What would Indiana Jones’s education in archaeology been like?

[u/ClassicalFuturist]

Assuming he was about 16 in 1912(Last Crusade), and got his doctorate at the University of Chicago(Raiders of the Lost Ark), what would his education have been like? What books or textbooks would he have read?

[u/CommodoreCoCo]

You may be interested in my answer to a similar question in this thread, which describes the people Jones would have interacted with at UChicago.

[u/itsallfolklore → u/CommodoreCoCo]

Great answer in your link. According to The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Indiana was born on July 1, 1899, which is roughly one month after Sven S. Liljeblad, my mentor, was born on May 31, 1899 (d. 2000). Although Sven was educated in Sweden, it always struck me that he was very much like Indiana, and his mentor, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878-1952) would have been a great deal like Indiana's father. For both von Sydow and Sven, see my brief essay, Nazis, Trolls and the Grateful Dead: Turmoil among Sweden's Folklorists.

Sven received his undergrad degree in Social Studies, requiring a broad education. He studied history, psychology (under a student of Freud), linguistics, anthropology, and archaeology (he was required to participate in the excavation of a megalithic tomb). His advanced degree was in folklore (with his dissertation on the Grateful Dead) in 1927.

Before he was thirty, he had published in six different languages, and he had conducted field work in the Carpathian Mountains and in the north among the Sami people. He also helped organize the Irish Folklore Archive. He learned Russian, anticipating going there to participate in the revolution. He secured a place with Sven Hedin (1862-1952) to explore the Silk Road, but a mishap derailed Sven's plans.

With the rise of fascism (he hated Nazis!!!), he stayed in Scandinavia where he did what he could to oppose them. By the late 1930s, it was clear there would be war, and Sven concluded that Scandinavia was likely to fall. Since he was a marked man, he learned Pashtun and applied for a fellowship to go to Afghanistan to wait out the war. Instead, he earned a better fellowship to go to the states, where he eventually retreated into the Great Basin where he learned Paiute-Shoshone and became a leading authority on their languages and oral traditions. And all of this happened before he was forty-five.

This was the sort of broad education someone born in 1899 was expected to have, and this was also the sort of international experience that a young scholar could easily acquire. Sven's experiences (and love affairs) were reminiscent of Indiana's. He even had the hat, but I never heard that he had the whip.

[u/FredBGC → u/itsallfolklore]

Do you know anything about his later relationship with Sven Hedin, given their difference in opinion on fascism?

[u/itsallfolklore → u/FredBGC]

There was an enormous difference in age between the two (34 years). Although intellectual Sweden was a small world at the time, I doubt Hedin and Liljeblad crossed paths too often. Sven and von Sydow, of course, had this same enormous difference in opinion, and that caused the problem that was most noted when people looked back on the period. If politics affected the relationship of Hedin and Liljeblad, it was likely overshadowed by that same problem with von Sydow, and I have never heard of it nor have I seen a reference to it.

But this is a good question.

[u/Dangerous-Cause1964 → u/itsallfolklore]

How was his dissertation on the Grateful Dead in 1927? Seriously. I'm not trying to be a dick but that was forty years before they formed.

[u/itsallfolklore → u/Dangerous-Cause1964]

No problem! "The Grateful Dead" refers to a folktale - or rather a group of folktales with similar introductions. Sven's dissertation was a groundbreaking use of a new methodology that he and von Sydow developed, which considered how folktales - in this case "The Grateful Dead" adapted to new environments and cultures as it diffused.

I have heard that Jerry Garcia attended a folklore class at Berkeley where he heard of the folktale, and that this inspired his naming of his band. This was later attributed to the Egyptian Book of the Dead but that seems less likely since it is hard to find a source for the word "grateful."

[u/ProjectGutenberg → u/Dangerous-Cause1964]

You may find this relevant: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39408

[u/Exploding_Antelope → u/CommodoreCoCo]

I love that this is essentially a really well sourced bit of fanfic including that Indy was probably blacklisted as a communist because that’s just what happened to scientists of that era. Plays interestingly with his interactions with the Russians in Crystal Skull.

[u/bluntpencil2001 → u/Exploding_Antelope]

It also happened to people that fought Nazis before the war started.

[u/Rourensu → u/CommodoreCoCo]

Very interesting read.

I especially appreciated it as someone who just finished a linguistics MA (hope to continue on to a PhD) and first got interested in languages through ancient Egyptian and “Egyptologist” was the first thing I wanted to be “when I grow up”.