The Original Indy

Otto Rahn was a Nazi archaeologist who inspired the Harrison Ford character. Here’s his strange and fascinating story.

I don’t know if Spielberg ever heard of Rahn or not, but chances are he heard of A. Hyatt Verrill or many of the other American archaeologists of the 20s and 30s who were little more than grave robbers (by today’s PC standards.)There were a lot of archaeologists buckling swash in that era.

Posted by John Costello  on  05/22  at  07:00 PM

Interesting.  I wasn’t aware of this story.

Posted by Brock Townsend  on  05/23  at  07:38 AM

Both the Nazis and Sovs used archaeology for political purposes. The Reich had a whole corps of Nazi archaeologists whose duty was to prove that Ur-germanen lived in Poland and Eastern Europe before the Slavs arrived. They spent a lot of time digging in Galicia, which Himmler planned to turn into a model SS state.

The soviet archaeolgists, on the other hand,came up with an archaeological ‘culture’ based on physical remains from the 3rd and 4th centuries in the southern Ukraine, unconnected to anything else in the world. It was only after the fall of the soviet state that the archaeological community was able to admit that this ‘culture’ was in fact the remains of the Ostrogothic state from that period (it was overrun and destroyed by the Huns.)

Posted by John Costello  on  05/24  at  06:09 PM
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