So You Want To Be A Treasure Hunter takes young readers inside the world of archaeology, focusing on the tools and dating methods in reader-friendly terms children can understand. Did you learn anything that surprised you in your research?

The biggest surprise was learning that the most responsible thing an archaeologist can do is sometimes nothing at all. I had assumed the discipline was about digging more, finding more, knowing more. It turns out the professional consensus today is to leave most sites untouched — because every excavation destroys the very context it studies, and the scientists who will read these sites 50 years from now will have tools no one alive today has imagined. That kind of restraint, that quiet deference to the future, struck me as profoundly humble in a way I hadn’t expected from a field I associated with adventure.

The other surprise was how many of the most famous discoveries were complete accidents. The Rosetta Stone was found by a French officer digging a fort foundation. The Terracotta Army was found by farmers digging a well. Mary Leakey’s hominid footprints arose from a paleontologist ducking a flying piece of elephant dung. The myth of the methodical archaeologist cracking ancient mysteries is partly true, but the messier truth is that the past has a habit of stepping out and waving.

Why do you think so many children are naturally fascinated by buried objects and ancient history?

Children haven’t yet been trained out of believing the world holds secrets. An adult walks past a patch of disturbed dirt; a child crouches down. An adult sees a rusted button in the gutter; a child wonders who lost it. That instinct — to suspect that the ordinary world is hiding something magical — is exactly the instinct archaeology rewards. It is one of the few fields where the question that comes most naturally to a seven-year-old (“what’s under there?”) is also the question that drives world-class research, and where the answer is uncertain until somebody picks up a brush and finds out.

I also think children are drawn to the past because they can sense, without anyone explaining it, that someone else has lived here before. The idea that another child once played in this field, dropped this clay marble, scratched their name into this brick — it doesn’t feel abstract to them. It feels like a friend they haven’t met yet. Archaeology gives them the tools to reach back and say hello. It tells them they are part of a very long line of people who have wondered what the world is and tried to leave it slightly more interesting than they found it.

There is one more piece, and it might be the most important. Children live in a world where almost everything has already been explained to them by an adult. Archaeology is one of the rare subjects where the adults openly admit they don’t know — where a Bronze Age civilization can vanish without explanation, where a script can sit undeciphered for centuries, where a sealed tomb might still hold a queen no one has ever heard of. To a child, the existence of genuine mystery — mystery that even grown-ups haven’t solved yet — is electrifying. It means there’s still room. It means the work isn’t finished. And it means that the curious child reading the book in their bedroom tonight might, one day, be the person who finally figures out what nobody else could.

The book balances education with adventure very well. How important was it that learning still felt exciting and imaginative?

Essential — but I don’t think of education and adventure as needing to be balanced like flour and sugar in a recipe. The adventure is already inside the truth. The writer’s job is to find it and get out of its way.

Archaeology is a vivid example. The trowel really does strike something a thousand years lost. The first human eyes on an object in fifteen centuries really are yours. A pollen grain trapped in a clay pot really can tell you what someone ate for dinner during the reign of an emperor. None of that needs dressing up. The excitement isn’t a decorative element a writer sprinkles on top of dry information to make it palatable — it is embedded in the actual work, woven into how the discoveries are made and what they reveal.

What I try to do is find the moments where the truth itself is already astonishing and let those moments carry the explanation. The point of the writing is to choose, out of everything that could be said about a profession, the details that already carry the charge — and then to render those details cleanly enough that the charge actually reaches the reader.

The other half is not to flatten what’s already vivid. I think children’s nonfiction often goes wrong by trying to make work sound easier, simpler, or safer than it really is. Kids see through that instantly. They can tell when a book trusts them and when it’s hedging. What I aim for, in every title in this series, is to meet a child eye to eye — to give them the real texture of a job, including the hard parts, and trust that the wonder will hold. It almost always does. The world is more interesting than the watered-down version of it, and children, more than anyone, already suspect this.

If you could take young readers to one archaeological site anywhere in the world, where would you choose and why?

Pompeii. Not because it’s the most beautiful site in the world, but because it’s the one where archaeology’s central insight lands with the most force: every life mattered.

When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it sealed an entire ordinary morning in volcanic ash. Bread still sat in the oven. Dogs were still leashed in their courtyards. A child had set down a wooden toy minutes before the world ended. None of these people made the history books. They weren’t emperors or generals. But 2,000 years later, archaeologists know what they had for breakfast, what they wrote on their walls, who they loved, who owed them money. Pompeii is the proof that ordinary lives are not lost — they are simply waiting for someone patient enough to read them.

I would want a child to stand on those streets and feel, in their own bones, that one day someone might walk where we walk and wonder about us with the same tenderness. That, more than anything, is what I hope archaeology teaches the next generation to carry forward.

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