Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Author(s):  
Shawn Malley

This chapter transposes the analogical investigation of ancient astronauts as a source of geopolitical meditation in Ancient Aliens to a SF film that make this connection explicit: Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull (2006), which adapts the cinematic antecedent of 1950s B SF movies—in which aliens function as a trope for governmental conspiracy, atomic anxiety, and Soviet hysteria—into ancient astronaut discourse. An interesting subtext of Spielberg’s nostalgic throwback to SF film history is the nature of the aliens themselves. As archaeologists and collectors, they replicate the kinds of colonial archaeology that Jones and even the audience may take for granted. These beings function within the SF métier as an external threat, but they simultaneously sanction the civilizing activities undertaken by democratic institutions like the British Museum, Louvre and Metropolitan Museum. The film thus neatly closes the hermeneutic circle on the Indiana Jones franchise by mining its latent SF tropes: the intrepid figure of colonial archaeology is reinvigorated through the exotic adventures of technologically-advanced beings from outer space. Archaeology is a device for manifesting threats that can be foiled by the very scientific structures and geopolitical forces that inform the entertaining world of action and adventure.

Muzealnictwo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Mariola Kazimierczak

Michał Tyszkiewicz was an outstanding collector of antiquities and a pioneer of Polish archaeological excavations in Egypt conducted in late 1861 and early 1862, which yielded a generous donation of 194 Egyptian antiquities to the Paris Louvre. Today Tyszkiewicz’s name features engraved on the Rotunda of Apollo among the major Museum’s donors. Having settled in Rome for good in 1865, Tyszkiewicz conducted archaeological excavations there until 1870. He collected ancient intaglios, old coins, ceramics, silverware, golden jewellery, and sculptures in bronze and marble. His collection ranked among the most valuable European ones created in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Today, its elements are scattered among over 30 major museums worldwide, e.g. London’s British Museum, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The latest investigation of M. Tyszkiewicz’s correspondence to the German scholar Wilhelm Froehner demonstrated that Tyszkiewicz widely promoted the development of archaeology and epigraphy; unique pieces from his collections were presented at conferences at Rome’s Academia dei Lincei or at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, and published by Italian, French, Austrian, and German scholars. He was considered an expert in glyptic, and today’s specialists, in recognition of his merits, have called a certain group of ancient cylinder seals the ‘Tyszkiewicz Seals’, an Egyptian statue in black basalt has been named the ‘Tyszkiewicz Statue’, whereas an unknown painter of Greek vases from the 5th century BC has been referred to as the ‘Painter Tyszkiewicz’.


Author(s):  
N. Megan Kelley

This chapter focuses on science fiction films that featured aliens passing as humans and examines how they tapped into the fears and anxieties about politics and issues of identity in postwar America. In films such as Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, friendly neighbors might be alien invaders pretending to be humans. These Hollywood films were of two main categories: those concerned with the external threat of alien invasions, and those that deal with the internal threat of aliens who infiltrated the earth and passed for human. The chapter suggests that aliens passing for human brought to the fore the connections between anxiety about racial passing, Communism, and subversive gender or sexual identities.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 665
Author(s):  
Klas Grinell

This article analyses museum responses to the contemporary tensions and violence in response to images of Muhammad, from The Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo. How does this socio-political frame effect the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, the V&A and British Museum in London, and the Louvre in Paris? Different genres of museums and histories of collections in part explain differences in approaches to representations of Muhammad. The theological groundings for a possible ban on prophetic depictions is charted, as well as the widespread Islamic practices of making visual representations of the Prophet. It is argued that museological framings of the religiosity of Muslims become skewed when the veneration of the Prophet is not represented.


Author(s):  
T. E. Mitchell ◽  
M. R. Pascucci ◽  
R. A. Youngman

1. Introduction. Studies of radiation damage in ceramics are of interest not only from a fundamental point of view but also because it is important to understand the behavior of ceramics in various practical radiation enyironments- fission and fusion reactors, nuclear waste storage media, ion-implantation devices, outer space, etc. A great deal of work has been done on the spectroscopy of point defects and small defect clusters in ceramics, but relatively little has been performed on defect agglomeration using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) in the same kind of detail that has been so successful in metals. This article will assess our present understanding of radiation damage in ceramics with illustrations using results obtained from the authors' work.


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