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He's our own Indiana Jones
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| ACTION HERO: Tim Darvill in his Indiana Jones hat |
YOU could almost say Indiana Jones owes it all to Bournemouth University Professor Tim Darvill.
Because at the start of the first film, Indy lectures on a British site that Prof Darvill actually excavated in real life.
"They call it the wrong name but it's very gratifying!" said Prof Darvill.
He's got all three films on DVD and absolutely' plans to watch the soon to be released Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The 50-year-old is a professor of archaeology at Bournemouth University even has his own replica of the famous hat.
Unlike Indiana Jones, Prof Darvills never had to eat chilled monkey brains in an Indian temple, but he worked in some outlandish and potentially dangerous places - north Moscow, the Caucasus, and post-war Chechnya.
And he thinks great discoveries are still to be made, similar to the 1974 unearthing of the Terracotta Army.
"A staggering find. It's a vast area, football fields worth of stuff."
He speciality is the Neolithic era, or new Stone Age', from around 4,000-5,000 years ago when Britain's population was 1-2m.
"It's one of the most critical moments in human history - we moved from a simple hunter-gatherer way of life to certain people settling down to start building big things and start developing social organisation."
His own favourite finds are arrowheads and flint tools.
"Back in the Isle of Man we found literally hundreds of arrowheads. What were they doing? Celebrating by firing them in the air?
Prof Darvill has just finished a high profile, and very rare dig at Stonehenge. This summer's digs will include the Cotswolds and Knowlton, six miles north of Wimborne.
"The British Isles are incredible to work on because there's just so much stuff. In and around Dorset we have got as much stuff as some countries have got."
Some of his finds are stored in the vast archives of the British museum - though sadly not in the sinister shelves full of treasures at the end of the first Indy film.
But while Indy needs to be able to scramble off a collapsing rope bridge or fight Nazis, real archaeologists need patience and stamina as they search each spadeful of earth.
The films are great action fun but Prof Darville thinks the popularity of archaeology has a deeper meaning.
"People want to know their history. I think it's partly a replacement for religion for answering the big questions - who we are, and where we've come from."
7:00am Monday 12th May 2008
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