Lives in Ruins (17 page)

The head of the NYU Classics Department introduced her with a flourish: Connelly had studied at Bryn Mawr, Princeton, the Field Museum, and no fewer than four of the colleges at “a little university in the middle of England you might have heard of called Oxford.” The MacArthur grant given to her in 1996 was mentioned, and other honors, too. Connelly took the stage smiling, petite and
pretty enough to stand out, not just among the scruffy folks who wandered into a free program in New York City, with free coffee and bagels, but also among the undergraduates serving as maiden attendants for this classics program, in flowing hair and Grecian dresses that bared a shoulder. The other speakers—the Frenchman with the corona of hair who sounded like Inspector Clouseau, the bow-tied professor, the woman in the sweater-set—showed you the crowns of their heads as they read their scholarly papers. Connelly, too, read from a text, but with a performer's confidence.

The screensaver on her laptop projected the image of a pair of high heels and a shovel, poised to bite into a Mediterranean beach, drawing laughter from the audience. Unlike several other presentations that day, Connelly's worked without a hitch, opening with a photo of an empty auditorium—“On November 26, 2010,” she began, “twenty-seven hundred people paid the equivalent of five hundred Canadian dollars to hear Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens debate whether religion was a force for the good, in which Hitchens declared, ‘I could not live without the Parthenon. I don't believe any civilized person could . . . but I don't care about the cult of Pallas Athena, it's gone, and as far as I know it's not to be missed.'” Not to be missed? Connelly begged to differ. She evoked the days of the cult of Athena and demonstrated persuasively how vital it was to the Parthenon and to Athens. Then she spun an argument for a reinterpretation of the narrative on the pediments of the Parthenon: it was not a parade to honor the city, as some had claimed, but to save it, by sacrificing one of the king's daughters. When Connelly waved the remote control, a beautiful slide of the Parthenon appeared, glowing at the top of a hill against a night sky lit with stars, particularly the constellation known as the Hyakinthides, which rose in the sky during much of the summer and was clearly visible above the Parthenon's eastern porch. Some said it represented the three daughters of Erechtheus, one of whom had been put to death, and whose sisters then leapt to their deaths in
solidarity. Connelly recounted the story, using the figures in the Parthenon's frieze. Then she had us imagine a circle of Greek maidens dancing in worship as they remembered these sisters—and the ancient pile of stones that was projected over our heads shimmered with ghosts. Religion was not something to be brushed aside, Connelly insisted, and certainly not dismissed out of hand. Religion had power. Indeed, the Parthenon, beautiful as it was, was nothing but a dead ruin without it.

There was something masterful and timeless about her presentation. She might have been a scholar from any era—save for the technology and another odd piece of her public profile: she was one of the experts featured in the 2008 History Channel documentary
Indiana Jones and the Ultimate Quest
.
^*
Our cool, sophisticated professor had put herself in the hands of the same team of producers and directors whose credits included
American Idol
,
Girls Next Door
, and
Ancient Aliens
.

“The extraordinary accomplishment of the Indiana Jones series is taking something that is the life of the mind and turning it into something action-packed and heroic,” she had declared in that documentary. And later, between noisy clips from the movies in the franchise—Harrison Ford as Indy galloping at reckless speed through a desert excavation, pits of writhing snakes, painted natives preparing to deep-fry Kate Capshaw, not to mention the director of the Center for Ancient Astronaut Research—Dr. Connelly had intriguing things to say about the risks archaeologists face in the field, in particular about the excavation she directed on an island off of Cyprus: she talked with animation about having to get in fishing boats every morning and fight strong currents to get to the island. Then the fishing boat had to land amid big rocks. Then she had to climb a twenty-one-meter cliff, just to get to the site.
And once the boat capsized! This thrilling story was immediately drowned out in the History Channel documentary by Indiana Jones sputtering, “Nazis. I hate these guys.”

