Writing our fascinations. Weaving modern archaeology into story with J.F. Penn on Ancient Heroes [Video]

I was interviewed on the Ancient Heroes Podcast. Here’s a clip about integrating modern archaeology into my thrillers.

Patrick: I know you also integrate modern archeology and archeological methods and things like that into your books. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve been able to do that?

Jo: Well, I am super fascinated with the use of AI in archeology.
I have like a James Bond Q character, with all the gadgets and things. And there was a Vatican digital scanning project that is still going on, scanning the digital archives of the Vatican.
And, this character was part of that project and discovered this ancient book and that led to the story in Soldiers of God, but I was like, oh my goodness, if you go and scan the stuff in the Vatican Secret Archives, what are you gonna find? That’s really cool.
And then for Spear of Destiny, while I was writing it, basically there were these scrolls that they found in Herculaneum, which was buried with Pompeii back in 79 AD, and that buried them and they were carbonized.
So these completely black sausages essentially, which are these rolled up scrolls that had been burnt so badly.
And when they tried to unroll them, they just crumbled to dust. So they haven’t been unrolled for like 2000 years. And then this prize was set up to use AI scanning technology to see into the scrolls. So they would scan it and then use this cool technology and they’ve actually managed it. So I had to use that in the book. Wow. They found some just really cool things by starting to read these scrolls that they’re on the second phase as we record this May, 2024. They’re just discovering new things about it.
https://scrollprize.org/
And you like Michael Crichton? Yes. They find these ancient things and then they’re bringing them back.
So there’s this company called Colossal Labs, which I kid you not, is a de-extinction lab for bringing back the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, which is the Tasmanian tiger. They’re actually doing this and so I try and weave these sort of modern technology into the books as techniques for my characters to find out more and as sort of the next thing.”
https://colossal.com/mammoth/

Spear of Destiny mentions the Herculaneum Scrolls — https://www.jfpenn.com/destiny
https://books2read.com/spearofdestiny
De-Extinction of the Nephilim is based on de-extinction technology – https://books2read.com/deextinction

You find can the Ancient Heroes Podcast on your favorite app https://ancientheroes.net/