The scene is one of those that grabs you: Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones lowers himself into a tomb not far from the Giza pyramids and has to recover a precious treasure in the funeral chamber swarming with asps and cobras.
The valiant hero will succeed in his undertaking and return to the surface safe and sound to deal with Belloq and his band of merciless scientists in the service of the Third Reich. This popular character is a typical product of Hollywood-brand archeo-fantasy; between one special effect and another, it has succeeded in stimulating the imagination of a generation of fans who, often with very shaky scientific knowledge, have taken up pick and shovel and ventured into the Egyptian Sahara or the dense Amazon rainforest. And with them the gigantic tourism industry has made its move, its customers having gone off in search of discount adventures, immortalizing with their latest-model cameras the pyramids, tombs, cursed temples, statues, gold masks, and everything else a few centuries old with a hint of the exotic and mysterious.
Added to this climate of suburban movie theater revival is the immensely popular genre of mystery writing; in a huge hodgepodge, with wildly sudden digressions, Christian Jacq and his brothers talk about Ramses as if he were their next-door neighbor; they push on into the bedroom and spy on Nefertari’s orgies; they converse with Moses or even Homer, and so on. Then there are daring, not to say unconscious, authors who dream up phantom extraterrestrial civilizations behind the construction of all the pyramids in the world (and there are so many!); who nonchalantly mix Stonehenge, the Nazca lines and – how could they leave it out? – Atlantis, creating a collage that is ridiculous to say the least. And what about the real archeologists? With few resources and boundless passion, they are only – but it’s not so little – scholars who scientifically investigate what can be reconstructed of the past based on minimal evidence.
They are often university professors or researchers from the National Research Center who conduct expeditions to places near and far to study history. The work is often obscure and not very gratifying, where ordinary objects are brought to light, and this is followed by a period of study and publication regarding what was found. It may be useful or at least curious as an example for me to describe two of the excavations I have participated in; they may provide some indications as to how archeological activity is conducted and on how certain exaggerations need to be absolutely avoided.
We are at Tebtynis (Al Fayyum Oasis, 120 km southwest of Cairo); under an unrelenting sun, with temperatures approaching 47ºC, the incessant cries of the rais spur the workers on: amidst a cloud of dust, without goggles or hats, shoes or protection of any kind, some fifty slaves are carrying 15-kilo baskets full of debris at an infernal pace. He who stops is lost! The blows of the rais’s cane fall mercilessly on the back of the hapless slacker. Anyone who dares slow down or take a longer route from the dig area to the carts where the debris is dumped is grabbed, assaulted, and beaten savagely by the rais. And the rais has strict orders: the boss – the archeologist – accepts no hesitation, brooks no indecision.
Everything is carried out at a mad pace, for seven hours under the sun, with serious risk for the excavated monuments and for the workers, who are treated like animals and underpaid with money from the Italian government (each of them earning the equivalent of Lit. 10,000 a day). “This is the only way to get assured results,” the boss says, justifying himself like the last extant colonialist.
But that’s not true! At Balat (el-Dakhla Oasis, 200 km west of Luxor), experts from the French Institute of Oriental Archeology, guided by the famous scholar Georges Soukiassian (who rediscovered the Alexandria Lighthouse, among other things), work in perfect harmony with the workers (I never saw the rais resort to cursing or caning); the climate is less torrid, the harmony between archeologists and boss is exemplary. In addition, any finds, and the buildings revealed, are promptly published, unlike the case at Tebtynis: in fact there, after 13 seasons of excavations, a single scientific monograph has been published, relating to the first two seasons (1988 and 1989!).
In short, archeology, even when it is not archeo-fantasy, is nonetheless a fascinating profession, undertaken with highly scientific means aimed at studying the past and often at the service of scholars in related disciplines who use the archeologists’ results for their own work. However, anyone who organizes expeditions to conduct excavations, especially in developing countries with cheap labor and under primitive social rules, must not go beyond the limits of civil convention and not turn into a neo-colonialist adventurer with funds from a democratic state.