Outside of scientific journals, archaeologists are depicted as searching for lost cities and mystical artifacts in news reports, television, video games, and movies like Indiana Jones or The Mummy. This fantastical image has little to do with day-to-day science, yet it is deeply connected to why people are fascinated by the ancient past. People today continue to find the mystical and archaeology and have a fascination with exotic artifacts and eerie practices. Exploring the development of archaeology helps us understand what archaeology is and why it matters. In this presentation by Jeb J. Card, the audience will follow a trail of clues left by adventurers and professional archaeologists through haunted museums, mysterious hieroglyphic inscriptions, fragments of a lost continent that never existed, and deep into an investigation of magic and murder.
Jeb Card (Tulane '07) specializes in historical archaeology, early colonialism, material culture hybridity, ethnogenesis, ceramic analysis, and pre-Hispanic Maya political history, working in Mesoamerica, chiefly in El Salvador.
Sponsored by Department of Anthropology
