This reminds me of a controversial post I made in the Star Trek subreddit a while ago. For those of you not familiar, Star Trek in the 90s had a re-occuring character (Vash) who was supposed to be an archaeologist — but in reality, she was just a looter. She was characterized as daring, free-willed, adventurous, etc. Episodes with her in it were full of romance and swashbuckling. In fact, she was a major love interest of Jean-Luc Picard. She didn’t do any sort of science or academia, she just went to “exotic” locations to steal artifacts to sell. I made a post criticizing how awful this character is, both in how she was written and her being a poor representation of modern archaeology. And how characters like her encourage people to become pothunters (looking at you, treasure hunter shows on Netflix and “History” Channel), which removes artifacts from their context — often more important than the item themselves. Once antiquities become commodified and sold to the highest bidder, they are isolated from our collective knowledge and regular people (and academics) no longer have access to this knowledge. It’s dangerous when only the wealthy can “own” the past.

I could tell by my post statistics that I had struck a nerve. Many people did not agree with my assessment and defended her. It’s clear that the American (and Western) psyche has been poisoned by notions of Western heroism with non-westerners/indigenous cultures as only a backdrop to highlight such heroism: these people aren’t as “real” as you nor I, therefore it’s our right to take and create “glory” for ourselves.

For certain Indiana Jones’ legacy is fraught. I admit that his films did inspire me, in part, to pursue anthropology. But the more I learned about the history of anthropology, the more saw how much it has to make up for with its racist and imperialist past. I was hoping the Indiana Jones franchise can “grow” with the times, but then it put out the heaping pile of garbage that is Crystal Skull. The whole “aliens built them” conspiracies are rooted in racism and encourages the erasure of indigenous/non-Western accomplishments