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The Life of Max Mallowan: Archaeology and Agatha Christie by Henrietta McCall, British Museum Press, £18.99, ISBN 071411149X

POOR Max Mallowan. One of archaeology’s great diggers and thinkers, he is stuck in the shadow of his famous wife, Agatha Christie. While her novels sell in their millions around the world, few people outside archaeology recall his pioneering work.

That picture is far too simplistic, however. Mallowan began his career in the Middle East in 1926. Working his passage as a seaman on an oil tanker destined for Port Said – funds were short – he travelled to what is now Iraq to work with Leonard Woolley on the excavation of a great ancient city, Ur. There he learned his trade, doing everything from keeping a notebook to directing huge teams of diggers and making sense of a large, complex site.

It stood him in good stead: his later excavations at Nineveh and Nimrud in the same area show his considerable grasp of scale. He could make sense of anything from pottery fragments to the muddled layout of a town, temple or palace that had been repeatedly built, destroyed and rebuilt over thousands of years.

His mind buzzing with ideas, Mallowan persuaded Woolley to let him dig a giant pit straight down through Ur’s many layers. At the time this seemed a bizarre idea, but it shaped the future of archaeology. Mallowan’s pit showed layer after layer of change in the ancient city. Different styles of pottery emerged with different strata.

Henrietta McCall’s style is plain, but the extensive quotes add life (see Mallowan’s Memoirs, HarperCollins, 2001, for the man’s own words). Her account of him meeting and marrying Agatha Christie makes it clear that Christie loved archaeology as well as the archaeologist. She put it to good use, too: her piecing together of pots and the recording and filming she did at the digs at Ur, Nineveh and Nimrud all provided material for her novels. She even used the journey there in her Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.

Nimrud, capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire between the ninth and eighth centuries BC, had been excavated many times, but Mallowan’s redigging and reporting transformed what was a blurred, tentative picture of the past into a meticulous record. He was renowned for getting his reports out swiftly, and he eventually left fieldwork to concentrate on research and writing. McCall’s book shows a busy life, a mind alive and enquiring until death.

And Christie? Her fame sustained interest and funding in archaeology in the Near East. The British Museum is currently staging an exhibition about her and her interest in archaeology. The catalogue is excellent: gossip, glamour and archaeology, all lavishly illustrated.