![]() ![]() But I don’t think any professional archaeologist has come across a booby-trapped site yet.” “Hollywood has a very vivid imagination when it comes to booby traps,” Hiebert says with a grin. I hope this exhibit will put a spotlight on cultural heritage, looting, and loss of heritage-a worldwide phenomenon going on now in Iraq and Syria and Peru and Egypt.” “Cultural artifacts need to stay in the place where they come from. “And that’s exactly the message National Geographic has,” says Hiebert. What the films do, though, is create that sense of awe and mystery that comes when we try to uncover the past.”Īlthough Indiana Jones seeks “fortune and glory,” he understands that the objects of his desire belong in a museum. “Not at all the way it's really done! The painstaking recording and documentation of every phase of a dig tells us as much as the object retrieved. “The films represent the ‘loot and scoot’ school of archaeology,” he writes. The big difference is that massive parts of the archaeological job-from creating and testing a hypothesis to raising money to getting permits and tools-are glossed over by Hollywood.”ĭavies is aware of those discrepancies, and best practices. “Unlike Indiana Jones,” he says, “I actually have to write research proposals and reports, take field notes and photographs. Of course, says Hiebert, real archaeology happens in the real world. Reached by email, the Welsh actor who played the Egyptian excavator Sallah-Indy’s burly, bearded sidekick in two of the films-writes, “I must have met at least 150 or 160 full professors, lecturers, practising archaeologists who have come up to me to say their first interest in archaeology began when they saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. That’s a great legacy for George Lucas-and for the relationship between popular media and science.” Some of the best archaeologists in the world today say Indiana Jones was what sparked their initial interest. “We can document their impact statistically, based on the number of archaeology students before and after the first film. “These films introduced so many people to archaeology,” says Hiebert. Their exotic exploits-finding lost cities, discovering treasure, deciphering hieroglyphics-captured the public imagination.ĭecades later, they inspired four films that braid pop culture and Hollywood magic with world history and archaeological science. ![]() But he was equally inspired by real 20th-century archaeologists like Hiram Bingham (National Geographic’s first archaeological grantee), Roy Chapman Andrews, and Sir Leonard Woolley. George Lucas created Indiana Jones as a tribute to the action heroes of his favorite 1930s matinée serials. At the same time, you move through four themed sections, each based on the work real archaeologists do: quest, discovery, investigation, and interpretation. ![]() Stroll through the immersive, interactive exhibit and you soon realize that four is the magic number.Ĭlips from the four Indiana Jones films- Raiders, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull-flicker on the walls. The point, says exhibit curator Fred Hiebert, a renowned archaeological fellow at National Geographic, is “to show how much these films have broadened the scope of archaeology and made the field more relevant-and exciting-to people everywhere.” The Power of Four (Since no actual Ark has ever been found, the one built for Raiders of the Lost Ark, on display here, has become the iconic image-a case of life imitating art.) And then there are some that hover in the fact-or-fiction netherworld: the Holy Grail, for instance, and the Ark of the Covenant. Other objects-like the Sankara Stones, the Cross of Coronado, and a Chachapoyan fertility idol-were imagined for the movies. ![]()
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