The entertainment tail wagging the archaeological dog?

Washington Post (By Neil Asher Silberman)

After 17 years, Hollywood's most famous archaeologist is back in action. Now grayer and a bit creakier, Indiana Jones is again hacking his way through thick jungles, careering wildly in car chases and scrambling through dark tunnels to snatch a precious artifact from the clutches of an evil empire (Soviet, this time).

And I'm thinking, oh no. Here we go again. Get ready for another long, twisting jump off the cliff of respectability for the image of archaeology.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of pop culture. But I have a problem with the entertainment tail wagging the archaeological dog. As someone who's been involved in archaeology for the past 35 years, I can tell you that Indiana Jones is not the world's most famous fictional archaeologist; he's the world's most famous archaeologist, period. How many people can name another? Whether I'm sitting on a plane, waiting in an office or milling around at a cocktail party, the casual mention that I'm an archaeologist inevitably brings up Indiana Jones. People conjure up images of gold, adventure and narrow escapes from hostile natives. And while "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" will almost certainly break worldwide box office records, it will also spread another wave of viral disinformation about what archaeologists actually do.

I know that the Indiana Jones series is just a campy tribute to the Saturday afternoon serials of the 1930s and the B-movies of the 1950s, but believe me, it totally misrepresents who archaeologists are and what goals we pursue. It's filled with exaggerated and inaccurate nonsense. Even the centerpiece of the new movie -- the "crystal skull" -- is a phony. Archaeologists have long known about this class of rare and bizarre artifacts, purportedly from the pre-Columbian cultures of Central and South America. But in the current issue of Archaeology magazine, Jane McLaren Walsh of the Smithsonian Institution reveals how she and her colleagues discovered the telltale marks of modern drills and sanders on their surface -- and recognized that these supposedly mystical ancient relics were made by profit-hungry forgers to feed the modern black market in antiquities.

Even worse, the picture of the vine-swinging, revolver-toting archaeological treasure hunter is all wrong.

I can see why Indiana Jones can rattle the chains of a dedicated archaeologist but it really doesn't bother me that archaeology is represented as something so different from the real experience by films like the Indiana Jones, Lara Croft and National Treasure series. That's what fiction is all about. I don't think that it is practical or desirable to make blockbuster film makers the guardians of our (or any) professions. Imagine if we believed that all policemen were like those in Lethal Weapon or Die Hard? I know some archaeologists who are actually rather flattered by the comparison with dear old Indi, in spite of (or even because of) the fact that they know that it's all absolute nonsense. At least Indiana Jones believes that artefacts should belong in museums :-)