Archaeology and Adventure

When I was little, there were two things that got me really interested in history.
The 1980s cartoon “The Mysterious Cities of Gold” was my first inkling of the great and mysterious empires of South America, the invasion of the Spanish and the tales of untold riches hidden in the jungle. It was in the footsteps of the cartoon hero Esteban I was following when I fulfilled my ambition of visiting Peru. Though sadly, I didn’t fly home in a golden condor.

Alongside this, who could resist the adventures of Indiana Jones? Who wouldn’t want to unearth ancient and mystic relics, while simultaneously fighting off an army and defeating the fiendish booby traps left set for 1000 years? It was all I could do to stop myself packing a whip for my trek into the Colombian jungle to the Indy-esque ‘Lost City of the Sierra Nevada’. Walking through jungle, wading rivers, meeting local Tirana indians, fracturing my elbow. I WAS Indiana. A bit.

So, how disappointed am I in his latest adventure? It’s not just the awful scene with the ants, stolen wholesale from the terrible Mummy films. It’s not just the cliched mad old man, the far-fetched survival of the waterfalls, the well-beaten roads in the impenitrable jungle or the frankly rubbish clues and inconsistencies (why say he’s in Nazca then got to find him in Cusco? Would Indy have a text book of the Nazca lines in 1957? They should also note that the Mayans weren’t in Peru, it’s the Incas they’re thinking of). It’s not even that the 1950s simply wasn’t a golden age of heroic archeology. It’s all this plus the ridiculous premise, the biologically impossible crystal skeletons, far-fetched powers, aliens and the utterly unforgiveable sci-fi ending.

And not only that, but INDY WOULD NEVER GET MARRIED! They also changed his character to an all-action hero, and not an adventuring archeologist who’s only a hero to get the artifact back for the museum. It wasn’t even the same man in the centre of all this.

It was just all wrong. I’ve genuinely had more thrills from an edition of Time Team.

On the plus side, our honeymoon will take in several sites of Mayan ruins in Mexico, Guatemala and maybe Honduras, and Penny has promised I can get a Fedora hat.