"I don't know how he stands a big heavy jacket and hat in those climates," said UC Berkeley classics professor and unabashed Indy fan Kim Shelton. "But it looks good in movies."Nonsense about archaeology and history can be used to reel in potential serious students. As I've remarked before, reading Erich von Däniken as a kid got me interested in this field.
Shelton spent 12 years as a full-time archaeologist at Mycenae, one of the great Greek city-states and home to legendary king Agamemnon, hero of Homer's "Odyssey." These days, Shelton directs the university's dig in Nemea, a site with links to the Hercules legend and the original Olympic games.
But Shelton has fond recollections of watching "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" with fellow archaeology students back in grad school. This time, she'll share the adventure with her own students, most of whom spent the semester exploring the myths and realities of archaeology and such topics as antiquities law, Trojan gold and "Whip or Trowel? Tools of the Trade."
It's not so much that the Indiana Jones movies are wrong, Shelton said, as that they depict "an old-fashioned way of doing things, a romantic version with traps and danger. You find things easily and sell them, which we don't do. And Indiana Jones never seems to publish. He gets his tenure from his good looks."
But Indiana Jones' greatest success has been in wooing students to archaeology and classics classrooms, Shelton said. The razzle-dazzle of Nazi fortune hunters and gleaming treasure lure them in. Science and history win their hearts.
Read the rest of this article to hear about Professor Shelton's coolest find ever. And about the "sudden avalanche of voracious, enormous red fox fleas," whatever those are. Ugh!