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I read this article today, it’s about how archaeology isn’t actually as exciting as Indiana Jones makes out.

“There are codes of ethics in archaeology, and I don’t think he would be a member. Not in good standing, anyway,”

“I spent a lot of time walking in cornfields and soy bean fields in the Midwest, and nothing very dramatic ever happened while I was out looking for artifacts,” said Rose of the Archaeological Institute

“I wish he’d take more notes and things. What’s his publication record?” Zimansky said. “But I don’t think anybody ever bought the ethos of Indiana Jones as a real career track.”

The cynical side of me thinks that perhaps these guys are just trying to keep down the number of people that become adventure-archaeologists. Seriously, there are only a certain number of minotaur filled labyrinths, holy grail death temples and zombie filled pyramids. They want to keep the goodies for themselves.

I’d also like to see a series of articles like this on different jobs, for example astronauts could explain that a shuttle flight isn’t really like Star Wars, a zookeeper could explain that chimps are not actually as big as King Kong and a computer programmer could tell us that you don’t program computers like in the Matrix (he can see through the code, man).

Finally, probably my favourite thing about the article is that it lets us know that the only people who do any real archaeology in the films are the nazis, and Indiana Jones kills loads of them and steals artifacts

“The one thing we do worry quite a bit about is the looting aspect, because archaeological looting is really a serious issue,” Murowchick said. “This kind of glorifying of breaking into a tomb and snagging a crystal this or golden that feeds into the notion that these are valuable objects, and we should all get it while we can.”