coptic monasteries, and the new museums


• Practical travel advice for Egypt and the Middle East, including cultural sensitivity and safety tips


• His post-apocalyptic fiction and thoughts on what will survive from our civilization for future archaeologists

You can find Sean at SeanMcLachlan.net and his books here on Amazon.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Joanna Penn, and today I’m here with Sean McLachlan. Hi Sean.

Sean: Hey, Joanna.

Jo: It’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction. Sean is a Canadian ex-archaeologist and the multi-award-winning author of history, travel, and fiction. His books include The Masked Man of Cairo Historical Detective series, the Moroccan Mysteries, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi series, Toxic World.

Wow, lots there. Sean, you were just telling me how long you’ve been a full-time author?

Sean: It’s my 25th anniversary this year as a matter of fact.

Jo: That is just incredible. But before we get into that, tell us about your previous career in archaeology, because obviously I’m fascinated with it. Lots of people are.

What is the reality of the archaeologist’s job? Are you really like Indiana Jones?!

Sean: Well, not quite Indiana Jones. I worked for about 10 years in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, got a master’s degree. And it’s an amazing job actually. There’s a lot of meticulous excavation and fieldwork, surveying, a lot of lab work, and it is a lot of fun.

I ended up shifting out of it because I didn’t like the academic side of it too much – the fighting for office space and funding and the petty backstabbing that you see in so many university departments. I really liked the fun stuff, which was the actual fieldwork.

And as far as being Indiana Jones, well I never got shot at when I was in the field. I did get shot at by accident once when I was hiking in Arizona, but that’s a different story. And the only real danger was once there was a Palestinian Viper on the site when we were working in Tel Gezer in Israel, Which is this really nasty snake that the venom can kill you in 20 minutes. But we were working near a kibbutz and one of the kibbutz members had a tractor and ran it over. So that was the end of that problem.

Jo: But just sort of coming back on, you said you didn’t like the academic side but you did enjoy the dig work and the lab work. So in my head, I know what dig work looks like from the movies, obviously. What did you do in the labs and —

What time period were you working on?

Sean: Well, I worked in several different time periods. The biggest site I worked at was Tel Gezer, which was an old archaeological site in Israel. And a tell is basically an artificial mound where people will build a settlement usually on high ground. And then people will build on those foundations and people will build. And after several thousand years, you end up with an artificial hill, which is all just archaeological deposits and you get this a lot throughout the Middle East and they’re called Tell, which is Arabic for Hill.

And we were digging through that. And the main thing we were doing in those field seasons was we were working through an Egyptian governor’s palace when the Egyptians conquered the Levant. And so we found some nice hieroglyphics and all that. And also the city gate, which was commissioned by King Solomon. It’s actually mentioned in the Old Testament.

So we’re working on that. And that was actually the second time I got in danger in archaeology, both at the same site because we had these things to either side of the gate called casemate walls, where you had an inner wall and an outer wall, and then a storage room in the center.

And so we were digging down through the deposits to find all the stuff that was inside and somebody was working on the other side of the wall, and I’m about eight feet down. And this guy had found a big rock and he thought it was just a deposit. It was too big to move, so he was slamming at it with a sledgehammer, but what he didn’t realize, it was part of the wall.

So I’m eight feet down with this not very stable wall above me of these giant stones, and suddenly it starts going boom, boom.

Jo: Buried alive!

Sean: Fastest I ever moved! I teleported out of that pit. I was just, one moment I’m in there and the other moment I’m about 10 feet away screaming my head off.

Jo: And one of the tells I’ve been to is Megiddo, which is the biblical Armageddon.

Sean: Megiddo is amazing.

Jo: What got me into writing the types of things that we both write is The Source by James Michener, which of course is based on that.

Sean: Well, I never worked at Megiddo. Michener’s book was amazing though. I read that in university and it was well worth reading. I actually read it in Bulgaria when I was on another excavation, and this was an interesting site because —

One of the exciting things about archaeology is you never know what you’re going to find —

and this site was on really high hill at this sharp turn of the Struma River, which runs through Bulgaria, down to Thessaloniki on the Greek coast.

We’d seen some Roman deposits come out of there. So we thought we were going to get a Roman village or a villa on top of this high ground. So we start digging down and the first thing we come to is ash. And we keep digging. We get more and more ash and we’re getting all like black hands and everything is poofing up everywhere and we’re sneezing black. It’s terrible.

And we went through about eight feet of this stuff and we asked around, and we found out that that had been a beacon from the Balkan Wars from 1912, because they were worried the Turks were going to come up the river valley and attack. And so this was to signal. So we got through that and then we found the Roman site.

But it wasn’t a villa, it was several graves. So we excavated those and we looked down further to see if we’d find more graves. And in the end, actually, we found a very well preserved Bronze Age village. So we went through a good 3000 years of habitation from 1912 all the way back to 1500 BC.

Jo: Wow.

Sean: So that was a lot of fun.

Jo: That is the romance of archaeology, right? That everybody thinks about. And then of course we both put that kind of stuff in our books now. But let’s talk about that because I wondered if you see things differently. I think when I went to Megiddo, I was kind of seeing the layers of story.

You travel a lot and you also research these different areas of history.

How do you look below the surface of what is there to find those stories underneath?

Sean: Well, one of the interesting things about archaeological sites is thinking about the people that were there.

I was at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, these giant Roman baths, just a few weeks ago. And my favorite part, you’re going through these giant vaulted rooms. They’re still preserved 2000 years later, tile floors. Interesting little drains that are still there, like the drains are still there, so well preserved.

But on this sort of marble seat next to one of the pools, somebody had carved the board for an old Roman board game. So these pe