Connelly's moments onscreen exhibited more range than Harrison Ford's. She could be campy, shuddering over snakes and noting that the venom of a snake native to Cyprus can kill its victim in twenty-five minutes (her team worked more than half an hour from the nearest hospital and did not keep an antidote on site). She could also be passionate. “The illicit antiquities trade [is] third only behind drugs and weapons, six or seven billion dollars a year. . . . Let's say a coin is found, they take a coin out [of the ground]. That coin could have dated an entire now-missing building. You've just destroyed a part of history by taking it out. You may think there's nothing there, but there's never nothing there.”

Watching the documentary, I had to stop to replay that part.
You may think there's nothing there, but there's never nothing there
. That was a line that bore engraving in stone, the freeze-frame moment at the center of the rowdy romp.

Connelly had waved off Indiana Jones's questionable archaeological practices, his tendency to yank things out of context and run. “I believe that if he was working in 2008, Indiana Jones would be a great proponent of cultural heritage protection and he would be on the front lines, helping law enforcement stop the trade in illicit antiquities,” she said, erring perhaps on the side of generosity. The Indiana Jones movies had been deliberately set in the thirties, precisely so that its archaeologist could be a swashbuckling snatcher of treasures. This meant he practiced (movie-style) archaeology before the real-life rules changed—before, for instance, the Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage of Europe, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, UNESCO's Cultural Heritage Protection Act, and The Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Indiana Jones operated free from the current expectation
that ancient artifacts and treasures should remain in the country where they were excavated and that those artifacts already taken, years before, should be returned.

If Indiana Jones were a contemporary archaeologist, he'd be on his knees, marking off test pits, brushing the soil, tweezing bits of bone and broken pots in baggies, then spending hours washing these fragments and analyzing them in a laboratory—not quite as cinematic as galloping through an excavation on horseback, grabbing the girl and the gold and streaking past the villains. Indy's job was acquisitions, not science; he was all about snagging the stuff. He collected golden, bejeweled objects for his university's museum, or big-ticket items like the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. He collected them by any means possible. “Professor of archaeology, expert on the occult, and, how does one say it? Obtainer of rare antiquities,” as one character described him in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.

These days, Indiana Jones would be considered a looter.

So what was Connelly doing in a documentary about Indiana Jones? Apparently, George Lucas, a friend of hers, was a distributor of it, and Connelly trusted that he would “do this well, as he does everything.” And, more importantly, she knew he would also let her get her message out about the terrible toll that looting took on the world's cultural heritage. She promotes archaeology with a passion. But she's not alone in her regard for Indy and her appreciation of those movies. The character has been used as a foil in serious academic work, as one British archaeologist did in a paper titled, “Why Indiana Jones is smarter than the post-processualists” (
post-processualist
being an unpronounceable name for archaeologists who believe that, in spite of all the science, their work is subjective):

In an admittedly rare classroom scene during that memorable biopic
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
, our hero is seen addressing a large class of adulating students. The theme: nothing less than “The Nature of Archaeology.” After commenting
that the discipline is 95% library work (an assertion which the rest of the film makes no attempt to support, if we except the scene where Indiana and his attractive assistant are engaged in skullduggery beneath a library floor), Professor Jones throws out a culminatory aphorism: “Archaeology is about Facts; if you want the Truth, go next-door to the Philosophy Department!”

Every archaeologist I interviewed worked Indiana Jones into the conversation, usually with affection, as if mentioning a daredevil older brother. Wherever they happened to stride, archaeologists absorbed his swagger. Grant Gilmore told me, “It's tongue-in-cheek, but if you scratch any archaeologist, deep down inside they want to be him, one way or another.” Battered Indy-style hats bob across the archaeological landscape, among the bandannas and keffiyehs (Arab head wraps) and baseball caps. Archaeology department costume parties double as Indiana Jones conventions. “For whatever reason,” one female grad student confided, “the guys all own fedoras and whips.”

