Misgivings about Agatha Christie

Abstract

Readers will no doubt recall that issue 1(2) of Public Archaeology carried Barbara Korte's review of the Ruhrland Museum's exhibition, Agatha Christie and the Orient Criminology and Archaeology. At the close of her review Korte wondered whether when it reached London it would have undergone any revisions. It has now reached London and the British Museum, and with a slightly amended title: 'Agatha Christie and archaeology: Mystery in Mesopotamia'. The change of emphasis that this signals is however no more than cosmetic and I came away with serious misgivings about the exhibition. I have no wish to decry the fiction of Christie, who has provided stimulation and enjoyment to millions with her books but the exhibition struck me as mirroring the light fiction of its subject: it is highly consumable, not without cultural insight but ultimately not very sustaining. So, although the exhibition successfully presented the facts of Christie's archaeological life in Mesopotamia it did so by skating over the surface of its subject without exposing any of the dark corners at the edge of the socio-politics of the time. It left me with the impression of the Near East as an Eden for Europeans in which they could find themselves and their birthright to civilization. Part of the attraction seems to have been seeing the 'peasants', be they Arabs, Kurds or Turks, framed in some sort of rural idyll. The great days of the Near East were over and their archaeological remains were fair game for the Europeans who saw themselves as the inheritors of the mantle of civilization. That is not to say that they did not bring scholarship, acumen and understanding to the investigation of the region's archaeology but they also brought with them a set of cultural, sociopolitical values, with which the exhibition chose not to engage. The economic privilege and cultural imperialism of European visitors, archaeologists or otherwise, though not explicitly tackled, is confirmed, with a nostalgic whiff, by the presence of an Orient Express railway carriage outside the Museum, touting for custom. There was clearly a strong interface between Christie and the various indigenous peoples of the region, though one really needs to read the catalogue (particularly the Life on Site section) to appreciate it, as in the exhibition it was dealt with in a perfunctory, value-avoiding way. The evidence was there, in Christie's photographs and films, but what they record was simply accepted at face value as what happened. We are told how much she liked to photograph not just the excavations, but the countryside, especially flowers and animals (particularly dogs) and also local people ploughing, sowing, and making bread. We get no sense of whether Christie or her companions engaged with questions of rural poverty, economic exploitation or economic migrancy, issues that must have afflicted some of those they worked with (or rather beside). I came away from the exhibition with the notion that the diggers were paid according to how many antiquities they found, though Isubsequently learnt from the catalogue that there was a basic labouring wage in addition to this system. However this payment was applied it still raises the question (but not by the exhibition) of what role it played in reinforcing or establishing amongst the (excluded) ethnic la-