Goodreads asked Marilyn Johnson:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Marilyn Johnson The obituaries always inspire me. I read a number of obituaries of archaeologists in 2010 and 2011 that made my heart beat faster -- what fascinating lives! Mary Leakey was crazy about her Dalmatians. Lewis Binford was married six, or was it seven, times. Donny George, an Iraqi archaeologist, had thrown himself between the looters of the Iraq National Museum and its treasures. I remember, around this time, asking a scientist which fields were in flux these days. Physics and astrophysics and medicine and biotechnology were booming, obviously, but also archaeology -- archaeology was being turned upside down on a regular basis. As the earth was being transformed by forces both natural and unnatural, pieces of the human past were turning up and changing what we knew about the human past. I was smitten.

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