Through a combination of Harrison Ford’s innate movie-star charm, his legal obligation to expose part of his chest, and the fact that he spends a good amount of screentime punching Nazis in the face, Indy doesn’t just make archaeology seem cool: he makes it sexy. But there’s also the simple fact that Indiana Jones is hot. Indy’s ability to find adventures around the globe-while somehow also juggling his duties as an archaeology professor-is an undeniable part of the character and the franchise’s appeal. If archaeologists were constantly hunting down the Holy Grail or discovering ancient alien civilizations, it’d probably make the news.īut in the professor’s defense, the Indiana Jones effect is tangible: Since the 1980s, the franchise has been a boon for real-world interest in the field of archaeology. On the first day, he repeatedly stressed that real archaeologists don’t live out their days like Indiana Jones, and, well, no shit.
The professor, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Larry David, was a bit of a curmudgeon, and he wasted no time dispelling our pop-culture-inspired ideas of what archaeologists do in the field. While pursuing an anthropology minor in college-because if the whole journalism thing doesn’t work out, why not fall back on an industry with even fewer job prospects?-I ended up taking an archaeology course.
