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?
Stuffed animal heads covered the walls of the trophy room and filled the deep window ledges. Lions, bobcats, gazelles—props for an old-fashioned movie about explorers. She pointed—“That is what we call the ‘canoodling sofa,’” she joked. But where was that whale phallus? We explored the whole room, and just when it looked like the strangest trophy of all had gone the way of the dodo, Connelly found it, tucked into a window well, mounted on wood, petrified, a termite’s nest rising to a bony point,
about four feet high. It was a magnificent specimen, the sort of thing you really want to see in a natural history museum but almost never do. Connelly stood beside it while I snapped her photo with my cell phone; then she photographed me, beaming by the towering whale member—souvenirs of our hunt.
Downstairs, by the fireplace framed with tusks, Connelly pulled out her laptop and files and the lesson she planned to give me in stratigraphy to help me visualize the way soil and rock get layered through time; she also pulled out a plastic ginger-ale bottle, sturdy and lightweight, which she’d filled with a fizzy, summery white wine. She had taken the subway uptown to the club, and worried that a wine bottle might break in the crush. Now she poured it into wineglasses from the Ralph Lauren bar. My expedition leader had thought of everything.
Convent-educated in Toledo, Ohio, Connelly grew up spending Saturdays with her beloved Irish-American father. He’d take her to the art museum in the morning for drawing lessons (there were riding lessons, too); then they’d visit his construction sites. He taught her how to use surveying tools, lay a foundation, talk to workmen, keep a project on task. Her dual education meant she felt comfortable anywhere, in museums or lumberyards. She spoke a basic workman’s Greek, picked up while working on excavations at Nemea. She is not married and has no children, and that surprises her; her mentor, Dorothy Burr Thompson, had both a great career and a family. Thompson was seventy-four when they met, “and how long do you think you have with someone when you meet them at that age? But she lived till she was a hundred and one. I had her wisdom and experience for twenty-seven years,” Connelly said wistfully. Someday she hoped to write about Thompson, after she finished her next book, about the Parthenon.
We were deep in conversation when the receptionist warned us that the club was closing in ten minutes. “In the old days,” Connelly confided, “some of the members used to slip the guy at the door a fifty- or hundred-dollar bill to keep it open. And he would!” Ah! A glimpse of the swashbuckling life! She had seen Thor Heyerdahl and Sir Edmund Hillary preside over these rooms. In the 1980s, she told me, she had traveled alone through Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Kuwait, staying in old legendary hotels “before they were refurbished,” communing with “the glamorous past.” As an archaeologist, Connelly did not simply appreciate that past; in a room with tusks framing the fireplace, she conjured it with flair.
FIELD SCHOOL REDUX
The earth-whisperers
THE COOL, orderly sanctuary I had imagined for Joan Connelly when I first heard her speak was a product of my imagination. She lives in NYU faculty housing, and her apartment is hers only until retirement. “Then they’ll ask me to leave,” Connelly said. “I know I ought to buy a place somewhere, but I haven’t.” She also has an office on campus, with a huge window overlooking the Washington Square Arch, as well as a combination conference and storage room, a veritable fiefdom in New York City. Then there is her claim to the Explorers Club. But the real estate with the grip on her heart is in Cyprus; in particular, on the tiny island of Yeronisos, off the west coast of Cyprus. Its cliffs hold aloft a table of cracked Mediterranean earth the length of three football fields. Over the course of twenty-three years, Connelly has dug trench after trench there, assisted by teams of NYU students. Gradually, she has pieced together a compelling story of this spot that suggests that Yeronisos was once developed to honor Caesarion, Cleopatra’s child by Julius Caesar—the heir Cleopatra hoped would unite the empires of Egypt and Rome, the East and the West.
In her conference room at NYU, Connelly has assembled a shrine to Yeronisos that includes a wall of twenty-three artful photos, one from each year of the ongoing dig, featuring members of her various expedition teams posed around a piano perched incongruously on a bluff, the photogenic island of Yeronisos shimmering in the background: attractive students in dressy clothes, sometimes with a famous archaeologist or even a famous famous person—a sunburnt, grinning Bill Murray, for instance—or someone wealthy who thought archaeology sounded fun and was willing to donate $10,000 to the program for a week in the field.
I joined the dig team for a more modest donation, and set about trying to cram what should have been months of physical conditioning into a couple of weeks. Connelly was adamant about visitors to Yeronisos being able to swim. She envisioned someone sinking in the waters off the island and taking her beloved program with it. I remembered her mentioning the cliffs her team had to climb that were twenty-one meters high (nearly seventy feet!); how would I hoist myself up something like that? Along with swimming lessons, I signed up for a climbing class. The second time I fell off the practice wall, the instructor offered me my money back. The swim lesson went better; I made it across the pool.
