Samantha Sutton and The Winter of the Warrior Queen By Jordan Jacobs is Perfect for YOUR kids!

Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this info and guest post, free of charge, Source Books PR,  for posting purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it

Welcome to my spot o the Samantha Sutton and the Winter of the Warrior Queen book tour today!

I have the perfect book for giving to your preteens/teens for their new ereaders and tablets, since they may be getting the 'I'm Boreds' already!

Globetrotting archaeologist and author Jordan Jacobs is back with another exciting adventure for his title heroine in SAMANTHA SUTTON AND THE WINTER OF THE WARRIOR QUEEN.  Jordan is a real-life archaeologist and travel enthusiast who infuses his firsthand experiences and knowledge of exotic settings into the SAMANTHA SUTTON adventure novels. Didn’t catch the first book? Don’t worry! Each SAMANTHA SUTTON novel stands on its own as a thrilling archaeological mystery.

Synopsis:

Samantha is hesitant to join Uncle Jay on a second archaeological excavation. But the marshes near Cambridge, England, sound harmless after the sinister perils she faced in Peru. Or so she thought...

During the excavation, Samantha realizes the site could be the ancient fortress of Queen Boudica, who led an uprising against the Roman Empire. An amazing find! But Samantha’s crucial discovery threatens to halt construction on a nearby theme park that will make millions for English Lord and eccentric landowner Cairn Catesby. Unfortunately for Samantha, Catesby is also the scheming head of Cambridge University's Archaeology Department, making him Uncle Jay's current boss. Catesby will stop at nothing to discredit Uncle Jay’s theories about the excavation site’s royal ties. When Samantha is entrusted with the protection of an artifact that undeniably links the site to the Warrior Queen, she becomes the target of unscrupulous men determined to get their fortune by any means necessary.

On the run through the snowy English countryside, Samantha must muster the strength and wit to protect the treasured artifact—with her uncle’s professional reputation hanging in the balance.

I asked Jordan about his exploits as a teenage archeaologist and this is what he said:

I was 13 when I took part in my first excavation: a quick, one-day project in California's Sierra Nevada.  But my first, full immersion into archaeology came three years later, and in some ways marked the beginning of my career.

Situated outside Cortez, Colorado, not far from Mesa Verde National Park, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s summer programs were beacons for kids like me: studious but social, and normal other than our shared obsession with the past.  On weekends, the High School Field School was like the other summer camps I’d been to, with field trips and hikes and rafting, and all the usual friendships and camaraderie.  But the weekdays were focused on work, with class and lab work in the evenings to supplement what we were doing in the field.

Not that any of us complained.  

For those assigned to Woods Canyon Pueblo, “work” meant a pleasant drive through the farmland of the Colorado Plateau, and a one-hour hike from the rim of a hidden arroyo to a cleft in the vertical cliff face. At one end of the ledge, ancient walls remained standing, the only visible sign that people had once lived here.  But traces filled the hard packed soil, and that’s where we focused our efforts. Potsherds popped from the earth with every scrape of the trowel.  Animal bones, too, were everywhere: and collected in the screens as the soil sieved through.  At first, the amount of artifacts seemed overwhelming, and were it not for the attentive instructors it would have been easy to lose focus. 

It took a particular find to make it all seem real.

One afternoon, my trowel caught a hard, stone edge, peeking up at an angle from the floor of the unit.  It would have been tempting to have found the object’s contours and simply pry it loose, but for the importance of context in archaeology and the risk that that would pose in losing other, critical information.  So, for the next several days, I scraped around the long flat stone, watching it emerge in infuriating increments. Finally, all its edges were visible, and it could be lifted out for study.

The object was a metate--it was quickly apparent--a stone for grinding corn.  It was in good shape: still usable, probably, if we could the mano that went with it.  Further analysis could be done at the lab, and it was my job to hike the metate back up to the excavation van.  But the object was extraordinarily heavy, and and I quickly fell behind the others.

Trudging by myself up the ancient trail, the realization came: someone, around a thousand years, had likely hauled this heavy stone in the other direction--maybe using the same exact route. They had known the same terrain, shared the same view, and sheltered from the same sun under the same canyon rim. And suddenly I was struck by a feeling of our shared humanity: a humbling, intimate connection to a person I never knew.  

It felt a little like time travel.  And I wanted to experience it again and again

Thanks Jordan for the that great view of your world and experience!

About the Author:

Jordan Jacobs’ career as an archaeologist began with a love of mummies, castles, and Indiana Jones. He journeyed to his first archaeological excavation at age 13 in California’s Sierra Nevada. A Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge-educated man, Jordan has worked as an archaeologist at world-class institutions such as The Smithsonian and The American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Jordan is passionate about public awareness for the illicit looting of artifacts at globally important archaeological sites. He works with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), where his recommendations have helped to protect historic sites and to alert agents around the world about precious artifacts smuggled on the black market. Jordan is currently a senior specialist at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Check out his website at  http://j-jacobs.com/