Professor Curtis Runnels blogs
Professor Curtis Runnels has just posted a new item on his blog, Archaeology and Eiseley’s Illusion of Two Cultures. “A measure of the success of archaeology is its popularity. Archaeology has a presence in the public eye, at least in the United States, fueled by popular novels such as James Michener’s The Source (1965), movies like The Mummy (1932), the Indiana Jones series (began 1981), and recent films such as The Dig or Canyon del Muerto (discussed previously in this blog). Further proofs of the public’s appetite for antiquities are the many popular organized tours to the centers of high civilization in Egypt, Greece, Mexico, Peru, and beyond. These tours have a long history. They are modeled on the tour which set out from the United States on the steamship Quaker City bound for the Mediterranean in 1867, which was chronicled by Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad. Then as now, highlights of that tour included visits to the ruins of the great Mediterranean civilizations,” read the entire blog here.