Archaeologists get a kick out of the envy they excite. Do orthopedists get a poster boy? Do book editors? Who is out there making the dental hygienists cool? Archaeologists are so grateful for Indiana Jones that the AIA not only appointed Harrison Ford to its board of directors, but also awarded him its first Bandelier Award for Public Service to Archaeology. Ford's service, of course, consisted of being a perennial advertisement for archaeology; he was the profession's superhero recruiter. Before presenting the award, the executive director of the AIA acknowledged the field's debt to his character: “I can't tell you how many archaeologists have come up to me and said, ‘I never would have become an archaeologist had I not seen these films.'” The year was 2008, just before the release of the fourth film in the series,
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
. Coupled with a timely cover story in the AIA's
Archaeology
magazine on crystal skulls (a fraud perpetrated in the nineteenth century, as the article made clear), the Indy tribute offered both an endorsement of the franchise and a meaningful thank-you. A sheepish Harrison Ford accepted his award via video feed. “He's a good guy,” one source told me. “He auctioned his whip for archaeology!”

As in most things, archaeologists take the pragmatic approach. Where would complaining about this character get them, anyway? Of course they embraced this promotional gift from Hollywood, even though it was pure fantasy. They weren't deluded. They understood that crouching in a fetid hole and teasing out bits of ancient garbage had nowhere near the enchantment of snatching glittering artifacts and dodging the Nazis, any more than clouds of mosquitoes evoked pits of giant, writhing snakes, or impoverished indigenous people resembled bloodthirsty cannibals. But, aside from the cinematic exaggeration, as Joan Connelly knew, archaeologists happened to be engaged in the same business as Indiana Jones in all his B-movie adventures: the heroic search for a glimmer of the past; the continual test of one's fortitude, endurance, and ingenuity; and the exotic, gutsy, authentic alternative to the tamed and packaged life.

JOAN BRETON CONNELLY
(call her “Indiana Joan” at your peril) led me on a private expedition to the Explorers Club one hot summer afternoon. The Manhattan headquarters of the international club is an extravagant piece of real estate, a monument to the adventurer's life tucked improbably on a manicured street on the Upper East Side. Generations of mountain climbers, divers, astronauts, explorers, and, yes, archaeologists have dropped their gear at the front desk and clomped through its nineteenth-century rooms ahead of us. The club didn't admit women until 1981. Connelly, who is comfortable walking into male enclaves—she was a member of the third class at Princeton to admit women—joined the Explorers Club in 1990.

“This members' lounge used to be a great old, dusty, authentic
place,” Connelly said in the barroom, pulling down wineglasses and pouring us diet iced tea from her cooler bag, “and then they decided to refurbish it. Now it's the Explorers Club bar as designed by Ralph Lauren.” It looked authentic to me—the narwhal horn perched over the lintel of the bar, the tusks framing the fireplace in the next room—but then, I've never seen a narwhal in the wild. We finished our refreshments, then left the bar to climb the creaky wooden steps. Archives, map rooms, and trophy rooms snaked randomly off the central staircase, with photographs of adventurers like Thor Heyerdahl and Buzz Aldrin and Ernest Shackleton and Roy Chapman Andrews and Reinhold Messner and Jim Fowler of the old Marlin Perkins wilderness show and Sylvia Earle, the great underwater explorer, all gazing down at us. Connelly pointed out Richard Wiese, host of the ABC adventure show
Born to Explore
. He had explored the world, skied to the North Pole, collared jaguars, and lived with pygmies. He had also dug on Yeronisos and declared that Connelly was “the best expedition leader I have ever explored with.”

We tore ourselves away from the walls of fame and climbed farther. Connelly led me into one room—“The single explorers used to meet here on Sunday mornings back in the nineties, and we'd make pancake breakfast together and hang out. Those guys! So much fun!”—and then into an elegant ballroom, and out onto a spacious terrace. “I used to hold the fundraiser for my dig in Yeronisos here every year,” she said, “but then they started charging thousands of dollars to use the space. It's the problem with clubs like this. The people that it's for can't really afford it. And then ideas and customs change, and it's not really politically correct to have stuffed animal heads on the walls. . . .” The explorers had held fast to their trophy room and its contents through changing times. They kept it “as a shrine to our founders, and to Teddy Roosevelt in particular,” Connelly explained, but she approached it with trepidation, worried that some of its treasures might have disappeared or been changed
while she was out of the country. Were the jaguar, the lion, and the whale phallus still here?