{"id":26005,"date":"2020-02-21T18:23:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-21T23:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=26005"},"modified":"2020-02-21T18:23:12","modified_gmt":"2020-02-21T23:23:12","slug":"mysteries-of-the-ancient-world-and-the-modern-mind-explored-in-agatha-christie-archeology-and-alzheimers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/mysteries-of-the-ancient-world-and-the-modern-mind-explored-in-agatha-christie-archeology-and-alzheimers\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysteries of the ancient world and the modern mind explored in Agatha Christie, Archeology and Alzheimer\u2019s"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Side by side, they put together the clues of the past to\nsolve mysteries both ancient and modern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For archaeologist Max Mallowan, the mysteries he tried to\nsolve were often 4,000 years old. But the mysteries his wife, prolific mystery\nnovelist Agatha Christie, were trying to solve seated at his side, typing away\nin the desert, they were mysteries concocted in her mind that could only be\nsolved by those conjured up by her little grey cells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their collective work, along with some modern questions\nabout whether Dame Agatha\u2019s little grey cells declined near the end of her\ncareer, will be explored at Hillary House next Wednesday as the Aurora\nHistorical Society hosts Dr. Amy Barron with her talk \u201cAgatha Christie,\nArcheology and Alzheimer\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Barron, who is presently working at the Clarington\nMuseum, holds a doctorate in Ancient Mesopotamian Studies and began taking a\ncloser look at Mallowan\u2019s work while completing her thesis in the United\nKingdom. But as much as she was invested in archeology, Mallowan\u2019s wife found a\nplace in Dr. Barron\u2019s heart much earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a high school student, she devoured the works of\nAgatha Christie, a legacy of more than eighty works, which are as popular today\nas they were when her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was\npublished 100 years ago this fall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI just gobbled up these books and thought they were\nfabulous,\u201d she says. \u201cBut, I moved on, and when you\u2019re in university, you spend\nall your time reading very serious, heavy and dull academic things, but when I\nwas on a research trip to London I was at the British Museum. The British\nMuseum has most of the artefacts Max Mallowan dug up, except for the ones still\nin Iraq, and they also have Agatha\u2019s first editions. They put up a little\npop-up exhibit during one year of my research that just showed in a really\nquick way the parallels of what Max was doing at the time and what Agatha was\nwriting at the time. It really stuck in my head that there was a really neat\nconnection between two things which I love. When I picked up [an artefact] and\nheld it in my hand, I knew it had been held by an ancient Assyrian, Agatha\nChristie and then me without too many people in between and that is kind of\ncool.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Barron\u2019s talk will take the audience though Agatha\nChristie\u2019s life, starting with her childhood in a loving family environment,\nthrough to the \u201cdistressing\u201d end to her first marriage and how that personal\ndisaster led to an exploration to the unknown of the Middle East trying to get\naway from it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where she fell into this whole new life she never\ncould have imagined and was reborn at the age of 40 by marrying a fine, dashing\nyoung archeologist and discovering this whole world she previously knew nothing\nabout. That filters down into her novels, so books like Murder on the Orient\nExpress and Death on the Nile, all of those encompass this new world that she\nis learning about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Barron will then touch upon the work of this dashing\nadventurer before touching upon their later years and what modern research\nsuggests about Christie\u2019s state of mind as she entered the last two decades of\nher writing career in the 1960s and 70s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know if Agatha Christie had Alzheimer\u2019s, but\nthey have now done studies on authors\u2026and the idea is that, over time, your\nvocabulary decreases and you just repeat words and phrases, and use words like\n\u2018everything\u2019 and \u2018something\u2019 rather than coming up with specific words more\noften. In Agatha Christie\u2019s works, from the first book to the end, you see\nalmost a 20 per cent drop in her vocabulary, that her mental processes weren\u2019t\nas strong as they once were. This isn\u2019t just aging because they have done this\nwith other writers as well, like Iris Murdoch (who lost a well-documented\nbattle with dementia) and she shows the same trends, but there are other people\nlike H.G. Wells who just got sharper and sharper right to the very end of his\ndays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMany people have no idea that Agatha had this wonderful\nand exciting life. They picture a somewhat middle-aged mystery novelist sitting\nat her typewriter and I think they picture her like Miss Marple, living out in\nthe English countryside. But she\u2019s working as an archeologist all day long,\ntyping in the sands of the desert, and was living this incredibly exciting\nlife. I often end up giving these talks at places where my crowd is on the\nslightly older side and I think it is neat to see a woman, who especially at the\ntime in the 1930s, starts this whole new adventurous life for herself at a time\nwhere, at 40, most women, especially a woman who has been left by her husband,\nwould have been just written off and settled into a life of spinsterhood. There\nshe was instead making this whole new world for herself. I think that\u2019s a\npositive message for all of us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNow, when people live so much longer than they used to,\nthey often say that 40 is the new 30 or whatever. You can always remake your\nlife and start over.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Amy Barron\u2019s \u201cAgatha Christie, Archeology and Alzheimer\u2019s\u201d will take place at Hillary House next Wednesday, February 26, from 7 \u2013 9 p.m. at Hillary House National Historic Site. Tickets are $10 ($7 for Aurora Historical Society members). For more information, visit aurorahs.com or call 905-727-8991.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir <\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Side by side, they put together the clues of the past to solve mysteries both ancient and modern. For archaeologist Max Mallowan, the mysteries he tried to solve were often 4,000 years old. But the mysteries his wife, prolific mystery novelist Agatha Christie, were trying to solve seated at his side, typing away in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-6Lr","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-01 09:52:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}