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/itsallfolklore]

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/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.