The day before I left for Cyprus, Connelly e-mailed: she was determined to decorate the hills and patio for her annual dig party with sand candles but had been unable to find paper lunch bags on the island. Could I bring as many as possible? I managed to stuff a hundred bags into my carry-on, and during my layover in London, I even hauled them through the British Museum. Before they held flickering candles on the hills of Cyprus, those brown paper bags basked in the presence of the Elgin Marbles.
YERONISOS GLEAMED OFF the coast of the little town of Agios Georgios. It looked as if it were only a few hundred yards from shore, easy swimming, if swimming came easily. This turned out to be deceptive. Each daybreak, we met at the town harbor and climbed into the Nemesis, a boat run by Valentinos, a handsome local fisherman. We huddled on the deck floor, smashed up against each other in our bright life preservers: Joan Connelly and her two archaeology partners, Richard Anderson and Paul Croft; one grad student, ten undergrads, one local hired hand (Yanni); and one interloper (me)—a flock of strange orange birds herded into the Mediterranean. The waves might be gentle, so only those with delicate stomachs felt queasy, or the waves might be brutal—but I tried not to think about that ahead of time.
My first day, the waves were not gentle. It took half an hour to cross that seemingly short distance and loop around to the island’s south side, and I could feel myself turning green. Connelly’s graduate assistant, Talia, coached me, “Keep your eye on a fixed spot, and breathe in and out with the swells.” Then we waited patiently, the fishing boat bobbing in the water, to disembark in shifts into a small dinghy, which Valentinos pulled, via rope, to the landing. The whole operation consumed another hour and was fraught. Valentinos steadied the dinghy and delivered orders, a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth, and the chain of Croft, Anderson, and Yanni steadied us as we staggered out of the wobbly dinghy across tires and planks—a jerry-rigged dock—to a cluster of boulders—the shore.
After we were safely on land, the more experienced crew formed another chain, and Valentinos passed up the backpacks, the equipment, the bags with breakfast, and the jugs of water (there was no fresh water source on the island). We threw our life jackets in a pile at the foot of a sheared cliff and began to climb, single file, up crumbling and ancient steps—steps!—to the top of the island, an elevated plain of rock and ruin, circled by gulls and surrounded by the sea. We emerged at the top of the cliff near two huts with stone foundations and wooden frames, their walls open to the view. These khalifis, set up above pilgrims’ huts from the sixth century, made our base camp shady and picturesque. We arranged ourselves on the stone benches in the larger khalifi and got our trench orders, our digging assignments, while the seagulls wheeled overhead, shrieking. Across the channel, Agios Georgios’s little Byzantine gem of a church twinkled in the early morning sun.
For the first two years of this island project, 1990 and 1991, Connelly directed an ecological assessment of the island that tracked its flora and fauna and prescribed ways to minimize the destructive impact of the excavation. “Our ecologist suggested only earth tones [for equipment] up here, so we wouldn’t disturb the birds,” Connelly said. “Our buckets, you notice, are earth- and sea-colored, not red and orange.” She recalled going to Machu Picchu and looking out over the breatht
aking specter of mountains and ruins. “And then it started to rain, and out came these plastic ponchos in millions of colors—yuk!” The ecologist made numerous other bird-friendly recommendations that Connelly incorporated into her vision of the place. “We have an early and short season so we don’t interfere with their nesting. And the khalifis are not covered in ugly corrugated metal, but thatched with sticks and brush.”
For Connelly, who was part of the Art History Department before she joined the Classics faculty, directing an excavation also meant art-directing it. Her field books are hand-bound “by a little old man in Limassol,” and filled in by hand, complete with illustrations of found artifacts. “Some digs give everyone an iPad, but we have no power source on the island. We use trench books that go back and forth in waterproof bags. Narrative on left, trench number, date, supervisors’ initials, weather, initials of everyone working on it, space for photos, trench drawings, objects written in red”—the classical approach to a classical dig.* Even the clothes Connelly worked in were earth-colored, for stepping lightly on the earth: beige linen shirt, snug green cords, canvas boots. (None of us wore red or orange, in deference to the birds.) There was an aesthetic element to everything. One day, Yanni reinforced a concrete wall near the staircase by slapping on more concrete. It was functional, but that wasn’t good enough for Connelly; the next day, he recemented the wall, artfully.
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