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`Indiana Jones': Real archaeologists don't have whips


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Indiana Jones managed to retrieve the trinket he was after in the opening moments of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." He pretty much wrecked everything else in the ancient South American temple where the little gold idol had rested for millennia. Though he preaches research and good science in the classroom, the world's most famous archaeologist often is an acquisitive tomb raider in the field with a scorched-earth policy about what he leaves behind. While actual archaeologists like the guy and his movies, they wouldn't necessarily want to work alongside him on a dig.

 

"If you asked these people why they were becoming archaeologists, it always starts off with Indiana Jones. It actually converted a number of people. They got their initial interest in archaeology from Indiana Jones," Zimansky said.

 

...interesting article at the Herald Tribune

 

I agree completely. Indiana Jones is a disaster as an archaeologist and quite why the university pays him to teach - when clearly he spends most of his time fighting nazi's in desert regions - because his irresponsible attitude to archaeology is to extract artifacts without the proper authority from the country involved. Therefore, not only is he a tomb-robber, but an antiquities smuggler as well. I also notice he never records any evidence or finds, and going on a dig with the otherwise respectable Professor Jones is a very risky venture.

 

Looks like fun though.... Sneaking into strange ruins... running from big heavy traps & irate natives... flying aeroplanes infested with snakes and nazi's.... getting involved with tank battles... eating strange insects... and getting involved with pretty and inebriated women.

 

Sign me up immediately.

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Sneaking into strange ruins... running from big heavy traps & irate natives... flying aeroplanes infested with snakes and nazi's.... getting involved with tank battles... eating strange insects... and getting involved with pretty and inebriated women.

 

Sign me up immediately.

 

If you'll settle for the first and last of those, you really should consider archaeology ;)

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Come on chaps, let's give credit where credit is due. Were it not for Indy, we wouldn't know where the Arc of the Covenant is stored! :D How would we know the discrete way for a lass to tell her prof that she loves him - without putting her hand on his knee? ;)

 

:ph34r:

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A few of his books on Ancient Rome are still available on Amazon to this day, and I have been planning on getting his book on Roman architecture. The man himself though was apparently not a big fan of the Romans. He said:

 

"I suffered from a surfeit of things Roman. I felt disgusted by the mechanistic quality of their art and by the nearness of their civilisation at all times to cruelty and corruption."

 

Here is more excerpted directly from Wheeler's Roman Art and Architecture and what he had to say on that subject with links to the full text of Chapter One including his Preface:

 

From the Preface to: Roman Art and Architecture (by Mortimer Wheeler - London 1964)

[ . . . The Parthenon had been a superb temple shyly concealing a skied procession of impersonal actors; the Altar of Augustan Peace, four centuries later, was a vivid family group before it was an altar. This primary awareness of humanity is always present in Roman architecture, even (or particularly) in the most exuberant manifestations of its five orders and its brave vaulting. It is fair to say that no facet of the Roman experience, the Roman achievement, can be studied without reference to the architectural frame, with its sturdy

Edited by Faustus
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Maladict, I thought you knew an arheologist that has a whip, but looking at GO's link I realised that all kinds of people could have whips.

 

I do know an archaeologist that has a whip, known him all my life in fact.

I also want to make it clear that it was a gift :whistling:

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Maladict, I thought you knew an arheologist that has a whip, but looking at GO's link I realised that all kinds of people could have whips.

 

I do know an archaeologist that has a whip, known him all my life in fact.

I also want to make it clear that it was a gift :whistling:

 

Willy Whiplock?

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