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From the Editor

2023; American Schools of Oriental Research; Volume: 86; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/725786

2325-5404

Stephanie Lynn Budin,

Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction

Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorStephanie L. BudinStephanie L. Budin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreHello, Readers!We’re getting a new Indiana Jones movie this month—Indiana Jones and the Dial Destiny. It should be a good one: The “Indiana Jones” franchise works in inverse to the “Star Trek” movie franchise. In “Star Trek” the even-numbered movies are good (Wrath of Khan seems to be a universal favorite, although I am personally partial to the “Save the Whales” theme of Star Trek IV: Voyage Home). By contrast, the odd-numbered movies of Dr. Jones are the winners. Or, perhaps more accurately, the even-numbered flicks are a hot mess, starting with the incomparable disaster that was Movie #2, Temple of Doom. Having listened to interviews with Spielberg and Lucas about that film, I can see what they were trying to do. They wanted a more intensely penny-dreadful version of the first film, something simultaneously more horrific and more slap-stick. The problem was that they opted to use the same people at both extremes: the Indians. This had the infelcitious effect of making the people of the Subcontinent seem simultaneously demonic and stupidly ridiculous. They actually, somehow, even managed to make Indian food look bad (total trick photography, I must guess). In the end, it wasn’t funny at all. It was horrific, but not how they expected. The film was banned in India. No loss at their end.This wasn’t a problem in movies 1 and 3, because they had Nazis. Nazis are pretty much always fair game for ridicule and monstrosity, and for the most part they got the ridicule in the Indy franchise. No harm done.Of much greater debate is what harm the Indiana Jones franchise might have done to the field of archaeology in general. Now I should start out by saying that MANY of the archaeologists I know, those of a “certain age,” originally became interested in archaeology because of Dr. Jones. A certain prominent Egyptologist with whom I went to high school started carrying around a little note book after she saw the movie, just like the one Indiana had when he found the map room in Tanis. You never know when you might have to jot down some hieroglyphs, I guess. People generally figured out that real archaeology did NOT involve whips, or temples with booby traps, or literally falling into the find of the century on your first try (as all archaeologists know, you make your major discovery on the last day of the dig. Rules are rules). For the most part, Indiana Jones was simply inspirational. It wasn’t really archaeology, but it did show you where archaeology could take you, and how cool the ancient world could be.No, the problem were all those people who did not seem to get that Raiders was fantasy. People who seem to think that “archaeologist” = “tomb raider.” Modern video games have not entirely helped in this matter, as we saw in a previous issue of Near Easter Archaeology. The idea that an archaeologist is/can be someone who is looking for commonalities of burial patterns to determine how a Chalcolithic society maintained networks of social identity can be really difficult to explain. Contributing to this is the fact that movies rarely show guys scraping at the dirt with a trowel, and if the do, it’s a handsome guy scraping at the dirt with a trowel (and here I’m thinking of Ralph Fiennes in The Dig. When an Australian colleague asked why male archaeologists are always portrayed as total studs, I asked her how much she’d pay to see Steve Buscemi scrape dirt. Two dollars Australian, was the answer. And thus we get Ford and Fiennes …) (no disrespect to Steve Buscemi, who is an awesome actor) (And I am not implying that handsome archaelogists are pure fantasy, either: You are all classically handsome in your own ways).More recently, though, the Indiana Jones franchise has started raising some difficult questions within the archaeological community itself. For example: Does every precious artifact (“treasure”) actually need to be in a museum? If the indigenous people are still actively worshipping that idol, should it be taken from its sanctuary and shoved behind Plexiglas, even in its native country? The sad thing is that the follow-up question is even worse: If the answer is “no,” but people know that the idol is there, how do you keep anyone else from stealing it? Is it possible to protect artifacts in situ? Are the only options museum or black market (realistically speaking)?I hope that Dr. Jones continues to inspire people to look into archaeology with some degree of awe, tempering that fascination with rationality and realism. We could use some enchantment when facing harder questions.Stephanie L. Budin, Editor Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Near Eastern Archaeology Volume 86, Number 2June 2023 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725786 Views: 32Total views on this site Copyright © 2023 by the American Society of Overseas ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.