Was the Indiana Jones idol based on a real artefact?
SHORT ANSWER This is less a case of ‘it belongs in a museum’, more ‘leave it to the movies’
LONG ANSWER In arguably one of the great movie opening sequences of all time, at the start of Steven Spielberg’s 1981 romp Raiders of the Lost Ark, the fedora-wearing, whip-wielding, globe-trotting archaeologist Indiana Jones treks through the South American jungle in search of a secret temple. Inside is a golden fertility idol, protected by a series of booby traps… and a giant boulder, of course. LONG ANSWER
Though it may not even be the main MacGuffin of the movie – Indy has to race to find the Ark of the Covenant before it’s discovered by the Nazis – this gilt idol has gone down in cinema history. But not in real history – because the artefact is entirely fictitious.
An Indiana Jones comic, published later, claimed that the idol represented a goddess of the Chachapoyas, a pre-Columbian Andean culture of what’s now northwest Peru that fell to the Inca in the 15th century. The ‘artefact’ also looks similar to a sculpture carved from a gleaming mineral, held in the collections at Dumbarton the throes of childbirth. However, that has been attributed to the Aztec people – based in Mexico, some 2,000 miles northwest of Peru – and may even have been made in the 19th century.
When did the 'Moors' invade Spain?
SHORT ANSWER Taking advantage of Visigothic infighting, Muslim forces arrived in AD
