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Title: Archaeology/Autobiography
Review: Paul Ilton, a friend of Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, was an archaeologist and collector of antiquities who lived and worked in Egypt and the Middle East from the 1920'a until his death in 1957 (just prior to the publication of this book). Although his escapades could at times rival those of Indiana Jones, he would not be admired today for his secretive collection methods (he refused to divulge where some of his artifacts came from, making collectors who own some of his pieces today -- myself included -- only guess at their actual origins). Although not the greatest autobiography, the book is interesting in that it explains much about the approach to archaeology in the late 19th and first half of the twentieth centuries, with Ilton typical of the many less-than-professional "history hunters" of that era.
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