How can you not be excited about a new Indiana Jones movie? How many archaeologists, do you suppose, entered the field because Indy made it look so…cool. Yes, a professional archaeologist will tell you that most of what they do involves painstakingly digging holes to retrieve broken pots and other stuff that ancient people threw out; that they’re not treasure hunters but highly trained professionals trying to shed light on our common human heritage. Yeah, yeah, but how many of them wish they had a little Jones in them? Maybe have the hat in their closet?

For the next generation of Indy-inspired budding archaeologists we offer the following titles:

Gods, Graves, and Scholars: the Story of Archaeology by C.W. Ceram is a classic history of the field. He covers all the great early digs: Pompeii, Troy, Mycenae, Crete, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Sumer, and Central America.

Stones, Bones, and Ancient Cities: Great Discoveries in Archaeology and the Search For Human Origins by Lawrence H. Robbins covers some of the same ground, but adds finds from paleontology, as well as underwater archaeology, and early astronomy.

Eyewitness To Discovery: First-Person Accounts Of More Than Fifty Of the World’s Greatest Archaeological Discoveries, edited by Brian M. Fagan gathers together 55 vivid accounts of great discoveries by the people who found them.

Vanished Civilizations: The Hidden Secrets Of Lost Cities and Forgotten Peoples and Lost Cities: 50 Discoveries In World Archaeology both offer glimpses into cultures and civilizations from every continent, and from Stone Age Turkey to Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

One thing about ruins is that they tend to all look alike. What’s cool about Virtual Archaeology: Re-creating Ancient Worlds is that it gives computer reconstructions of ancient sites, using archaeologists’ best guesses about how places like the Temple of Karnak, the Acropolis, Teotihuacan, or Pompeii once looked.

The new Indiana Jones movie is set in a lost city in the Amazon jungle; the closest thing in real life is probably the long-gone civilization of the Maya, in Central America. To learn more about them, A Forest Of Kings: The Untold Story Of The Ancient Maya by Linda Schele and David Freidel, is a good place to start.

And yes, there are such things as crystal skulls scattered in museums around the world, and yes, we actually have a book about at least one of them. It’s called The Crystal Skull: The Story Of the Mystery, Myth, and Magic Of the Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull Discovered In a Lost Mayan City During a Search For Atlantis by Richard Garvin. Truth can be stranger than fiction.

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