In 2007 there was an audio file online, of a talk titled “Lairs of Cthulhu: Archaeology, Myths and Mysteries in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft”. Sadly the file has vanished into the aether of the net, but I found a detailed set of notes on the talk at the Bookkake website. One quote suggests, perhaps, why Lovecraft never considered archaeology as a career — even if he could have torn himself away from his beloved New England…
“Those were the great days of collecting. Anything for which a fancy was taken, from a scarab to an obelisk, was just appropriated and if there was a difference of opinion with a brother excavator one laid for him with a gun.” — Howard Carter.
Found the mp3 http://tentaclii.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/james-holloway-mp3-lecture-on-lovecraft/