The Death Pit

Here, from award-winning writer Andrew Lawler, is what may be the world’s oldest true-life whodunit. The detective: Joan Oates, a diminutive 82-year-old grandmother, close friend of famed mystery writer Agatha Christie, and, as Lawler writes, one of the world’s most distinguished archaeologists. In Syria, she’s uncovered the death pit – a mass grave that gives us a radical, disturbing, and timely view into just how, where, and why we began to live in cities, trade over long distances, and, apparently, slaughter each other in large numbers.