Is Indiana Jones an awful (or at least atypical) archaeologist? Max Gladstone thinks not.
First, I want to acknowledge the common protests. Jonesian archaeology looks a lot different from the modern discipline. If Jones wanted to use surviving traces of physical culture to assemble a picture of, say, precolonial Peruvian society, he’s definitely going about it the wrong way. Jones is a professional fossil even for the mid-30s—a relic of an older generation of Carters and Schliemans. Which, if you think about it, makes sense. By Raiders, he already has tenure, probably gained based on his field work in India (Subterranean Thuggee Lava Temples: An Analysis and Critical Perspective, William & Mary Press, 1935), and the board which granted him tenure were conservatives of his father’s generation, people who actually knew Carter and Schliemann—not to mention Jones, Sr. (I’ll set aside for the moment a discussion of cronyism and nepotism, phenomena utterly foreign to contemporary tenure review boards…)
Jones is the last great monster of the treasure-hunting age of archaeology. To judge him by modern standards is to indulge the same comforting temporal parochialism that leads us to dismiss post-Roman Europe as a “Dark Age.” Jones may be a lousy archaeologist as we understand the field today. But is he a lousy archaeologist in context?
A fun read, especially for someone who’s been hearing a lot more about archaeology lately.
In context, yes he is still a looter and pot hunter. For example, in 1930, the state of Oklahoma passed one of the first archeological protection laws to defend Spiro Mounds from people doing just this sort of thing. The mining company looting the site’s response was on the last day they could legally be on site was to dynamite the center of the major mound out of spite.
@Marc – Argh.