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.

Abu Simbel.

An unpublished paper by Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University, relevant to Lovecraft: “To What Green Altar? The Myth of American Paganism 1920-1945”…

“In the 1980s, the United States experienced a ‘Satanic Panic’ largely generated by the media, about the nefarious activities of rumored Satanic rings. While much has been written on this phenomenon, it is not generally recognized that a very similar phenomenon occurred between about 1925 and 1945, as popular writers and journalists explored the ideas of Sir James Frazer and Margaret Murray about paganism and pagan survivals in medieval and modern times. Though originally told as fantasy fictions, these stories acquired remarkable credibility and even influenced official behavior. By the 1930s, American news media were avidly exploring tales of witch cults and human sacrifice rings in many parts of the US, including German Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and in Native American communities across the nation. Such tales actually influenced serial murder investigations in major cities. My paper is therefore a study of the cross-fertilization of pulp literature with academic anthropology, with curious consequences for popular belief and folklore.”

The essay throws some light on Lovecraft’s first unveiling of the New England countryside as a setting for horror, in the story “The Picture in the House” (Dec 1920)…

“The first tales of clandestine alternate religions in the heartland date from an era of rapid change in the American countryside, and in the relationship between urban and rural societies. The 1920 census was the first to show a majority of Americans living in cities rather than the countryside, while the popularity of the private automobile vastly increased the opportunities for city-dwellers to explore those rural landscapes which now seemed so exotic. As tourism boomed, entrepreneurs made all they could of the exoticism of the countryside […] A serious scholarship of folklore flourished alongside this popular hucksterism […] Ethnographic observations of backward rural communities flourished in the inter-war years. […] Because of its proximity to major East Coast cities and newspapers, German Pennsylvania was a particular target for such romantic investigations”