Saturday Links

The real Eleanor of Aquitaine, at an international print fair in New York, obscure black historical figures, a life of Willa Cather, and more.

Marie-Philippe Coupin de La Couperie, Queen Eleanor and Rosamund Clifford (c. 1826). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning! Jude Russo spent a summer working on an archaeological dig in Turkey. It didn’t go well: “I had never taken a course on archaeology, or read any books about the practice of excavation and stratigraphy, or familiarized myself with even the broad varieties of pottery I’d be relying on to date whatever I happened to dig up. I had been under the impression—which, I note without bitterness, none of my supervisors at the offices had tried to dispel—that I would be working close by a more senior excavator, if not quite as a mere assistant, then at least under heavy supervision. This impression persisted until quite late in the game. I was delivered to my trench at 7:00 a.m. in ‘Pinkie,’ the excavation’s flesh-colored 1962 Land Rover; the dig director introduced me to Birol, the oldest and strongest of the twenty villagers assigned to my trench, instructed me to refer to him respectfully as Birol-Abi (‘older brother’), and made to hop back into Pinkie.”