No Shit Sherlock: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Use of Archaeological Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interactions with Pseudoarchaeology: Approaches to the Use of Social Media and the Internet for Correcting Misconceptions of Archaeology in Virtual Spaces" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

There are a number of fascinating instances in the Sherlock Holmes canon of four novels and fifty-six published short stories in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hints at the presence of malevolent forces embedded in archaeological landscapes. Doyle uses these seemingly eerie, inevitably mist-enshrouded places as a backdrop for stories involving spectral hounds from hell, evil spirits, blood sucking vampires, and inexplicable and ineffable descents into madness. For Doyle, archaeological sites do not just provide an interesting context in the canon; they serve, in a sense, as characters in the stories. Ancient sites are used by Doyle to represent what archaeologist Jeb Card characterizes as a "mythic past," a distant time period quite alien to our modern world, one that is "spooky," and decidedly goosebumpy. The connection between antiquity and the apparently paranormal evil manifested in a some of the Holmes stories is explicit even if the precise nature of the connection is opaque. Fortunately, while this may be how Doyle uses archaeological landscapes, Sherlock Holmes is having none of it and explicitly says so, though he’s not above collecting arrowheads with his dear friend Dr. Watson.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Interactions with Pseudoarchaeology: Approaches to the Use of Social Media and the Internet for Correcting Misconceptions of Archaeology in Virtual Spaces

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25465