You have to dig it.
An archaeologist is on a mission to uncover the history behind Indiana Jones, and in the process finds himself living out some of the Hollywood hero's adventures in real life.
Dr. David West Reynolds has spent the past 20 years traveling the world to retrace the journey of the flagellated archaeologist in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the 1981 blockbuster was filmed. We have rediscovered long-lost sets and locations.
“People in the field are very uncomfortable with Indiana Jones being the ambassador,” the University of Michigan-educated archaeologist told the Post. “We always hear from academics about how movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark disrespect history, and we want to show that that's not really all there is to it.”
The Indiana native is currently raising money to make a documentary.
“I want to show how amazingly accurate that movie is,” he said. “And that means respecting history. This documentary aims to reveal the surprising real-life history and archeology behind Raiders of the Lost Ark.” .”
Reynolds' journey in the documentary Chasing Raiders took him from humid jungles to scorching deserts to frigid Arctic waters, but it began long ago in a galaxy far, far away.
In 1995, Reynolds was completing his Ph.D., but felt his thesis hadn't truly tested his mettle as a field archaeologist, so he decided to prove what he could do.
A bona fide Star Wars nerd, he was inspired by the desert location where the original 1977 film was filmed in North Africa, a location completely lost to time despite the film's enduring fame. I came up with the idea of tracking locations.
“Before GPS, it was easy to lose location information,” Reynolds says. “And if it was a place of wilderness, it was difficult to track its location. There was no ordinance map of wilderness in Tunisia. In the 70s, the world still seemed limitless .”
All Reynolds had was a Topps gum trading card and a photo of a Star Wars scene paused on a television screen, but he was able to muster all his archeology skills. I did. This included communication with nomads. I don't know what the movie is about. Finding a set that has been lost for nearly 20 years.
Deliberately equipped with a GPS, Reynolds recorded the coordinates, then went home and wrote up his findings “as an archaeologist would do”, which he published in Star Wars Insider magazine.
“Star Wars” creator George Lucas was simultaneously working on a prequel and wanted to reuse some of the locations from the original film, but his team knew they were I realized that I had no idea where it was. Until someone discovered Reynold's article on Star Wars Insider.
“They found out that I was the only person in the world who knew the coordinates of all these places. They had to hire me as a location scout,” he said.
So Reynolds leads Lucas and his team across North Africa, and the two hit it off so well that the director enlists his archaeologist skills to dig through the archives at Skywalker Ranch and create a Star Wars reference book. I asked him to create a series. Visual Dictionaries was a huge success.
Reynolds, who was inspired to become an archaeologist by watching Lucas' script Raiders of the Lost Ark as a boy, now works with props from the iconic film for the first time. It was during his years working at the Skywalker Ranch. And he was amazed at what he saw.
“We found in the Lucasfilm archives that Indy's props for 'Raiders' were at a completely different level of quality than what you would normally see in a movie,” he said. “These were incredibly accurate pieces. Some of these pieces didn't look like they came from the British Museum. They didn't look like movie props.
“Movie props aren't designed to be easy to handle and look real; they're designed to look real on screen,” he added. “But the Indiana Jones Raiders props were amazingly well-researched and museum-quality.”
One such prop is the staff of Ra headdress that Jones uses to mark the hiding place of the Ark of Tanis, to which Reynolds gives a historical and regional context to the Biblical story of the Ark. Found the correct obscure language inscribed.
“They use a Middle Semitic script, which is Aramaic. At the time the Ark was stolen, Aramaic was the language of the Israelites,” Reynolds said. “This is such a crazy insight that only a few academics would recognize it.”
And he continued to make further appearances, as the golden idol Indy stole from a Peruvian temple closely matched a genuine sculpture of the Aztec god Tlazolteotl. Throughout the film, the Ark operated in subtle ways that were consistent with the Biblical story. The frescoes painted on the Egyptian set contained authentic hieroglyphic messages.
The scenery throughout the film also includes what Reynolds calls “quotes” from actual ancient ruins, including Indiana's use of light shining through the walls of the temple to locate the Ark. It also included a map room, which accurately reflected the way the sun illuminated ancient Egypt. Abu Simbel temple.
“A lot of things in 'Raiders' are tied to real history and archeology, and it's one amazing story after another, one surprise after another,” Reynolds said. . “No matter how many times you've seen this movie, we're going to show you something you've never seen before.”
But Reynolds wasn't satisfied with Lucasfilm's archives alone. I wanted to see the real places where Indiana Jones went on his adventures and follow in the footsteps of the fictional hero. So, just like his work on Star Wars, Reynolds set out around the world to discover other long-lost film locations.
Raising as much money as he could and looking for an archaeological study that would take him closer to the Indiana footprint, Reynolds flew to places like Hawaii, where he chartered a helicopter until he found the exact mountain with the Paramount logo fused into it. , spent days traversing the rugged volcanic peaks. At the opening of “Raiders”.
He spots a field where Jones is fleeing from a horde of angry natives and runs through it. He jumped from the vine and fell into the same lake where Jones had escaped from the tribesmen. In Africa, he discovered the remains of the original stage set, made of fiberglass and inscribed with hieroglyphics.
But Reynolds wanted to take it a step further. Even though “Raiders” wasn't actually filmed in Peru, he decided to ride through the Peruvian mountains on horseback and visit the temples that inspired the film. He did the same in Egypt, hiking through the desert, walking through the markets of Cairo, and watching the sun set over the walls of Abu Simbel.
On his travels, Reynolds always took something with him. — Whip. The whip was given to him as a gag gift by his uncle while he was completing his master's degree, but he learned to perform a few tricks with it and now uses it to knock bottles out of people's hands. They claim that it can be broken.
“It started as a joke. But then I realized that if you're good at this, you can show up in a small village or a desert in the Amazon and do some whiplash tricks and the kids will see it. , that they would love it. Now, everyone in that village loved me,” Reynolds said.
“It will never be a hassle again,” he added. “I was the guy who carried the whip, so I never got robbed again. It's not like traveling with a gun. It's stupid to travel with a gun, and most of the time , you're inviting trouble. But the whip meant you weren't going to go looking for trouble, but it suggested that trouble shouldn't go looking for you.”
He claims that someone dropped a small live explosive device in a Tunisian town during his trip. Trying to avoid panic, he pulled out his whip and cracked it in the air.
The streets have been cleared and the situation has calmed down, he said. This scene was almost identical to the moment in the first film when Jones is cornered by an assassin in a Cairo square and uses a whip to escape.
“I ended up asking George about this because it was unexpectedly helpful. I said, “Is that what you had in mind when you gave Indiana the whip?” And he said, “As you can imagine, Zorro had a whip, so I gave Indiana a whip and that was it.”
All these adventures and artifacts, after years of research and travel, are what Reynolds is sharing in the documentary Chasing Raiders. It is currently in production after raising $30,000 through a Kickstarter campaign.
“This documentary reveals the surprising real-life history and archeology behind Indiana Jones. The film focuses on Raiders of the Lost Ark. has a respect for history and archeology that is very rare in Hollywood,” Reynolds said.
“Instead of finding all the flaws and saying, 'This is where we went wrong,' show us how right we were.”
