4 ideas
Olson profiles Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, a pioneering French Egyptologist who worked in the Resistance and broke into a male-dominated field. Her career spans wartime courage and archaeological breakthrough.
She mobilized an international campaign to relocate the temples of Abu Simbel before Lake Nasser's rising waters from the Aswan Dam drowned them. The rescue became a landmark of global heritage cooperation.
The book chronicles her fight for authority and recognition in early-20th-century archaeology, which resisted women scholars. Her persistence expanded who could lead major expeditions.
The narrative frames monument preservation as a responsibility that transcends national ownership. What one nation holds physically belongs, in this view, to all of humanity.